Catullus' Bedspread: The Life of Rome's Most Erotic Poet

by Daisy Dunn

A vivid narrative that recreates the life of Gaius Valerius Catullus, Rome’s first modern” poet, and follows a young man’s journey through a world filled with all the indulgences and sexual excesses of the time, from doomed love affairs to shrewd political maneuvering and backstabbing—an accessible, appealing look at one of history’s greatest poets.

Born to one of Verona’s leading families, Catullus spent most of his young adulthood in Rome, mingling with the likes of Caesar and Cicero and chronicling his life through his poetry. Famed for his lyrical and subversive voice, his poems about his friends were jocular, often obscenely funny, while those who crossed him found themselves skewered in raunchy verse, sudden objects of hilarity and ridicule. These bawdy poems were disseminated widely throughout Rome. Many of his poems recall his secret longstanding affair with the seductive older Clodia.

While Catullus and Clodia made love in the shadows, the whole of Italy was quaking as Caesar, Pompey and Crassus forged a doomed alliance for power. During these tumultuous years, Catullus increasingly turned to darker subject matter, and he finally composed his greatest work of all—a poem about the decoration on a bedspread—which forms the heart of this biography, a work of beauty that will achieve immortality and make Catullus a legend.

Catullus’ Bedspread includes an 8-page color insert. 

Genres: History, Biography, Nonfiction, Poetry, Classics, Ancient History, Audiobook

329 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 5, 2016

About the author

Daisy Dunn is an author, classicist, and cultural critic. Her first two books, Catullus’ Bedspread: The Life of Rome’s Most Erotic Poet, and The Poems of Catullus: A New Translation, were published by HarperCollins on both sides of the Atlantic in 2016. The same year, Daisy was named in the Guardian as one of the leading female historians. Daisy has three books due out in 2019, the first of which, In The Shadow of Vesuvius: A Life of Pliny, was published by HarperCollins on 30 May (it will be released by Norton in the US in December). She is represented for books and media by Georgina Capel at Georgina Capel Associates Ltd.

Daisy contributes features, reviews, and comment articles to the Daily Telegraph, Evening Standard, History Today, Literary Review, The London Magazine, New Statesman, Newsweek, The Oldie, The Times, Sunday Times, Spectator, Standpoint, TLS, Apollo Magazine, Catholic Herald, and in the US she contributes to The LA Review of Books, New Criterion, and Lit Hub. Representing her former Oxford college St Hilda’s, Daisy played 3 matches of the 2016 University Challenge Christmas Special on BBC 2. Her team, captained by crime writer Val McDermid, won the series. Daisy has contributed to the BBC World Service, recorded two short films for BBC Ideas, and in 2015 her essay ‘An Unlikely Friendship: Oscar Wilde and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’ was longlisted for the international £20,000 Notting Hill Editions Essay Prize.

Daisy is particularly interested in the ancient world and its afterlife from the Renaissance forwards. Her doctorate, which she was awarded at UCL in 2013, spanned eighth-century BC Greece to sixteenth-century Italy. Her expertise lies in the history of the late Roman Republic and early Empire, literature of Greece and Rome, and art of Renaissance Italy.

Daisy read Classics at the University of Oxford, before completing a Master’s in the History of Art at the Courtauld in London, where she was awarded a scholarship for her work on Titian, Venice and Renaissance Europe. In the course of completing her doctorate, Daisy was recipient of the AHRC doctoral award, the Gay Clifford Award for Outstanding Women Scholars, and an Italian Cultural Society scholarship. She has taught Latin at UCL and continues to give talks and lectures in museums, galleries, and at festivals. She was formerly trustee and Executive Officer of the Joint Association of Classical Teachers. She is now Editor of ARGO http://www.hellenicsociety.org.uk/pub..., a journal published through the Hellenic Society, founded in 1879.

