To the young Catullus Rome was a golden nightmare. Vast and teeming, viciously corrupt, this center of the crumbling Republic was also the setting for his own self-destroying search for perfection in love. For in Rome reigned Clodia...the Lesbia of his poems -- enigmatic, beautiful, depraved.This is the story of Catullus's metamorphosis from a bright-haired, romantic youth into a man ill and embittered at the age of thirty. It is also the story of the last days of the Republic, and of Cicero's struggle against the brutish Clodius, whose ruffians roamed the streets after dark. His scorn for public opinion, his defilement of the mysteries of the Good Goddess, his relationship with his sister and his naked lust for power exceeded the tolerance even of the world's most sophisticated city. It is the story of Caesar, Pompey and Crassus, and their battle for political domination through terror and subterfuge. But it is most of all the story of an extraordinary woman, one of the great beauties of the age, complex, sinful, brilliant, and of the the meaning to her of love: "Death's only enemy...our best and only god".