Lucky Catullus (in Alma-Tadema’s version, centre, above). He has had more publicity in the last 24 hours than in the last 24 years. Whole cohorts of journalists who have never read a word of the first century BC poet have been puzzling (with the help of wiki usually) about what the words ‘pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo” really mean? Because these were the word written by Mark Lowe [see “The hedgie, the hotpants and a £4m sex pest claim“] in an email to a young woman who had asked him the meaning of “diligite inimicos vestros“. What it means is quite simple (though a number of family newspapers have refrained from printing a translation without a good few dashes and asterisks)…
—So wrote Mary Beard in the Times Literary Supplement. (Thanks to improbable researcher Sarah Brooks for bringing this to our attention.)