tribas cinaedus-ing

hello!!!! yes i Do have recs :-]  however first of all

i am not a classicist and haven't studied him / that time period in any sort of detail academically, so if i recommend an outdated text / miss something really obvious then please more knowledgeable mutuals correct meeee

ANYWAY:

wrt primary sources, all the letters from book 8 of ad familiares were written by him (cicero’s replies can be found in book 2) which are like. thee most important to read i would say

the pro caelio of course . i would also say r g austin’s third edition introduction to it is pretty good for more general overviews of Stuff, though it’s from the sixties so. take it critically

there are small little mentions/anecdotes about him around - seneca mentions him in de ira, he gets a little bit of valerius maximus, there's a tiny section on him in cassius dio and caesar mentions him briefly in his bellum civile

uhhhhhhhhh pliny mentions him also when talking about aconite which is how we know about the whole 'accusing bestia of being a serial killer who fingered his wives to death' thing (paraphrasing)

the only surviving bits of his oratory (to my knowledge) are in quintilian! awesome sexy in hybridam fragment save me

catullus & his world by t p wiseman has a section on caelius which is Really Good . and also like. catullus . read catullus 🫵

another older text is cicero and his friends by gaston boissier - again this is from like the 1800s so a lot of stuff is outdated (esp wrt catullus.? if i remember right. i also remember him being really mean about ovid for no reason :[ ) but you know. awesome and cool. corrupting intercourse etc etc

the only full length biography of him is by marina volponi - i have a pdf (thanks lu!) that i can send you if you’d like, though it is in italian 

this. i don't agree with a lot of what it says about caelius esp regarding his later life but it's fun!

comedy in the pro caelio 👍

these articles are all pretty good - i used to have a Hoard with many more but i've since lost it. wails.

(probably not what you were asking about but still - wrt historical fiction, the key / the lock / the door in the wall by benita jane karo are all caelius-y (the key + the door in the wall from his perspective) and fun, if not super accurate. attis of course. the cicero trilogy. he shows up like two whole times in masters of rome </3 and i haven't read it but i've heard roma sub rosa has a good caelius in !)

The Trans Agenda is to Keep My F*cking Friends Alive — sol rios