Catullus, in full Gaius Valerius Catullus (born c. 84 bce, Verona, Cisalpine Gauldied c.

54 bce,
Rome), Roman poet whose expressions of love and hatred are generally considered the finest lyric poetry of
ancient Rome. In 25 of his poems he speaks of his love for a woman he calls Lesbia, whose identity is
uncertain. Other poems by Catullus are scurrilous outbursts of contempt or hatred for Julius Caesar and lesser
personages.
No ancient biography of Catullus survives. A few facts can be pieced together from external sources,
in the works of his contemporaries or of later writers, supplemented by inferences drawn from his poems,
some of which are certain, some only possible. The unembroidered, certain facts are scanty. Catullus was
alive 5554 bce on the evidence of four of his poems and died young according to the poet Ovidat the age
of 30 as stated by St. Jerome (writing about the end of the 4th century), who nevertheless dated his life
erroneously 8757 bce. Catullus was thus a contemporary of the statesmen Cicero, Pompey, and Caesar, who
are variously addressed by him in his poems. He preceded the poets of the immediately succeeding age of the
emperor Augustus, among whom Horace, Sextus Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid name him as a poet whose
work is familiar to them. On his own evidence and that of Jerome, he was born at Verona in northern Italy and
was therefore a native of Cisalpine Gaul (Gaul This Side of the Alps); he owned property at Sirmio, the
modern Sirmione, on Lake Garda, though he preferred to live in Rome and owned a villa near the Roman
suburb of Tibur, in an unfashionable neighbourhood. According to an anecdote in the Roman biographer
Suetonius Life of Julius Caesar, Catullus father was Caesars friend and host, but the son nevertheless
lampooned not only the future dictator but also his son-in-law Pompey and his agent and military engineer
Mamurra with a scurrility that Caesar admitted was personally damaging and would leave its mark on history;
the receipt of an apology was followed by an invitation to dinner the same day, and Caesars relations with
the father continued uninterrupted. (Suetonius cites the episode as an example of Caesars clemency.)

Catullus poetry reports one event, externally datable to c. 5756 bce, a journey to Bithynia in Asia
Minor in the retinue of Gaius Memmius, the Roman governor of the province, from which he returned to
Sirmio. It also records two emotional crises, the death of a brother whose grave he visited in the Troad, also in
Asia Minor, and an intense and unhappy love affair, portrayed variously in 25 poems, with a woman who was
married and whom he names Lesbia, a pseudonym (Ovid states) for Clodia, according to the 2nd-century
writer Apuleius. His poems also record, directly or indirectly, a homosexual affair with a youth named
Juventius.

A consideration of the text of Catullus poems and of its arrangement is of unusual interest. Its survival
has been as precarious as his biography is brief. Not being part of the school syllabus, from roughly the end of
the 2nd century to the end of the 12th century, it passed out of circulation. Knowledge of it depends on a
single manuscript discovered c. 1300, copied twice, and then lost. Of the two copies, one in turn was copied
twice, and then it was lost. From the three survivorsin the Bodleian Library at Oxford, the Bibliothque
Nationale in Paris, and the Vatican Library in Romescholars have been able to reconstruct the lost
archetype. Incorrect transcription in the preceding centuries (some 14 instances are beyond repair),
however, has invited frequent and often uncertain emendation. Depending on whether one poem is divided or
not, 113 or 114 poems survive. In the printed total of 116, numbers XVIII to XX were inserted by early
editors without proof that they were written by Catullus. In 14 instances gaps are visible (eight of these of one
or more lines), and in possibly six poems fragments of lost poems have been left attached to existing ones.
Ancient citations indicate the existence of at least five more poems. The surviving body of work is therefore
mutilated and incomplete and (in contrast to the Odes of Horace) cannot in its present published form
represent the intentions of either author or executors, despite the elegant dedication to the historian Cornelius
Nepos that heads it. With these qualifications, it permits the reconstruction of a poetic personality and art
unique in Latin letters.
The collection is headed by 57 short poems, ranging in length between 5 and 25 lines (number X, an
exception, has 34) in assorted metres, of which, however, 51 are either hendecasyllabicthat is, having a
verse line of 11 syllables (40 such)or iambicbasically of alternate short and long syllables (11). These
rhythms, though tightly structured, can be characterized as occasional or conversational. There follow eight
longer poems, ranging from 48 lines to 408 (number LXV, of 24 lines, is prefatory to number LXVI) in four
different metres. The collection is completed by 48 epigrams written in the elegiac distich, or pair of verse
lines, and extending between 2 and 12 lines, a limit exceeded only by two poems, one of 26 lines and the other
of 16.

Lucretius, in full Titus Lucretius Carus (flourished 1st century bce), Latin poet and philosopher
known for his single, long poem, De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things). The poem is the fullest extant
statement of the physical theory of the Greek philosopher Epicurus. It also alludes to his ethical and logical
doctrines.
Apart from Lucretiuss poem almost nothing is known about him. The little evidence available is quite
inconclusive. Jerome, a leading Latin Church Father, in his chronicle for the year 94 bce (or possibly 96 or 93
bce), stated that Lucretius was born in that year and that years afterward a love potion drove him insane.
Having written some books in lucid intervals, which Cicero afterward emended, he killed himself in his 44th
year (51 or 50 bce). In his Life of Virgil, Aelius Donatus, a grammarian and teacher of rhetoric, noted that
Virgil put on the toga virilis (the toga of an adult) in his 17th year, on his birthday (i.e., 54 or 53 bce), and that
Lucretius died that same day. But Donatus contradicted himself by stating that the consuls that year were the
same as in the year of Virgils birth (i.e., Crassus and Pompey, in 55 bce). This last date seems partly
confirmed by a sentence in Ciceros reply to his brother in 54 bce (Ad Quintum fratrem 2, 9, 3), which
suggests that Lucretius was already dead and also that Cicero may have been involved in the publication of his
poem: The poems of Lucretius are as you write in your letterthey have many highlights of genius, yet also
much artistry. Excepting the single mention in Cicero, the only contemporary who named Lucretius was a
Roman historian, Cornelius Nepos (Atticus 12, 4), in the phrase after the death of Lucretius and Catullus.
The only contemporary whom Lucretius named was one Memmius, to whom he dedicated his poem, probably
Gaius Memmius (son-in-law of Sulla, praetor of 58 bce, and patron of Catullus and Gaius Helvius Cinna), for
whose friendship Lucretius hopes.
The title of Lucretiuss work translates that of the chief work of Epicurus, Peri physes (On Nature), as
also of the didactic epic of Empedocles, a pluralist philosopher of nature, of whom Lucretius spoke with
admiration only less than that with which he praised his master Epicurus.
Lucretius distributed his argument into six books, beginning each with a highly polished introduction.
Books I and II establish the main principles of the atomic universe, refute the rival theories of the pre-Socratic
cosmic philosophers Heracleitus, Empedocles, and Anaxagoras, and covertly attack the Stoics, a school of
moralists rivaling that of Epicurus. Book III demonstrates the atomic structure and mortality of the soul and
ends with a triumphant sermon on the theme Death is nothing to us. Book IV describes the mechanics of
sense perception, thought, and certain bodily functions and condemns sexual passion. Book V describes the
creation and working of this world and the celestial bodies and the evolution of life and human society. Book
VI explains remarkable phenomena of the earth and skyin particular, thunder and lightning. The poem ends
with a description of the plague at Athens, a sombre picture of death contrasting with that of spring and birth
in the invocation to Venus, with which it opens.