Short answers, pulled from the story.
Gaius Valerius Catullus was a Latin poet of the late Roman Republic, born around 84 BC in Verona, in the region of Cisalpine Gaul, and died around 54 BC. He came from a prominent equestrian family whose social standing was sufficient for his father to host Julius Caesar. He is known for 116 surviving poems ranging from intimate love lyrics to political invective.
Lesbia is generally identified as Clodia Metelli, sister of Publius Clodius Pulcher and wife of Quintus Caecilius Metellus Celer, the consul of 60 BC. The Roman writer Apuleius stated that Lesbia was a certain Clodia. Catullus used the pseudonym Lesbia as an allusion to the poet Sappho, who came from the island of Lesbos.
The surviving collection contains 116 poems, divided into three formal groups: roughly sixty short poems in varying meters called polymetra, nine longer poems, and forty-eight epigrams in elegiac couplets. Each group is compact enough to fit on a single ancient scroll, running to approximately 860, 1136, and 330 lines respectively.
After falling into obscurity following the late second century CE, a manuscript of Catullus's poems was discovered in Verona in 1305. It disappeared again shortly after, but two copies had been made; one is now held in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. All modern editions of Catullus trace back to those two copies of the lost Verona manuscript.
Catullus was influenced chiefly by Callimachus and the Alexandrian school of Hellenistic poetry, which had turned away from classical epic in the tradition of Homer. He was also a devoted admirer of Sappho; his poem 51 is a partial translation and transformation of Sappho 31, and he used the Sapphic stanza in poems 11 and 51.
Catullus influenced an unusually broad range of later creators, including John Milton, Petrarch, Robert Herrick, William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound, and Robert Frost, who named Catullus his favorite Roman poet. In music, Carl Orff set Catullus texts in his 1943 cantata Catulli Carmina, Dominick Argento set roughly fifty lines for mixed chorus and percussion in 1981, and Thomas Campion drew on poem 5 for his 1601 lute-song "My Sweetest Lesbia."