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Biography of Gaius Valerius Catullus
Name: Gaius Valerius Catullus
Birth Date: c. 84 B.C.
Death Date: c. 54 B.C.
Place of Birth: Verona, Italy
Nationality: Roman
Gender: Male
Occupations: poet
Gaius Valerius Catullus
Gaius Valerius Catullus (ca. 84-ca. 54 BC) was a Roman lyric poet. He is best known for the intense poems which reflect various stages in his love affair with "Lesbia."Catullus belonged to a circle of neoteroi, or "new poets," who used as their models the learned Greek poet-scholars at Alexandria in the Hellenistic period and wrote elegant, allusive, and highly finished poems on love, mythology, and other topics. They cherished the epithet docti, "learned." Catullus's friends were the poets C. Licinius Macer Calvus, Furius Bibaculus, and C. Helvius Cinna; the orator Q. Hortensius, Cicero's rival in the law courts; and the biographer Cornelius Nepos, to whom Catullus dedicated his book of poems.Catullus was born in Verona. St. Jerome gives the year 87 B.C. and says that he died at age 30. Since events of 55 B.C. are referred to in several of Catullus's poems, however, and no poem can be …showed first 150 words…
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…showed last 150 words…Catullus's little book of poems "maddeningly scrappy." The poems are indeed uneven in quality, and many are difficult to understand. Nevertheless he wrote a new kind of poetry which influenced poets for two generations after his death. His direct personal lyricism gives a quality to many of them which makes them similar to modern lyric poems. Further Reading A biography that considers the political and cultural milieu of Catullus's works is Tenney Frank, Catullus and Horace: Two Poets in Their Environment (1928). Two of the best studies of Catullus in English are E. A. Havelock, The Lyric Genius of Catullus (1939), and Arthur Leslie Wheeler, Catullus and the Traditions of Ancient Poetry (1934). Kenneth Quinn, The Catullan Revolution (1959), assesses the poet's importance in the development of Roman poetry. A later work is David O. Ross, Jr., Style and Tradition in Catullus (1969).Stoessl, Franz, C. Valerius Catullus: Mensch, Leben, Dichtung, Meisenheim am Glan: Hain, 1977.
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