1. Marriage and its transgressions

The sequence as we have it begins with two poems, 61 and 62, which focus explicitly on the marriage rite. Both can loosely be characterized as epithalamia, though it may be technically more correct to describe 61 as a combination of cletic hymn (to the marriage god Hymen or Hymenaeus; 1–75), hymenaeus (a processional song accompanying the deductio domum or transfer of the bride to her new home; 76–183) and epithalamium (properly, a song sung outside the marriage chamber of the newly-weds; 184–228).Footnote ⁶ Poem 62, an amoebaean or antiphonal contest between rival choruses of youths and girls, is less easily located within the marriage ritual, but presents itself in the opening lines as taking place after the marriage feast and apparently before the deductio domum (3–4).

Until relatively recently, discussion of these two poems revolved largely around issues of performance and relation to Greek and Roman ritual practice: does either poem correspond closely to what actually happened at Roman weddings, or are they literary fantasies, drawing on Greek models but introducing clearly Roman elements such as the Fescennina iocatio (ribald joking at the groom’s expense), enacted at 61.119–48? Poem 61 celebrates the nuptials of a real couple, Iunia (or Vinia, or Vibia) AurunculeiaFootnote ⁷ and Manlius Torquatus (in 62, by contrast, the bride and groom are anonymous and generic): was it composed for ‘live’ performance at the wedding itself? These debates have now largely been abandoned, a broad consensus having been reached that both poems combine Greek and Roman elements; neither can have been performed in the way that was envisaged by (some) earlier scholars, but should instead be viewed in the context of ‘mimetic’ poems such as Callimachus’ Hymns 2, 5, and 6. Both poems, that is, are performative in the sense that the ritual is enacted by the text itself, with the speaker (or the two choruses in the first stanzas of 62) playing the role of master of ceremonies and engaging the reader as a kind of virtual participant.Footnote ⁸

More recent criticism has turned its attention instead to the poems’ handling of gender roles and – in particular – their focus on (female) desire and resistance to marriage.Footnote ⁹ Important studies of the epithalamia by Ole Thomsen (1992) and more recently Karen Wasdin (2018) lay emphasis on the role of the two poems – and the ritual in general – in acculturating the bride into the role of matrona. Whereas Roman girls were supposed to prize and at all costs preserve their virginity, the bride is expected to play the role of desiring subject as well as object, though within the strict constraints of the marital relationship: Catullus seems notably sympathetic towards the anxieties that this, and the rapid transition from girlhood to maternity, is likely to have produced in young brides. Imagery of delicate and vulnerable plants and flowers, drawn, perhaps directly, from the epithalamia of Sappho, and references in both poems to the raptio or ritual seizure of the bride from her mother’s arms, arguably gesture towards fears more explicitly voiced in the rhetorical question posed by the girls’ chorus at 62.24, quid faciunt hostes capta crudelius urbe? (‘What crueller deed does the enemy commit in a captured city?’).Footnote ¹⁰

At the same time, the bride’s reluctance to leave her parental home, attributed at 61.79 to her ingenuus pudor (‘well-bred modesty’), is in tension with the sexual arousal that her husband is expected to inspire in her, and her new role as mistress of the house and more specifically as mother. The two poems negotiate this conflict in slightly different ways. In 62, the boys both assert that the girls’ protestations are disingenuous (at lubet innuptis ficto te carpere questu, ‘but unmarried girls take pleasure in carping at you [sc. Hymen], with feigned complaints’; 62.36), and counter their use of the conventional flower simile with more functional, though equally traditional, agricultural imagery (62.49–58), as well as more bluntly asserting the importance of familial authority and obedience due to parents (62.28, 59–66).Footnote ¹¹ In 61, the bride’s transition to adulthood is in effect enacted in the course of the epithalamium itself, as Iunia is transferred from her mother’s embrace (a gremio suae/matris; 58–9) to the new home where she will shortly (breui; 204) become a mother herself, dandling her own infant in her lap (matris e gremio suae; 210). At the same time, the Fescennine raillery in the central part of the poem points to a parallel moment of transition for the groom, who must abandon the (unproductive) amores of early manhood and devote himself instead to his new, familial role and the production of legitimate heirs (61.134–43).Footnote ¹²

Poem 61’s almost startling emphasis on Iunia’s desire for Manlius, and on their sexual ‘play’, is counterbalanced and normalized by repeated references to the legitimacy of their union: Iunia will be a faithful Penelope (219–23); Manlius will not engage in unsanctioned relations with other men’s wives (97–105); their child will bear an unmistakable resemblance to its father (214–18); and – above all – their mutual desire is regulated and constrained by the ‘good’ Venus (44)Footnote ¹³ – the goddess, that is, of productive, marital sex. But while we may agree with critics such as Panoussi that poems 61 and, to some extent, 62 offer an idealized image of marriage as an institution, indicating a ‘renewed faith in…its ability to provide personal fulfilment and promote social stability’, there is already in these two poems a shadow side.Footnote ¹⁴ The figure of the mala adultera (‘wicked adulteress’; 61.97–8) lurks in the background as the negative counterpart of bona Venus, even if Iunia is reassured that – provided that she complies with her husband’s sexual demands (144–6) – Manlius will never pursue such shameful relations; and there are hints elsewhere in the poem of the dangers of sexual passion, as a force that may not be fully contained within the regulatory institutions of society. Most obviously, the bride is compared to Venus as she appeared at the judgement of Paris (‘the Phrygian judge’; 18–19): the adulterous Helen is inevitably an absent presence here, as the negative counterpart to the virtuous Penelope of the poem’s closing stanzas.Footnote ¹⁵

