Catullus 85: Odi et amo
Catullus wrote in Rome in the first century BC, and many of his poems are about a woman he calls Lesbia. This one is two lines long and is the most famous love poem in Latin. Because it is so short, it is a realistic first poem to read in the original.
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The text and translation
Odi et amo. Quare id faciam fortasse requiris.
I hate and I love. Why I do this, perhaps you ask.
Word by word
- Odi
- I hate
- et
- and
- amo
- I love
- Quare
- why
- id
- it, this
- faciam
- I do
- fortasse
- perhaps
- requiris
- you ask
Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.
I do not know, but I feel it happen, and I am tormented.
Word by word
- Nescio
- I do not know
- sed
- but
- fieri
- to happen
- sentio
- I feel
- et
- and
- excrucior
- I am tormented
What to notice
- Odi et amo. Three words, and two of them are verbs. Latin verbs carry their own subject, so “I” needs no separate word.
- The poem has eight verbs in fourteen words, and no nouns at all. The couplet is almost nothing but action and feeling.
- fieri means “to be done” or “to happen”. He has just been asked why he does this, and he answers that it happens to him.
- excrucior comes from crux, a cross, and is the root of our word excruciating. It is the last word in the poem.
Read it yourself
Urling teaches the words in this text first, so that when you reach it you can read it in Latin. It uses short lessons, and nothing has to be memorised from a list.
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Sources
Catullus, Carmen 85 (ed. Merrill), Latin Wikisource; English: literal translation by Claude (AI)
Text licence: Public domain.
Language pack licence: Texts public domain; annotation and translations CC BY-SA 4.0.
Texts: Latin Wikisource (public domain; Catullus ed. Merrill, with long-vowel marks; the Vulgate passages in the Clementine text). English: Douay-Rheims (public domain) for the Vulgate passages; other sentence translations and all tagging by Claude (AI), checked against Wiktionary; not yet reviewed by a person.
The introduction and notes on this page were written by Claude (AI). Word glosses are AI-assisted, and so is the English unless the source above names another translator.
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- All Gaul is divided: the opening of Caesar's Gallic War
- What people wrote on the walls of Pompeii
- Catullus 5 in Latin: “Let us live, my Lesbia”
- “Quo usque tandem”: Cicero against Catiline
- “Carpe diem”: Horace's original Latin
- The Lord's Prayer in Latin: Pater noster