A fresh, knowledgeable introduction to life, love, war, and rivalries in ancient Rome.
The short life of Rome’s first lyric poet.
Journalist and classicist Dunn (translator: The Poems of Catullus, 2016) reveals the “uncertain and turbulent times” of ancient Rome in this appreciative, informed biography of Catullus. Dying before he was 30, Catullus produced 117 poems “full of emotion, wit, and lurid insight into some of the key Roman personalities.” Melding many literary genres, his poems’ “apparent simplicity…often masks far greater, deeper sentiment and subtlety of thought,” and he influenced later writers, including Ovid, Virgil, Horace, and Roman satirists. Central to Dunn’s study is Catullus’ longest poem, which she appends to this biography. She calls it his “Bedspread Poem” because it describes in detail the myths incorporated into the sumptuous wedding bedspread of one of Jason’s Argonauts. “The bedspread,” she writes, “was a visual web of words” that evoked history and mythology to create “a miniature epic.” Dunn constructs her narrative around Catullus’ verse, which she has translated from the Latin. “I see this very much as a joint venture: Catullus provides the poetry; I offer something of the world that informed it.” That world was peopled by Cicero, the wealthy orator and statesman, who sought to bolster stability by strengthening Rome’s Senate; ambitious Julius Caesar, a friend of Catullus’ father, who “cemented his claim to Rome through dictatorship”; and the poet’s beloved, Clodia Metelli, a married woman of at least 35 who appeared to him as a “shining goddess.” He gave her the pseudonym Lesbia and made her the subject of a spate of erotic love poems. Lesbia became the poet’s “raison d’etre.” Among many revelations about Roman culture, Dunn speculates that because their affair produced no child, either Clodia or Catullus might have used some method of herbal or barrier contraception.
A fresh, knowledgeable introduction to life, love, war, and rivalries in ancient Rome.Pub Date: July 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-231702-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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