Julius Caesar) and orators, including Cicero, are thrashed as well. invectives: some of these often rude and sometimes downright obscene poems are targeted at friends-turned-traitors (e.g., Poem 16) and other lovers of Lesbia, but many well-known poets, politicians (e.g.Catullus displays a wide range of highly emotional and seemingly contradictory responses to Lesbia, ranging from tender love poems to sadness, disappointment, and bitter sarcasm. erotic poems: some of them indicate homosexual penchants (48, 50, and 99), but most are about women, especially about one he calls " Lesbia" (in honour of the poet Sappho of Lesbos, source and inspiration of many of his poems) philologists have gone to considerable efforts to discover her real identity, and many have concluded that Lesbia was Clodia, sister of the infamous Publius Clodius Pulcher and a woman known for her generous sexuality, but this identification rests on some rather fragile assumptions.poems to and about his friends (e.g., an invitation such as Poem 13).The polymetra and the epigrams can be divided into four major thematic groups (ignoring a rather large number of poems eluding such categorization): Not all editors agree with these divisions, especially with regard to Poem 68. Furthermore, some editors have considered that, in some cases, two poems have been brought together by previous editors, and, by dividing these, add 2B, 14B, 58B, 68B and 78B as separate poems. Some modern editors (and commentators), however, retain Poem 18 as genuine Catullan.
While the numbering of the poems up to 116 has been retained, three of these poems-18, 19 and 20-are excluded from most modern editions because they are now considered not to be Catullan, having been added by Muretus in his 1554 edition (which identified 113 poems existing in the Catullan manuscripts). There is no scholarly consensus on whether Catullus himself arranged the order of the poems. However, a few fragments quoted by later Roman editors but not found in the manuscripts show that there are some additional poems that have been lost. These manuscripts contained approximately 116 of Catullus's carmina. These three surviving manuscript copies are stored at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the Bodleian Library at Oxford, and the Vatican Library in Rome. Catullus's poems have been preserved in three manuscripts that were copied from one of two copies made from a lost manuscript discovered around 1300.
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