Christopher Polt argues that ‘Catullus … performs his individuality by borrowing these readily recognisable signs and characters from Roman comedy’ (175): the young man in love, the strict father, the meretrix, the braggart soldier and all the rest. As he points out, comedy was familiar as ‘a meaningful source of cultural and artistic value’ (6), a source of patterns of behaviour to be emulated or to be chastened. P. shows how both Lucretius and Cicero use stock characters and familiar scenes from comedy in the service of their own moralising projects. Catullus uses them as well, but for different reasons. Where Cicero uses comedy ‘to recall, promote, and reinforce the mos maiorum’ (6), looking back to the age of Terence as a golden age for Rome, Catullus can use the same plays to critique those values.

P. notes, following J. K. Newman and others, that Catullan keywords like lepidus, nugae or sal are not only Callimachean, but Plautine, ‘the characteristics of a person who can imbue people and things with alternate meanings’ (9), as a playwright turns actors and props into the fantasy world of the stage. The words refer not only to delicacy, but to a sort of playful mischief: ‘what matters is not what you see, but what you can make believe and make others believe’ (13).

P. gives close readings of more than thirty poems, mostly from the polymetric group, accompanied by his own clear translations. He includes not only fairly obvious choices like 1, 5, 7 and 16, but less popular texts like the metrically odd 55 and 58b, the stolen-napkins poem 12, some of the Juventius poems (24, 48, 99), and even the Cicero poem, 49. The latter is compared to 21 and 24: though they ‘appear to be so utterly mismatched as to seem that they cannot comment on one another’ (127), in fact there is a clear resemblance. All address someone using a superlative or an exaggerated diminutive, with a partitive genitive depending on it; all then compare that person to all the members of the relevant group who ever were or will be: quotque post aliis erunt in annis (49.3). The line-ending aliis erunt in annis occurs in all three poems. P. shows that this is not just a coincidence. Rather, in all three, the speaker is playing the role of the servus callidus and participating in what W. Anderson calls ‘Heroic Badness’ (128), the deceptions and general mischief by which the clever slave thwarts his adversaries, and for which we applaud him. In poems 15 and 21, the speaker traps Aurelius, using the puer delicatus as bait. Poem 24 fits into both the Aurelius/Furius group and the Juventius group, and the speaker seems almost to be playing Aurelius and Furius off against each other as he tries to get Juventius for himself. Here Juventius is put in the role of the meretrix in a comedy (142). Finally, in poem 49, ‘the same Plautine deception and assertion of control over a rival in a superior position undergirds his engagement with Cicero as well, and with similar humorous effects’ (143).

But ‘Heroic Badness belongs not to the servus callidus alone but also to other incarnations of the subaltern, particularly the meretrix callida, or clever sex laborer’ (150), and P. devotes a chapter to the women of Catullus's world, who are generally not the virtuous women we meet in epitaphs. For example, the women the speaker meets outside Pompey's theater in poem 55 are clearly sex labourers (the term P. consistently uses), so the speaker seems to feel justified in bullying them, but they are cleverer than he is and win the encounter. The discussion of this poem also compares the ‘I've been searching everywhere’ routine, a familiar stock scene occurring half a dozen times in Plautus and Terence; P. takes Amphitruo's search for Naucrates (Plaut., Amph. 1009–1019) as an example (157). P. also takes poems 36 and 37 together as an example of a woman outwitting the male speaker, and ‘a mixture of iambic threats and Plautine farce’ (173).

The discussion throughout engages with the extensive prior scholarship on these poems, but the extended analysis of Catullus’ use of comedy is new and original. The book may be as interesting to scholars of Roman comedy as it is to Catullans.