Catullus 5
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Let us live, my Lesbia, and let us love, and value all the mutterings of stern old men at a single penny.
Let us live and love: the poem begins by setting private desire against the judgment of severe old men.
Who is Lesbia?
Lesbia is the poetic name Catullus uses for the woman at the center of many love poems. Ancient testimony identifies the pseudonym with a woman named Clodia, and many scholars consider Clodia Metelli a plausible candidate, but the historical identification is not certain enough to treat every poem as documentary biography.
Do the poems tell one continuous story?
Do the Lesbia poems tell one story? Not in the way a novel does.
Dickinson College Commentaries shows how individual poems occupy very different emotional positions: poem 2 presents tenderness around Lesbia’s sparrow; poem 5 celebrates love; poem 8 stages a self-command to endure separation; poem 70 distrusts a lover’s promise; poem 72 tries to explain a love that has become both more intense and less affectionate.
Why Catullus can be both easy and difficult
Before over-analyzing one line.
Lesbia, Catullus himself, a friend, or an enemy.
Before searching for hidden symbolism.
Not as a prerequisite for basic comprehension.
Read around Catullus
Aeneid: Liber I
Move from lyric compression into epic narrative and a very different poetic scale.
Epistulae Morales I-X
For a prose counterpoint: direct moral address rather than lyric self-dramatization.
Sources & further reading
- Dickinson College Commentaries, Catullus 5, 2a, and 70 — Latin samples, notes, meter, and vocabulary
- Poetry Foundation, Gaius Valerius Catullus — cautious discussion of the Lesbia/Clodia identification