Gaius Valerius Catullus

Writing in the late Roman Republic, Catullus is remembered as one of ancient Rome’s most vivid lyric poets. He was born in Verona, probably around 84 BCE, and spent part of his life in Rome, where his poems captured the intensity of personal feeling with unusual directness and energy.

His surviving collection includes love poems, elegies, wedding songs, and fierce satirical attacks. Many readers know him for the poems addressed to “Lesbia,” a literary name for the woman at the center of some of his most famous work, but his writing also ranges across friendship, betrayal, travel, and mourning.

Catullus died young, probably around the mid-50s BCE. Even so, his influence has lasted for centuries: later Latin poets learned from his style, and modern readers still return to him for the mix of tenderness, polish, humor, and raw emotion in his verse.