I, Clodia, and Other Portraits

"I, Clodia" is the story of Clodia Metelli—poet and lover—and her relations with her far-away paramour Catullus, her husband Metellus Celer, her brother Publius Clodius, and her accuser Cicero. By giving Clodia—the "Lesbia" of Catullus's famous love poetry—her own first-person narration, Anna Jackson upends and reinvigorates the beloved classical sequence with biting wit and tender attention. Who was Clodia and what did she think about the affair, the gossip, the scandal, the poems? Jackson...