Short answers, pulled from the story.
Gaius Valerius Catullus was born around the 84th year before the Common Era in the provincial city of Verona in Cisalpine Gaul. He emerged from the Roman equestrian class and spent his childhood summers at a family villa on the shores of Lake Garda.
Modern scholarship identifies Lesbia with Clodia Metelli, a wealthy and powerful woman from the patrician Claudii Pulchri family who was a widow after her husband died in 59 BC. She was the sister of the demagogue Publius Clodius Pulcher and maintained multiple lovers alongside Catullus.
Julius Caesar did not deny the truth of the accusations in the poems but responded with magnanimity by inviting Catullus to dinner on the same day the poet apologized. This gesture suggests a complex relationship where personal charm overrode political enmity between the young poet and the rising dictator.
During the year from the summer of 57 to the summer of 56 BC, Catullus traveled to the Troad to perform rites at the tomb of his brother who had died. He recorded this profound grief in poem 101, describing the burial as a total collapse of his family's future and his own emotional stability.
The seventh-century BC Greek poet Sappho was the most profound influence on the work of Gaius Valerius Catullus, who translated and imitated her poetry. Catullus 51 is a direct adaptation of Sappho 31, and he adopted the Sapphic stanza in several of his own works including poems 11 and 51.
The surviving corpus of Gaius Valerius Catullus consists of 116 poems preserved in an anthology known as the carmina. These poems have been read, studied, and set to music for over two thousand years, inspiring composers and novelists from Mátyás Seiber to Vladimir Nabokov.