Helen has a more explicit part to play in the last of the carmina maiora, the complex and experimental 68, which (with its tantalizingly slippery conflation of myth and personal experience) was to prove profoundly influential on the love poets of the next generation. The poem begins as an expression of gratitude to a friend, Mallius or Allius, but centres on an account of the beloved’s arrival at the house which (M)Allius has lent the couple as a venue for their assignations.Footnote ¹⁶ This soon develops into a hugely extended comparison with the mythical couple Protesilaus and Laodamia, which in turn gives way (via a brief reference to the Trojan War and the abduction/elopement of Helen) to lamentations for the death of Catullus’ brother, which apparently took place in the Troad. From this central panel, the poet works back again – in a symmetrical, ‘recessed-panel’ or ‘Chinese box’ structure – to the Trojan War, Helen and Paris, and Laodamia’s love for her doomed husband (the first of the Greeks to die in the war). Further comparisons present themselves, in a somewhat bewildering array: Laodamia’s love is deeper than the drainage ditch dug by Hercules at Pheneus in Arcadia (109–16); her husband was as dear to her as the grandson born of his only daughter to an elderly paterfamilias (119–24), or a dove to its mate (125–8). At this point we finally return to Catullus and his beloved, who is said not to fall short, or only a little short (aut nihil aut paulo…concedere digna; 131), of the mythical heroine – even though she is not faithful to her lover, who resolves nonetheless to bear with her ‘occasional lapses’ (rara…furta; 136). The poem ends with further thanks and good wishes to (M)Allius.

This profusion of comparisons, and particularly the evident slippages between comparanda, have been variously interpreted by critics.Footnote ¹⁷ In particular, Laodamia seems more closely to resemble Catullus himself than his beloved, even though she is the overt tenor of the simile. Laodamia’s all-consuming love and the loss of her husband bear obvious similarities to Catullus’ ‘fiery’ passion (50–4; cf. 73: flagrans amore) and the death of his brother at Troy. At the same time, several of the other similes suggest comparisons beyond their overt reference: notably, the themes of marriage, adultery, family, and the domus (‘home’, ‘household’) resonate through the poem, to the extent that 68 (or 68b) can be read as a companion piece to 61, framing the carmina maiora with ‘optimistic’ and ‘pessimistic’, or normative and transgressive, images of marital relations.Footnote ¹⁸

The comparison between the beloved and the bride Laodamia is already anticipated in the language of 68.67–72, where she is represented as a ‘shining goddess’, setting her foot on the threshold of the domus whose mistress, domina, she will figuratively become. Iunia, too, is compared to a goddess (61.17–19), and urged to step lightly over the threshold of the new home (61.159–61) to which Hymen is summoning her – with the same paronomasia, domum dominam uoca (61.31).Footnote ¹⁹ But the beloved in 68 appears, ominously, to set her foot on the threshold, where she is left suspended for some sixty lines while Catullus turns to the (equally, if differently) ill-omened union of Laodamia and Protesilaus, whose marriage – or, more literally, ‘house’ (domus again; 74) – was ‘begun in vain’ (inceptam frustra; 75), presumably because it would not fulfil its purpose in producing children.Footnote ²⁰

The unravelling sequence of similes that follows alludes to other less than happy couples: the adulterous Helen and Paris (87 and especially 103: abducta…moecha, ‘seduced adulteress’); Hercules and Hebe, who can only be united through the hero’s death (and following his murder of his own children; 116); and Juno, who is forced to swallow her anger at her husband’s philandering (138–40). The eikasmos or comparison, especially to deities and heroes, traditional in the epithalamium again finds a darker counterpart here: the bride-like domina of this poem is in in fact no bride but an adulteress, forever entering the borrowed domus to which she has not been escorted in a formal deductio or wedding procession (nec … mihi dextra deducta paterna, ‘nor was she escorted to me by her father’s hand’; 68.143).Footnote ²¹ The munus or ‘duty’ of marriage, which aims at the production of legitimate children (61.43, 227) is replaced by the furtiua munuscula, ‘stolen love gifts’, pilfered from the very gremium (‘lap’, ‘bosom’) of the girl’s husband (68.145–6), in a kind of parodic inversion of Hymen’s parting of the bride from her mother’s embrace (a gremio suae / matris; 61.58–9).

Recent interpretations of the poem have laid particular emphasis on Laodamia’s childlessness, which – in connection with the death of Catullus’ brother – suggests a submerged anxiety around the continuity of the family line.Footnote ²² The domus theme in 68b is anticipated in the ‘covering letter’ by the poet’s grief-struck outcry, o misero frater adempte mihi, / tu mea tu moriens fregisti commoda, frater, / tecum una tota est nostra sepulta domus (‘o my brother, taken from me to my sorrow, in dying, you have wrecked all my pleasures, with you our whole house lies buried’; 68.20–2) – lines partially repeated, strikingly, at the centre of 68b (92–4). A strong hint can be detected here that the brother has died childless, leaving Catullus alone to continue the family line. His domina, however, is a Helen, not a chaste Penelope,Footnote ²³ and there will be no legitimate heir – no Catullus paruulus (cf. 61.209: Torquatus…paruulus, ‘a baby Torquatus’), no caput seri…nepotis (‘life of a late-born grandchild’; 68.120) will come from this union. If, as Panoussi suggests, poem 62 urges the rival claims of individual needs (the girls’ desire to maintain their virginity and the female friendships of their childhood) and societal demands (the boys’ assertion of parental rights: compare the praise of Hymen at 61.66–75 as preserver of familial continuity and the security of the patria), a similar clash may be seen to structure poem 68, where Catullus represents himself as, ultimately, prepared to sacrifice his paternal domus in favour of an unsanctioned and inevitably sterile ‘quasi-marriage’. Poem 61’s attempt to contain (female) desire within the constraints of a socially validated union contrasts with the disillusion of 68, where the ideal of mutual fidelity collapses, and amor overspills the bonds of marriage, entailing the destruction of the Trojan War and, symbolically, of Catullus’ own domus.

