Catullus Through his Books

Modern readings of the Roman poet Catullus' work have always been constrained by doubts about the surviving text. Does the sequence of our corpus reflect the artistically coherent and meaningful arrangement of the poems? Why are the various parts of the collection so jarringly different in content and emotional tone? To what extent, if at all, can we explain these shifts by appealing to Catullus' famously vivid portrayals of his emotions and life circumstances? Catullus Through his Books argues that we possess three separate books of poems designed by the poet himself; at key moments in these books, the poems dramatise the creative activity of their own composition, embedding apparent autobiographical details and purportedly revealing the poet's intentions and goals. These dramas of composition direct us through the poems, integrating our understanding of each part and generating a holistic vision of Catullus as poet of self-destroying longing and irreparable loss.

'… a book with which every expert of Catullus will have to confront himself and that certainly testifies the intelligence, acuity and even the esprit de finesse of its author.' Sergio Audano, Resenas Reviews

John Schafer is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Wake Forest University, North Carolina. He specialises in Republican and Imperial Latin literature, and is the author of numerous articles on Seneca, Vergil and Horace, as well as the monograph Ars Didactica: Seneca's 94th and 95th Letters (2009).