In Love by the Numbers Helena Dettmer suggests that poem 17, which begins o Colonia, quae cupis ponte ludere longo, belongs to a disparate group of poems within the Catullan corpus, which contains poems with personified inanimate objects. Yet two of that larger group, poem 17 and poem 67 (addressed to a house door or ianua), are more closely drawn together by their settings, which the author hints are northern and specific while leaving them undefined and general. Furthermore, the two represent personified wooden objects, a bridge (poem 17) and a door (poem 67), while the broader group of poems includes personified estates and poetry. Finally, the metre of poem 17 is unique within the Catullan corpus. It sets the poem apart from the others and assists in defining its character.

Poems 5, 6, 7 and 8 of Catullus form an interconnected series. Catullus draws them together by referring to notions of display and concealment in a love affair. In particular, Catullus explores a paradox inherent in the competing needs to keep a relationship a secret and to announce it to the wider public. In the tongue-wagging world of Rome, hiding the existence of an affair, as Flavius attempts to do in poem 6, can never be successful and will attract the suspicious minds and cruel tongues of observers; hence Catullus advocates that Flavius confess, in order to control the gossip, in the case of poem 6, from Catullus himself. On the other hand, ostentatious display of felicity in love has the power to evoke the inuidia of the observer which can manifest itself in a hex upon the affair: to counter this, in poems 5 and 7, Catullus recommends that the affair, or at least its precise details, be hidden from those who would watch in an envious spirit (5.11-13, 7.11-12). There is something fundamentally perplexing about 5 and 7, since Catullus proclaims what he would conceal, leaving himself, his girl and his affair exposed to the inuidia he wishes to avoid.

In the prologue of Terence's Eunuchus, written, according to the didascalia, in 161 BC, the author of the play defends himself against the charge of literary theft. He denies completely any knowledge on his part that the Greek plays he had combined to produce his own play had already been translated into Latin. In the alternative, he argues against the charge of comic theft by way of the very nature of stock characters. ‘If’, argues Terence, ‘a man isn't allowed to make use of the same characters [personae] as other writers, how, all the more, is he allowed to write of the running slave, to make his matrons good and his prostitutes wicked, his hanger-on greedy, his soldier arrogant; how is he allowed to have a child substituted, an old man deceived through his slave, to love, to hate, to be suspicious?’ This last line — amare odisse suspicari — aims to evoke the characteristic attitude of the comic adulescens, whose emotional vacillation is presented as just another stock aspect of the genre, a literary inheritance as clich6d as any of the comedy's archetypal stock characters. ‘Nothing is said nowadays which hasn't been said before’, concludes Terence. Mid second century BC, and the Latin literary lover is already afflicted by textual, as much as emotional, exhaustion.

Catullus is fascinated by the subject of incest. In the last third of his collection, no less than eight pieces are devoted to this particular topic. There are, in addition, thematically significant mentions of the practice in poems 59, 64 and 67. Furthermore, China's Zmyrna, the neo-Callimachean virtues of which are famously touted in poem 95, dealt centrally with the incest of the eponymous heroine and her father Cinyras. To put the matter crudely, then, the incest-theme surfaces in roughly ten per cent of Catullus' surviving poems. But the bulk of such allusions are clustered in poems 69-116, most particularly in the cycle on Gellius (74, 88-91), who, while not disdaining an oral-genital fling with a male partner (80), suffers, according to Catullus, from a psychologically and somatically unhealthy obsession with bedding his closest female relatives. Of especial importance is poem 79, Lesbius est pulcher: it will be discussed at the close of the paper.

One of the hallmarks of Latin love poetry is its seemingly oppositional stance toward traditional Roman values. As I and others have recently argued, however, critical approaches that merely focus on a search for oppositional ideology in Roman poetry are not only reductionist but also fail to do justice to the complex literary strategies at work in those texts. As Matthew Santirocco suggests, Augustan literature does not simply reflect a pre-existing ideology but rather participates interactively in its production. It seems to me that mis applies equally well to Catullus. By problematizing the poet's relationship to male public culture, Catullus sets the stage not only for the elegists’ ambivalent stance toward political life, but also for their ambiguous gender identifications.

We treasure both Gaius Valerius Catullus and Quintus Horatius Flaccus for their literary gifts and for their lyrics on the power of love and the pleasures of sophisticated urban living. We also, and often, treasure Catullus and Horace together; after all, both poets share a number of distinctive interests: metrically, stylistically, thematically, and what one might call professionally.

Among these common professional interests is their shared literary debt to a female predecessor, the early sixth century BCE Greek poet Sappho. For this reason alone, one might expect Catullus and Horace to acknowledge the presence and activity of female poets, and especially women erotic poets, in their own Roman milieu. I would like to argue that both Catullus and Horace in fact make such acknowledgments, but do so in strikingly different ways.

Prudentius' account of the martyrdom of the young Spanish girl Eulalia in Peristephanon 3 is particularly interesting because not only does it consist of her defiance of an order to pay homage to the pagan gods but also a rejection of pressures to get married. If martyrdom constituted an act of rebellion against the conventions of pagan society, then female martyrdom was doubly so and the ways in which it was presented to a community in which Christianity was still struggling to establish its reputation is worthy of detailed examination. Prudentius was arguably the Christian poet most influenced by his pagan predecessors, making an active effort to compose poetry worthy of the great Latin poetic tradition. When examining the classical antecedents of Peristephanon 3, scholars have largely concentrated upon its Virgilian echoes, emphasising the heroic dimensions of Eulalia's conduct by comparing her to Virgilian ‘heroines’ (the Sibyl, Camilla and Dido) who challenge conventional female roles. Some critics have pointed to elements of an epithalamium within the poem but they have related this imagery to late antique epithalamia or to the Song of Songs rather than looking for antecedents within classical poetry.

In his manifesto Personism, Frank O'Hara celebrated his own work with the announcement: ‘the poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages.’ In fact, he says, he was about to write another poem when he realised he could just pick up the telephone instead. Perhaps it is lucky telephones had not been invented when Catullus was writing his poems, which also seem to belong between two persons instead of two pages.

Yet despite the address to a ‘you’ that characterises many of Catullus’ poems, readers do not, as they do when reading a letter addressed to them, typically place themselves in the position of the person addressed. Rather, readers identify with Catullus himself.