Poetry of Catullus

The poetry of Gaius Valerius Catullus was written towards the end of the Roman Republic. It describes the lifestyle of the poet and his friends, as well as, most famously, his love for the woman he calls Lesbia. List of poems by Catullus Catullus's poems have been preserved in three manuscripts that were copied from one of two copies made from a lost manuscript discovered around 1300. These three surviving manuscript copies are stored at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the Bodleian Library at Oxford, and the Vatican Library in Rome. These manuscripts contained approximately 116 of Catullus's carmina. However, a few fragments quoted by later Roman editors but not found in the manuscripts show that there are some additional poems that have been lost. There is no scholarly consensus on whether Catullus himself arranged the order of the poems. While the numbering of the poems up to 116 has been retained, three of these poems—18, 19 and 20—are excluded from most modern editions because they are now considered not to be Catullan, having been added by Muretus in his 1554 edition (which identified 113 poems existing in the Catullan manuscripts). Some modern editors (and commentators), however, retain Poem 18 as genuine Catullan. Furthermore, some editors have considered that, in some cases, two poems have been brought together by previous editors, and, by dividing these, add 2B, 14B, 58B, 68B and 78B as separate poems. Not all editors agree with these divisions, especially with regard to Poem 68. Catullus's carmina can be divided into three formal parts: short poems in varying metres, called polymetra (1–60); eight longer poems (61–68); and forty-eight epigrams (69–116). The longer poems differ from the polymetra and the epigrams not only in length but also in their subjects: there are seven hymns and one mini-epic, or epyllion, the most highly prized form for the "new poets". The polymetra and the epigrams can be divided into four major thematic groups (ignoring a rather large number of poems eluding such categorization): poems to and about his friends (e.