Overview

Catullan Questions Revisited offers a new insight into the brilliant poet who loved an aristocratic girl, attacked Julius Caesar and became a satirical playwright. Insisting on scrupulous use of the primary sources, Peter Wiseman combines textual, historical and even archaeological evidence to explode the orthodox view of Catullus' life and work. 'Lesbia' was not a woman in her thirties, as has been believed for 150 years, but a girl only recently married; Catullus' poems were written for performance, private or public, and it was only in 54 BC, at what he saw as the turning-point of his life, that he collected their texts into a sequence of probably seven volumes. His subsequent literary career, equally successful but much less well attested, was as a 'mime'-dramatist. This book is intended for everyone who is interested in poetry and history, and who does not believe that literary texts exist in a vacuum.

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9781009235716

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Reviews

'It is always a pleasure to read Wiseman: the style, the intellect, the ingenuity ... And, although here the reader must take care not to become bedazzled, there is always authentic, welcome erudition. All of which is to say that I enjoyed this book.' W. Jeffrey Tatum, Gnomon

Author Information

T. P. Wiseman is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Exeter. He has been a leading scholar of the political and social history of republican Rome for more than half a century and has a particular interest in social historical approaches to Catullus. His books include Catullan Questions (1969) and Catullus and His World (Cambridge, 1985).

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