Preserve Your Works - Caryl Ramsdale's Blog

Save copies of all you write.  Read what happened to the works of Roman Poet Catullus who dined with Julius Caesar then wrote satirical attacks on him.  Caesar was his father’s friend.  Catullus wrote of anxiety, castration, friendship, loss, marriage, mythology, nature, poetry, religion, sex and travel.  He was a poet of impressive talent and range, demonstrated in many different meters, with self-conscious precision and energy.  His known works depend on a single manuscript discovered in a monastery in his hometown; twice copied, and then lost once again.  Only 116 of his poems survive.  He was born about 84 B.C., and died in Rome, possibly of consumption, about thirty years later.  Catullus was also known as Gaius Valerius Catullus.  Catullus laments his brother’s death in poem 101 below.

ROMAN POET CATULLUS READING HIS POEM, 1885 by Stepan Vladislavovich Bakalovich

Catullus Poem 101 [Elegy]

Wandering through many countries and over many seas

     I come, my brother, to these sorrowful obsequies,

to present you with the last guerdon of death,

     and speak, though in vain, to your silent ashes,

since fortune has taken your own self away from me

     alas, my brother, so cruelly torn from me!

Yet now meanwhile take these offerings, which by the custom of our fathers

     have been handed down—a sorrowful tribute—for a funeral sacrifice;

take them, wet with many tears of a brother,

     and for ever, O my brother, hail and farewell!