Catullus and Related Topics

Virgil

Ancient Roman poet of the Augustan period.

Page from the beginning of the Eclogues in the 5th-century Vergilius Romanus

Horace, Virgil and Varius at the house of Maecenas, by Charles Jalabert.

Late 17th-century illustration of a passage from the Georgics, by Jerzy Siemiginowski-Eleuter.

A 1st-century terracotta expressing the pietas of Aeneas, who carries his aged father and leads his young son

Virgil Reading the Aeneid to Augustus, Octavia, and Livia by Jean-Baptiste Wicar, Art Institute of Chicago

A 3rd-century Roman mosaic of Virgil seated between Clio and Melpomene (from Hadrumetum [Sousse], Tunisia)

A 5th-century portrait of Virgil from the Vergilius Romanus

Virgil in His Basket, Lucas van Leyden, 1525

The verse inscription at Virgil's tomb was supposedly composed by the poet himself: Mantua me genuit, Calabri rapuere, tenet nunc Parthenope. Cecini pascua, rura, duces. ("Mantua gave me life, the Calabrians took it away, Naples holds me now; I sang of pastures, farms, and commanders" [transl. Bernard Knox])

From Virgil's admiring references to the neoteric writers Pollio and Cinna, it has been inferred that he was, for a time, associated with Catullus' neoteric circle.

Sappho

Archaic Greek poet from Eresos or Mytilene on the island of Lesbos.

Head of a woman from the Glyptothek in Munich, identified as "probably" a copy of Silanion's fourth-century BC imaginative portrait of Sappho

Sappho (1877) by Charles Mengin (1853–1933). One tradition claims that Sappho committed suicide by jumping off the Leucadian cliff.

P. Sapph. Obbink: the fragment of papyrus on which the Sappho's Brothers Poem was discovered

Sappho inspired ancient poets and artists, including the vase painter from the Group of Polygnotos who depicted her on this red-figure hydria.

In the medieval period, Sappho had a reputation as an educated woman and talented poet. In this woodcut, illustrating an early incunable of Boccaccio's De mulieribus claris, she is portrayed surrounded by books and musical instruments.

Detail of Sappho from Raphael's Parnassus (1510–11), shown alongside other poets. In her left hand, she holds a scroll with her name written on it.

alt=Red-figure vase painting of a woman holding a lyre. On the left, a bearded man with a lyre is partially visible.|One of the earliest surviving images of Sappho, from c. 470 BC. She is shown holding a lyre and plectrum, and turning to listen to Alcaeus.{{sfn|McClure|2002|page=38}}

Sappho's portrait from the Istanbul Archaeology Museums. Roman copy of an original from the Hellenistic period

alt=White marble bust of a woman|A Roman sculpture of Sappho, based on a Classical Greek model. The inscription reads ΣΑΠΦΩ ΕΡΕΣΙΑ, or "Sappho of Eresos".

In the first century BC, Catullus established the themes and metres of Sappho's poetry as a part of Latin literature, adopting the Sapphic stanza, believed in antiquity to have been invented by Sappho, giving his lover in his poetry the name "Lesbia" in reference to Sappho, and adapting and translating Sappho's 31st fragment in his poem 51.

Lesbia

Lesbia with the Sparrow by John William Godward, 1916

Catullus at Lesbia's by Lawrence Alma-Tadema, 1865

Favourite Poet by Lawrence Alma-Tadema, 1888

Lesbia and Sparrow by Lawrence Alma-Tadema, 1886

Lesbia was the literary pseudonym used by the Roman poet Gaius Valerius Catullus (c.

Catullus 51

Catullus 51 is a poem by Roman love poet Gaius Valerius Catullus (c.

Alcaeus and Sappho, the two great poets of Lesbos. Attic red-figure calathus, c. 470 BCE

Sapphic stanza

Aeolic verse form of four lines.

A few centuries later, the Roman poet Catullus admired Sappho's work and used the Sapphic stanza in two poems: Catullus 11 (commemorating the end of his affair with Clodia) and Catullus 51 (marking its beginning).

The Tusculum portrait, possibly the only surviving sculpture of Caesar made during his lifetime. Archaeological Museum, Turin, Italy.

Julius Caesar

Roman general and statesman.

Dictator Lucius Cornelius Sulla stripped Caesar of the priesthood.

