493 Catullus - The Poet of Love and Hate
The History of Literature
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Catullus Hates Caesar
Catullus was friends or acquaintances with other dignitaries, including Cicero and Pompey. He writes poems about them but what we really know him for are his surviving relationship with a young man named Juventus. The major relationship in the poetry is with Lesbia, who in the poems is older, married, from a more prestigious family,. They seem to have had an affair, and that seems to have been broken off. But scholars have pieced together that her real name was Clodia.
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