Catullus as Love Poet

Catullus is one of the most popular of Classical Latin authors because he offers poems easily presented to a beginners' class: not weighty and serious but short and humorous. But this is not the whole truth. He is also deeply committed to the Roman Republic, its traditions, the disaster of Pompey's defeat and Caesar's triumph, the decay of public morality. This is what Newman already emphasised in his Roman Catullus and the Modification of the Alexandrian Sensibility (Weidman, Hildesheim 1990, Pp. 483) and tries again to emphasise for the more general reader here.