Daisy Dunn (1)

Unusual and spellbinding biography of Pliny the Younger, with much mention of Pliny the Elder and the latter's influence on him. Divided thematically into several parts, called by the names of seasons, from "Aut-" cycling through to another "umn" each begins with something of that season, branching off into other facets of Pliny's life, times, and personality. The impressive Como Cathedral is graced with statues of Como's two native sons, "pagans" though they be. Pliny the Younger was especially generous to his hometown.

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Unlike any other biography I've read of anyone; quite fascinating how the author cleverly reconstructed Catullus's life mainly from his own poetry and other primary sources. Though scatological and even obscene at times, he was a poet of great feeling, introspection, and intensity. Some of his incisive poems on particular personalities presage Martial or Juvenal. The author used as point of reference #64 -- what she considers his masterpiece, the miniature epic she termed the "Bedspread poem" of extended mythological scenes and Catullus's Five Ages of Mankind -- which led her to relate his other poems to his life: from growing up in Verona, to Rome, to Bithynia on the Black Sea, thence back to Rome and his home on Lake Garda. The "Lesbia" poems trace his love affair with Clodia Metelli, from fevered beginning through love/hate to its end, where he tells two fellow poets [and us]:
"And may she not expect my love as before,/Which through her fault has fallen like a flower/On the edge of a meadow, touched/By a plough passing by." From Poem #11.

We enter into Catullus's world, also the political conditions, machinations, and upheaval of the Late Republic. Ms. Dunn has also provided interesting analyses of some of the poems -- what she thinks are subtle meanings between the lines. She does fill in gaps in setting the scenes with her own words: for instance, when Catullus first climbs the Palatine to the Metellus home, his voyage home from Bithynia and last, where we see him on the shore of Lake Garda. He watches the water "lick the land like tears."

http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/titian-bacchus-and-ariadne
Based on the Ariadne and Bacchus myth from the "Bedspread poem".
Commissioned from Titian by the Italian Renaissance nobleman Alfonso III, d'Este, Duke of Ferrara.

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