Catullus is one of the most popular of Classical Latin authors because he offers poems easily
presented to a beginners' class: not weighty and serious but short and humorous. But this is
not the whole truth. He is also deeply committed to the Roman Republic its traditions the
disaster of Pompey's defeat and Caesar's triumph the decay of public morality. This is what
Newman already emphasised in his Roman Catullus and the Modification of the Alexandrian
Sensibility (Weidman Hildesheim 1990 Pp. 483) and tries again to emphasise for the more
general reader here.John Kevin Newman born in 1928 made his first acquaintance with Classical
scholarship at Oxford in 1946-52 where Eduard Fraenkel and Rudolf Pfeiffer were still
lecturing. After teaching for the Benedictines at Downside Abbey for some years in 1969 he
accepted a professorship at the University of Illinois from which he has now retired. He has
published eight books and over a hundred articles on Classical themes.
