Catullus, GAIUS VALERIUS, the greatest lyric poet of ancient Italy, and one of the greatest poets of all ages, was born at Verona either in 87 or, more probably, in 84 B.C. Few of the incidents in his life are known to us, and the dates assigned to these are in most cases only conjectural. He appears to have belonged to the equestrian order, and his years were spent mainly at Rome, where he settled about 62 B.C., and at his villas, to which he was fond of retiring, at Tibur and Sirmio. He began to write verses when a boy of sixteen or seventeen. 'When my primrose youth was in its pleasant spring,' he says, 'I played enough at rhyming.' In Rome he mingled with the best society, becoming intimate with the two Ciceros, the Metelli, Hortensius, and probably with Lucretius. And in Rome he met the lady whom, under the name of Lesbia, he has sung in verses which stand at the head of the lyric poetry of passion. It is almost certain that the Lesbia of Catullus was none other than Clodia, the sister of Cicero's enemy, Publius Clodius Pulcher. One of the most beautiful and accomplished women of her time, she inspired Catullus with a passionate love of which the changing phases are mirrored in a wonderful cycle of poems. There is first a time of rapturous joy; then come doubts, quarrels, and reconciliations, and in the end betrayal and despair. The final rupture seems to have happened in 57 B.C., and in that year Catullus accompanied the propraetor Gaius Memmius to his province of Bithynia. He returned to Rome disappointed in his hopes of enriching himself, and entered impetuously into the contest which was then being waged between the senatorian and the democratic parties. Like Cicero and most of the men of letters of his day, he espoused the cause of the senate. A fiery, unscrupulous partisan, he assailed his enemies with equal scurrility and wit, and directed one of his coarsest lampoons at the head of Julius Cæsar. His closing years were darkened by the loss of a favourite brother, on whose tomb in the Troad, which he visited when returning from Bithynia, he wrote one of the most exquisite of all poems that breathe regret for the dead. He was himself cut off in early life, for, though the exact date of his death can only be conjectured, in all probability he did not survive the year 54 B.C.
The extant works of Catullus comprise 116 pieces, many of which are extremely brief, while the longest of them contains only some 400 lines. There is considerable variety, however, in this somewhat slender body of poetry. There are graceful, playful verses of society, and there are verses, struck out in the heat of party warfare, in which satiric wit sparkles through fescennine raillery. There are elaborate descriptive and mythological pieces, such as the Coma Berenices and the stately and richly-coloured Peleus and Thetis, which appear to have been translated or adapted from the Greek. There is the Attis, a strange poem, unlike any other work of a Latin writer in its wild imaginative power and in the magnificent sound and sweep of its gallianbic verse. And there is the crowning series of love-poems, in which the incarnation of burning passion in exquisite language, the mastery of verbal music, are carried to what is seemingly the highest attainable point of perfection. In these 'Lesbia poems' there is no sign of the laborious art which produced the mosaic-work of the Horatian odes. They seem to have flowed forth—thought, feeling, phrase, and cadence combined in a perfect whole—at a single creative impulse. Their author's mastery of the Latin tongue was unerring and unbounded. In his works it seems endowed with the elastic and radiant strength of the Greek. He revealed all it had of energy, sonority, and sweetness, of monumental dignity and laughing grace. He moulded it into lines which neither Lucretius nor Virgil has surpassed for majesty of rhythm; he wove it into lyrics which for lightness of movement and caressing sweetness of cadence are unmatched in all the fields of Latin verse. For breadth of vision, fertility of thought, insight into human character, we must turn to other writers than Catullus. For fire and music and unlaboured felicity of phrase he has no superior among the lyric poets of all time.
The text of the works of Catullus, after having been lost for more than three hundred years, was discovered in the 14th century at Verona. The original manuscript was again lost, and until lately only one copy of it, which was preserved at St Germain, and is now in Paris, was believed to be in existence. A manuscript in the Bodleian Library, however, has been discovered by Dr Bährens to be a sister copy of the St Germain manuscript. The best editions are by Mr Robinson Ellis (1867; new ed. 1878; Commentary, new ed. 1889), Bährens (Leip. 1876; new ed. 1885); Postgate (1889); and S. G. Owen (1893). Among English verse translations are those of Martin (1861), Cranstoun (1867), Ellis (1871), Hart Davies (1879), and Grant Allen (the Attis, 1892). See also Munro's Criticisms and Elucidations (1878); Sellar's Roman Poets of the Republic (new ed. 1881); and Lafaye, Catulle et ses Modèles (1894).