1 Pliny’s uncle, Pliny the Elder, refers to Catullus in the Preface to the Natural History as his conterraneus (‘fellow-countryman’). For Catullus’ canonical status, see esp. Nep. Att. 12.4 (where he is paired with Lucretius as ‘the most elegant’ poets of their age); Vell. Pat. 2.36.2 (paired with Varro and Lucretius); Quint. 10.1.96 (see n. 30 below); Jer. Ep. 53.8.17 (mentioned alongside Horace, Septimius Serenus, and Greek lyric poets). See also Ov. Am. 3.15.7 and Mart. 1.61, 14.195, where he appears in lists of poets whose celebrity has brought reflected glory to their place of birth.

2 See Gaisser 1993: 12–15, 2009: 174–5. But Gaisser exaggerates the ‘disappearance’ of Catullus after the end of the second century, particularly in her more recent publication: he is quoted in the fourth and fifth centuries by Ausonius and Macrobius, as well as the Virgilian commentators Servius and Donatus and other grammarians (for references, see Wiseman’s catalogue of ‘References to Catullus in Ancient Authors’ [Wiseman 1985: 246–62]); and there seems no strong reason to believe that all the quotations were derived at second hand from intermediary sources.

3 Compare Du Quesnay 2021: 167, ‘a collection of unparalleled diversity’.

4 For a fuller discussion of material covered in this section, see Gale 2021, with further bibliography at 241.

5 Prop. 2.25.3–4, 2.34.87–8; Ov. Am. 3.9.61–2; cf. [Tib.] 3.6.39–42.

6 In Propertius, see most obviously 1.19, where the poet claims that Protesilaus’ love for Laodamia lasted even beyond death, whereas Catullus emphasizes the depth of her love for him (compare esp. 1.19.10: antiquam uenerat umbra domum, ‘he had come as a ghost to his former home’, with Catull. 68.73–4: flagrans aduenit amore /…Laodamia domum, ‘Laodamia arrived at her [new] home, burning with love’; and 1.19.26: non satis est ullo tempore longus amor, ‘however much time is granted, love is not long enough’, with Catull. 68.81–3: ante…quam…auidum saturasset amorem, ‘before she could satisfy her eager love’; see also Lyne 1998: 209–12). In Tibullus, see 1.4.21–4, where the erotodidactic advice nec iurare time: Veneris periuria uenti/inrita per terras et freta summa ferunt (‘don’t be afraid to swear: love’s perjuries are brought to nothing and carried off by the winds over land and sea’) ironically recalls Ariadne’s condemnation of Theseus’ periuria in Catull. 64, esp. 142: cuncta aerii discerpunt irrita uenti (‘the airy winds have torn apart all his promises and brought them to nothing’), 146: nil metuunt iurare (‘[men in general] do not shrink from oaths’), and 148: nihil periuria curant (‘they care nothing for their perjuries’). Ovid, in Am. 3.11b, offers a typically flippant take on the odi et amo theme of Catullus 85; for further Catullan echoes in Ovid, see Ferguson 1960.

7 For the terminology, see Chapter 1, p. 24 and n. 74, above.

8 Prominent examples include Prop. 2.7; Tib. 1.1.73–9; Ov. Am. 1.9. For discussion, see Gale 1997; Drinkwater 2013. For the argument that the trope is anticipated by Catullus, see Gale 2018: 1600–3.

9 See pp. 27–8 above. On elegy and comedy, see esp. James 2003 (esp. 21–8, 35–41), 2012; Polt 2021:174–88.

10 Poem 103, which denounces Silo as a leno (the lena’s male counterpart), is the sole example.

11 See e.g. Wyke 2002: 29–30.

12 Putnam 2006.

13 Ostentatiously so: Horace reinserts Sappho’s phrase ἆδʋ φωνείσας (‘sweetly speaking’, fr. 31.3–4), omitted by Catullus.

14 On Catullan echoes in 1.22 and other love odes, see (in addition to Putnam 2006) Commager 1962: 129–59; Hubbard 2000; Sutherland 2005.

