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Catullus
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Catullus and his friends are the main characters here, and Caesar, as usual, is the most interesting. Clodia is not the evil witch of the west, and her infatuation with Caelius is explained as being as strong as that for Catiline. Catullus rants and raves, with his emotions up and down and all over the place; nowadays, he would be on heavy psychotropic drugs. Hardy takes the most liberties with Catullus' life, giving a new picture of his family and his death. This is actually a good book, interesting for its different view of all concerned. Catullus' poems are well incorporated into the text, as are some of the Gallic Wars.
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A biography that considers the political and cultural milieu of Catullus's works is Tenney Frank, Catullus and Horace: Two Poets in Their Environment (1928). Two of the best studies of Catullus in English are E. A. Havelock, The Lyric Genius of Catullus (1939), and Arthur Leslie Wheeler, Catullus and the Traditions of Ancient Poetry (1934). Kenneth Quinn, The Catullan Revolution (1959), assesses the poet's importance in the development of Roman poetry. A later work is David O. Ross, Jr., Style and Tradition in Catullus (1969).
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This set of poems ranges over all sorts of people Catullus may have met or imagined meeting in the complicated world of the last years of the Republic. If some of them seem overdrawn, think of the parallels in Dickens' world and the caricaturing portrayals of Hogarth a little earlier and Cruikshank in Dickens' mid-century. These all fit into a wild mosaic of faces and attitudes, actions and inactions, and have more to do with the way Catullus saw life than what life was really like in his time. Erase the personal stamp of insight and anger, and you have only words and verses. Keep the poems intact and you can observe an incredible sense of mental hyperactivity coupled with acute involvement in observing life.
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Catullus has a small but important part in this book about Gordianus the Finder, who has been hired by Clodia to find out who killed Dio the Egyptian envoy and to prove that Caelius tried to poison her. Catullus, who spends most of his time drunk and disorderly, deeply in love with Clodia and furious at Caelius, befriends Gordianus. It is Catullus who gives Cicero some of his choicest phrases to use in his case on behalf of Caelius. Catullus is not a very interesting character - he is too drunk and consumed with Clodia to have scintillating dialog.
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Catullus went to Rome early in life and spent most of his time there, with the exception of his service on the staff of C. Memmius, governor of Bithynia in 57/6 BCE. He does not seem to have liked his commander or army life. His political sentiments appear to have been Republican; at least he did not like Julius Caesar or the people around him much. He was part of a group of poets who are called "new poets" because they drew their poetry from Greek Hellenistic literature. Many of Catullus' poems seem to have been addressed to a lover whom he calls Lesbia. It is likely that this was a pseudonym for Clodia, sister of P. Clodius Pulcher and wife of Q. Caecilius Metellus Celer.
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The wide variety of metres which Catullus employs stems from his interest in the Alexandrian experimentalists. When one reads Catullus, it is important to get the meters in focus, which can be done with the aid of any good commented text. Merrill's turn of the century school text (reprinted various times) still has the clearest exposition of the Catullan metrical schemes. Perhaps the best test of one's ability to read Latin verse well is to be found in Poem #63, with its unique and brilliantly involved Galliambic metre. The later part of the volume is largely elegaic, and an easier place to start for an uncertain metricist.
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Catullus