One of the less pleasant aspects of education when I was a child was the extent to which teachers relied on making you memorise things. Inspiring curiosity about the subject seemed almost a breach of the rules.

Perhaps as a result of that, of all the subjects I was not good at, I was outstandingly not good at Latin. Sitting in a classroom working out the declension of endless little sentences about firing darts and arrows at accursed Gauls and Belgians just wasn?t my idea of fun.

The sad thing is that at the end of however many years I spent in studying Latin, as a result of that style of teaching, I knew little more about the Romans and what was going on with them than I did at the beginning.

With that admission, then, I hope no one will think that in writing about the poetry of Catullus I am trying to show off my erudition in Latin.

I freely acknowledge I have none.

I pick Catullus simply because I cannot resist reading more of a poet who begs a meal from a friend and says that in return:

Don?t be taken in. Pretty as that is, Catullus is far from the kind of man to dwell in violet-drenched niceties. In fact, he?s so earthy that I?m sure wouldn?t print half the stuff that comes down to us since his days of writing, more than 2,000 years ago.

Catullus can be brutally frank, and never hesitates to be obscene when he wants to be.

In those days in Rome, using foul language and thinking crude thoughts wasn?t the province of the lowbrow working classes, as it seems to be today. It was the style of the emancipated young men of the upper classes.

And since Catullus was also bisexual (as were many Romans, both men and women), and was quite explicit about his exploits, his poetry really does have the capacity to shock in the 21st Century.

This is one of the milder examples of Catullus at his brutal best:

Catullus?s writing certainly often offends against good taste. But, like Sappho, he is today thought of also as one of the world?s most influential love poets, sophisticated and highly skilled in the use of poetic form, capable of using the most refined and beautiful language.

His poems also show that he was not exactly the type we think of as poetry writers these days. He seems to have been a jocular, amused sort of man:

Catullus was born in 84 years before Christ was, in Verona, to a wealthy and well-connected family.

His father was a friend of Julius Caesar?s. Catullus was influenced by early Greek poets, and wrote in the style of the neoterics, a school of poetry that prized urbane, witty, short poems.

Just about everything known about Catullus comes from interpretation of his poems, of which there are precious few remaining. He died very young ? when he was 33 ? and all he left to posterity was enough to fill about 80 pages of text.

Luckily, it?s a pretty intense 80 pages ? in them he hates, he loves, he sneers at the rich and the noble, he is by turns funny, tender, delicate, angry and? pretty mad.

We?re lucky to have what we do ? only a single manuscript was ever found, in his home town of Verona in about the 14th Century. The original has long since been lost, so what we have are copies of copies of copies of a portion of what was probably a much larger body of work.

The love of his life was a woman he calls Lesbia in his poems, but who scholars think they have identified as a married woman called Clodia.

He loved her dearly, but she also drove him nearly mad.

This is a piece of a longer poem, in which he begs the gods to give him a break:

In another poem, he writes of being torn between feeling love and hate for the same woman, at the same time:

And in another:

But his poetry was far from exclusively devoted to his love for Lesbia.

He might have been a sailor, because two of his 111 poems were about boats. One of them could only have been written, I think, by someone who had sailed long enough to know that boats have personalities:

And to round out this very short tour around Catullus?s poetry, there is this little excerpt, in which I thought he caught the intersection of two types of spring beautifully:

Catullus is, and it is a pity, the province these days mostly of scholars.

But they seem to take good care of him. One, whose little monograph on Catullus I read last week, said if you start to read him young enough, and sincerely enough, ?there will be enough artistry and brilliance there to last you the rest of your years.?

That?s compliment enough to keep Catullus resting easy for another couple of millennia.