These themes resonate to a greater or lesser extent through poems 63–6: notably, the word domus occurs twenty-six times in the carmina maiora, as against only five in the rest of the corpus. In poem 63, the young Attis has left the civilized domus where he enjoyed the status of an admired and much-courted ephebe (63–7) for the wild and alien landscape of Phrygia, the domus (20, 35, 58) of Mistress Cybele (Dindymenae dominae; 13). Having castrated himself in an ecstatic frenzy, along with his companions (who, however, soon disappear from the poem), he can never become husband or father, or properly fulfil any of the social roles he mournfully catalogues at 62–9:

The only role he can play henceforth, as the poem’s chilling conclusion confirms, is that of slave, famula (90; cf. 51–2, 68), to domina Cybele.Footnote ²⁴

One productive way to read this poem is against the gender discourse of the first-person love poems, not least 68: Catullus’ passion (as we saw in Chapter 2) effeminizes him, so that he willingly plays the role of Laodamia to the beloved’s Protesilaus; Attis more literally becomes a woman, or rather a ‘fake woman’ (notha mulier; 27), characterized by feminine grammatical forms from line 8 onwards.Footnote ²⁵ Attis’ self-castration resonates disturbingly, too, with the image of the cut flower at the end of poem 11, which in turn links the speaker to the deflowered virgin implied by the simile of 62.43.Footnote ²⁶ On this reading, Cybele is a mythical analogue for Lesbia, and her self-emasculated devotee for the Catullus of the love poems. In adopting the conventionally female role, moreover, Catullus (like Attis) has rejected, perhaps betrayed, his expected familial and societal duties: the concluding apopompe or ‘averting prayer’ of 63, where the poet prays that the goddess will inflict her frenzy on others, and spare his own domus (91–3), is shot through with irony, particularly when read in the context of the domus/marriage theme that pervades the carmina maiora.

Poem 64, discussed in more detail below, also opens itself to ironic readings, particularly of the nostalgia that the speaker expresses for the Age of Heroes (64.22–4) and the apparently rosy portrayal of the wedding of Peleus and Thetis that is the main subject of the narrative.Footnote ²⁷ The ‘heroic virtues’ (51; cf. 348: egregias uirtutes; 357: magnis uirtutibus) depicted on the coverlet of the marriage bed, in the famously extended ecphrasis of lines 50–264, resolve themselves into Theseus’ callous abandonment of Ariadne and the curse that she in turn calls down upon him and his family (the killing of the Minotaur is passed over in a five-line simile, 105–9);Footnote ²⁸ and the future exploits of the happy couple’s son, Achilles, are foreseen in a prophecy filled with gore and maternal lamentation, culminating in the vividly described slaughter of the virgin Polyxena (366–70) – itself a perversion of the marriage rite.Footnote ²⁹

Poems 66 (with its covering note, 65) and 67 can be seen to form a contrasting pair, portraying as they do a mutually devoted, albeit temporarily separated couple, Queen Berenice and her husband, Ptolemy, and the ultimate in transgressive marriages, compromised – according to the animated house door that is the poem’s main speaker – by impotence, incest, and serial adultery.Footnote ³⁰ The adulterous bride of this latter poem both anticipates the less-than-faithful mistress of poem 68 (esp. 135–46) and gives substance to the shadowy figure of the mala adultera (‘wicked adulteress’) who haunts poem 61. The doorway motif forms the most obvious connection between the three poems: while the (literally) liminal position of the speaker in 67 plays on comic more than epithalamial models,Footnote ³¹ the transgressive matrona invites comparison with both the virginal bride of 61 and the domina of 68, with the associated symbolism of the threshold in each case. Strikingly, too, the door itself is addressed in terms which momentarily suggest a bride (o dulci iucunda uiro, iucunda parenti, / salue, ‘Greetings, o cherished by a darling husband, cherished by a father’; 67.1–2), an ambiguity which is only resolved by the vocative ianua in line 3.Footnote ³² Literal or figurative references to the gremium (‘lap’, ‘bosom’), which (as we saw) recur in 61 and 68, again mark the contrast between the transgressive marriage of 67 and the virtuous union of 66: the incestuous father-in-law of 67 is described – with the crudity proper to invective – as having ‘pissed in his own son’s lap’ (ipse sui gnati minxerit in gremium; 67.30),Footnote ³³ whereas the personified lock of Berenice’s hair that is the speaker of 66 finds itself in the ‘chaste lap of Venus’ (Veneris casto…gremio; 66.56) – that is, of Berenice’s deified predecessor, Arsinoe-Aphrodite.Footnote ³⁴ More disturbingly, the Lock’s playful mockery of Berenice’s ‘fraternal’ relationship with her new husband (66.21–2) is echoed in the father-in-law–daughter-in-law incest of poem 67.Footnote ³⁵

The themes of childlessness and sterility explored above in relation to poems 63 and 68 recur here, too, most explicitly in the figure of the impotent husband of 67.20–2 but also in the densely metaphorical language of poem 65. In apologizing to his correspondent, Hortalus, for inability to comply with a request for a poem, Catullus describes his reaction to his brother’s death in terms evocative of both sterility and infanticide (65.1–4, 12–14):

