Gaius Valerius Catullus

Gaius Valerius Catullus (c. 84 – c. 54 BC) was a Roman poet born at Verona in Cisalpine Gaul. He moved to Rome as a young man and belonged to the circle of the "new poets" who prized short, polished, personal verse on the Alexandrian model. His surviving book of about 116 poems ranges from love lyrics to savage invective, from occasional pieces to a few longer learned poems.

His best-known poems address a woman he calls Lesbia, usually identified with Clodia, and trace the course of an intense and unhappy love. He also wrote elegies for his brother, who died in the Troad, and epithalamia, the epyllion on Peleus and Thetis, and the Attis. This selection gives the whole surviving corpus in the English of Robinson Ellis (1871), who translated it in the metres of the originals.