Describe how Plato, Sappho, and/or Catullus conceive of love (and/or friendship). You can also choose to compare their views on love with The Odyssey, Oedipus Rex, or Lysistrata.

Catullus is a very passionate writer, he loves and hates hard. He writes of a woman named Lesbia, it is obvious that the love he has for her is strong just by the way he writes about her. In Poem 5 Catullus says, “You’d like to know how many of your kisses would be enough and over, Lesbia, for me? Match them to every grain of Libyan sand in silphium-rich Cyrene, from the shrine of torrid oracular Jupiter to the sacred sepulchre of old Battus; reckon their total equal to all those stars that in the silent night look down on the stolen loves of mortals.” Here, he describes that he would want endless kisses from Lesbia, he wouldn’t get tired of them. He expresses his love by using metaphors in his poem. Catullus’ poems and Lysistrata are a bit different when it comes to the topic of love because the love is actually genuine in Catullus’ poems. In Lysistrata, it was more about the men just wanting sex out of the women, they didn’t really appreciate them. But they are also a bit similar because sex was brought up many times in the poems of Catullus.