15 Lyne 1980: 203.

16 See Chapter 4, p. 73, above.

17 Compare Catullus 25.10–11: ne laneum latusculum manusque mollicellas / inusta…flagella conscribillent, ‘or whips will scrawl on your fleecy flank and soft paws and brand them’, with Epod. 4.3: peruste funibus latus, ‘branded on your flanks by the lash’, and 4.11: flagellis, ‘whips’; and Catullus 29.6–7: superbus et superfluens / perambulabit, ‘will that arrogant spendthrift strut around?’, with Epod. 4.5: licet superbus ambules pecunia, ‘though you strut around, arrogant in your wealth’. Compare also the fate wished on ‘stinking Mevius’, whose shipwrecked corpse will provide ‘rich pickings’ for seagulls (Epod. 10.21–2) with that of Catullus’ Cominius in poem 108, briefly discussed above (p. 73).

18 See esp. Fitzgerald 1988; Oliensis 1998: 64–101; Gowers 2016. Also relevant here is the interplay between Archilochean and (the self-consciously milder style of) Callimachean iambus, which has been seen as underlying both Catullus’ and Horace’s self-fashioning. For Horace, see esp. Harrison 2001; Watson 2003: 4–17. For Catullus, see Wray 2001: 167–203 and Chapter 4, pp. 70–4, above.

19 For Virgil’s reception of Catullus, see esp. Putnam 1996; Petrini 1997; Nappa 2007; Hardie 2012. For Ovid, see Wray 2009; Myers 2012. Earlier discussions by Westendorp Boerma (1958) and Ferguson (1960, 1971–2) remain useful for detailed cataloguing of parallels. Constraints of space preclude discussion of the Heroides, for which Catullus’ Ariadne is an important archetype – and not only in Ariadne’s own letter, Heroides 10: she figures also in the Ars Amatoria (1.527–64) and the Fasti (3.459–516, on which see Conte’s influential discussion, 1986: 60–2). On Ovid’s Ariadne, see further Foulon 2005; Armstrong 2006: 221–60.

20 Virgil substitutes litore, ‘shore’, for the Catullan uertice. Also relevant in this connection is the cutting of Dido’s lock by Iris at the end of Book 4: see J. Tatum 1984: 444; Lyne 1994: 190–1; Wills 1998; Hardie 2012: 233–4. For further discussion of Dido and Catullus’ Coma, see also Griffith 1995 (with a helpful review of earlier scholarship at 48–50); Pelliccia 2011.

21 ‘History in the future tense’: W. H. Auden, ‘Secondary Epic’. For further discussion and bibliography, see Myers 2012: 249–54 (Ovid); Gale 2021: 238–9 (Virgil). Also relevant here is Virgil’s reworking of poem 64 in Eclogue 4, with its inversion of the Catullan pattern of decline from the Age of Heroes to the grim present: see esp. Du Quesnay 1977: 68–75; Van Sickle 1992: 37–64; Hubbard 1998: 78–85 (with full bibliography at 78 n. 65, to which add Fernandelli 2012: 328–38; Trimble 2013).

22 Aen. 2.746: aut quid in euersa uidi crudelius urbe? (‘what crueller sight did I see in the overthrown city?’), echoing Catullus 62.24: quid faciunt hostes capta crudelius urbe? (‘what crueller deed does the enemy commit in a captured city?’). Euryalus and Pallas are compared to drooping flowers (with close echoes of Catullus) at Aen. 9.433–7 and 11.67–71 respectively. As Hardie 2012: 225–35 demonstrates, these echoes intersect with a complex of allusions to poems 63 and 66 which foreground the themes of severance and separation. I have argued elsewhere (Gale 2021: 236–7) that the Catullan theme of familial and intergenerational continuity, examined above (pp. 92–3), is also an important thematic intertext for Virgil’s epic.

23 Compare, too, 6.689 with Catullus 64.166: unlike Ariadne, Anchises is given one last chance to ‘hear and reply to [Aeneas’] familiar voice’. For further Catullan (and Homeric) intertexts, see Conte 1986: 32–9; Putnam 1996: 93–9; Hardie 2012: 222–3.

24 On Pliny’s poetry and reception of Catullus, see esp. M. Roller 1998; Marchesi 2008: 53–96; Newlands 2021: 245–7.

25 For a stimulating discussion of epistolary exchange in Catullus and Pliny, see Gunderson 1997; for Catullus’ thematization of literary exchange, see pp. 11–13 and 54–5 above.

26 A recurrent theme also in Statius, for whom, as Newlands 2021: 255–6 points out, rapidity of composition is associated with virtuoso improvisation, in another marked inversion of Catullan poetics (contrast Catullus’ animadversions against Suffenus and Volusius [?] in poems 22 and 95). For Statius’ engagement with Catullus more generally, see Newlands 2021: 253–61.

