CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Catullan Intertextuality: Apollonius and the Allusive Plot of Catullus 64
Catullus’ neoteric masterpiece, his longest and most complex poem, belongs formally to the genre of epic, though its highly compressed quality has led modern critics to assign it to the category of epyllia (“mini-epics”). Insistent on its epic status, however, Catullus 64 demands to be read not only in relation to earlier epyllia (most prominently, Callimachus’ Hecale) and to the similar productions of his neoteric contemporaries (such as Calvus’ Io and Cinna’s Zmyrna), but also as a representative of the epic tradition, with a particularly intimate relationship with his Hellenistic predecessor, Apollonius’ Argonautica, and through Apollonius with the genre’s fount, Homer. The central importance of the Argonautica for Catullus 64 has long been recognized, for Catullus at first appears to be intent upon a retelling of the Argo legend and the related myth of Jason and Medea, and allusions to both stories are prevalent throughout the poem (Perotta 1931; Braga 1950; Avallone 1953; Clare 1996; LeFèvre 2000a). What has not been fully appreciated is just how strongly Catullus marks Apollonius’ epic as his primary model in his opening and how integral a role the earlier poem plays in the structural frame of Catullus 64, as well as in Catullus’ representation of himself in relation to his poem’s narrative. A deeper understanding of the relationship between these two poets will help to explain two aspects of Catullus’ epyllion that have long troubled readers: why does a poem on the wedding of Peleus and Thetis start with the Argo (e.g., R. F. Thomas 1982: 163), and what, if any, Hellenistic precedent lies behind the poem’s structure (e.g., Perotta 1931; LeFèvre 2000a)? The focus of these pages will be on the epyllion’s opening and frame; our conclusions, however, will have implications for readings of the ecphrastic centerpiece as well.
What makes the narrative of Catullus 64 unusual is that the poet-narrator is alternately ostentatiously passive and insistently assertive. The narrative strategy of passivity serves, at one level, to signal the poem’s alignment with the typically impersonal medium of epic, in which the poet’s role is that of a conveyer of tradition rather than the creator of a new story. When, however, that passivity is prominently displayed (as we will see, for example, at the opening of the poem), this signal may carry more than one message. Because the narrator’s (willfully) passive relationship to his poem is so clearly marked, his first-person entrances, most notably through apostrophe, but also through other means of authorial intervention, are highlighted all the more. Catullus further reinforces the assertive nature of these entrances through rhetorical devices such as exclamation (o! line 22; heu! line 94) or emphatic repetition (e.g., neque tum…neque tum…/toto…toto…tota in lines 68–70). The poet’s first-person intrusions can also, however, like his passivity, convey more than one meaning, as his authorial ego itself may echo the words of earlier poets (Gaisser 1995; Wray 2000, on Apollonius).
All of this does not make the Catullan poet-narrator unreliable in any straightforward sense (on this aspect of 64, see Schmale 2004); for, as we will see, he has a direct precedent for the first instance of passive narration in the poem. It does, however, require an unusually high level of poetic engagement on the part of the reader. Neoteric readers are prepared for this, of course, aware as they are already that the effective power of intertextuality depends on their ability to read both what the poem before them says, on its surface, and what is said by additional voices, whether supportive or contradictory of the poem’s surface meaning, that are simultaneously recalled and suppressed by the text (on allusion and necessary reader collusion, Goldhill 1991: 288–9; cf. Pasquali 1951; Conte 1986; Hinds 1998).
Catullus’ alternately passive and assertive narrative self-positioning also serves another, larger purpose in the poem, as a vehicle through which the poet points to, and comments on, both his belatedness in the tradition he has entered and his own disruption of that tradition in order to make a place for himself (for other aspects of the problem of belatedness in 64, see Fitzgerald 1995: 140–68; Theodorakopoulos 2000: 139–41; Martindale 2005: 90–100). As Goldhill stated, “To write a Hellenistic epic, then, is to be inscribed in an especially intricate, overdetermined relationship with the literary past” (1991: 286; cf. Bing 1988: 73–5). The neoteric (and later, Augustan) poets have a heightened sense of their own epigonal status, since they are acutely aware that they have inherited even the problematic notion of belatedness itself from their Hellenistic predecessors. In addition, they now have their own Roman literary tradition before them. The Romans also inherited, from the Hellenistic poets especially, a recognition that establishing their own place within this continuing tradition required, at some level, a deliberate breach or rupture of it.
