Today’s new post gives a glimpse into the social life of bright young things in the late Roman Republic via Catullus’s tenth poem. Hear the Latin and follow in English here and see the illustrated blog post here.
Catullus has heard that Aurelius and Furius are saying that, to judge from the erotic poetry that he writes, he is living an immoral life. Catullus responds in no uncertain terms. THIS POEM CONTAINS VERY BAD LANGUAGE AND IMAGERY THAT SOME READERS MAY FIND OFFENSIVE.
Hear it in Latin and follow in English here.
Hear Catullus’s tender poem in Latin and follow it in English here.
The perfume that Catullus will serve at his bring-your-own-dinner-party smells so good that Fabullus will wish to be all nose. Hear the Latin and follow in English here.
Catullus again fails to count the kisses he wants to give to Lesbia while (courtesy of Vincent Van Gogh) the starry night looks on. See his earlier attempt here.
This is a landscape selection from the Latin poets (see the selections index here). The ancients would have assumed that the world was boundless and nature was inexhaustible, in contrast to our modern realisation that the world is small and fragile in a way that was unimaginable as recently as the 1960s.
First (see a shield used as an umbrella in the illustration from a 5th-century Virgil), in the wild and storm-swept Carthaginian hunting country, Dido and Aeneas find a fateful shelter from the rain in
On the occasion of the festival of Fontinalia, Horace celebrates the beauty of
Horace flatters a friend over the attractions of his beloved Tarentum, but makes it clear that he will be staying at his Sabine farm near
Catullus gives us a complete account of the changing seascape from the Black Sea all the way to Italy as told by his
In Book 8 of the Aeneid, and centuries before it was built, Virgil gives us a
guided tour of the future Rome.
Zooming out, Boethius reminds us that prospects are not only Earthly and local, but