Catullus 16, Money for Nothing, and the value of art

By Helen Lovatt.   My son is discovering the music of the past via Spotify. Last week he said: ‘Let’s listen to the one with “chips for free”. I really like that one.’ After some discussion and quotation of lines (‘We gotta move these refrigerators’) it became apparent that he meant Money for Nothing by Dire …

Censorship, gender and power: Fordyce and Catullus 58

Helen Lovatt considers the relationship between bowdlerising a classical text and broader questions of censorship. Issues of free speech are still very much debated: recently the classicist Mary Beard was caught up in a twitter storm about no-platforming speakers at universities, in particular certain radical feminists whose views offend some in the transgender community. It …