Catullus’ grief has hindered the figurative coupling with the virginal Muses, which – like the marriage of Manlius and Iunia – would have produced a ‘child’, the fetus of line 3: in this sense (in addition to the loss of his brother), he resembles the bereaved mother of Itylus, who has likewise lost a son.Footnote ³⁶ Catullus’ figurative sterility turns out to be only relative, since he has in fact produced a poem, albeit a translation of Callimachus, poem 66, rather than a wholly new work.Footnote ³⁷

The poem’s closing simile, in which Hortalus’ request is troped as an apple sent to a young girl by her fiancé,Footnote ³⁸ picks up the opening imagery of childbirth. The ‘chaste virgin’ of the simile hides the apple in her gremium, but absent-mindedly lets it fall as she jumps up to greet her mother – as though proleptically giving birth to the baby she will bear after the marriage takes place.Footnote ³⁹ The language of gift-giving (munere; 19) suggests a secondary association between the apple and the poem that follows: Catullus’ obligation to his correspondent, like the girl’s respect for her mother, is strong enough, it seems, to bring forth poetry after all, even in the face of overwhelming grief (or, in the girl’s case, of her innocent complicity with her lover).Footnote ⁴⁰ At the same time, the troubling implications of the nightingale simile persist in spite of the poem’s consoling conclusion. As the commentators note, Catullus conflates two versions of the aetiological myth to which he alludes here. According to one account, Aedon, daughter of Pandareus, accidentally kills her own child Itylus, mistaking him for the son of her sister Niobe, of whose fecundity she is jealous. In the other, more familiar, story, Procne’s husband, Tereus, rapes his sister-in-law, Philomela; in revenge, the two sisters murder Procne’s son Itys and serve up the child’s dismembered body to his father.Footnote ⁴¹ In both versions, however, Aedon/Procne is herself responsible for the loss of her child, and it is this element in particular that, once again, resonates with poem 68 and the childlessness of both Laodamia and (apparently) Catullus himself. The poem’s maternal imagery, then, hints both at a sense of responsibility, even guilt, for the end of the family line (Procne/Aedon’s infanticide) and at a compensating figuration of poetic composition as childbirth (poetry as ‘offspring of the Muses’): the immortality conferred by commemoration in verse, a theme developed more explicitly in the opening lines of 68b, is weighed against, but does not cancel out, the failure of the domus entailed on the more literal level by death and childlessness.

2. Translation, appropriation, and alienation

A number of scholars have pointed to a rather different way in which the closing simile of poem 65 serves to connect the covering letter with the translation that follows: that is, through intertextual echoes of the Aetia of Callimachus, where Catullus (probably) encountered the original ‘Lock of Berenice’.Footnote ⁴² While the scenario that Catullus describes has no close parallel (as far as we know) in the Greek poem, the details of the rolling apple (65.23) and the girl’s blush (24) irresistibly recall the Acontius and Cydippe narrative of Aetia 3.Footnote ⁴³ Acontius, prompted by Eros, inveigles the beautiful virgin Cydippe into marriage by writing ‘I swear to Artemis that I shall marry Acontius’ on an apple and rolling it before her feet at the sanctuary of Artemis, so that – taking the bait and reading the inscription aloud – she unwittingly commits herself to him. As Tony Woodman has observed, this story has no obvious correspondence with the situation in Catullus’ poem;Footnote ⁴⁴ but, pace Woodman, that cannot prevent the connection from occurring to the reader, particularly when the simile immediately follows an explicit reference to ‘poems of Callimachus’ (carmina Battiadae; 16). On one level, the phrase evidently refers to the translation that follows; but on another, we could understand poem 65 a self-fulfilling prophecy, in so far as it is itself a kind of ‘Callimachean poem’, one that selects and recombines elements from one of Callimachus’ best-known passages, redeploying them in a context quite different from the original but still bearing recognizable similarities to it.Footnote ⁴⁵

Taken together, poems 65 and 66 thus offer us two very different models of ‘translation’ (to use the term loosely). In the latter case, the surviving fragments of the Aetia suggest a relatively close, almost word-for-word (or at least line-for-line) correspondence between the Greek source-text and Catullus’ Latin version – as is also the case in the Sappho translation, poem 51.Footnote ⁴⁶ In poem 65, the relationship between source and target is much looser: instead of taking over the model-text wholesale, Catullus appropriates Callimachean motifs to his own ends. In that sense, the two poems taken together exemplify the very wide range of translation practices, or, more broadly, intertextual relations with Greek models, self-consciously employed by Roman writers from at least the time of Plautus, as recent scholarship has emphasized.Footnote ⁴⁷ This, in turn, may be related to broader themes of cultural transfer, separation, and alienation that are – again – brought to the fore when we read the carmina maiora as a connected sequence.