27 For uersiculi (‘little verses’, ‘light verse’), compare Plin. Ep. 3.21.3–4 (of Martial’s epigrams), 4.27.4, 5.3.1–2, 9.16.2, with Catull. 16.3, 16.6, 50.4. For lusus/ludere (‘play’, ‘playful poetry’), compare Plin. Ep. 4.14.3, 4.27.3, 7.9.10, 8.21.2, 9.22.2, 9.25.1, with Catull. 50.2, 50.5, 68.17. For ioci/iocare (‘joke[s]’), compare Plin. Ep. 4.14.3, 5.3.2, 8.21.2, with Catull. 50.6 (and cf. 12.2, 36.10, 56.1, 4). For lepos (‘charm’), compare Plin. Ep. 1.16.5, 6.21.5, 7.4.6, with Catull. 16.7, 50.7. For urbanus and facetus in Catullus, see pp. 13 and 54 above. M. Roller 1998: 287 notes that Pliny, in contrast to Catullus, confines this terminology to the literary sphere: for the inappropriateness of urbanitas in the context of a meeting of the Senate, see Ep. 4.25 (where the distance from Catullus’ value-system is marked by the echo of Catullus 22.2 and 9, in senatu dicax et urbanus et bellus est, ‘who is [inappropriately] witty, urbane and smart in the Senate’; 4.25.3).

28 The diminutive is both Catullan in style and characteristic of Pliny in its mildness: as Newlands 2021: 245 observes, Pliny is self-consciously much gentler in his criticism of Saturninus, and his models, Catullus and Calvus, than Catullus himself in his own critique of contemporary poets.

29 For Pliny’s relationship with Martial, see Ep. 3.21. My discussion of Martial’s Catullan reception is particularly indebted to Fitzgerald 2007: 167–86 and Newlands 2021: 247–53. See also Newman 1990: 75–103; Swann 1994: 10–81 and 1998; Lorenz 2007; Gaisser 2009: 168–74.

30 Quintilian (who seems to have regarded Catullus primarily as an invective poet – he is listed under the heading of iambus in the reading list of Inst. 10 [10.1.96; other Catullan poems quoted or referenced in the treatise are 29, 62, 84, 86, and 97]) opines that overt attacks on powerful individuals such as Catullus 93 are tantamount to insania (Inst. 11.1.38).

31 Fitzgerald 2007: 167–86. For the ‘grotesque body’ in Martial (and Catullus), see Swann 1994: 71–5.

32 For Martial’s use of this vocabulary, see Swann 1994: 47–64.

33 Pliny is, unsurprisingly, more coy about this, claiming to eschew the use of nuda uerba (‘unvarnished language’; Ep. 4.14.4–5) even while pronouncing it acceptable under the ‘law of the genre’ (huius opusculi…uerissimam legem) that he extracts from Catullus 16.5–8. For Catullus as authorizing figure in Martial, see Newlands 2021: 247–8. Catullus’ name is linked with those of Marsus, Pedo, and/or Gaetulicus at Ep. 1 praef., 2.71.3, 5.5.6, and 7.99.7.

34 At least twenty times: see Swann 1994: 33–4 for a full list. On two occasions, Martial refers to Catullus the mimographer (identified by Wiseman 1985: 183–98, 2023: 42–6 with our Catullus; but Wiseman’s argument has not won wide acceptance). Three further references are apparently to a contemporary, though see Fitzgerald 2007: 168–9 for a persuasive metapoetic reading of one of these (Mart. 12.73).

35 The punchline of this second poem both inverts its Catullan model and plays on the idea of the ‘impure mouth’, prominent elsewhere in Catullus (and combined with the kiss motif at 78b, 99): the kisses that the returning traveller has to endure are so far from desirable, including as they do those of a fellator and a recens cunnilingus (10), that it would be better not to have returned at all. The first poem, of course, deliberately misreads Catullus, who ultimately wants not to keep count (5.11–13). For Diadumenus’ kisses, see also 3.65, where Martial riffs on the ‘kisses as food’ theme of Catullus 48; and 5.46, which reverses the self-abasing acquiescence of Catullus 99, normalizing the erastēs–erōmenos relationship as one between master and slave. See also 11.6, quoted in the main text below.

36 See above, p. 25.

37 Catullus’ passer/Passer is also referenced at Mart. 1.7.3, 1.109.1, 4.14.13–14, 7.14.3–4. On the double/triple entendre, see esp. Gaisser 1993: 236–42.

