Peatland Poetry From the Past: The Neighbour of Catullus (First Half of the 1 ^st Century BCE)

Texts from Antiquity include valuable information on how ancient cultures perceived peatlands and other wetlands. Catullus - a poet from the first half of the 1 st century BCE - wrote a cynical wetland-related poem in which he wished one of his neighbours to fall into a sludgy “pool” because he was too stupid to notice that his wife had affairs with various lovers. The poem gives some indication of how the Romans designated unconsolidated wetland sediments (gyttja).