Poem 66 itself has largely been treated by scholars as a kind of mine from which the details of lost sections of the Callimachean original might be extracted, and/or commended (or criticized) on its success (or failure) in reproducing the verbal texture of its model.Footnote ⁴⁸ In recent years, however, under the influence of postcolonial and translation theory, and prompted to some extent by reconsideration of Virgil’s controversial quotation of lines 39–40 in Aeneid 6, it has become more fashionable to see Catullus as recontextualizing and even remaking Callimachus for an elite Roman readership.Footnote ⁴⁹ In this connection, the sense of displacement and dislocation expressed by the Lock can be read metapoetically, as a comment on the expropriation of Greek culture by the Roman upper classes. Regine Höschele (drawing on earlier work on Callimachus) points out that the Lock in its Callimachean instantiation has already undergone a ‘fourfold displacement from origin’ (Berenice’s move from Libya to Alexandria; separation from the queen’s head; removal to the lap of Arsinoe-Aphrodite; and ultimately catasterism); this is compounded by the separation of Catullus’ version of the poem from its original (political, literary) context and his redeployment of the Callimachean source-text as part of a personal narrative of separation and loss and, simultaneously, a broader story of cultural appropriation on the grand scale.Footnote ⁵⁰

The densely intertextual make-up of other carmina maiora, considered from this perspective, points to other kinds of ‘translation’ and showcases the range of ways in which Greek literary texts might be naturalized and assimilated to the Roman context. We have already noted how poems 61 and 62 fuse the conventions of the Greek wedding poem with elements of Roman ritual (the characteristic dress of the bride – and of Hymen as a ‘bridal’ figure – in 61; references to the symbolic seizing of the bride from her mother in both poems; the inclusion of Fescennine mockery).Footnote ⁵¹ Poems 64 and 68 both draw on an extraordinarily wide range of Greek (as well as Roman) literary predecessors, reforging them into what are, in certain respects, highly individual and deeply Roman works. In the case of 64, the once popular idea that the poem is either wholly or partly a translation of a lost Greek original has now largely been abandoned; but Catullus’ importation of the so-called ‘epyllion’ (or miniature epic) form pioneered by Callimachus in the Hecale remains fertile ground for reflection on Roman responses to Greek culture. The agonistic view of Catullan intertextuality developed by Richard Thomas and others (considered in Chapter 1), according to which Catullus sets out to rival or ‘correct’ his various, mainly Greek models, is also relevant here.Footnote ⁵² The poem’s coda most obviously recontextualizes the mythical material by connecting it with the characteristically Roman (and particularly Late Republican) idea of moral decline, on which Augustus was to capitalize so effectively in the next generation.Footnote ⁵³ Poem 68 more explicitly draws on (mainly Greek) myth and literature as a means of framing personal experience – of desire, loss, and gratitude.Footnote ⁵⁴ And poem 65, as we have seen, makes similarly complex use of intertextual resonances.

Elizabeth Young has recently sought to relate this pervasive pattern of intertextual appropriation in the carmina maiora to the prominence of west–east (and east–west) movements and voyages in this part of the collection, most notably the Argonautic myth, which looks set to be the main theme of poem 64 before the narrative is hijacked by the Peleus and Thetis story, and allusions to the Trojan War in 68; Attis in 63, too, sails from Greece to Asia Minor, though soon finds that the return voyage is closed to him by his self-emasculation.Footnote ⁵⁵ This failure to complete the loop and return triumphantly to Greece (Italy) – as, for example, Virgil represents himself as doing in the opening lines of Georgics 3 – tends, however, to complicate the picture of Catullus as ‘heroic’ translator that Young sketches. Whereas Cicero, Virgil, and others typically represent their literary endeavours as a kind of (re)conquest of Greece, Catullus’ heroes seem doomed throughout the carmina maiora to tragic or failed homecomings: Peleus and Thetis’ son will die at Troy, like Laodamia’s husband in poem 68; Attis is bound in eternal servitude to Cybele; Theseus returns to a home (domus again; 64.246) that is in mourning for the death of his father; and the Argonauts, though successful in their quest for the Golden Fleece, will also bring back Medea, whose ‘absent presence’ haunts the ecphrasis of the coverlet at the centre of 64 (as discussed below).Footnote ⁵⁶

This recurring pattern perhaps reflects anxieties, as well as triumphalism, in relation to Greek-influenced cultural production (as, indeed, Young suggests), but it is also related to Catullus’ tendency to identify – and invite his readers to identify – with the victims and the bereaved rather than the ‘heroic’ victors of these narratives of quest and conquest. This is particularly striking in the case of poem 68, where the focus is on the widowed Laodamia, left at home to mourn her loss.Footnote ⁵⁷ Grieving mothers figure prominently, too, in the Song of the Parcae, at 64.349–51, and we might also note the disproportionate focus on the abandoned Ariadne, at the expense of the ‘heroic’ Theseus, in the central ecphrasis of poem 64. Here we may compare the ambivalent handling of Roman imperialism, and the related tendency to adopt the victim position, discussed above in relation to poem 11: Catullus’ depiction in that poem of the foreign Other, and of Roman hegemony, I suggested, at once confirms and calls into question contemporary imperialist and gender discourses.Footnote ⁵⁸ So, too, the carmina maiora may be said to explore the experience of deracination, dislocation, and alienation as much as they celebrate the poet’s triumphant appropriation and mastery of his Greek models. However incongruous and humorously exaggerated the complaints of the Lock in 66, for example, her experience of separation from her ‘sisters’ (comae…sorores; 66.51), together with Berenice’s longing for her ‘brother’ Ptolemy (fratris cari flebile discidium, ‘your tearful separation from your dear brother’; 66.22), can be seen to replay in a different register the anxieties of the young brides in 61 and 62, and, more startlingly, the poet’s own bereavement.Footnote ⁵⁹ Much is made in poems 65 and 68 of the brother’s distant resting place – buried not ‘among familiar tombs or near the ashes of his kin’ (68.97–8; cf. 65.7), but on the far-off shore of the Troad. Similarly, the Lock is quite literally removed from its roots (me afore semper, / afore me a dominae uertice, ‘I shall always be separated – separated I shall be from my mistress’ head’; 66.75–6), and Attis, too, is destined to spend the rest of his days amid the profoundly alien landscape of Phrygia, under the dominion of the never fully Romanized deity Cybele, and in a body no longer wholly his own (ego mei pars, ‘I, a part of myself’; 63.69).Footnote ⁶⁰

