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The history of Catullus’ reception has been one of exclusion as much as inclusion. Since the seventeenth century, many Anglophone writers have used Catullus as inspiration for their translations, poetic adaptations, and novels. A great deal of these works occluded the role that male homoeroticism played in the Latin poems, especially by omitting Catullus’ male love object, Juventius. Writers have employed various techniques to deal with Catullus’ ‘problematic’ pagan mores: choosing to ignore the suite of poems associated with homoeroticism (for example, Wilder 1948); bowdlerising homoerotic language (such as Nott 1795, Cranstoun 1867, and Macnaghten 1899); and performing ‘gender swaps’ to portray male-male relationships as male-female (a technique employed to memorable effect by de La Chapelle in 1680, and later by Lamb in 1821). Excision of whole poems or bowdlerisation of obscene terms was also often used to deal with Catullus’ depictions of male-on-male sexual violence, a topic regularly entwined with the gentler homoerotic content. This article surveys, analyses, and explains this aspect of Catullus’ reception in English from 1659–1915.

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This chapter offers a new reading of Catullus’ Lesbia by examining the poet’s spatial poetics. These poetics play a crucial role in shaping the worlds created in the poems. Catullus’ collection features three distinct poetics of place: topical, neoteric, and abstracted, clustered in specific groups of poems: the polymetrics, the carmina maiora, and the elegiac epigrams, respectively. As Lesbia is the only character (apart from the ‘Catullus’ persona) who appears in each group, she presents the ideal subject for examining how Catullus’ distinct poetics of place shape characterization in different genres of poetry. Furthermore, as a woman whose gender is frequently thematized, Lesbia presents a fulcrum for investigating how gendered ideologies of certain spaces might have shaped Catullus’ spatial poetics. This chapter offers close readings of three ‘Lesbia’ poems: 37, 68b, and 70, to highlight the importance of place and space to Lesbia’s role in each poem.

Catullus c. 67 is a problematic piece that has proved troublesome for scholars, primarily because its story of sexual scandal is highly ambiguous. Various scholars have claimed that they have finally solved the details of the poem's slippery narrative, and have identified the author's intention in creating such obscurity. Copley, Giangrande and Richardson argue that the story is clear, and then create a web of hypothetical events to explain the ambiguities in the text. Unfortunately, the hypotheses contradict one another, and none provides an account of the story that explains away all the problems. So far, consensus on a ‘solution’ has not been reached. More recently, scholars have turned away from this controversial topic, focusing instead on the poetic and thematic effects of the poem.