My Sweetest Lesbia Comments

Catullus was the first poet in the ancient world to write about a personal love affair in an extended way. Other poets treated the subject of “love, ” allowing the flushed cheeks or alabaster limbs of this or that inamorata to enter the frame of their poems, but it was Catullus who built his nugae, or trifles, around a single, near-obsessional passion for a woman whose entire presence, body and mind, fills the lines of his poetry.