In adapting elements both of narrative structure and of content from Apollonius, Catullus establishes a continuity with the epic tradition as it is passed down from Homer, through Apollonius, to himself. Simultaneously, however, his drastic reworking of Apollonius’ epic, which results in a complete suppression of the Argonautica’s principal story (and indeed, of the poem itself ), signals a rupture of an extreme nature. Catullus’ creative response to his late arrival in the tradition takes the form of first announcing his model in the poem’s introduction, then eliminating that model’s presence altogether from the surface of his poem. The tension between these two aspects of Catullus’ poetic project is manifested throughout the poem, both narratively and thematically. The desire for continuity, on the one hand, is seen in Catullus’ (and his poem’s) expressed longing to reach a past that is no longer attainable (o nimis optato saeclorum tempore nati/heroes, “O heroes, born in a time of the ages too much hoped for!” 64.22). On the other hand, because Catullus has placed his model so thoroughly yet barely under erasure, his disruption of the tradition, also necessarily incomplete, is also strongly felt, most noticeably in the replacement of Jason and Medea with Theseus and Ariadne in the poem’s ecphrastic centerpiece. Here, the tension between continuity and rupture is figured as a problem of murderous family relations, marked most strongly in the conflation, through allusion, of Ariadne’s Minotaur brother, murdered by Theseus with her help, and Medea’s brother Apsyrtus, murdered by Jason with Medea’s support. The replacement of Medea’s murder of her children with Ariadne’s successful prayer for Aegeus’ death may be seen, at one level, as a figure for the tradition at war with itself, since in Catullus’ poem, the story’s progenitor, rather than its progeny, is eliminated.
Problematic family relationships are also relevant to the story of Peleus and Thetis. In displacing the story of their courtship and marriage from its status as an event that had taken place prior to the time of the main story in Apollonius and Homer, and making it the beginning of his own poem, Catullus successfully inverts his relationship with both poets, eliminating his literary “father,” Apollonius, and creating a space for himself before both the Argonautica and the Homeric poems. Catullus thus follows the same impulse that led Apollonius to make the Argo legend the subject of his epic. Even in his revised version of the Peleus and Thetis story, Catullus nonetheless manages to highlight elements in the tradition that point to the troublesome familial issues involved in the wedding. The relationships in the story serve, in a sense, as figures for the relationship between Catullus’ poem and those of his predecessors.
The Opening of Catullus 64: An Apollonian Proem
Catullus establishes his poem as a creative rewriting of Apollonius’ Argonautica in the first 30 lines of his epyllion, and those lines will be the initial focus of our attention. It will be useful to adumbrate my argument with an outline. In the structure of his opening, an elaborate praeteritio, or “passing over,” Catullus not only allusively reworks his predecessor’s proem but simultaneously responds to challenges implicit in Apollonius’ text. Catullus presents in 1–24 a drastically compressed version of Apollonius’ Argonautica (Gaisser 1995: 585). In this mini-Argonautica, Catullus marks the Peleus and Thetis story – told in a narrative digression in Book 4 of Apollonius’ poem – as the particular aspect of his predecessor’s epic with which he means to interfere. Lines 19–21, with their elaborate construction, introduce the element of disorder with characteristically neoteric flair. Immediately afterward, 22–4 serve simultaneously both to close the mini-Argonautica and to announce the true beginning of Catullus’ narrative proper: the wedding of Peleus and Thetis. Catullus ensures that we recognize the new beginning through duplication and repetition, as he retells, in 25–30, the story already related once in 19–21, using language that both recalls and revises the earlier passage.
A Catullan praeteritio begins as the mini-Argonautica opens 1
Peliaco quondam prognatae uertice pinus
dicuntur liquidas Neptuni nasse per undas
Phasidos ad fluctus et fines Aeeteos
Pines born on the Pelian peak once upon a time
are said to have swum through the clear waters of Neptune
to the waves of Phasis and the Aeetean borders.
