The Charles Bukowski Memorial Center for Classical Latin Studies

Obscenity in Classical Latin

Index

• Bukowski and Catullus: Two Unrefined Gentlemen
• The Complete Hyperlinked Catullus (with concordance)
• Verba Cloacae: A Prurient Latin Vocabulary List
• Obscure Texts (Priapeia)

Salvete, Irrumatores!

The ancient Romans had lusty appetites; just like modern people, they seemed to have one thing on their minds.

The Charles Bukowski Memorial Center for Classical Latin Studies seeks to drag obscenity out of those dusty tomes and stick it right where it belongs.

Bukowski wrote the same sort of poetry that Catullus did, the kind that hits you hard in the gut. The two poets even shared common themes.

Obscurae Scriptae

Some obscene Latin texts are well known, such as the naughty poems of Catullus. The Obscure Organization is proud to offer a new hypertext edition of Catullus with a full concordance.

Other texts are even more obscure.

Verba Cloacae

Tired Latin texts written by prim religious scholars do not give the discerning cinaedus enough vocabulary to read the racier texts properly. The Prurient Latin Vocabulary List seeks to remedy this omission.

Altera Scriptae

• bukowski.net - comprehensive index of Bukowski's work
• Project Libellus—the original source for the Catullus texts analyzed here.
• Catullus Links— Alison W. Barker's collection of Catullus study materials
• Translations of Catullus in English and over 35 other languages
• Online Latin Dictionary - has Latin-English, English-Latin, and a grammar aid. A decent replacement for the now-defunct Notre Dame Latin tools.
• Latin Dictionary and Grammar Resources - Latdict - user friendly Latin-English, English-Latin dictionary from Kevin Mahoney.
• Whitaker's Words—an excellent word analysis tool from the late William Whitaker. Also available on GitHub in source and binary forms for download.
• Clodia—possibly the real-life Lesbia.
• The Perseus Project's Catullus pages—a massively hyperlinked classical reference.
• Allen & Greenough's New Latin Grammar—a hypertext version of the canonical Latin grammar reference.
• Facsimile edition of Allen & Greenough (via Google Books)
• Latin Language and Literature from the late Professor William Harris. Includes hypertext versions of standard Latin refrences including another Allen & Greenough
• Vicipaedia: Encyclopædia Libera... Latina lingva—a free Wiki-based Latin encyclopedia.
• American Classical League
• 3 Quarks Daily musings on lyric poetry—a good primer on why the poems of Catullus have so much appeal
• Online Public Classics Archive - aggregator site with the mission: "a public media Classics database that archives and organizes the public media engagement with antiquity on the Internet"
• Latinum - Patreon-driven online Latin class, self paced.
• Linney's Latin Class - Free online Latin class provided to homeschooled and self-taught communities.
• The First Year of Latin: Based on Cæsar's War with the Helvetii Gunnison & Harley's 1902 Latin I text (free, public domain)
• Cambridge Latin Course Unit 1 (Stages 1-12) - YouTube latin tutorials from Cambridge University
• Cambridge Latin Course Unit 1 (Stages 1-12) - YouTube latin tutorials from Cambridge University
• Larn Latin Episode I: Introduction - by Gregory Myles (a popular YouTube Latin tutorial)
• The Schinke Latin stemming algorithm for the Snowball stemmer. This could be useful in fixing up the Catullus concordance here eventually.

Tabulae Nexarum

While these pages are no longer active Web, they served as inspiration and guidance for the creation of this resource. All links are to Internet Archive Wayback Machine targets.

• Buk's page
• Yahoo's Bukowski Links
• Yahoo's Catullus Links
• meOme Latin Portal—A German-language portal's Latin section
• Little Rome—Roman history, culture, and general Latin and Roman-related fun.
• Latin Dictionary and Grammar Aid Notre Dame professor Wm. Kevin Cawley maintained this great resource for years. He retired in 2019 and wrote on the importance of archives. Alas this is non-functional now.

The Charles Bukowski Center for Classical Latin Studies by Richard Bullington-McGuire is licensed under Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International