Catullus Bedspread: The Life of Romes Most Erotic Poet

A biography of Gaius Valerius Catullus, Romes first great poet, a dandy who fell in love with another mans 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 Romes 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 Romes sparring titans Pompey, Crassus and his fathers 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 Dunns brilliant portrait of life during one of the most critical moments in world history.