The key word is dicuntur. Its employment here is an instance of the phenomenon rightly recognized as not only a general poetic appeal to authority (the Callimachean “I sing nothing unattested” [fr. 623 Pf.]) but, more specifically, a self-conscious marker of allusion, for which Ross coined the phrase “Alexandrian footnote” (1975: 78; Hinds 1998: 1–3). Gaisser raised a significant point, however, with her observation that dicuntur in line 2, which she called an “authority formula,” also alerts the reader to the story’s status as a fiction which has many authors (1995: 582). In this instance, the plural verb (strictly speaking, attached to its plural noun, pinus) is particularly apt, since, as R. F. Thomas (1982: 144–60) has shown, the poet pointedly alludes to a number of different literary texts in 1–18 (Zetzel 1983; Stoevesandt 1994/5).
Still, as Gaisser’s observation reminds us, Alexandrian footnotes, even when they are footnotes, are not necessarily (or even usually) exhaustive, but more often serve, as dicuntur does here, as a signal to the reader that a certain selectivity has been employed by the poet in his handling of the tradition. This leads to two aspects of the opening of Catullus’ epyllion that have not yet been fully explained. First, in his allusion to previous poetic versions of the Argo legend, the poet-narrator has been simultaneously selective and exhaustive. Selectively, in 1–18 (esp. 1–14), he has concentrated his (and his readers’) attention on the ship, highlighting his predecessors’ conflicting accounts of its material (pine versus fir), its maker (Argus or Athena), and the derivation of its name (from Argus, or from the nationality of the Argonauts themselves [Argiuae robora pubis, “strength of the Argive youth,” 5], or from the adjective “swift” [Greek argos ; Latin citus, in cita decurrere puppi, “to course along in a swift ship,” 6]). Exhaustively, Catullus has recalled so many of the previous literary versions of the Argo story in his representation of the ship that the reader has the feeling the poet has surely included them all. A third quality of Catullus’ intertextual practice might also be added: suppression. For the poet has done all of this without ever naming either the ship itself or its traditional creator (R. F. Thomas 1982: 162).
This raises certain questions: why has the poet selected the ship, in particular, as his focus, and why has he described it with such a display of learned detail yet omitted directly naming it or its (mortal) builder? The answer to these questions is found in Catullus’ most important model, Apollonius’ Argonautica, and is signaled by a second aspect of Catullus’ initial verb that has not been fully appreciated: dicuntur is an unusual way for a poet-narrator to begin an epic. With his opening words, the poet first identifies his narrative role in relation to the story he will tell, and the reader expects either a request from the Muse (such as the Iliad ’s “sing, Muse, the anger of Peleus’ son Achilles”) or a first-person beginning such as that which opened Hesiod’s Theogony (“From the Heliconian Muses let us begin to sing”) and was later used by Aratus in the Phaenomena (“From Zeus let us begin”) and by Apollonius in his Argonautica (“Beginning with you, Apollo, I will recall the famous deeds of men of ages past”). Vergil and Ovid both return to the first-person opening in their own highly allusive epic beginnings (Vergil’s Aristaeus episode in Georgics 4 announces itself similarly [lines 285–6]); and the pseudo-Vergilian epyllion Ciris begins with the poet. As Bühler (1960: 47) noted, Catullus does follow Callimachus’ precedent in the Hecale in “using an ornamental adjective with adverb to sum up the dateless past.” Callimachus’ first sentence, however, contains a finite verb (“once upon a time there lived an Attic woman in the hill country of Erechtheus” [Hollis 1990: 137]). While Callimachus’ Hecale may well have been a source for the Theseus story in 64, Catullus is not following the earlier poet’s lead with his dicuntur.
There is something unusually manneristic about Catullus’ delegation of narrative authority as a means to open his poem. As has been suggested already, Catullus has taken his cue from Apollonius here, though not from his model’s first line. The proem of Apollonius’ Argonautica itself exhibits a complex structure, which alludes to both Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey (Fantuzzi 1988: 22–3; Goldhill 1991: 288–91; Hunter 1993a: 119–23; Clauss 1993: 14–25; Clare 2002: 20–32, 261–2). Furthermore, Apollonius has adopted the structure of the Iliad’s beginning as the model for his own proem: “In both poems the opening verses foreshadow later major events – what the epic is about (Argonautica 1.1–4, Iliad 1.1–7) – and then a transitional passage fills in some of the background up to the point at which the narrative proper begins (Arg. 1.1–4, Iliad 1.12–42).” In doing this, the Hellenistic poet has drawn his readers’ attention to Homer as the “touchstone against which to measure his epic” (Hunter 1993a: 119).
