Customer Reviews

Catullus and his World: A Reappraisal

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...BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK!

This is a great book, and it's scholarly and exhaustively researched to boot. It's weird, because it's fun and great reading, but you really sense Wiseman's profound ability to get so close to something that is really so far away from our everyday lives--now this is scholarship! He's an intellectual but never haughty or boring. It'll make you want to read all of Catullus' poems right away in any kind of format. I can never tell people enough that it's okay to read Latin (or Greek) literature in translation.

The last chapter, concerning Lesbia and modern poetry, is an amazing survey, tracing various poets' incarnations of the Divina Puella, from Marcus Antonius Flaminius' vision of Lesbia as a Medieval damsel-mannequin in distress, to Dorothy Parker's verdict of Lesbia as nothing more than ancient Rome's version of Holly Golightly.

I rarely read introductions, but Wiseman's inspired me, especially when he says that "the imagination of one callow youth was caught" when he first read the poems of Catullus when he was 14. Certainly his imagination rivals Catullus' own.

This book tells you most everything that can be known or guessed about Catullus, and it does so in a way that is both erudite and entertaining--a rare combination.