Catullus wrote on a wide variety of subjects - love (for both women and men), friendship, enmity, bereavement, the joy of homecoming and of drinking wine... And his poems display many moods: from romantic passion to bitter disillusionment, from teasing humour when a friend doesn't acknowledge his unwellness to sharp satire for a bad poet who thinks he's a good one, from grief expressed with a light touch at the death of his sweetheart's sparrow to total desolation on the death of his brother. All the poems have an apparent simplicity and straightforwardness of expression: like Roman frescoes and mosaics, they seem to speak directly to us.