ABSTRACT
In this farcical indictment of prudery in literature and life and a further critique of Victorian ideals, Strachey sets the first-century BC Roman lyric poet, famous for his erotic and obscene writings, against the most widely revered poet of – the personification of poetry in – the Victorian age. A friend of Julius Caesar, who himself defends Epicureanism in ‘Julius Caesar and Lord Salisbury’, Catullus too subscribed to Epicureanism, with its elevation of personal relationships over political or religious investments. This was a sentiment that also helped to define Bloomsbury; its most direct expression is found in E. M. Forster’s manifesto ‘What I Believe’, where he writes, ‘If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country’. 1 Given its spiritual affinity with W. B. Yeats’s question of dessicated scholars, ‘Lord, what would they say / Did their Catullus walk that way?’, 2 the message speaks clearly enough for itself in this dialogue, which dramatizes a subject that Strachey returned to repeatedly throughout his adult life, from Cambridge onwards.