Reviews

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Subtitled, “The Life of Rome’s Most Erotic Poet,” this is the biography of Gaius Valerius Catullus, believed to be born in Verona about 82 B.C. One of the problems with trying to write the biography of someone who lived so long ago is obviously the lack of material to work with. However, in this case, we are lucky. For Catullus was Rome’s first lyric poet and his poetry, unlike most of his contemporaries, dealt less with epic adventures, and more with the personal.

Catullus lived in turbulent times and his world was populated with great men – Julius Caesar (a dinner guest of his father), Pompey the Great, Crassus, Cicero and others. Therefore, his poems also give us a personal portrait of a critical point in world politics, as well as a personal and immediate view of his life and his loves. For Catullus was more bedroom than battlefield and his immediate concerns mostly involved his own personal life. As a poet he inspired Ovid and Virgil among others and, because his poetry deals with his own feelings, disappointments and emotions, they still seem extremely relevant and, almost shockingly modern.

Author, Daisy Dunn, interweaves poetry into this book; using Catullus’ own words to tell his story. So here is his story, of a poet from the upper echelons of society. A second son whose elder brother died and who was forced to return to Verona from Rome. A man who fell passionately in love with another man’s wife. Above all a man who used his experience to write great poetry. I think he would be pleased that this book existed and that his poetry is still read and remembered. A fascinating read and an amazingly vivid portrait of a man who lived so long ago, in such amazing times.

[Jane · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unlike any other biography I've read of anyone; quite fascinating how the author cleverly reconstructed Catullus's life mainly from his own poetry and other primary sources. Though scatological and even obscene at times, he was a poet of great feeling, introspection, and intensity. Some of his incisive poems on particular personalities presage Martial or Juvenal. The author used as point of reference #64 -- what she considers his masterpiece, the miniature epic she termed the "Bedspread poem", of extended mythological scenes and Catullus's Five Ages of Mankind -- which led her to relate his other poems to his life: from growing up in Verona, to Rome, to Bithynia on the Black Sea, thence back to Rome and his home on Lake Garda. The "Lesbia" poems trace his love affair with Clodia Metelli, from fevered beginning through love/hate to its end, where he tells two fellow poets [and us]:
"And may she not expect my love as before,/Which through her fault has fallen like a flower/On the edge of a meadow, touched/By a plough passing by." From Poem #11.

We enter into Catullus's world, also the political conditions, machinations, and upheaval of the Late Republic. Ms. Dunn has also provided interesting analyses of some of the poems -- what she thinks are subtle meanings between the lines. She does fill in gaps in setting the scenes with her own words: for instance, when Catullus first climbs the Palatine to the Metellus home, his voyage home from Bithynia and last, where we see him on the shore of Lake Garda. He watches the water "lick the land like tears."

http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/pai...
Based on the myth of Ariadne and Bacchus from the "Bedspread poem", the Titian painting commissioned by the Italian Renaissance duke Alfonso III, d'Este, of Ferrara.

Highly recommended.

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Daisy Dunn weaves the poetry of Catullus with the history of first century BC Rome. A very readable biography in which the details of Catullus’s life are teased out of his poems and other sources.

[عدنان العبار · Rating 5 out of 5]

Without a doubt, Catullus' Bedspread was my favorite biography of 2023. I have listened to the audiobook version, narrated by the superb Mike Grady. I will go to Daisy Dunn's other books very soon, for she is a spectacular historian and author.

Not only does the book put Catullus in his proper context, but it never anachronistically judges him by our current standards, nor does she lack any sympathy for his affair that ruined a great part of his life -- but made him into the poet we have come to love so much.

I was fascinated with Catullus after reading Edith Hamilton's chapter on him, and very soon he became my favorite Roman poet, and the best poet in Latin I have read. (My Latin does not allow me now to read him without assistance, even though I enjoy the music of the original verse.)

I cannot recommend this book enough. Right after finishing the audio version, I immediately put a paperback copy in my Amazon cart. This book is worth having in your library, and it is spectacular and beautiful and poetic by its own right.

