![]() ![]() ![]() What's certain is that she was married and that Catullus's relationship with her was adulterous. Lesbia might have been one of Clodia's sisters, or another Clodia altogether. Classical scholars disagree over whether she was the Clodia married to the praetor Metellus Celer, infamous for her licentiousness and possible matricide. It was as a very young man, then, that he found his way to poetry - and to Lesbia. Gaius Catullus was born around 84 B.C., in Cisalpine Gaul, the son of a minor aristocrat and businessman with holdings in Spain and Asia Minor, and lived until roughly the age of thirty. From the first excruciating moments of infatuation with the woman he called "Lesbia," through the torrid transports of physical love, to the betrayals that leave him stricken, Catullus told it all, and, in so doing, did more than anyone to create the form we recognize today as the love story. Other poets treated the subject of "love," allowing the flushed cheeks or alabaster limbs of this or that inamorata to enter the frame of their poems, but it Catullus who built his nugae, or trifles, around a single, near-obsessional passion for a woman whose entire presence, body and mind, fills the lines of his poetry. The Latin poet Catullus was the first poet in the ancient world to write about a personal love affair in an extended way. ![]()
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