Catullus’ Bedspread: The Life of Rome’s Most Erotic Poet
About this audiobook
A biography of Gaius Valerius Catullus, Rome’s first great poet, a dandy who fell in love with another man’s wife and made it known to the world through his verse.
This superb book gives a rare portrait of life during one of the most critical moments in world history through the eyes of one of Rome’s greatest writers.
Living through the debauchery, decadence and spectacle of the crumbling Roman Republic, Catullus remains famous for the sharp, immediate poetry with which he skewered Rome’s sparring titans – Pompey, Crassus and his father’s friend, Julius Caesar. But it was for his erotic, scandalous but often tender love elegies that he became best known, inspired above all by his own lasting affair with a married woman whom he immortalised in his verse as ‘Lesbia’. A monumental figure for poets from Ovid and Virgil onwards, his journey across youth and experience, from Verona to Rome, Bithynia to Lake Garda, is traced in Daisy Dunn’s brilliant portrait of life during one of the most critical moments in world history.
About the author
Dr Daisy Dunn is a British writer, based in London. She read Classics at Oxford, followed by an MA in Art History at the Courtauld and a PhD in Classics, funded by the AHRC, at UCL, where she also taught Latin. She also writes for the Daily Telegraph, Spectator, Standpoint, Evening Standard, History Today, and Apollo. She frequently delivers lectures and public talks around London. She is a trustee of the Joint Association of Classical Teachers and sits on the board of Classical Association News.
