The Renunciation Poems of Catullus

Extract

Few poems ever written have the poignancy of those in which Catullus finally turns aside from Lesbia and renounces her. They are the more poignant because of their finality, a finality clearly expressed as he deliberately looks back across the course of their love, and with that backward glance points his rejection of her. This is most clearly seen in the eleventh poem. When Catullus first came to Rome as a young provincial, he was doubtless encouraged by Metellus Celer (who had been in Cisalpine Gaul in 63 b.c. and presumably, like Caesar later, stayed with Valerius Catullus the elder) to visit Metellus' house on the Palatine. There he met Clodia. She overwhelmed him; and, unable to find words of his own in which to express this new and overpowering emotion, he turned to a poem of Sappho's, conveying rather than translating it in perhaps the first Latin Sapphics ever written (li).