Attis’ alienation from his surroundings prompts comparison not only with the Lock’s longing for its ‘sisters’ but also with the sense of displacement articulated by the poet himself in 68a. Apologizing to (M)Allius for his inability to provide the requested poem, Catullus explains that a part of his difficulty lies in the fact that, having returned to his native Verona in the wake of his brother’s death, he does not have his library with him (68.34–5):

The emphatic tricolon powerfully conveys a feeling of deracination: no longer at home in his provincial birthplace, Catullus longs for his ‘dwelling’ in the capital. As we saw in Chapter 1, however, the poet repeatedly represents himself as an outsider to the metropolis and seat of aristocratic power: like Attis, he seems not fully at home anywhere. These lines point to another aspect of the domus theme which, as we have seen, runs so prominently through the carmina maiora: Catullus offers us a rather less optimistic take on the shared loyalty to ‘two patriae’ which Cicero explores at the beginning of Book 2 of the De legibus.Footnote ⁶¹ For Cicero, there is as clear a hierarchy between natal and civic identity, as between family and state: however fond he may be of Arpinum, Rome commands, and should command, his primary loyalty. Catullus, in contrast, suggests a sense of profound unease occasioned by what Emma Dench terms the ‘hyphenated identities’ of the Italian and provincial elite: caught between Verona and Rome, the poet’s plight is suggestively figured in both the alienated Attis of poem 63 and the (literally) severed Lock of 66.Footnote ⁶²

3. Poem 64: the textual labyrinth

If Attis, Catullus’ brother, Berenice’s Lock and the poet himself (writing, in poem 68, from Verona) are all, in their different ways, displaced and isolated, the figure of whom this is most obviously true is Ariadne in poem 64. Abandoned by Theseus on the desolate island of Dia, she cannot return to Crete or hope for help from the family she has betrayed (64.178–81):

Theseus, she claims, perfidiously cheated her of the marriage that he had promised when she helped him to kill the Minotaur (the ‘brother’ mentioned in the lines quoted above): no woman should trust a man’s promises when he is out for what he can get (139–48). Ariadne’s sentiments here suggest yet another instance of cross-gender identification on the poet’s part, strongly flagged by the inversion in these lines of the misogynistic sentiments expressed in propria persona in poem 70, where it is a woman’s words that are condemned as untrustworthy (70.3–4):

Michael Putnam, in a ground-breaking article, suggested that these and numerous other echoes between the epyllion and the first-person poems point to an autobiographical element in 64, which he reads as a ‘personal document’, in which the poet’s lived experience is transposed into the more conventional format of mythological epic.Footnote ⁶⁴ On this reading, Ariadne’s betrayal by Theseus is a kind of metaphor – like the Laodamia myth in 68 – for the relationship between the poet and Lesbia. Conversely, the love of Peleus and Thetis represents the ideal of perfect reciprocity propounded in poem 109 and elsewhere: Putnam particularly compares the juxtaposition of the two narratives with poem 70, where Lesbia claims to prefer Catullus to Jupiter himself (just as the god concedes the love of Thetis to Peleus, 64.26–7), yet is no more trustworthy in her promises than Theseus, as we saw above. But the unity that Putnam perceives here, in accordance with then-innovative New Critical principles, has been challenged by more recent criticism, which has tended to emphasize the poem’s fractures, complexities, and inconsistencies, taking the labyrinth – with its confusing twists and turns, false starts, and dead ends – as an emblem for the reader’s experience of the poem.Footnote ⁶⁵

Structurally, the poem has something in common with the recessed-panel construction of 68. Beginning with the voyage of the Argonauts (1–30), the epyllion soon focuses in on the marriage of Peleus and Thetis. An extended description of the arrival of the wedding guests, human (31–49) and divine (278–302), is punctuated by a lengthy ecphrasis (50–266) of the coverlet of the marriage bed, depicting the abandoned Ariadne, which in turn incorporates a flashback to Theseus’ arrival in Crete and victory over the Minotaur (76–115), a long speech by Ariadne (132–201), a further flashback to Theseus’ parting from his father, Aegeus, including another passage of direct speech (212–37), and a flash-forward to the working out of the curse that Ariadne calls down on her lover and his family, with the death of Aegeus (238–48). Finally, we return to the ecphrasis proper, with the arrival of Bacchus with his train of satyrs and maenads, to claim Ariadne for himself (251–64). At the end of the ecphrasis, the departure of the human guests and arrival of the gods and demigods leads into a second long inset, looking this time to the future, in the form of the Fates’ prophecy of the birth and exploits of Achilles (305–83). The poem concludes – without resuming the narrative of the wedding – with a coda, in which the narrator laments the decline from a time when the gods mingled freely with mortals to what Catullus represents as the moral depravity of the present day (384–408).

Among the many interpretative challenges posed by this complex structure is the question of how the Theseus–Ariadne story on the coverlet relates to the framing narrative of Peleus’ and Thetis’ marriage, and indeed what exactly we should imagine as depicted on the coverlet. Plausible answers to the latter question are suggested both by the detail of the text and by intertextual – or rather, in this case, intermedial – parallels. In the first place, as Gaisser points out, the numerous verbs of speaking and the lack of specifically visual detail in all but the opening and closing sections of the ecphrasis suggest a double perspective: that of the viewers depicted within the poem, who see only two scenes – Ariadne on the shore, Bacchus approaching with his train; and that of the reader, for whom the narrative context is supplied by the narrator.Footnote ⁶⁶ In the second place, the numerous visual representations of Ariadne which have survived from Pompeii and elsewhere typically depict either Ariadne sleeping on the shore or looking out to sea at Theseus’ departing ship, or Bacchus’ approach (in one instance, the two are combined in the same scene, as in Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne).Footnote ⁶⁷ The ancient reader, then, will likely have been prompted by familiarity with these scenes (as modern readers might by the paintings of Titian, Kauffmann, Waterhouse, and others) to imagine analogous representations on the coverlet, and to understand the narrator’s filling in of the backstory as a supplement to the ecphrasis proper.

