Recently, I studied the Roman poet Catullus – a writer whose work feels startlingly modern despite being over two thousand years old. He lived during the late Roman Republic, around the same time as Caesar and Cicero, but his poetry couldn’t be more different from the political speeches and epic histories of his age. Catullus didn’t write to glorify Rome; he wrote about love, betrayal, grief, and desire – the things that make people human.

Born in Verona to an upper-class family, Catullus spent time in Rome’s social and political circles, even crossing paths with Caesar (whom he famously insulted in verse). His poems, 116 in total, vary widely – from intimate lyrics to obscene jokes to deeply emotional reflections. They’re personal in a way that was unusual for the time, full of real names, real pain, and the raw emotional whiplash of being alive in a collapsing Republic.

The central figure in much of his poetry is Lesbia — a pseudonym for a woman thought to be Clodia Metelli, a powerful Roman noble. Their affair unfolds through Catullus’s poems like a dramatic relationship in real time: intense love, jealousy, heartbreak, and eventually bitterness. Lesbia becomes both muse and symbol — of passion, betrayal, and the fleeting nature of beauty and loyalty.

But beyond these love poems, Catullus 64 stands apart. It’s his longest and most ambitious work, a miniature epic that retells the myth of the hero Peleus and the sea-nymph Thetis — the parents of Achilles. On the surface, it’s a mythological wedding poem. Beneath it, it’s a lament for a world that’s lost its moral center.

Through the wedding tapestry and its mythic flashbacks, Catullus contrasts a golden heroic past with the moral decay of his own time. The poem’s tone shifts from grandeur to melancholy: divine love and human cruelty sit side by side. When he describes Ariadne abandoned by Theseus, the emotion feels painfully human — heartbreak that transcends myth. By the end, the poem reads like a quiet elegy for Rome itself, dressed in the language of legend.

What’s remarkable about Catullus 64 is how it merges personal emotion with cultural critique. It’s as if Catullus takes the intensity of his short love poems and stretches it across an epic canvas — replacing the grandeur of empire with the intimacy of human pain. His “epic” isn’t about conquest but about loss, disillusionment, and the erosion of values.

Even today, Catullus feels ahead of his time. He could be angry, erotic, sentimental, or vicious — sometimes all in the same poem. He translated Greek poets like Sappho but added his own sharp Roman edge. His language is simple yet musical, ordinary yet artful. In him, we see the start of something new: poetry as confession, not performance.

Catullus 64 captures that perfectly — a poet using myth to mourn not only a lost lover, but a lost world.