In his dedication of a small collection of poetry – a collection that would mark Catullus' brief career as much as it would ‘make’ the poet for generations of readers to come – Catullus asks a deceptively simple question: To whom do I give this charming new work? Two lines later the poem provides its own answer – the libellus will be dedicated to the historian Cornelius Nepos – but the question and its implications remain for the poet, the recipient, and the readers who have encountered it since. On closer inspection this simplest of inquiries becomes only more complex, more difficult to decipher, and more demonstrative of the anxieties of textual exchange and the author's desire to remain a subject even as he becomes, through his text, an object. Who will understand what the gift of a text means? Who will make sure that the right people read it? Who will be able to read it as it was intended to be read and who will, perhaps, make a gift in kind? What, at last, does it mean to entrust one's text – one's persona – to the care of another, and how does one write about this meaning?