Catullus: Rome's Most Erotic Poet

The Ancients

History Hit

History

4.7 • 3.5K Ratings

🗓️ 1 November 2020

⏱️ 50 minutes

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Summary

If you're looking for a raunchy Roman poet, look no further than Catullus. Born into one of the most exciting periods in Roman history, in the early 1st century BC as the Roman Republic started to sing its swansong, Catullus was an aristocrat who moved in powerful circles. He was known to Cicero; he dined with Julius Caesar even after he’d mocked the great leader in verse. Catullus was well-connected, but it was his abiding love for a woman he called Lesbia (probably Clodia Metelli, a powerful woman herself) that inspired much of his poetry, which survived in a single manuscript of 116 verses.

Catullus was revolutionary, bringing a new type of poetry to the fore in ancient Rome. Often his poems were deeply personal, filled to the brim with emotion. Rarely did the young man hold back when pouring his heart out into his verses. Friends and enemies were targeted in sexy and scurrilous poems that continue to shock readers to this day. Nevertheless Catullus' legacy was far-reaching. From Ovid to Byron, Catullus has inspired many of those famous romantic poets that followed him.

To talk through the life of Ancient Rome's 'bad boy poet' (to quote our current Prime Minister Boris Johnson), it was an honour to interview Daisy Dunn, a leading classicist and Catullus' 21st century biographer. In this podcast Daisy brilliantly talks through the life of Catullus and his remarkable legacy. This was a brilliant chat and I hope you enjoy as much as Daisy and I did recording it.

Daisy is the author of Catullus: Rome's Most Erotic Poet.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	It's the Ancient's on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes your host and today I've got a real
0:09.6	real treat for you because I am joined by one of the greatest classicists of our time.
0:15.1	Daisy Dunn, she has recently written a book all about 79 AD, the eruption of Asuvius
0:20.6	and the Younger Pliny. But before that she also wrote a book about one of the most extraordinary
0:26.5	figures in Ancient Roman history, a man called Catulus known as Rome's most erotic poet,
0:34.0	Rome's bad boy poet, Rome's sex, mad poet and a pretty hopeless romantic. And it is Catulus
0:42.4	who is the subject of our podcast today. Daisy, she's a brilliant communicator in this
0:47.8	podcast, she talks through the relatively short life of Catulus, what we know about him,
0:52.0	where he went, his legacy and so much more. This was an absolutely brilliant chat and I've
0:59.1	no doubt that you are going to absolutely love this one. Enjoy.
1:09.4	Daisy, welcome to the show, it's a pleasure to have you on. Oh, it's my pleasure to you, thank you.
1:15.5	Now I have been very much looking forwards to this topic. Catulus, Rome's bad boy poet,
1:20.4	Rome's most erotic poet, what really astonished me when reading your book was how much we know about
1:25.9	him and his extraordinary life through his own writing. He didn't hold back, he was very emotional.
1:31.0	He was unusually emotional for a Roman, I think you think of the Romans as being such just
1:35.0	stoic characters and he seems to complete opposite to that. He's writing so much about his
1:40.3	feelings and his emotions and you just, you don't really find people doing that in Rome until he
1:45.3	was doing so instead the late is the Republic. So it is really refreshing, I think, when you're
1:49.5	used to reading, it was kind of didactic poetry and he says a nalais and he's quite kind of heavy
1:54.7	going pieces of Roman literature and then you come across these quite sexy and scarless poems.
1:59.7	It's quite exciting, I think. Does he feel like in regards to poetry and ancient poetry, he's
2:05.5	really at the start of a new era as it were of poetry? I think very much so, yeah, I mean I think
	...

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