Catullus' full-blooded personal poetry, dealing candidly with love and hate, exerts an irresistable appeal, particularly the well-known poems to his lover Lesbia. The 116 poems collected here show Catullus' mastery of three distinct genres. The short poems reveal his facility with lyric metres; the long ones show he can deal equally memorably with themes from romantic legend; in the epigrams, his skilful use of invective enables him to attack his contemporaries viciously, to be blatantly obscene, and yet to command respect from his public then and now.