SOURCE: "The Poems (1)" and "The Poems (2)," in Catullus, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1988, pp. 24-31, 32-9.

Below, Ferguson provides an overview of the Lesbia poems, the elegies, and four long poems; two marriage-hymns ("Poem 61" and "Poem 62'), "Attis" ("Poem 63,"), and "Poem 64."'

The Lesbia-poems

Catullus chooses to introduce his readers to the woman central to his life in the two poems about her pet sparrow. She is not there identified even by the pseudonym Lesbia, but, whatever other women there may have been in the poet's life, there is no serious doubt that all the six love-poems in the first eleven refer to the same woman. We have come to appreciate that the first of these ('2') is a hymn, the sparrow who drew Aphrodite's carriage taking on her divinity, that it stands within Hellenistic traditions, and that the language is highly erotic in its details. There...