Apollonius is also concerned, of course, to differentiate himself from Homer and signal his own contribution to the epic tradition. He unveils his poem’s true starting point with a second proem in 18–23:
As for the ship, the singers who came before me still celebrate
that Argus made it, under the guidance of Athena.
But I now will tell the lineage and names 20
of the heroes, and their long journeys over the sea,
and the deeds they accomplished as they wandered.
May the Muses be the inspirers of my song.
Apollonius uses a variant of the authority formula (“they celebrate”) to locate himself within the tradition of poets who have also sung of the Argonaut legend. By opening his verse with “ship” (nêa), Apollonius emphasizes for the reader that poets of the past have made their subject the Argo itself. He, however, disposes of the vessel quickly, attributing its creation to Argus, with Athena’s help (though as a learned poet himself, he was no doubt aware of competing versions). With his abbreviated yet prominent mention of the ship’s treatment by earlier poets, Apollonius employs the strategy of praeteritio and simultaneously suggests that a detailed description of its creation is by now hackneyed, or that, in good Alexandrian fashion, he has selected one version, perhaps even alluding to a particular earlier treatment, and suppressed the others (Goldhill 1991: 290–1; Hunter 1993a: 122). The praeteritio also, of course, serves another, more significant function, which is that of staking the poet’s claim for his own place in the tradition to which he has referred. His contribution, Apollonius announces in 20–2, will be the catalogue of heroes, which immediately follows these lines.
Apollonius’ praeteritio in 18 provides the answer to our question(s) of why Catullus has chosen to begin with the Argo itself and why he has described it with such allusive precision. In 64.1–18, Catullus meets the implicit challenge he found in Apollonius’ dismissal of a detailed description of the Argo as passé. In response, Catullus demonstrates ably what a talented neoteric poet can do with the long succession of predecessors available to him (including, now, Roman poets as well as Greek); and in this sense, his display of intertextual virtuosity in the opening of his epyllion exhibits a kind of literary polemic, though of a slightly different order than R. F. Thomas (1982) suggested. Catullus’ suppression of the one fact directly included by Apollonius (Argus’ manufacture of the ship) serves as a backhanded acknowledgment of his primary allusive model. It also puts us on the alert to the possibility that other aspects of Apollonius’ epic might receive similar treatment.
Once we recognize that Catullus’ dicuntur responds to a narrative strategy in Apollonius, we receive reassurance, on a metapoetic level, of what we have known all along, that our poet is in fact running the show from behind the curtain. But, as has been noted, in Apollonius’ second proem (18–23), which follows his first-person opening, the Apollonian ego again appears, this time to announce the upcoming catalogue that is the genuine start of his narrative. Catullus, in contrast, has (thus far, at least) removed all personal identifying markers from his opening. His allusion to his predecessor’s narrative strategy of praeteritio suggests that lines 1–18 of poem 64 similarly comprise a praeteritio (or part of one), albeit a more elaborate one. Furthermore, our confidence that Catullus recognized the Iliadic structure that lay behind Apollonius’ start leads us to expect that he has similar plans to rework his own model’s beginning. Catullus’ decision to begin his poem with an allusion to the start of Apollonius’ second proem is an example of the poet’s determination simultaneously to continue and to disrupt the epic tradition as he received it. As Apollonius had imitated Homer’s structure, then added a second proem, Catullus follows (and reworks) Apollonius, beginning at precisely the point where the earlier poet distinguished himself from his model.
Catullus’ refusal to acknowledge his narrative control at the very start of his poem has a further effect. In the context of his own epyllion, we receive the impression that our poet, like the characters within the narrative, and like the reader, is reacting to the course of the poem rather than guiding it. The (unnamed) Argo itself seems to assert control over the narrative in 1–18. The first action narrated is that of the ship, in the form of personified pine trees, swimming through the sea (2), and it is the Argo as subject that “first initiated the inexperienced Amphitrite” (11) and that “plowed the sea with its beak” (12). Finally, it is the ship as monstrum (“marvel,” 15) that draws the nymphs’ admiring gaze and motivates them to emerge from the water and display themselves to the sailors (12–18).
