Product Description

Catullus' brilliantly pungent, spare sketches of a great civilisation beset by civil war and social unrest portray a turbulent and magnificent period of the Roman Republic. Catullus was a genius of the lyric and the epigram, a master of both love poems and lampoons. His talent was to depict life and society in the golden days of the Roman Republic, with wit and elegiac tones to awaken a sense of love, loss and time passing - 'But ours is one brief day of light/Before the long last, everlasting night'. Born in Verona, Catullus belonged to a wealthy and influential family. He was a fashionable youth and his early writing was often about love, but already showed his trademark style of brevity and wit so successful in later works of sharp social commentary. Over a 20-year period he wrote continuously and became widely popular. At this time many great Romans were emerging centre stage - inspirational leaders like Caesar, Pompey and Crassus, learned men and orators like Cicero. The great slave revolt under Spartacus shook Rome's confidence but was put down without mercy. Catullus moved to Rome, where he entertained in the style of fashionable and wealthy young men, holding dinner parties and having love affairs. His famous poems to 'Lesbia' refer to Ciodia, a married woman with whom he conducted a long but unsatisfactory affair, and are widely held to be his greatest work. Following the ultimate failure of this love Catullus wrote little more and died in obscure circumstances around the time of Caesar's invasion of Britain. He whose poems had been so popular during his lifetime was soon forgotten. Indeed his entire body of work would have been lost to us, most destroyed with the libraries of Alexandria, had not a single book containing 100 poems, just over 2000 lines, been rediscovered in the 14th century.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #766080 in Books
• Published on: 2004-07-29
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 320 pages

Review
The poetry of Catulllus - sexy, tender, malicious, witty, and instantly memorable. Those of us who struggled through Latin 'O' level, still have fond memories of Lesbia's sparrow and the adoring poet's attempt to count up his kisses for his beloved. But Catullus had far more to offer, as Aubrey Burl demonstrates with racy exuberance in his new book. Burl puts Catullus in context; he places him firmly in a Rome where political machinations and sexual depravity were the order of the day. He gives us a Rome of filthy streets and crucified traitors, a Rome locked in turmoil as she struggled between the old ways of the Republic under Pompey, and the thrusting young upstart, Caesar. Yet like Jane Austen, whose heroes and heroines dance their courtly pavanes against the background of the Peninsular War with never the slightest reference to old Boney, Catullus is so embroiled in his doomed love for the lascivious Clodia ("Lesbia"), that the external world barely impinges upon his poetry. Burl has done the seemingly impossible : he has brought together the body of Catullus' work (including some of the most explicit and eye-watering poetry ever written), and as well as discussing the poetry per se he gives us an enthralling insight into Rome as she battled through one of the most dynamic periods in her history. Any student of daily life in Rome will find rich pickings here, yet even an uninformed reader will delight in the extravagance of Antonia who adorned her goldfish with earrings so she could admire them as they glittered in her pool at night, or shudder at the prospect of sixty men sitting in a row defaecating simultaneously while trying to cadge an invitation to dinner. This is the Rome of Spartacus, and Caesar - Cleopatra is here, complete with rolled up carpet, and there are grisly deaths by the score. We learn the Latin for brassiere and eavesdrop upon sexual combinations which would embarrass the editors of the Sunday tabloids. Burl is clearly utterly captivated by his subject and it is impossible to avoid being swept along by his sheer enthusiasm. Readers of this book will undoubtedly turn to the poems of Catullus - but they will also look upon their heroes of Ancient Rome in a different light. (Kirkus UK)

New Humanist, January 1, 2004
'Aubrey Burl's introduction to this entralling and occasionally capricious book ...'

Synopsis
Catullus' brilliantly pungent, spare sketches of a great civilisation beset by civil war and social unrest portray a turbulent and magnificent period of the Roman Republic. Catullus was a genius of the lyric and the epigram, a master of both love poems and lampoons. His talent was to depict life and society in the golden days of the Roman Republic, with wit and elegiac tones to awaken a sense of love, loss and time passing - 'But ours is one brief day of light/Before the long last, everlasting night'. Born in Verona, Catullus belonged to a wealthy and influential family. He was a fashionable youth and his early writing was often about love, but already showed his trademark style of brevity and wit so successful in later works of sharp social commentary. Over a 20-year period he wrote continuously and became widely popular. At this time many great Romans were emerging centre stage - inspirational leaders like Caesar, Pompey and Crassus, learned men and orators like Cicero. The great slave revolt under Spartacus shook Rome's confidence but was put down without mercy.

Catullus moved to Rome, where he entertained in the style of fashionable and wealthy young men, holding dinner parties and having love affairs. His famous poems to 'Lesbia' refer to Ciodia, a married woman with whom he conducted a long but unsatisfactory affair, and are widely held to be his greatest work. Following the ultimate failure of this love Catullus wrote little more and died in obscure circumstances around the time of Caesar's invasion of Britain. He whose poems had been so popular during his lifetime was soon forgotten. Indeed his entire body of work would have been lost to us, most destroyed with the libraries of Alexandria, had not a single book containing 100 poems, just over 2000 lines, been rediscovered in the 14th century.