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Hello, Kautilus 84 to 54 BC wrote some of the most sublime poetry in the late Roman Republic and some of the most obscene.

He found a new way to write about love in poems to the mysterious Lesbia,

married and elusive, and he influenced Virgil and Ovid and others, yet his scatological poems were to blight

his reputation for a thousand years. Once the single surviving manuscript were discovered in the

Renaissance, though anecdotally as a plug-in-a-wine, but he inspired

Petrarch and the Elizabethan poets as he continues to inspire many today.

We'd me to discuss Katelles are Gail Trimble, Brown Fellow and Tutor in Classics at Trinity College at the University of Oxford.

Simon Smith, Reader in Creative Writing at the University of Kent, Poet and Translator of Catullus,

and Maria Wike, Professor of Latin at University College London.

Maria Weike, what do we know about Katellis?

Well, we have to be careful about what we think we know about Katellis.

He writes many poems in the first person very passionately

about his circumstances, but this is poetry designed to be consumed by the public as poetry and what you say in poetry is not necessarily who you are.

But what do we know about him?

But we have a few things that we do know about him, one of which is that he was born in Verona, which is quite significant because Verona then was not part of Italy, it's a province.

We know that he, his father was probably a magistrate because he was a friend of Julius Caesar.

They owned a country villa by Lake Garda.

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