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I reread this book last week in order to get my ideas straight for a lecture I presented at the Contemporary Art Platform. (You can see some highlights on my Instagram account at @Phusisophia: Now, alabbar94.) I also ordered the book from Amazon to go through it a third time. This book is truly a masterpiece. I highly recommend getting the accompanying volume of poetry. Daisy Dun is a fantastic translator. I emailed her my hundreds and thousands of thanks for writing this book, and she was very lovely with her response.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a fun biography of Catullus (using, mostly, his own poems, which is of course Fraught) for a general audience. I'm impressed by the dogged attempt to put everything into a chronology, which is great for a history, but doesn't work for a poetry book -- and so it makes a lot of sense that this is NOT a poetry book. Dunn has apparently also done a translation (except for excerpts, 64 is the only poem completely translated in this book), which is definitely something I'd like to get my hands on.

For those who haven't read Catullus, and simplifying a bit, we have a vaguely-metrically-arranged book of Catullus' poems that was likely not Catullus' original arrangement of the book (or books), and would probably not have been chronological in the first place. You pretty much have to read the whole thing to absorb the interconnectedness of it all. Because Catullus mentions a lot of contemporaries, it's very tempting to mine his book for biographical details and make connections to historical events, but that only goes so far before you start having to make educated guesses. My one complaint with Catullus' Bedspread is that Dunn often doesn't make it clear what's a guess (or the thought process behind that guess). Not doing this makes it a lot more readable, of course, so it's hard to argue too much, but there were points where I would have liked a footnote (this book used endnotes, which is a perfectly sensible choice that I always absolutely hate).

[Ruben · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

It was nice to learn about Catullus, but clearly too little is known about him to fill a book. The author therefore fills in the blanks by taking liberties but also by making lots of digressions - into Catullus' contemporaries, the political situation as we are nearing the end of the Republic but also the arts and mythology. The problem with these digressions is that either you are familiar with them already, in which case they are superfluous or you are not, in which case they are much too brief and sketchy to really understand.

I liked the Pliny book better.

[Saimi Korhonen · Rating 4 out of 5]

"If only he had known as he slipped away, in the grip, perhaps, of some indeterminate ailment - a flu, pneumonia, a chill that went too far – that his name would live on for so much more than a hundred years. It would outlive his world itself."

Catullus’ Bedspread is a biography of one of the most famous and beloved Roman poets, Gaius Valerius Catullus, who is most known for his erotic love poems about a woman he loved that he referred to with the codename Lesbia. Using what little evidence we have of his life, mostly his own words, Daisy Dunn reconstructs what his life was and might’ve been while also offering the reader an insight into the turbulent political situation of Rome that influenced Catullus’ writing.

I love Catullus and his poetry. He has such a way with words and an uncanny ability to be utterly hilarious, devastatingly tragic, beautifully romantic and seethingly angry, often all at once within a single poem. I love how he uses history and mythology to convey his emotions and thoughts, and I am always amazed at how relevant and relatable he still seems, even after thousands of years. He writes, largely, about every-day stuff, things we still today deal with: love, jealousy, grief, anger and gossip. He writes both sensual erotic verse and complaints about a guy who stole his napkins at a party. He makes dick and poop jokes which are universally, throughout history, been funny to people. He wrote many a poem which referenced his fear of his words being forgotten and it is quite wonderful to read them and realize that he got what he wanted: he is immortal to us.

