“This bedspread, / Embroidered with the shapes of men / Who lived long ago, unveils the virtue of heroes / Through the miracle of art.” These lines, from a mini-epic by the Roman poet Catullus, speak of a coverlet given to Thetis, mother of Achilles, on her wedding day; Catullus is about to set its embroidered scene into motion using the “miracle” of poetry. With a racy title—Catullus’ Bedspread: The Life of Rome’s Most Erotic Poet—and the use of this quote as epigram, classicist Daisy Dunn lays claim to a parallel miracle: The reanimation, for modern readers, of the poet himself. It’s a noble goal, but one that can be pulled off only by resorting to the dark arts of historical biography—guesswork, speculation, and the reconstruction of characters’ thoughts and feelings. Dunn’s book raises questions about how far these forms of necromancy can be taken before nonfiction passes over into fiction, and scholarship is eclipsed by romance.

The lure of these dark arts is strong for any scholar who approaches Catullus; the voice and emotional candor of this twenty-something writer—he died at age 30—are as alive as anything from ancient Rome. I vividly recall my first encounter, more than three decades ago, with the two dozen odes in which he charted a passionate and ultimately agonized love affair with the woman he called Lesbia, a name that evoked in his day the lyric genius of the Lesbos-born poetess, Sappho. “I hate and I love,” he wrote of his inability to get free of his obsessive passion for this woman. “Why do I do it, perhaps you will ask. / I don’t know why. But it’s happening, and it’s torment.” Catullus may have refined that elegiac couplet, today the most famous in all Latin literature, over days or weeks, but like so many of the poems about his feelings for Lesbia it reads like it poured straight out of him.

Just as his Lesbia poems course with lust and anguish, the verses Catullus addressed to male rivals, or to friends who he felt had let him down, often pullulate with rage and obscenity. Paedicabo ego vos et irrumabo is his gloriously defiant reply to two companions, Furius and Aurelius, who had criticized the indecency of his writings: “I shall fuck you in the ass and I shall fuck you in the mouth.” His fearless attacks on his enemies, even revered public figures, teem with anuses, penises, stinking armpits—one man, a certain Rufus, is said to have a wild goat living beneath his—and graphic sex acts either given or received. The saltiness of these poems has thrilled many a beginning Latin class, but their power extends beyond mere shock value. With his freewheeling aggression, his willingness to let fly at the slightest provocation, Catullus evokes the modern Beat poets; the “neoteric” school to which he belonged was just as daring as theirs in breaking with literary tradition.

CATULLUS’ BEDSPREAD: THE LIFE OF ROME’S MOST EROTIC POET, by Daisy Dunn Harper, 366 pages, $25

Catullus’ corpus of 116 poems connect us powerfully to his inner life, but to what degree do they describe his life? They come down to us in the order assigned by some ancient editor, grouped by their metrical schemes—essentially a random shuffle. Few can be pinned to a date during Catullus’ decade of adult life, the mid-60’s to the mid-50’s B.C., or even sequenced relative to each other. The problems posed by such undateable texts are complex, as I learned recently when writing about the Roman philosopher Seneca, whose tragic dramas also stand outside chronology. Fortunately, since Seneca played a leading role in politics, contemporary writers supply the framework of his life. Catullus by contrast was small-time, a provincial from Verona (Dunn misleadingly calls him a Gaul) who lived among the great at Rome but never attained greatness. “Practically everything that can be known about him must be extracted from his book of poetry,” Dunn writes in her prologue—an admission, seemingly, that extreme measures will need to be taken.

Dunn’s first foray into the realm of the dark arts comes when she identifies Lesbia as Clodia Metelli, the sister of Publius Clodius Pulcher—a leading politician of Catullus’ day, a bizarre, bad-boy aristocrat next to whom Donald Trump might seem a sober statesman. This is not an egregious leap of faith; an ancient source with good authority tells us that Lesbia’s real name was Clodia, and Catullus himself reveals, in one of his poems, that Lesbia’s brother was named Pulcher. The trouble is that Clodius had three sisters, all of whom were named Clodia, and at least one recent scholar has strongly argued that a different Clodia was the woman who drove young Catullus half-insane. Since the Clodia Metelli theory is central to Dunn’s story—especially given that much is known about Clodia Metelli’s scandalous sex life, including a rumored affair with her brother, is detailed in an extant speech by Cicero—it matters deeply that it is only a theory. Yet the constructs Dunn builds upon this flawed foundation—the imagined first meeting of Catullus and Clodia, their efforts to keep their affair secret from Metellus, the correlations of Catullus’ Lesbia poems with what is known (or at least rumored, in a surviving diatribe by Cicero) facts of Clodia Metelli’s scandalous sex life—assume it has the solidity of fact. Dunn’s single, poorly reasoned footnote does little to address a problem that should have been acknowledged openly, in her text.