A Catullan praeteritio continues: the Apollonian Argonautica is interrupted
In 19–21, Catullus introduces a startling twist to the Argo’s story. The surprise is accompanied by the second appearance of an authority formula, fertur (19).
tum Thetidis Peleus incensus fertur amore,
tum Thetis humanos non despexit hymenaeos, 20
tum Thetidi pater ipse iugandum Pelea sensit.
Then for Thetis Peleus is said to have been inflamed with love,
Then Thetis did not look down upon wedding a mortal,
Then to Thetis the father himself (sc. Jupiter) felt that Peleus should be joined.
In this instance, as Gaisser (1995: 585) noted, the formula does not appear to be fully reliable as an allusive marker. For here Catullus uses fertur when reporting an event whose timing, which the poet emphasizes with the first tum of an anaphoric trio, Catullus himself appears to have invented, in direct contradiction to traditional versions of the myth (see esp. Ellis 1889: 278–83). Most significantly, those earlier versions include Apollonius’ Argonautica, in which Peleus and Thetis are married prior to the Argo sailing, and Chiron brings the child Achilles to see his father off (Argon. 1.558). Could it be that, as with dicuntur, Catullus is challenging the reader to seek a different kind of intertextual model, one that is again concerned not only with content but also, and more pointedly, with structure and narrative control?
With fertur following upon dicuntur, Catullus has allusively and authoritatively, if again obliquely, marked his disruptive contribution to the mythological (and literary) tradition as he received it, and directed his reader to the epic narrative (and narrator) that inspired his daring innovation and whose version of the story he has upset most dramatically. Our ability to recognize what this marker conveys depends upon our recognition of two additional aspects of Catullus’ poem here that imitate Apollonius’ narrative practice. First, we must recognize that Catullus is not simply producing a mini-Argonautica in his opening 24 lines; more specifically, the neoteric poet offers, within his condensed Apollonian epic, an extraordinarily compressed (and, as a result, heavily revised) version of the Peleus–Thetis episode as Apollonius himself had presented it (64.12–18). It is immediately after this, but before the (Apollonian) Argonautica ends, that Catullus inserts his chronological twist.
The reader must also recognize Apollonius as the model for the insertion of the twist itself. We may begin more readily with this second demand, since it has already long been suspected by Catullus’ readers that Apollonius lies behind Catullus’ audacious revision in line 19 (cf. Clausen 1982: 192: “Perhaps Catullus was emboldened by the example of Apollonius”). The grounds for this suspicion also provide the primary evidence in its support. For, in Catullus 64’s second major reversal of traditional literary-mythological chronology, Catullus follows Apollonius’ lead more directly (though no less obliquely: Weber 1983). A brief examination of this second reversal in Catullus 64, and of the Apollonian manipulation that inspired it, will be useful for our consideration of the epyllion’s first switch.
As we have seen, the Argo is introduced by Catullus as the world’s first ship (“that ship first initiated Amphitrite with its voyage,” 64.11); but later, in the Theseus and Ariadne story embroidered on the wedding coverlet (uestis), Theseus is depicted sailing away in a ship, a chronological impossibility set up by the poem itself. For we are told that the coverlet depicts priscis hominum…figuris (“ancient figures of men,” 64.50), which certainly suggests, if read straightforwardly, a time prior to that of the wedding for which the tapestry was woven. It has also been noted that Catullus, in reversing the chronology, has followed the precedent set by Apollonius, who similarly manipulated the relative timing of Theseus’ legend and the Argonauts’ journey in his own epic (Weber 1983: 269; Clare 1996: 66–8).
