The identification of Catullus’ Lesbia with Clodia Metelli was assumed by Ludwig Schwabe in 1862 and challenged in Catullan Questions (1969); its continued acceptance, most conspicuously in the translations of David Mulroy and Peter Green, is shown to be incompatible with the known dates of the poems. The suggestion in 1969 that Lesbia was one of the sisters of Clodia Metelli is also unlikely, given Catullus’ consistent use of the word puella; more probably Lesbia was one of the daughters of Ap. Claudius the consul of 54 BC, and therefore sister of the man who called himself ‘Pulcher Claudius’ (Catullus 79.1 ‘Lesbius est Pulcher’).

Catullus 68 is largely composed of similes, and the chapter discusses how the similes in the poem appear to try to describe the poet’s emotions and experience by creating analogies; in the end, Catullus’ efforts to capture his experience in words are revealed as futile, since each of his attempts to illustrate something just ends up taking him further away from the thing itself.

This chapter concentrates on how the concerns of Catullus’ texts inform the erotic and cultural dynamics of Wyatt’s love poetry. Focusing on gendered images of speech – the impotent or unreliable tongue, verbal duplicity, broken oaths and overt lies – it examines how issues of speaking are turned into ethical markers which can be mapped onto the spectrum of gender. Contextualising the poetry from the two periods against, respectively, one of Cicero’s forensic speeches, and Henry VIII’s love letters, it investigates how modes of speaking are used to contest and uphold the idea of masculinity as a moral state, not just a gender position: what it might mean to ’speak like a man’ in Republican Rome and Henrician England.