Daisy Dunn Reads Catullus's 'Poem 64'

At Los Angeles Review of Books, Catullus's "Poem 64" is the subject of an article by Daisy Dunn. "Catullus was the most erotic poet of ancient Rome," Dunn writes, "He wrote thrillingly of his desire to play with a lover’s 'sparrow' and of his hunger for 'a thousand kisses, then a hundred, then another thousand' from the mistress he called Lesbia." From there: 

When their relationship soured, he pictured Lesbia soliciting “on crossroads and in alleys” and complained of being “crucified” by his feelings: odi et amo (“I hate and I love”). But Catullus was also the author of a short epic that rivaled Homer in its profundity. Surprisingly little known these days, “Poem 64” was Catullus’s greatest masterpiece, a poem that questions what it means to live and love in the shadow of the past.

Writing in the mid-first century BC, as the Roman Republic crumbled beneath the feet of rising populists, including his father’s friend, Julius Caesar, Catullus turned to the poets of ancient Alexandria for inspiration. Scholars from the city’s great library had long since refined the art of reshaping familiar stories into original, tight verse. Late Republican Rome was hardly the time for composing sprawling martial epics. Catullus determined to show that shorter was better, his “miniature epic” of just over 400 lines a celebration of concision and form. “Poem 64” is a retelling of the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur embedded within a retelling of the myth of one of Jason’s Argonauts. It is a Russian doll of a poem: intricate, clever, endlessly turning.

Read more at Los Angeles Review of Books.