SOURCE: "The Poetry of Social Coment," in Catullus. An Interpretation, B. T. Batsford Ltd., 1972, pp. 204-82.
In the following essay, Quinn explores Catullus's poems that focus upon political and social commentary: those poems which, in the main, "establish a norm (if one can speak of a norm in connexion with a segment of society whose habits are often so abnormal), set against which the Lesbia affair stands out in sharp contrast, without any more needing to be said."