This dual perspective points in turn to complexity and uncertainty in the relationship between ecphrasis and narrative setting: the (intradiegetic) viewer sees one thing, while the (external) reader is offered a different perspective.Footnote ⁶⁸ At the same time, any clear-cut distinction between ecphrasis and narrative is blurred by what Andrew Laird has termed the ‘disobedience’ of the ecphrasis: both the opening description of Ariadne and the closing scene of Bacchus’ approach contain elements (sound, movement, direct speech) which we cannot easily imagine to be part of the visual representation.Footnote ⁶⁹ Indeed, the whole issue of representation is foregrounded particularly by the simile of line 61, where Ariadne is compared to a stone statue of a bacchant. One representation (the embroidered Ariadne) is compared to another (the statue); in both cases, the potential for movement and violent action seems to be at issue, given the association of bacchants, like those of lines 254–64, with frenzied activity. Thus, it becomes difficult to maintain an unambiguous contrast between depicted scenes and narrated backstory: even the more obviously descriptive parts of the ecphrasis blend into the narrative elaboration, as the ‘frozen’ Ariadne moves, speaks, and interacts with her surroundings.

In so far as we can posit such a contrast, however, the experience of internal viewer and external reader might be mapped onto different ways of interpreting the relationship between ecphrasis and surrounding narrative. Aligning ourselves with the presumptive perspective of the wedding guests, we can understand the coverlet as celebrating Ariadne’s rescue by and union with Bacchus, as a parallel for what the narrator insistently characterizes as the happy marriage of Peleus and Thetis. Alternatively, taking an ‘external’ perspective, and given the narrator’s emphasis on Ariadne’s suffering rather than her future happiness, we might perceive a contrast between happy and unhappy love, between one couple’s divinely and socially sanctioned union and the betrayed promises of the other.Footnote ⁷⁰ Or, again, the failure of the (promised) marriage between Theseus and Ariadne might be taken to foreshadow the impending failure of that of Peleus and Thetis, which – as ancient readers would have been well aware – was destined to be among the most spectacularly unsuccessful unions in the whole of Greek mythology: already in the Iliad the couple are apparently estranged, and the son born of their union is doomed to die young.Footnote ⁷¹

The resonances that Putnam identifies with other Catullan poems are likewise complicated by intertextual echoes, especially of Apollonius’ Argonautica, but also of Euripides and Ennius. As we saw in Chapter 1, the opening lines of the poem evoke a whole range of earlier texts: the most obvious connections, however, are with the famous opening lines of Euripides’ (and Ennius’) Medea. Footnote ⁷² Medea is in the background again in Ariadne’s despairing series of rhetorical questions (178–81, quoted above), which – while very widely echoed by other abandoned heroines in texts both earlier and later than Catullus – have their origin in Euripides (Medea 502–5; cf. Enn. Tragedies, fr. 104 Jocelyn): particularly noteworthy is the rather startling reference to the Minotaur as ‘my brother’, which underlines the parallel with Medea and her involvement in the murder of her brother, Apsyrtus. Still more striking is Ariadne’s near-quotation of the opening lines of Ennius’ Medea at 171–2:

These and other echoes tend to assimilate Ariadne to Medea, so that the intertext offers another ‘competing voice’, in Gaisser’s phrase: the narrator’s sympathetic treatment of Ariadne, indicated particularly by the ‘subjective’ interventions at 71 (a misera, ‘ah, poor girl’) and 94–5 (heu misere exagitans immiti corde furores, / sancte puer, ‘alas, divine boy [sc. Cupid], with merciless heart you stir up mad passion, inflicting misery’), is complicated by the implicitly Medea-like aspect of her character and situation. Ariadne represents herself as a helpless victim, but the Euripidean/Ennian intertext suggests a more frightening, punitive agency – a hint which is ultimately fulfilled in the curse she lays on Theseus and its working out in the death of Aegeus.

Further conundrums for the reader are presented by the narrative misdirection which marks the poem’s opening,Footnote ⁷³ and the apparent conflict – noted above – between the Parcae’s insistence on the felicity of Peleus and Thetis’ match and the glorious future awaiting their child, on the one hand, and the actual content of their song, on the other. Many critics, too, have detected considerable irony in the framing contrast between the ‘all too longed-for age’ of heroes (22) and the grim present (397–408): in particular, the intrafamilial violence supposedly characteristic of the present day seems oddly reminiscent of Ariadne’s betrayal of her ‘brother’ (perfudere manus fraterno sanguine fratres, ‘brothers drenched their hands in brothers’ blood’; 399 ∼ respersum iuuenem fraterna caede secuta, ‘following the youth spattered with my brother’s blood’; 181), while the reiterated idea that the gods ‘showed themselves at the gatherings of mortals’ in the Heroic Age (384–6; cf. 407–8) has been seen as undercut by the curious separation imposed between human and divine guests at the wedding (267–77).Footnote ⁷⁴

