The poetry of Gaius Valerius Catullus has had two lives. In Rome, Catullus and his generation, the “new poets,” played an essential role in the development of Augustan poetry. They helped to create the possibility that one might be a poet by profession. They brought to Rome the learned and self-conscious style of Hellenistic poetry, and they helped to create and explore those interests in erotic pathology that issued in the Roman love elegy. Later, during the empire, Catullus became the model for Martial’s epigrams, poems that were witty, often vulgar and satiric observations of life in Rome. Then his poetry was all but lost. With the exception of one marriage poem (around 62 BCE) included in a 9th-century anthology, he was relatively unknown after the time of Aulus Gellius (late 2nd century CE) until a stray manuscript was found in Verona early in the 14th century. The scattered references to Catullus’s poetry can be listed: St. Jerome, Martianus Capella, and Macrobius in the 5th century; Priscian and Boethius in the 6th century; and Isidore in the 7th century. Hildemar of Corbie appears to echo Catullus in 841 CE, and Hiericus of Auxerre quotes a phrase from Catullus in 873 CE. Bishop Rather, who organized the scriptorium of Verona, records in 965 CE that he is reading Catullus, whom he had not read before. Two others, William of Malmesbury and Marcus Grabman, appear to echo Catullus’s poetry in the 12th century. In general Catullus remained unknown until a manuscript known as V surfaced in Verona about 1305, only to disappear before the end of the century. Two copies were made from V (O and X). One of these copies is now in the Bodleian Library, Oxford; the other, which was probably owned by Petrarch, was copied twice (G and R in 1375) and then it, too, disappeared.
The fortuitous discovery of V gave Catullus and his poetry a second life, although at first he was quoted, improbably, as a moralist. Soon he became one of the special favorites of European lyric, as his verse responded well to different readers in different ages. For the Renaissance he was the master of wit and brevity. Robert Herrick raised his “immensive cup / of Aromatike wine” to Catullus’s “Terce Muse”; John Milton praised Catullus’s “satyrical sharpnesse, or naked plainness.” For the Romantic poet William Butler Yeats, Catullus was the natural poet, and for Ezra Pound and Robert Frost he was a poet of hardness and clarity, the source of poetic renewal. For most of the 20th century, Catullus was viewed as a lyricist who poured forth his heart in verse addressed to himself or no one and who led the “Catullan revolution” by inventing the deeply felt poetry of personal lyric. In more recent years, classical scholars have emphasized his Alexandrian learning and technical mastery, and most recently critics have begun to talk of him in terms of continuity with the Roman traditions of epigram and comedy.