But as much as I love Catullus and his works, I did not know much about him as a man (other than what he reveals in his poems) or the world he lived in. I knew he lived during the rise of Caesar and died before Caesar became a dictator (a shame, really, I would’ve loved to have read his poems about all that chaos). I knew he fell in love with a woman he called Lesbia and was ruined by that love. I didn’t even know that he died at around 30 years of age. Reading this book taught me so much about the man himself and his world. I really liked how Daisy Dunn balanced the personal and the political in this biography. The focus was always on Catullus and what he was doing, but in order to truly understand his life, you must also understand what was happening around him. And, boy, a lot was happening around him. Catullus lived in one of the most turbulent times of the Roman Republic – its last decades. And even though Catullus was just a rich boy from Verona (a noveau riche boy, to be exact, so not as fancy as the rich of old families) who wrote smutty poems, his life was quite entangled with those of the political powerhouses of the time. His father was a friend of Caesar’s (which makes Catullus’s poems about Caesar’s sex life even more hilarious and awkward), his Lesbia aka Clodia Metelli was the sister of one of Caesar’s wives and Clodia’s brother, Clodius, was a chaotic figure in his own right who messed up Roman politics, ended up causing Cicero’s exile and much more. A slave his friend Cinna freed while the two of them were in Bithynia working with the Roman occupation ended up becoming a Greek tutor to Virgil. All these connections blew my mind!

But, I have to say, that at times the amount of names being thrown around and the amount we focused on the larger political structure started to be a bit tiring. I wanted, in those moments, to get back to Catullus and his life. The historical context is so important in every biography, but I think sometimes there was perhaps a bit too much focus on that. But this is a rather minor critique: the book was still very readable and enjoyable from start to finish.

It is rather fun how, due to the structure of the book and Dunn detailing both Catullus’ life and those of Caesar, Crassus, Pompey, Cicero and so on, the reader is presented with an image of all these incredible historical, monumental moments happening while Catullus is sitting somewhere, crying over how the woman he loved more than life itself, betrayed him. This spoke to something I think every ”regular person” everywhere can relate to: big political, economical and cultural things happen, but normal people have to keep living and they keep being normal people with feelings. I liked how Dunn approached Catullus and Clodia’s relationship, sympathizing with both of them. Catullus was clearly distraught over Clodia refusing to be with him, even after the death of her husband, but Dunn also makes a good point about how we do not know at all what Clodia felt, thought or said, because all we have is Catullus’ deeply subjective poems about her, and that it would’ve been near impossible for a woman of her status and name to marry a man like Catullus. Dunn also gives space for the reader to appreciate how clever, connected and smart Clodia was. She was from a powerful family that was often marred by scandal and gossip, but she was also an active player, a woman who spoke to politicians and so on. She was such a thorn in Cicero’s side that he referred to her, in court, as ”the Palatine Medea” and made crude jokes about her sexuality and personality, branding her a murderer and a liar. That stank of the age-old tactic of discrediting women who threaten a man’s status and masculinity with labels such as ”whore”. Speaking of Cicero, I have to say that every single thing I hear and learn about him makes me all the more convinced that he was one of the most boring spoilsports of all time. After their relationship fell apart, Catullus joined in this slander of Clodia and her family, writing poems about her having sex with hundreds of men – one of the lesser appealing sides of Catullus.

Since I cannot speak or read Latin, I always knew there must’ve been tons of little nuances I missed whenever reading a translation of Catullus. This turned out to, naturally, be the case. I was fascinated to learn that Catullus mixed the language of learned, rich folks with the language and dialect of ”regular people”, creating poetry that was mixed, complex and very bold for his time. His own dialect (he was from Verona and considered himself part Etruscan and part Gaul) also influenced his word choices, as his way of speaking affected how, for example, vowels sounded like. In a time when everyone aspired to be the best Roman man ever in order to be respected and get ahead in life, Catullus held on to his roots admirably stubbornly. He also refused to censor himself and wrote openly about not just himself but his friends and the political figures of the time. He was a bit of a rebel, which I think is also one of the reasons we still love him. He and his poet pals, including Calvus who would go on to become a lawyer and Cinna, whom I mentioned before, were referred to, by scandalized people like Cicero, as ”new poets” due to their earthly subject matters, their raunchiness, their straightforwardness and their new styles. Catullus’ poetry is full of puns and double meanings one can only really appreciate in Latin which makes me, once again, consider enrolling myself in a Latin class.