A denarius depicting Julius Caesar, dated to February–March 44 BC—the goddess Venus is shown on the reverse, holding Victoria and a scepter. Caption: CAESAR IMP. M. / L. AEMILIVS BVCA

The extent of the Roman Republic in 40 BC after Caesar's conquests

Vercingetorix throws down his arms at the feet of Julius Caesar, painting by Lionel Royer. Musée Crozatier, Le Puy-en-Velay, France.

A Roman bust of Pompey the Great made during the reign of Augustus (27 BC – 14 AD), a copy of an original bust from 70 to 60 BC, Venice National Archaeological Museum, Italy.

Cleopatra and Caesar, 1866 painting by Jean-Léon Gérôme

This mid-1st-century-BC Roman wall painting in Pompeii is probably a depiction of Cleopatra VII as Venus Genetrix, with her son Caesarion as Cupid. Its owner Marcus Fabius Rufus most likely ordered its concealment behind a wall in reaction to the execution of Caesarion on orders of Octavian in 30 BC.

Green Caesar, posthumous portrait of the 1st century AD, Altes Museum, Berlin

Statue of Julius Caesar, Via dei Fori Imperiali, Rome

La clémence de César, Abel de Pujol, 1808

Denarius (42 BC) issued by Gaius Cassius Longinus and Lentulus Spinther, depicting the crowned head of Liberty and on the reverse a sacrificial jug and lituus, from the military mint in Smyrna. Caption: C. CASSI. IMP. LEIBERTAS / LENTVLVS SPINT.

The senators encircle Caesar, a 19th-century interpretation of the event by Carl Theodor von Piloty

The Death of Caesar, Jean-Léon Gérôme, 1867

Bust of Mark Antony made during the Flavian dynasty (69–96 AD)

Marc Antony's Oration at Caesar's Funeral by George Edward Robertson

Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus, Caesar's adopted heir

The Chiaramonti Caesar bust, a posthumous portrait in marble, 44–30 BC, Museo Pio-Clementino, Vatican Museums

Reliefs of Cleopatra and her son by Julius Caesar, Caesarion, at the Temple of Dendera

Roman painting from the House of Giuseppe II, Pompeii, early 1st century AD, most likely depicting Cleopatra VII, wearing her royal diadem, consuming poison in an act of suicide, while her son Caesarion, also wearing a royal diadem, stands behind her

Bust in Naples National Archaeological Museum, photograph published in 1902

Bust in the National Archaeological Museum of Naples

Bust of Julius Caesar from the British Museum

Modern bronze statue of Julius Caesar, Rimini, Italy

Catullus wrote two poems suggesting that Caesar and his engineer Mamurra were lovers, but later apologised.

Ovid

Roman poet who lived during the reign of Augustus.

Statue of Ovid by Ettore Ferrari in the Piazza XX Settembre, Sulmona, Italy.

Ovid Banished from Rome (1838) by J.M.W. Turner.

Engraved frontispiece of George Sandys’s 1632 London edition of Ovid's Metamorphoses Englished.

A 1484 figure from Ovide Moralisé, edition by Colard Mansion.

Delacroix, Ovid among the Scythians, 1859. National Gallery (London).

Ovid as imagined in the Nuremberg Chronicle, 1493.

Scythians at the Tomb of Ovid (c.1640), by Johann Heinrich Schönfeld.

Bust of Ovid by anonymous sculptor, Uffizi gallery Florence

They also play with generic conventions; most of the letters seem to refer to works in which these characters were significant, such as the Aeneid in the case of Dido and Catullus 64 for Ariadne, and transfer characters from the genres of epic and tragedy to the elegiac genre of the Heroides.

Catulli Carmina

Cantata by Carl Orff dating from 1940–1943.

The work mostly sets poems of the Latin poet Catullus to music, with some text by the composer.

Helvius Cinna

Gaius Helvius Cinna (died 20 March 44 BC) was an influential neoteric poet of the late Roman Republic, a little older than the generation of Catullus and Calvus.

Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Catullus at Lesbia's 1865

Sappho 31

Archaic Greek lyric poem by the ancient Greek poet Sappho of the island of Lesbos.

First translations of the poem would derive from Catullus' re-visitation of the poem, Catullus 51, painting Sappho with a green taint of jealousy.