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Gaius Valerius Catullus, known as Catullus, was a Latin neoteric poet of the late Roman Republic. His surviving works remain widely read due to their popularity as teaching tools and because of their personal or sexual themes.
Robinson Ellis, FBA was an English classical scholar.
The Priapeia is a collection of eighty anonymous short Latin poems in various meters on subjects pertaining to the phallic god Priapus. They are believed to date from the 1st century AD or the beginning of the 2nd century. A traditional theory about their origin is that they are an anthology of poems written by various authors on the same subject. However, it has recently been argued that the 80 poems are in fact the work of a single author, presenting a kind of biography of Priapus from his vigorous youth to his impotence in old age.
Gaius Helvius Cinna was an influential neoteric poet of the late Roman Republic, a little older than the generation of Catullus and Calvus. He was lynched at the funeral of Julius Caesar after being mistaken for an unrelated Cornelius Cinna who had spoken out in support of the dictator's assassins.
The history of Latin poetry can be understood as the adaptation of Greek models. The verse comedies of Plautus, the earliest surviving examples of Latin literature, are estimated to have been composed around 205–184 BC.
Catullus 49 is a poem by the Roman poet Gaius Valerius Catullus (c. 84–c. 54 BC) sent to Marcus Tullius Cicero as a superficially laudatory poem. Like the majority of Catullus' poems, the meter of this poem is hendecasyllabic. This is also the only time Cicero is ever mentioned in any of Catullus' poems.
Lesbia was the literary pseudonym used by the Roman poet Gaius Valerius Catullus to refer to his lover. Lesbia is traditionally identified with Clodia, the wife of Quintus Caecilius Metellus Celer and sister of Publius Clodius Pulcher; her conduct and motives are maligned in Cicero's extant speech Pro Caelio, delivered in 56 BC.
The Neoterikoi or Neoterics were a series of avant-garde Latin poets who wrote in the 1st century BCE. Neoteric poets deliberately turned away from classical Homeric epic poetry. Rather than focusing on the feats of ancient heroes and gods, they propagated a new style of poetry through stories that operated on a smaller scale in regard to themes and setting.
Catullus 51 is a poem by Roman love poet Gaius Valerius Catullus (c. 84 – c. 54 BC). It is an adaptation of one of Sappho's fragmentary lyric poems, Sappho 31. Catullus replaces Sappho's beloved with his own beloved Lesbia. Unlike the majority of Catullus' poems, the meter of this poem is the sapphic meter. This meter is more musical, seeing as Sappho mainly sang her poetry.
Catullus 3 is a poem by Roman poet Gaius Valerius Catullus that laments the death of a pet sparrow (passer) for which an unnamed girl (puella), possibly Catullus' lover Lesbia, had an affection. Written in hendecasyllabic meter, it is considered to be one of the most famous of Latin poems.
Catullus 2 is a poem by Roman poet Gaius Valerius Catullus (c. 84 – c. 54 BCE) that describes the affectionate relationship between an unnamed puella ('girl', possibly Catullus' lover, Lesbia), and her pet sparrow. As scholar and poet John Swinnerton Phillimore has noted, "The charm of this poem, blurred as it is by a corrupt manuscript tradition, has made it one of the most famous in Catullus' book." The meter of this poem is hendecasyllabic, a common form in Catullus' poetry.
Catullus 101 is an elegiac poem written by the Roman poet Gaius Valerius Catullus. It is addressed to Catullus' dead brother or, strictly speaking, to the "mute ashes" which are the only remaining evidence of his brother's body.
Catullus 9 is a Latin poem of eleven lines in Phalaecean metre by the Roman poet Catullus.
Catullus 12 is a poem by the Roman poet Catullus. In it, he chides Asinius Marrucinus for stealing one of his napkins, calling it uncouth and noting the disapproval of his brother, Pollio. Note the reversal of the praenomen and nomen in the first line. While "Asini Marrucine" could be translated simply as "Asinius Marrucinus", the inverted word order introduces the alternative meaning "Marrucinus [son] of a jackass". Napkins in Ancient Rome were handmade and therefore far more valuable than they are today; also, Catullus has a sentimental attachment to the napkins, as they were a gift from two close friends, Fabullus and Veranius. In comparison to Catullus's other invective poetry, this is relatively light: the main point of the poem could be to praise Pollio rather than to chide Marrucinus.
Charles Hubert Sisson, CH, usually cited as C. H. Sisson, was a British writer, best known as a poet and translator.
Charles Martin is a poet, critic and translator. He grew up in the Bronx. He graduated from Fordham University and received his Ph.D. from the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York. He now teaches at Queensborough Community College of the City University of New York, Syracuse University, and the Stonecoast MFA Program at the University of Southern Maine. Martin's specialty is Latin poetry. Martin is also a New Formalist, and was an original faculty member of the West Chester University Poetry Conference.
The poetry of Gaius Valerius Catullus was written towards the end of the Roman Republic in the period between 62 and 54 BC.
Catullus 16 or Carmen 16 is a poem by Gaius Valerius Catullus. The poem, written in a hendecasyllabic (11-syllable) meter, was considered to be so sexually explicit following its rediscovery in the following centuries that a full English translation was not published until the 20th century. The first line, Pēdīcābo ego vōs et irrumābō, sometimes used as a title, has been called "one of the filthiest expressions ever written in Latin—or in any other language".
Latin prosody is the study of Latin poetry and its laws of meter. The following article provides an overview of those laws as practised by Latin poets in the late Roman Republic and early Roman Empire, with verses by Catullus, Horace, Virgil and Ovid as models. Except for the early Saturnian poetry, which may have been accentual, Latin poets borrowed all their verse forms from the Greeks, despite significant differences between the two languages.
References
- ↑ D.F.S. Thomson, Catullus (University of Toronto Press, 1997, 2003), p. 242.
- ↑ Emily Gowers, The Loaded Table: Representation of Food in Roman Literature (Oxford University Press, 1993, 2003), p. 234.