Carmina

A collection of 116 poems ranging from short, obscene invective against political and literary rivals to the anguished love poems addressed to 'Lesbia,' widely identified with Clodia Metelli, and a long mythological epyllion on Peleus and Thetis. Catullus belonged to the poetae novi, a circle that rejected Ennius's epic grandeur for the polished, allusive, small-scale Alexandrian style of Callimachus, and his poems move without apology between crude sexual taunts, tender grief for his dead brother, and some of the most quoted lines of unrequited love in Latin literature ('odi et amo'). The collection's raw, first-person intensity gave later Roman elegists their central model of poetry as intimate confession.