38 Mart. 8.73.8, 12.44.5. For amica Catulli, see 7.14.3–4; for dilecta Catullo, see 14.77 (in the last two instances, she weeps for her pet bird, with reference to Catullus 3).

39 See p. 41 above. The contemporary Lesbia also appears in Ep. 1.34, 5.68, 6.23, 10.39, 11.62, and 11.99. On these poems, see Newlands 2021: 249–53.

40 Fitzgerald 2007: 175 (with reference to echoes of poem 72 in Ep. 2.55: ‘the emotional heat of Catullus’s world is turned down a notch or two’). For echoes of Catullus 16.5–6: nam castum esse decet pium poetam / ipsum, uersiculos nihil necesse est (‘it’s right for a devoted poet to be virtuous himself, but his verses don’t have to be’), see Mart. 1.4.8 and 11.15.13; and compare Catullus 16.7–9: qui [sc. uersiculi]…habent salem ac leporem / si… / …quod pruriat incitare possunt (‘poetry has piquancy and charm if it can stir up an itch’), with Mart. 1.35 (esp. 11: ne possint, nisi pruriant, iuuare, ‘[epigrams] cannot please unless they rouse an itch’) and 11.16.

41 For the poem as weapon, see esp. Catullus 116 and pp. 71–2 above. As Lorenz 2007: 430–3 points out, however, the apologetic note that Martial strikes in 7.12 is qualified by other epigrams (6.64, 10.5, 12.61) in which the poet threatens his addressee with infamy, under provocation. But, again, we can see a self-conscious toning down here of (e.g.) Catullus 40 and 108. Mart. 12.61 offers a particularly neat paradox in response to Catullus’ attack on Ravidus: Martial refuses to write invective against Ligurra, on the grounds that the latter is worthy only of toilet graffiti (in the process, of course, making him the target of an invective poem). Mart. 10.5 is – again somewhat paradoxically – an invective attack on an invective poet who targets those who should be above criticism: here, while steering clear of the gruesome relish with which Catullus imagines the dismemberment of Cominius in poem 108, Martial nevertheless ups the ante by having his victim’s sufferings prolonged into the afterlife.

42 Gaisser 2009: 170.

43 Or almost no access: along with a handful of disputed echoes (on which see Butrica 2007: 26; Oakley 2021: 271; and – in more detail – Kiss 2016), we have the testimony of Bishop Rather of Verona, who claims to have read Catullus in c. 966, referring to the poet, significantly, as ‘never before read’ (numquam antea lectum). In addition, a manuscript written in the mid-ninth century in northern France contains poem 62, along with selections from Martial, Juvenal, and others: this is the Codex Thuaneus, now in the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, our oldest surviving manuscript of Catullus. For further evidence of the availability of Catullan manuscripts in the Middle Ages, see Kiss 2015a, 2016, who argues that the poems were more widely known than the scholarly consensus suggests.

44 The epigram is reproduced in full by, e.g., Butrica 2007: 27; Oakley 2021: 266. For discussion and a historia quaestionis, see most recently Kiss 2015b.

45 Strictly, it would be the pre-archetype, if manuscripts O and X are not direct copies (see below). On the Codex Thuaneus (T), see n. 43 above.

46 For a stemma of the earliest manuscripts, see Oakley 2021: 272. Oakley also includes a full list of extant manuscripts written before c. 1500, with their current locations (2021: 287–90), based on that of Thomson 1997: 72–89. The manuscripts mentioned above are Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, lat. 8071 (T); Oxford, Bodleian Library, Canon. class. lat. 30 (O); Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, lat. 14137 (G); Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Ottob. lat. 1829 (R); and Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, lat. XII.80 (M). For a clear and readable account of the early textual history, see Butrica 2007. For more detail on these, as well as the fifteenth-century manuscripts (the recentiores) and the interrelationships between them, see Thomson 1997: 22–43; Kiss 2015a; Oakley 2021. There is broad agreement among scholars that the great majority of the recentiores descend from R (a theory first adumbrated by W. G. Hale in 1897, and more fully elaborated in Hale 1899: 140–4), and have independent value only as sources of conjectural readings; it is highly probable, though not certain, that all descend from either R or G.

47 So Thomson 1997: 28.

48 Oakley 2021: 275; the figure is taken from Goold’s important review of Mynors’ text (Goold 1958).

49 For modern editions and textual criticism, see below, Appendix, pp. 144–6.

50 On the Aldine and other early printed editions, see Gaisser 1993: 24–65; Kiss 2021: 292–8.

51 Gaisser 1993: 220–33; the same argument is summarized at Gaisser 2007b: 440–5, 2009: 177–84.

52 Renaissance controversy and polemic in relation to the ‘obscene’ interpretation of poems 2 and 3 is discussed in detail by Gaisser 1993: 75–8.

