Dedicated to her Former LEH Teachers

The major new edition of Catullus' Poem 64 was published last month at a glamorous launch at Trinity College, Oxford, where Gail works as Associate Professor in Classical Languages and Literature, specialising in Latin poetry and literary form.It was attended by her former Classics teacher Clare Eltis, who still works at LEH.  Ruth Iredale, to whom the book is also dedicated, and who was Head of department when Gail attended the school, has now retired and was unable to attend.

Gail took nearly 20 years to write the magnum opus about the poem she first discovered at LEH. She says: 'It is wonderful to see the commentary published at last - and perhaps even better that I can still truthfully say that Catullus 64 is my favourite poem. I feel very fortunate to have had the time and space to explore this text in the way that it deserves. I hope that my edition will help other readers to deepen their understanding and appreciation of Catullus' masterpiece, and also that, like the commentaries I most admire, it will shed light on many other aspects of ancient literature and culture too.'

In the introduction to the book, Gail writes: “I dedicate this book to two women I have known for even longer than I have known this poem. Clare Eltis read Catullus with me, suggested what it might be like to be an Oxford classicist, and ran extra classes on the parts of this poem which weren’t on the A level syllabus. Ruth Iredale taught me a great deal of Latin grammar, read Homer and Virgil with me, and can speak Latin hexameters more memorably than anyone I have ever heard win a declamation prize.”

Miss Eltis says: “The book is absolutely phenomenal. Gail has dived into every level of meaning and it’s an extraordinarily scholarly work. It’s the seminal exploration of the poem that will be referred to for years to come.

“It’s really very moving, very touching, that Gail has dedicated the book to me and Ruth. She was always obviously brilliant as a pupil, and it was such a joy to teach her. She delighted in every aspect of language and literature, with a real passion for it and a fabulous ability to communicate. Both Ruth and I believe she taught us more than we did her! Her genius was apparent well before she went on to impress the nation on University Challenge.”

Gail hit the headlines when she captained the Corpus Christi team on University Challenge as a postgraduate student in 2009. The media dubbed her “the human google” and cleverest contestant ever after she scored more points than her three team-mates combined. She also had great success when she appeared alongside her brother and husband on Only Connect with Victoria Coren in 2017.
 
Gail’s specialist subject remains Catullus, who is a central figure in the canon of Latin poetry - famous both for his passionate love poetry and his obscene attacks on his enemies. Poem 64 is his longest work at 400 lines and is a tiny epic set in the world of Greek mythology which has fascinated and perplexed readers from the first century BC until today.  

Poem 64 begins with the Argonauts, quickly turns into a love story between a hero and a sea-nymph, then abandons the description of their wedding for an apparently unrelated narrative about Ariadne before culminating in a prophetic epithalamium on the Trojan War and a lament for the degeneracy of the human race. Highly wrought, densely allusive, moving and beautiful, it was hugely influential on the next generation of Roman poets, especially Virgil and Ovid, and is widely read by modern classicists.

Gail’s book investigates the poem on every level of detail, combining a line-by-line commentary with longer discussions of sections of the poem, an introduction that sets it in its historical and literary contexts, and an epilogue that offers an overall interpretation. Part of the commentary began as her doctoral thesis, and she worked on the book over the years, alongside the other commitments involved in being Trinity's Fellow and Tutor in Classics and mother to three.