I hate and I love. Why I do so, perhaps you ask. I know not, but I feel it and I am in torment.

This line is the famous opening of Catullus’s epigram traditionally numbered Poem 85, a two-line elegiac couplet from his collection (mid–late 1st century BCE). It is usually read in connection with the poet’s turbulent affair with “Lesbia” (likely Clodia Metelli), a relationship marked by intense desire, jealousy, betrayal, and reconciliation. In the late Roman Republic’s elite social world, such love affairs could be both personally consuming and publicly fraught. Poem 85 distills that emotional volatility into a stark paradox—simultaneous love and hatred—capturing the psychological whiplash that recurs across Catullus’s Lesbia poems.

The couplet dramatizes emotional contradiction as an inescapable lived reality rather than a problem to be logically resolved. Catullus anticipates the reader’s rational question (“why?”) only to deny the possibility of a coherent explanation: he does not “know,” he only “feels.” The torment arises precisely from this gap between reason and passion—an experience of being acted upon by desire and resentment at once. The poem’s power lies in its compression: it turns a complex, messy relationship into a universal statement about conflicted attachment, where love can persist alongside anger and humiliation, and where self-knowledge offers no relief.

Odi et amo. quare id faciam, fortasse requiris.
nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.

1) “I hate and I love. Why, you may ask, do I do so? I do not know, but I feel it happening and I am tortured.”
2) “I hate and I love. Perhaps you ask why I do this. I don’t know; I only feel it, and I’m torn apart.”
3) “I hate and I love. You ask, perhaps, how can that be? I cannot tell; I only feel it, and it racks me.”