An octogenarian, a man who has read Latin for pleasure all his life, recently remarked to me that, of all the Roman poets, Catullus was the one who actually seemed like a human being. I knew what he meant. Gaius Catullus was born in 84 B.C.to a provincial aristocrat in Verona, in the province of Cisalpine Gaul. His father had a villa on Lake Garda, where he entertained Julius Caesar. Later in Rome, Caesar, lampooned by Catullus in stinging epigrams (including one that ran: “I’ve no interest, Caesar, in currying favor with you, or indeed in learning whether you’re a white or a black”), huffily demanded an apology; Catullus obliged; Caesar said, “Come to dinner”; Catullus did. In Rome, Catullus had joined ranks with other young highborn poets like Calvus and Cinna in a loose conspiracy to reform pompous, heavy, elephantine Roman poetry by injections of Alexandrian wit, erudition, and concision. Catullus retained from old Roman poetry, however, a habit of personal vituperation, obscene and rank, that he was to deploy in a variety of registers from angry to playful. In the city, Catullus conceived a passion for the patrician Clodia, faithless wife and, after 59, faithless widow of the magnifico Metellus Celer, governor of Catullus’s home province. In 57-56, Catullus and Cinna served as lieutenants on the staff of Memmius, governor of a province on the Black Sea. (This Memmius, vituperated by Catullus, was himself a poet and was the dedicatee of the greatest of Roman