Word: catullus
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...beautiful woman, currently busying herself breaking the heart of the poet Catullus, Clodia is in disfavor with old guard Romans (such as Cicero) not only because of her love affair with her brother, but because of her practice of taking parties of respectable Roman matrons to gladiators' taverns in the suburbs. Clodia has numerous love affairs, delights in building them up to some dramatic public humiliation of her lovers. Bold, self-righteous, Clodia can stand everything except the obscene verses about her which are now beginning to be scribbled in public places all over the city...
Absolved of obscenity: Poets Gaius Valerius Catullus and Vincent McHugh; by a grand jury in Manhattan. The jury threw out a suit brought last spring by famed Dirt Chaser John S. Sumner, who had objected to a phallic "Suite from Catullus" in Adaptei McHugh's book, The Blue Hen's Chickens, Sumner, who caid he was "not at all surprised," was now operating his battered old Society for the Suppression of Vice under a slightly more delicate name: the Society to Maintain Public Decency...
...McHugh's publishers into a Manhattan court on an obscenity charge. The book under discussion: McHugh's just-published The Blue Hen's Chickens. What probably shocked Sumner (though he didn't say): an octet of pornographic love poems, "derived" from a translation of Catullus. To Sumner's charge, Random House's joke-collecting President Bennett Cerf (Try and Stop Me) cried: "Absurd!" But Publisher Cerf was not all indignation. "Maybe," he mused, "it will help good poetry get some sales...
Proving there's nothing new under the sun is TIME'S reference (Dec. 30) to experiments of Dr. Robert Marshall Stephan with urea to combat tooth decay. Gaius Valerius Catullus, about 2,000 years ago, wrote: (Ad Egnatius, Canto XXXIX) ". . .We know the Spanish custom, how Spaniards clean their teeth and scour their gums with the same water that issues from their bladders. ... If your teeth are clean, we know how you have used your urine...