53 See Wong 2021 (quoted phrase at 326) and (in more detail) 2017: esp. 25–40, 54–87. On Pontano and his successors, see also Gaisser 1993: 220–54, 2009: 176–90.

54 On Skelton and Catullus, see McPeek 1939: 57–61. Echoes of Catullus in Skelton’s poem are not close and may be indirect; but compare lines 120–6 with Catull. 2.2 and 3.8, and lines 159–60 with Catull. 3.9. There are hints of the eroticism more explicitly present in the Neo-Latin sparrow poems, esp. in lines 159–78 and 341–62.

55 For sixteenth- and seventeenth-century versions and adaptations into English, see Gaisser 2001: 3–42; the surveys in Harrington 1924: 143–87 and McPeek 1939 remain useful. For Catullus 61, 62, and 64 as the ‘salient template’ for Renaissance epithalamia, see R. Greene 2015: 329–33.

56 Stead 2016: esp. 223–68, 210–22 for parodies of poems 31 and 45. See also Stead 2016: 33–98 for the translations of John Nott (1795) and George Lamb (1821). The history of Catullan translation is a subject that merits full treatment in its own right, though constraints of space have allowed no more than the briefest of mentions here. The versions assembled by Gaisser 2001 give a good sense of the range of strategies that translators have adopted for dealing with the problems involved in rendering Catullus into English, notably colloquialism and obscenity, patterned language, wordplay, and variation in register. See also Vandiver 2007; D. H. Roberts 2008; Venuti 2008: 68–82, 186–94; Bassnett 2014: 92–101.

57 For the versions of poem 64 by Frank Sayers (1803) and Charles Abraham Elton (1814), see Stead 2016: 101–22; the latter is included in Gaisser 2001: 96–105. Stead also discusses allusions in Leigh Hunt, Thomas Love Peacock, and Keats. The epyllion was admired by Landor, who observed (of the simile at 269–75) that ‘a more beautiful description, or one in which every verse is better adapted to its peculiar office, is neither to be found nor conceived’ (quoted in Gaisser 2001: 87).

58 Perhaps due in part to Gibbon’s admiration for the poem, as Gaisser 2009: 199–200 suggests.

59 See Stead 2016: 257–65. Hunt’s translation is available in Gaisser 2001: 112–16.

60 Lines 147–52, quoted by Stead 2016: 266–7: cf. Catullus 63.47–9. On Hunt’s poem and its historical context, see further Stead 2016: 265–8. Unsurprisingly, the homoerotic overtones of lines 64–7 (ego gymnasi fui flos, ‘I was the flower of the gymnasium’, etc.) are suppressed in both ‘Velluti to His Revilers’ and Hunt’s translation of poem 63, where lines 64–5 are rendered ‘I was the charm of life, the social spring,/first in the race, and brightest in the ring’. A similar sleight of hand can be remarked in Hunt’s and Elton’s translations of poem 45, where Acme is domesticated as Septimius’ ‘bride’, as well as the more general tendency to de-emphasize (or even switch!) Juventius’ gender, for which see Stead 2016: 81–2; Gaisser 2009: 205–6.

61 Landor 1842: 369. On Landor and Catullus, see A. Roberts 2015: 375–8; Stead 2016: 154–65.

62 ‘These violent delights have violent ends’, quoted by Swinburne (from Romeo and Juliet, Act ii, Scene 6), in his defence of ‘Dolores’ in the 1866 pamphlet Notes on Poems and Reviews. On Catullan echoes in ‘Dolores’, see Wiseman 1985: 214–15; Boulet 2009.

63 An allusion to the Priapeum formerly included in the collection as poem 18 (see Chapter 1, n. 11, above), now generally referred to as fragment 1. Lines 3–4 refer to the worship of Priapus at Lampsacus, ‘more abundant in oysters than other shores’ (ceteris ostriosior oris).

64 On Tennyson’s Catullus, see Vance 1997: 119, 124–7; Markley 2015: 542–4 and (in more detail) 2004: 66–7, 76–8, 97–8, 114–20. Poem 101 is also echoed in section 57 of ‘In Memoriam’: ‘Eternal greetings to the dead; / And “Ave, Ave, Ave,” said, / “Adieu, adieu,” for evermore’.

