Akrasia and the Catullan Lover: Resisting Reason in Republican Rome

This book explores psychological conflict and self-control in Catullus’ erotic poetry, offering new insight into Roman philosophy, masculinity and poetic selfhood in the late Republic. Exploring how the Roman poet Catullus portrays erotic desire as a problem of self-control, Leah O’Hearn argues that Catullus presents himself as a lover plagued by akrasia (the failure to act on better judgement) drawing on philosophical models, particularly Aristotle’s, to frame his emotional conflict. Offering new insights into Roman masculinity and selfhood in the late Republic, this book follows the full range of Catullus’ collection from the familiar Lesbia poems to the Juventius cycle, friendships, rivalries and mythological narratives. Positioning Catullus within a broader literary engagement with philosophical thought, this book contributes to the growing field of classical emotion studies by tracing how conflicting desires were staged and moralised in Roman poetry. In doing so, it reveals how Catullus’ conflicted speaker resists philosophical ideals of rational self-mastery, offering instead a poetic script for loving too much, regretting it, and doing it again anyway.