Gaius Valerius Catullus was born in Verona, northern Italy in 84 BCE and died in Rome in 54 BCE. Little detail about his life survives. What is known is inferred from the poems or from indirect secondary sources. He was a contemporary of Cicero and Caesar, the latter a friend of his father, and an immediate antecedent of the Augustan poets Horace, Propertius and Ovid. His surviving poems are among the finest lyric verse of ancient Rome.