At the center of this book is Catullus’ magnum opus, his Poem 64 which Dunn refers to as the Bedspread Poem. It is truly a masterful piece of art, a multifaceted story within a story that explores mythological stories such as the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, the doomed romance of Theseus and Ariadne, and Ariadne’s rescue by Bacchus, while also brimming with commentary on the world Catullus himself lived in. He speaks of the five Ages of mythology and of the brutal Iron Age the ancients believed they lived in, and he also imbues his poem with such raw emotion that one cannot help but wonder if he is writing of his own pain over Lesbia when describing Ariadne’s anguish over Theseus’ betrayal (an example of the gender-play Catullus seemed to enjoy – in one of his wedding hymns, he writes very emotionally from a bride’s point of view, seemingly relating more to her than to the men of the poem). He goes against typical, Homeric depictions of heroes, detailing Theseus’ cruelty and Achilles’ brutal violence – where authors typically saw glory, Catullus saw something much darker. The Bedspread Poem is, I learned, also glorious for the way Catullus plays with meter and genre: he writes in an epic way while focusing on topics that were considered decidedly un-epic, such as love, weddings and so on.


Here are some random facts I learned:

- Caesar and Cicero had the same rhetoric tutor: Apollonius Molon.

- Catullus’ poetry was lost for centuries until it was discovered in Verona – the first printing of his collection was published in 1472, in Venice.

- One of Catullus’ good friends, Cinna the poet, was slaughtered by people who thought he was one of Caesar’s killers, another man named Cinna.

- Baiae was a resort with a scandalous reputation where the rich and the powerful (including Clodia Metelli) went to bathe and relax – by the times of Emperors Caligula and Nero, it was known as the ”inn of vice”.

- Clodia Metelli changed her name from Claudia to Clodia because she wanted to appeal to the ”regular people” with a name less aristocratic and fancy.

- Clodia Metelli’s brother Clodius had epic beef with Cicero and ended up causing Cicero’s exile – throughout his life he was also notorious for his political maneuvering, for getting himself adopted by a Plebeian family in order to be appointed a Tribune (essentially, he transferred himself from the upper class to the lower) and for infiltrating a female-only religious event dressed in drag. Please, someone make a movie of this wild dude.

- Catullus wrote really rude poems about Caesar when he began truly believing that Caesar’s power-hunger was dangerous but, after Catullus apologized, Caesar forgave him, even though Catullus had insulted him in the worst possible way for a Roman man: by calling him a bottom.

- Catullus was Rome's first lyric poet.

- Throughout history, people have censored his poetry or even omitted certain poems from collections due to their raunchiness – I have a feeling his infamous Poem 16 has been one of the most censored ones.

- Catullus' literary idols included figures such as Sappho and Apollonius of Rhodes.


I would recommend this book to anyone interested in Catullus himself or in this period of Roman history in general. For anyone who has read Catullus’ poems and wanted to know more about the man behind those passionate words, Daisy Dunn has got you covered. I quarantee you finish the book with a whole new level of appreciation for this guy – even if he was, truly, a melodramatic asshole most of the time. He is my problematic fave of the Roman Empire.

[Vicki Cline · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author reconstructs Catullus' life from his poems and contemporaneous historical accounts. Besides his poetry, Catullus is most famous for his affair with Clodia, the sister of the demagogue Publius Clodius Pulcher and the wife of former consul Quintus Caecilius Metellus Celer. Many of his poems are quite scatological, and others are outright attacks on people, including Caesar. It's a very interesting look at Rome during the last years of the Republic.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don’t know why I decided to read yet another book about Catullus during term time when I don’t need to know about him for my degree anymore, but I did and I enjoyed it. The book combines analysis of Catullus’ poetry with wider context of his life and what was going on in Rome at the time (spoiler: lots was going on in the late Republic!). I don’t study much Roman history but this period is really interesting and I’m glad I now know more about it in general.

