SOURCE: "Catullus," in The Latin Love Poets: From Catullus to Horace, Oxford at the University Press, 1980, pp. 19-61.

Wiseman on understanding Catullus's poetry:

… Why] should we expect his design to be immediately apparent to us? Just because he was capable of writing individual poems of such direct simplicity that they still speak to us face to face after two millenia, it does not follow that he was always simple, much less that his tastes and attitudes necessarily coincide with ours.

Catullus and his friends wrote for a small and intelligent audience, and we must work hard to reconstruct the intellectual climate they inhabited and the standards of sensibility they took for granted. Otherwise we have no chance of properly understanding either the arrangement of his collected works or the full meaning of the poem in which he introduced them to his friend … Cornelius Nepos. No doubt Nepos understood...