The Catullus of the Augustans is, above all, a poet of love. Regularly paired with Calvus, as in the two quotations above, he is hailed for his doctrina (‘learning’) and lasciuia (‘licentiousness’, ‘playfulness’), and acknowledged as a founding father of erotic elegy: Propertius locates him in the canon of love-poets that also includes Cornelius Gallus, and to which he himself aspires; and Ovid imagines him as coming to greet his successor, the recently dead Tibullus, in a literary Elysium.

The long-running debate about the ‘origins’ of Latin love elegy has regularly recognised that Catullus had an important part to play in the formation of this short-lived genre: Poem 68 (or ‘68b’) – with its introspective focus and complex use of mythological paradigms – is commonly cited as a (if not the) foundational text.