The book did slow down a bit towards the end, and I got bogged down in all the different Roman senators, consuls and generals etc. who were being introduced, but I would recommend it to anyone wanting to flesh out their knowledge of Roman poetry and this moment in time as a whole.

If you want to read about Catullus and all the luxury & decadence (good and bad) of late-Republic Rome but don’t want the poetry analysis etc., ‘Counting the Stars’ by Helen Dunmore is a really good, semi-fictionalised story about Catullus’ affair with Lesbia.

[Illiterate · Rating 1 out of 5]

As much historical fiction as reliable scholarship.

[Jon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Make it three and a half, because some of her translations are quite imaginative and immediate. She even imitates Catullus' "frenetic rhythm" in poem 63, the only one in Latin in this "galliambic" rhythm, meant to remind the reader of the cymbals and drums of wild worshipers of the Great Mother Cybele. But the whole project is a little suspect from the start: almost nothing is known about the poet's life, and what is guessed is drawn (as she does here) from supposedly autobiographical details in his poetry. There's a lot of dispute about that, which she honestly acknowledges (in her footnotes). There are 116 poems, and they are clearly not in chronological order. They do not tell a step-by-step story. 22 of them mention "Lesbia" as the love (and hate) of his life. Other love poems are written to an unnamed woman--is that still Lesbia, or somebody else? How can anyone possibly decide? There are some famous names in his poetry, but are they identical with the people of the same name whom history remembers? There are a lot of mythical allusions--do they reference then-current political events? Dunn comes down pretty firmly on all these questions. But it seems to me she has conjured up a Catullus who is, like the promises of women in love (as he says), written in the wind and on running water.

[Colin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I originally borrowed this book from the library in Phoenix, but I finally have my own Kindle copy. A biography of the poet of the late Republic, Gaius Valerius Catullus, which attempts to take a measured view integrating all that is known or surmised about him, including some of the subtler references in his own poetry. It is entirely too easy to dismiss Catullus as a smutty writer, a purveyor of poetic filth, if one does not understand the unparalleled deftness and elegance with which he wrote, or the more serious nature of some of his work. His father's political connections to Julius Caesar, his more personal connections with Cicero and Clodia Metelli . . . fascinating stuff. The serious Catullus scholar is likely to find that most of this covers familiar ground, but there are bound to be a few revelations!

[Dorthe · Rating 3 out of 5]

Meh ... I adore Catullus and so of course had to read this one.

I'm sure the factual stuff is fascinating (well, more fascinating - you know what I mean) if you don't know it all already. As for the conjectures and opinions, well, those are the author's and I do not necessarily agree.

The choice of narrator for the audio version does not help - who came up with what sounds like a 60-yr old man to narrate a book by a woman about a young poet?

[Hannah · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 Stars - Really good, almost great, book

Daisy Dunn details, as best as she can, the life of Roman poet Catullus.

Ancient Rome fascinates me and I appreciate this book is about an aspect that, historically, is overlooked — poets and their poetry. Usually, at least in my experience, there’s a lot of work on military, politics, and important players in those fields. Of course that’s not to say that those traditional elements don’t play a part in Catullus’ story because they do. However, this book is parsed with Catullus poetry and the author does a good job of balancing fact, poetry, and analysis.

Do I recommend this one? Yes. Overall it’s a different view of Ancient Rome and I liked it.

[julia · Rating 5 out of 5]

The prose is vivid and far-reaching, painting a vast picture of Catullus’ Rome. It’s part analytical, exposing the genius of Catullus’ poetry, but still moves at a solid pace through the biographical elements, easily shifting between the bigger and smaller pictures of the time period

[Craig Chapman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fantastic read bring Catullus and his poems back to live

[Jo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although little is known of his life, Dunn creates an interesting biography of Catullus. It's a study of his life and times as well as his work and serves as a good introduction to all this.

