Catullus’s work, with its impassioned, insistently present-tense scrutiny of love and faithlessness, reflects his generation’s appalled awareness that the spoken words we depend on to reveal emotional affinities and make social contracts real are insubstantial, wayward things, “written on running water, on the wind.” “Rufus, I thought you my friend. In vain, and to no purpose”; “You told me once, Lesbia, that Catullus alone understood you”: Catullus’s gaze, disconcertingly fixed on the unraveling of every human bond, erotic, affectionate, or political, is entirely new to classical poetry, and for all its deserved reputation for charm, his is an art sparked by social disorder. Even the semidivine legendary founder of Rome gets slapped with a crude epithet for tolerating the corruption of Caesar and his cronies: “Hey, / fag Romulus, can you put up with such a scene?”
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