Love-poetry of this sort has no precedent in Greek literature, and was conditioned by a novel
combination of social circumstances. The Lesbia of Catullus was really Clodia, one of the spectacular
sisters of the aristocratic demagogue Clodius, and probably the wife of Metellus Celer, the consul of 60
B.C. Upper-class women had achieved greater emancipation than at any time in the ancient world, and
Clodia had not only the style to inspire sophisticated poetry but the education to understand it. If she
showed a conspicuous disregard for the ancestral proprieties, her lover could woo her with a sense of
adventure and write about her with a lack of reticence impossible within the context of marriage. It is
true that some Greek courtesans had been cultured and intelligent, but new elements were the Roman
interest in the individual (witness Lucilius and Cicero's letters) and the outspoken independence of a
privileged class. When Meleager writes elegant epigrams to his Zenophila or Heliodora, nobody cares
whether they ever existed, but Catullus can build up a convincing series of poems about a real
relationship in all its vicissitudes. Nothing like that had ever been done before.
Most of the Lesbia cycle is in fact poetry of disillusionment. What gives it its characteristic tone is not
just the piquant blend of apparently incompatible emotions but the persistence of the rational voice: here
we find subsisting together rueful self-examination, resolute self-exhortation, reasoned reproaches, and
virulent hate. Catullus may start at the traditional level of epigram, but he ends by adding a new element
to literature.
What a woman says to her eager lover should be written in wind and in swirling water (70. 3 f.)
I hate and yet love. You may wonder how I manage it. I don't know, but feel it happen, and am in
torment. (85)
I loved you then not just as the world loves its girl but as a father his sons and sons-in-law (72. 3 f.)
Poor Catullus, you must stop being silly and cut your losses (8. 1 f.)
It's hard suddenly to put aside a long love; it's hard, but somehow you must accomplish it. This is the
only way out, this fight you've got to win, this you must do whether it's possible or impossible (76. 13 ff.)
Let her go and get on with it with those lechers of hers whom she clasps in her embrace, three hundred
at once, loving none really but repeatedly bursting the loins of all of them, and let her not this time count
on my love which has collapsed through her fault like a flower on the field's edge when touched by a
passing ploughshare (11. 17ff.)
The modern world tends to regard such personal pieces as the poet's most significant achievement, but
ancient critics would have set a higher value on his more elaborate artefacts. Catullus was a member of
the so-called 'Neoteric' movement, which with its precision and preciosity suddenly made traditional
narrative poetry seem old-fashioned; though there was an overlap with the writers of occasional short
poems, the two trends were distinct in origin. The new movement, which had its roots in Callimachus,
was stimulated by the Greek poet and mythographer Parthenius, who was brought to Rome as a prize of