[Carla]

Adored this delightful bio of bad boy poet Catullus. It's a model of concision, and the translations are great.

[harriet · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this book. It inspired so much thought in so many ways and areas and I can honestly say I had never thought this much about one person until this book!

[Ludo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very good resource to understand catullus better

[Charlie · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful journey into the world of one of Rome's best, enduring, and at one time controversial poets. A story of the end of the Roman Republic cleverly interwoven with his poems. Daisy Dunn has linked Catullus' poems so well with the issues of that day, and explained the double meanings we miss out on reading the poems in translation so well, that this book deserves to go to the top of any person who wishes to find out more about Roman poetry.

[Michael Arnold · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow is the subtitle ill-advised and stupid.

This is quite a good book, and quite an interesting take on it all - but I can already see that it is better to think of this book as a novel than as a biography of a poet we basically don't know anything about. As a novel, this is actually (being honest) extremely well written and well worth reading.

I'm not sure I agree with many of Dunn's opinions on Catullus's relationships, and her timeline, but I suppose that isn't the point. This book is, though, very well written, and very well researched - even if it assumes Dunn's opinions as fact, there is absolutely no evidence Catullus died at age 30 in Rome. He simply disappears from the record, anything could have happened to him, his death is just the safest bet. However, she is a lecturer in Classics, so her opinions and guesses are obviously informed enough to carry some weight.

This is worth reading, and it's even a lot of fun. But I do not think it should be taken as bible paper or anything.

[Simon Vozick-Levinson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this wonderfully vivid account of Catullus' life and work -- a lepidus blend of literary analysis, biography, and cultural history, with plenty of original insight and sal to spare. Catullus' poems have been a personal favorite ever since I studied them in school many years ago, and Dunn captures his surly, sensitive spirit better than any English commentator I can recall.

[Carey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Considering so little is known about this scurrilously wickedly good poet she has created an imaginative, accessible portrait of him. Wonderful.

[Travis Müller · Rating 3 out of 5]

If one thing is made absolutely clear by classicist Daisy Dunn within her text, it is that she is an absolute fan of Catullus, a poet writing at the time of the crumbling Roman Republic. It shows less so in her explanations and more in the stunning way which she has rendered his poetry. Latin is a language that requires profound understanding in order to interpret the beauty of its poetic canon, and it is clear that Dunn's command of the language as well as talent for emotional writing has gifted the English-speaking world with an incredible piece of work. If this book has done anything, it has made me want to read all of Catullus's work as rendered by Dunn in her separately published collection.

Her passion for Catullus is a major advantage for the reader of this text. Although she is a fan, she is more passionate about and loyal to the work itself. In short, she is in no way here to preach about the good or bad things that he may or may not have done. Her theories are theories, and she does not attempt to justify his behavior - which at times would be more closely associated with our modern fuck-boys than a tortured artist. Catullus, a rich young man who did much to hide and/or ignore his ties to Gallic/Roman nobility, was a biting and at times bitter romantic - an author consumed by the nature of how people love and how they ultimately lie. As a result, his works are grotesque in their beauty.

Where Catullus's Bedspread misses the mark is in the unfortunate lack of proper information we have. All we know of Catullus comes from secondary sources and, for the most part, his own poetry. As a result, we have to infer a lot about what his intentions accurately were. Dunn does a good job arguing her theories, but, at the end of the day, that's what they are. Theories. At times, it feels more like fact than perhaps it should. This is combined with Dunn's attempt to match Catullus poetic language by writing her own prose so delicately. The ending result may be approachable and beautiful, but it also lends itself to slight reader confusion when compared to other more straight-forward history books. I'm glad I had more context thanks to other works to help me truly understand the situation happening in Rome at the time - this in spite of Dunn's ample digressions from Catullus (necessary given how little is factually known about the man).

