This short poem is set in a pub in Rome. Catullus looks for his girlfriend Lesbia, and finds her seated with many other men at a long wooden table, like those which are most easily found in similar public places. What follows is one of the most famous scenes of jealousy in ancient literature: Catullus points his finger to the seated men, who are addressed with extremely violent, and often vulgar, words. Egnātius (Ignace) in particular, a Spanish man who is one of Catullus' favourite victims in his poems, is made fun of because of his country's usage to wash one's teeth with urine.
Here we find the most common vulgar words of classic Latin, in order of apparition: mentula (penis), confutuere (compound of futuere, to have a vaginal intercourse), hircus (cuckold), irrumāre (to force somebody to have an oral intercourse), sōpiō (drawing of a penis with its testicles).
The verse of this metre is called "scazōn" (in Greek: "crippled"), or "chōliambus" (in Greek: "crippled iamb"), or "Hippōnactēus" (from Hippōnax, the first poet thought to have used this metre), a kind of iambic trimeter, particularly common in scoptic poetry, where the last iambic dipody (short-long-short-long) has been replaced with an antispastus (short-long-long-short).
Here is a translation from Wikiquote:
Lustful tavern and you comrades-in-arms,
the ninth column from the Temple of Castor and Pollux,
do you think that you alone have dicks,
that you alone are permitted to fuck all at once whatever number of girls,
and to think everyone else goats?
Or can it be that because one hundred (or two hundred?)
of you idiots sit in an unbroken line, you do not think
I would dare to make all two hundred of you lazy asses suck my dick!
Know this: I will plaster the exterior
of your entire tavern with drawings of cocks.
Because my girl, who fled my lap,
having been loved as much as no other will ever be loved,
for whom by me great wars were fought,
sits together with them in that place.
This one you fine and well-to-do fellows,
all of you, love, and – which is undeserved indeed –
all small-time thugs and alleyway adulterers;
Above all others, you, one of the long-haireds,
son of your bunny-filled borderlands,
Egnatius, whom a dark beard
and teeth scoured with Spanish piss make a fine gent.
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