To whom am I to present my pretty new book, freshly smoothed off with dry pumice stone? To you, Cornelius: for you used to think that my trifles were worth something, long ago.

This line comes from the opening poem of Catullus’s collection (commonly numbered Carmen 1), a dedicatory preface written in the late Roman Republic. Catullus addresses “Cornelius,” generally identified with Cornelius Nepos, a contemporary author and friend. The poem imagines Catullus presenting a newly prepared papyrus book-roll—“smoothed with dry pumice”—a real finishing technique for scrolls. By calling his poems “trifles” (nugae), Catullus adopts a modest, playful stance while also signaling the polished artistry of his work and situating it within elite literary exchange and patronage networks at Rome.

Catullus frames his poetry as both carefully crafted and deliberately light in tone. The “pretty new book” and the detail of pumice-polishing emphasize material refinement and artistic labor, while “trifles” performs conventional humility and aligns his verse with witty, urbane neoteric aesthetics rather than grand epic. Addressing Cornelius/Nepos underscores poetry as a social gift: the value of the work depends partly on an informed reader who has long appreciated it. The opening thus sets the collection’s key tensions—playfulness versus seriousness, intimacy versus public literary ambition—and invites the dedicatee (and audience) to treat the poems as small in scale but worthy of lasting recognition.

Cui dono lepidum novum libellum
arida modo pumice expolitum?
Corneli, tibi: namque tu solebas
meas esse aliquid putare nugas,
iam tum, cum ausus es unus Italorum
omne aevum tribus explicare cartis,
doctis, Iuppiter, et laboriosis.
quare habe tibi quidquid hoc libelli,
qualecumque; quod, o patrona virgo,
plus uno maneat perenne saeclo.