Catullus

Gaius Valerius Catullus was a Roman lyric poet of the late Republic, probably born at Verona around 84 BCE. He belonged to a prosperous family with connections to Julius Caesar and spent much of his adult life within the literary and social circles of Rome. His surviving poems move between intensely personal love poetry, friendship, mourning, learned mythological composition and savage political or sexual invective directed at rivals and public figures.

Catullus was strongly influenced by Hellenistic poetry and by the Alexandrian preference for polished, compact and allusive verse. The woman he calls Lesbia, conventionally identified with Clodia Metelli, dominates many of his best-known poems, though the literary persona cannot simply be treated as documentary autobiography. Catullus also travelled in the eastern Mediterranean and mourned a brother buried in the Troad. He probably died around 54 BCE, still a relatively young man.