Finally, the poem’s handling of mythological chronology is notoriously problematic. Most obviously, there is an evident contradiction between the emphasis in the opening lines on the Argo’s primacy as the very first ship (prima [11], with the following description of the Nereids’ wonderment at this monstrum or ‘marvel’ [15]) and the prior existence of the ship in which Theseus sails to Crete, as depicted on the coverlet.Footnote ⁷⁵ Gaisser and Weber point to other, subtler anachronisms: the imported luxuries of Peleus’ palace (43–9, esp. 48: Indo…dente), in an age notionally prior to transport by ship, and the anomalous ordering of events, with both the Argonautic expedition and the exploits of Theseus falling before the marriage of Peleus and Thetis.Footnote ⁷⁶ Among other difficulties created by this resequencing of the narrative, Medea’s story seems to belong simultaneously to the past (of Theseus and Ariadne) and the future (of the Argonautic narrative): in other versions of the story, her first meeting with Jason takes place only after the Argo reaches its destination in Colchis; subsequently abandoned by Jason, she flees to Athens after killing their children in revenge, and here attempts to forestall the reunion between Theseus and his father, Aegeus, by poisoning the former.Footnote ⁷⁷ Catullus, however, relegates the meeting of father and son to a flashback within the inset narrative (217): thus, it must precede Theseus’ abandonment of Ariadne, which in turn precedes the Argonautic expedition and Medea’s first glimpse of Jason.

Almost equally puzzling are the overtones of the Golden Age implicit in the evocative lines 38–42, where agriculture is described as suspended for the duration of the wedding celebrations: the phrase rura colit nemo (‘no one works the land’; 38) and the negative enumeration at 39–41 of tasks not carried out are particularly reminiscent of versions of the Golden Age myth from Hesiod on.Footnote ⁷⁸ But the rusting plough (42) must belong by definition to the Iron Age, while the nimis optato saeclorum tempore (‘all too longed-for age’; 22) in which the poem is set is clearly the Age of Heroes, generally represented as preceding the Iron Age of the writer’s present day. Time in this poem is not even running backwards, as it does in Virgil’s version of the Song of the Parcae in Eclogue 4:Footnote ⁷⁹ in Catullus’ epyllion, it seems entirely out of joint, and fluctuates unpredictably from one part of the poem to another.

Given the poem’s many internal contradictions and uncertainties, any attempt to pull together its disparate threads into a coherent overarching reading may be doomed to failure, though, of course, many scholars have endeavoured to do so. For the sake of clarity, however, we can identify three broad lines of interpretation that have dominated studies of the poem since the 1950s. One option open to us is to take the narrator’s pronouncements about the happiness of Peleus and Thetis, and the Heroic Age in general, at face value: on this reading, the ecphrastic centrepiece must be understood either in wholly positive terms (Ariadne’s distress is a brief interlude, preceding a presumptively happy union with Bacchus) or as a foil which throws the bright colours of the framing wedding scenes into relief. The poem’s coda darkens the mood, as nostalgic hankering after the lost glories of a mythical past slides into condemnation of the corrupt present; but the sense of alienation experienced by the narrator in these closing lines – like the longing of Ariadne and Attis for their abandoned homes – only intensifies the idealized images painted in the main part of the poem. Conversely, we can choose to emphasize the ironic incongruities noted above: the narrator’s introduction of the scenes on the coverlet under the rubric of ‘heroic virtues’, and the clash between the bloody content of the Parcae’s wedding song and their blithe predictions of happiness for the bridal couple. On this reading, the narrator must be seen as unreliable, naïve, or disingenuous, and the coda is ironized in turn: the present may be corrupt and brutal, but have things ever really been any better? Ariadne’s lament might be seen thematically, as well as structurally, as the heart of the poem: her bitter complaint both mirrors those of the poet himself elsewhere in the collection (inviting sympathy?) and foreshadows the similarly unhappy ending of the overtly joyful marriage celebrated in the framing narrative.

A third possibility, a kind of middle way, is to see the poem as either undecidable or inextricably mixed: elements of both nostalgia and irony are present, and the poem’s slippages and fractures underline a more general instability of meaning. Intertextuality has a part to play here, too, as – with a turn of the kaleidoscope – the innocent Ariadne becomes a vengeful Medea. So, too, the shimmering scenes of Peleus’ and Thetis’ mutual love and happy union dissolve into a Homeric and tragic future of desertion, death, and human sacrifice. The coda’s unexpected shift forward to the present day leaves the reader in some perplexity: are we to see the union of Peleus and Thetis as representative of a happier time or as the beginning of the end? Or is the Hesiodic model of decline from a paradisal past comprehensively ironized, so that, far from offering an interpretative key, the coda is just one more turn in the labyrinth?

Taken as a whole, poem 64 is notable for the coexistence of controlled elegance of form with conflicts and slippages of chronology, theme, and narrative.Footnote ⁸⁰ In this respect, it is – perhaps surprisingly – similar to the invectives considered in the previous chapter, where at least part of the impact is typically generated by clashes between form and subject matter or diction. Equally, the range of critical responses that the epyllion has elicited is perhaps not merely a function of changing fashions in scholarship: arguably, this is a poem that allows for and even invites different kinds of reading – through connections with other poems in the collection, through intertextual (and intermedial) echoes, and through the various almost overt contradictions that Catullan scholars have detected in the framing of the narrative. I have suggested in this chapter that we can productively read it in the context of the carmina maiora as a group; this approach is not intended to be prescriptive, however, though it is only possible here to gesture towards the range of interpretations that have been advanced in the decades since Klingner’s seminal defence of the poem’s unity.Footnote ⁸¹ The flood of publications on Catullus’ epyllion shows no sign of abating, and no doubt new readings will continue to be put forward in accordance with changing emphases in the study of both Hellenistic and Roman poetry.