Overall, the book was enjoyable, but the marketing lets it down. Catullus's Bedspread is not strictly a biography; rather, it is a strongly argued literary analysis with some biographical fact and a lot more biographical theory. What this books does well, aside from Dunn's impeccable rendering of the Latin into English, is offer us context as it relates to Catullus himself. This text tells the story of the fall of the Roman Republic from a very different perspective - not through the eyes of a politician (there are plenty) but through an artist mostly preoccupied with his feelings and the way Roman human behavior was, as its Republic was, decaying.

And, for anybody who loves the delicious drama concerning the Clodii Pulchri, this book will provide you with a lot of context.

[Ptera Hunter · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Catullus's Bedspread, the author creates a blend of history and biography with a literary analysis of Catullus' erotic poetry. She uses one poem (#64) to weave together the theme for the book. Poem 64 describes the bedspread of Peleus and Thetis, which is embroidered with mythological scenes.

The book integrates Catullus' erotic love for a noble Roman woman--what we might today consider stalking-- with the political intrigue of the era. At times, the metaphor feels a bit forced, but overall, it works well. Ms. Dunn creates a vivid picture of the Roman world.

The book explores the complex emotions of Catullus' poetry and how he and it fit into his world of the late Roman Republic

NB: If you are not familiar with Catullus' works, you will probably find the material daunting. If you choose to read them, keep in mind that he wrote erotic poems, and some may find the material offensive. If you do procure a copy, keep in mind that many translations sanitized his work, depriving them of the power they would have had for the Romans and what they would have in better if more graphic translations.

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was not made clear (at least in the audiobook version) what a lot of the sources of the information here were, but it seems that a lot of it came directly from Catullus's poems themselves. In fact, a decent fraction of the book seems like extended glosses on one or another fraction of a poem.

I do not really think this is the fault of the author, because my understanding is that we don't have great sources about Catullus's life. She makes reference to Catullus dying young several times in the book, but then does not make much fanfare about it towards the end of the book, because as far as I can tell from reading Wikipedia, we don't have any idea how Catullus died or why.

It may be true that this is about as good of a biography of Catullus as you're going to get, but I don't think I got a great sense of what his life was like. There seemed to be a decent amount of jumping around in time going on in the narrative, too, which made it a bit harder to follow.

2.5 of 5 stars

[Anna Nesterovich · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think the author misjudged her audience. This book is not a "vivid narrative" it claims to be. It is very well researched, interesting, somewhat controversial, but definitely not vivid. Paragraphs feel disjointed from one another. The narrative behaves more like a solid than a liquid, and a living solid at that: it jumps like a cricket from one paragraph to the next, instead of flowing seamlessly as I would expect it. The whole biography resembles a workbook, with a lot of extensive notes. And there is also a decisive lack of original Latin poems. I know, the interested reader is supposed to go out there and find them. But it would be really nice to at least have a few examples, even if only to see first-hand the rhythm the author talks about.

[Justin Redpath · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not quite historical fiction but the type where the author says things like, "Catullus walked up the Palatine, sweating profusely in the Roman summer" -- things that are plausibly true but ultimately unprovable. However, I thoroughly enjoyed reading this. Dunn brought together a wealth of resources to provide an invaluable overall CONTEXT not only for the life of Catullus but also for his poems. Now I finally know who each person is (was), what was going on in Roman politics and social life, etc., to explain each poem. It makes me want to set this as required reading for my high school students when we get to the unit on Catullus.

[Eve · Rating 2 out of 5]

I mean. it was kind of valid but it was so frustrating how the author just told us stuff without any explanation!! And if you’ve already read some Catullus. Like. You can tell she’s using the poems to form a biography. but like please how did u get this anecdote because I don’t recognise the poem and there is no endnote!!!

It’s a good intro though. I learnt about poem 64 which I had never actually read in full so I guess there’s that. also, origins of manuscripts and some idea of the chronology. not as valid as I hoped though I guess