Biography Essay

The poetry of Gaius Valerius Catullus has had two lives. In Rome, Catullus and his generation, the "new poets," played an essential role in the development of Augustan poetry. They helped to create the possibility that one might be a poet by profession. They brought to Rome the learned and self-conscious style of Hellenistic poetry, and they helped to create and explore those interests in erotic pathology that issued in the Roman love elegy. Later, during the empire, Catullus became the model for Martial's epigrams, poems that were witty, often vulgar and satiric observations of life in Rome. Then his poetry was all but lost. With the exception of one marriage poem (ca. 62 B.C.) included in a ninth-century anthology, he was relatively unknown after the time of Aulus Gellius (late second century A.D.) until a stray manuscript was found in Verona early in the...