The poems

One of the most versatile of Roman poets, Catullus wrote verse of an almost unparalleled diversity and stylistic agility, from the brevity of the epigram to the sustained elegance of the elegy.

This collection contains all of Catullus' extant work and includes his lyrics to the notorious Clodia Metelli - married, seductive and corrupt - charting the course from rapturous delight in a new affair to the torment of love gone sour; poems to his young friend Iuventius; and longer verse, such as the extraordinary tale of Attis, a Greek youth who castrates himself in a fit of religious ecstasy.

Ranging from the tender, moving and passionate to the vicious and even obscene, these are poems of astonishingly modern force and content.