65 On the importance of the homosocial in nineteenth- and twentieth-century imitations and reworkings of Catullus (and the misogynistic undercurrents which often accompany it), see Fitzgerald 1995: 212–35.

66 The phrase ‘uncleanly wit’ is taken from Landor’s ‘On Catullus’; for similar sentiments, see his ‘Lines Written in a Catullus’ (both printed in Gaisser 2001: 276).

67 This is the revised version of the original text published in The Wild Swans at Coole (1919), incorporating changes to lines 7–10.

68 So e.g. Harrison 2021: 349.

69 The contrast itself nods to Catullus’ rejection of the rumores…senum seueriorum (‘censure of stern old men’) in poem 5, as well as the image of the poet ‘tossing on [his] bed’ in poem 50 – though here, of course, his restlessness is attributed to the homosocial and literary excitement generated by the previous evening spent with Licinius Calvus, rather than the demands of ‘beauty’s ignorant ear’.

70 Originally published 1680; an English translation appeared in 1707. As Gaisser notes, La Chapelle, like Yeats, was keen to ‘rescue Catullus from the pedantry of scholars’ (Gaisser 2009: 201–3; quoted phrase at 202).

71 Fitzgerald 1995: 212–35, esp. 213–15, 222–7.

72 Ziolkowski 2007: 416.

73 For twentieth- and early twenty-first-century novelizations of Catullus’ life, see esp. Wiseman 1975 (now reprinted, with a postscript briefly covering more recent novelists, at Wiseman 2023: 142–58); Ziolkowski 2007: 416–29; Theodorakopoulos 2013. See also Fitzgerald 1995: 221–2 on Benita Kane Jaro’s The Key (1988).

74 See Wilder’s prefatory note to the novel (2003: xv–xvi; page references in the main text and notes below are to this edition). For discussion of the interplay between verisimilitude and self-conscious fictionality in Wilder’s novel, see Scourfield 2024.

75 Hinted at in Caesar’s ‘journal-letter’ to the fictional Lucius Mamilius Turrinus (14), and later made explicit by Clodia in a letter to Catullus (57). Caesar refers to Clodia as ‘one of those innumerable persons who trail behind them a shipwrecked life’ (14) and ‘this woman who has lost intelligible meaning to herself and lives only to impress the chaos of her soul on all that surrounds her’ (32).

76 Schwabe 1862: 69–70, my translation. For similar characterizations, see e.g. Baehrens 1885: 40–1; Harrington 1924: 3–44; and J. C. Squire’s poem ‘To a Roman’ (1923; in Duckett 1925: 63–5), discussed by Wiseman 1985: 224–5 and Fitzgerald 1995: 225–7. Even in the mid-1980s, vestiges of this notion of Catullan ‘purity’ lingered: Wiseman 1985: 224 sees ‘some historical justification’ in the ‘conflict of moral innocence and corrupt sophistication’ central to such narratives; his own Catullus is essentially a rather traditionally minded provincial, an ingénu in ‘the corrupt and cynical world of Roman high society’ (92–129; quoted phrase at 122).

77 Wilder’s novel does refer on a number of occasions to the invectives against Caesar, which are represented as arising from a personal animosity (partly political; partly, it appears, a reaction to unjustified sexual jealousy); but, as noted above, the crude language of these poems is contrasted with the austerity of the poet’s life – a contrast which must derive ultimately from poem 16.

78 ‘Poetry is the thoughts of the heart. I’m sure that’s what Catullus meant by mens animi. Poetry is hyphenated, like so many British names. It’s a thought-felt thing’ (quoted by Putnam 1983: 247). For discussion of Pound’s reception of Catullus, see Arkins 2007: 466–70. For Frost and Catullus, see Putnam 1983. On twentieth-century poetic receptions more generally, see Ziolkowski 2007: 409–16; Harrison 2021: 349–54.

79 The latest translations, too, reflect these scholarly trends: Uzzi and Thomson (2015), for example, seek to bring out the element of aggression and competitive masculinity emphasized by Wray (2001) and others (Uzzi in her introduction compares the poet to the rap musician Eminem), while Isobel Williams’ quirky Catullus: Shibari Carmina (2021) emphasizes Catullus’ characteristic gender inversions, with an eye both to recent scholarship on the poet’s self-representation and to the concern of our contemporary moment with sexual and gender fluidity.

80 See Fredricksen 2021 on Carson’s ‘philology of grief’.