A biography of Gaius Valerius Catullus, Rome-s first great poet, a dandy who fell in love with another man-s wife and made it known to the world through his verse.This superb book gives a rare portrait of life during one of the most critical moments in world history through the eyes of one of Rome-s greatest writers.Living through the debauchery, decadence and spectacle of the crumbling Roman Republic, Catullus remains famous for the sharp, immediate poetry with which he skewered Rome-s sparring titans - Pompey, Crassus and his father-s friend, Julius Caesar. But it was for his erotic, scandalous but often tender love elegies that he became best known, inspired above all by his own lasting affair with a married woman whom he immortalised in his verse as -Lesbia-. A monumental figure for poets from Ovid and Virgil onwards, his journey across youth and experience, from Verona to Rome, Bithynia to Lake Garda, is traced in Daisy Dunn-s brilliant portrait of life during one of the most crit
