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.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.‘A superlative translation’ Sunday Times‘Translated, with bright-eyed intelligence’ Spectator‘An intelligent and often original interpreter of the poetry [she] provides clear, direct and readable translations’ Financial TimesDr 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.- For fans of Sarah Bakewell’s book on Montaigne, ‘How to Live’, Edmund de Waal and Tom Holland’s ‘Rubicon’.- The book will use Catullus’s life to explore this incredibly exciting period in Roman history but will also include – Footsteps like – some memoir/autobiography – so in that way really fits into the new genre of non-fiction.- Professor Paul Cartledge has already endorsed Daisy, and ‘Catullus’ Bedspread’ will likely receive lavish quotes from the likes of Tom Holland and Boris Johnson.
Pubblicato da: HarperCollins Publishers