A Thousand Kisses

'I hate and I love. You may wonder why I do that.' In an extraordinary tour-de-force Frederic Raphael, the acclaimed novelist, screenwriter and critic, imagines the life of that most passionate and outspoken Roman poet, Gaius Valerius Catullus, the ill-used young lover of Lesbia, his married mistress, the wife of a powerful consul. Catullus meets, charms and clashes with Julius Caesar, Cicero, Publius Clodius and other contenders for fame and fortune in the last, bloody decades of the Roman republic. The narrative of the poet's life and loves, including his affair with a young male contemporary and his view of Caesar and his contemporaries, is intercut with new, sharp translations of his erotic and satirical poems. Catullus was one of the the greatest Roman lyric poets - who lived fast and died young. Prized by some for his sincerity and chastised by others for crudeness he has influenced generations of writers and thinkers from Ovid, Horace and Virgil to Thornton Wilder and Louis MacNiece. 'Crossing the Rubicon, jaundiced divide, decisive dribble, I was on my way past more dried, perhaps still drying, blood and wormy guts than I chose to think about, minded only to make my mark in Rome, armed with a satchel of words.'