Catullus will have noticed that while Apollonius did not overtly signal the inconsistencies in his use of the Theseus tradition, he called attention to them nonetheless, and without taking full responsibility for the problems he had created. It is the poet-narrator who, in the catalogue of heroes, excuses Theseus from taking part in the expedition on the grounds that he was detained in the underworld (Argon. 1.101), not, as the later mentions of the hero in Books 3 and 4 would suggest, because he was chronologically unavailable. In Book 3, it is Jason, not the poet-narrator directly, who marks the remoteness of his story of Ariadne and Theseus with “once upon a time” (dê pote, Argon. 3.997), granting it an antiquity that contradicts the introduction of Theseus in Book 1. It is also Jason who emphasizes only the most positive aspects of Ariadne’s story as he relates it to Medea, omitting the unpleasant elements and employing pointedly ambiguous language that is immediately noticed by every reader. Still later, in Argonautica 4, the robe sent by Jason and Medea among the gifts to lure Apsyrtus to his death is said to retain the divine fragrance from the time when Dionysus held Ariadne, whom “once upon a time (pote) Theseus had abandoned on the island of Dia, when she had followed him from Cnossus” (Argon. 4.430–4); and we learn in the same passage that Hypsipyle, the Lemnian queen who, as Jason’s lover in Book 1, prefigures Medea’s role in the epic, is the granddaughter of Dionysus and Ariadne (Argon. 4.424–7). In this instance, it is the poet-narrator who further complicates the poem’s chronology of Theseus and Ariadne; and by mentioning Theseus’ abandonment of Ariadne directly, he supplies the unpleasant aspect of Ariadne’s story omitted from Jason’s account to Medea in Book 3 (Weber 1983: 269; Fusillo 1985: 69–71; Hunter 1989 ad 997–1004; Goldhill 1991: 301–6).
Apollonius’ treatment of Theseus (and no doubt of other aspects of his epic) sensitized Catullus to the idea that strict faithfulness to mythological-literary history was, or could be, a choice, and that violation of the tradition offered significant poetic possibilities. Also, as Catullus’ expert manipulation of his allusive sources in 1–18 demonstrates, he was fully aware that the choice of which earlier versions, or even individual elements, of myths are selected and privileged as intertextual models also lies with the poet. In Catullus’ rendition of the Peleus and Thetis story in 19–21, he takes his cues on narrative selection most strongly from Apollonius’ Jason. Like the “once upon a time” of Jason in Argonautica 3.997, but with greater emphasis, Catullus marks his chronological revision with tum (“at that time”) in 19. He then completes, in 20–1, his own highly selective and pointedly ambiguous – but not, apart from the timing, altogether false – description of the courtship of Peleus and Thetis. Fertur in 19 is not (again, apart from the chronology) employed by the poet in bad faith; for there are versions of the story (including that in Argon. 4.805–9) in which Thetis does not disdain the marriage itself (her anger comes later); and in Pindar (Isthm. 8.45–7), Zeus joins the other gods in favoring the union of Thetis with a mortal, once the prophecy that Thetis will bear a child greater than his father is known.
It is worth noting that apart from fertur, nothing about the poet’s presentation of his mythological innovations in 19–21 is equivocal. The lines are presented with considerable fanfare, as a triplet, each beginning, as mentioned above, with anaphoric tum, the force of which is felt all the more strongly as it is followed in each instance with Thetis in polyptoton (Thetidis…Thetis…Thetidi).
Apollonius’ Peleus and Thetis: Catullan compression and revision
The reader’s recognition of Apollonius as the model for Catullus’ chronological disruption in 19–21 is only one of the two aspects of his revision of the earlier poet’s Peleus and Thetis story that Catullus expects his reader to notice. We turn now to the other: Catullus’ allusive compression, in 11–18, of the Peleus and Thetis episode of Apollonius’ epic.
In order to appreciate more fully what Catullus has done with his model, it will be useful to summarize the structure and character of the story as it is told in Argonautica 4, where it forms part of a digression from the main narrative: the escape of Jason and Medea, with the Argonauts, from the pursuit of Medea’s family after the murder of her brother Apsyrtus. The account begins just after Circe’s expulsion of the pair from her island with the warning that Medea’s father will not give up his pursuit to avenge her brother’s death. Hera, who has been monitoring events, sends Iris to summon Thetis, whose aid, together with that of her sister Nereids, Hera enlists to guide the Argo between the hazards of Scylla, Charybdis, and the Wandering Rocks. The episode is of considerable length (Argon. 4.757–968) and becomes itself part of a mini-ˆOdyssey, which finally rejoins Medea’s story at Alcinous’ palace at Phaeacia, to which the Colchians have pursued the couple by an alternate route (Vian 1974–81: III. 46; V. Knight 1995: 207–16; Byre 2002: 134–9; Clare 2002: 139–44).
Within the digression, the story of Peleus’ and Thetis’ wedding, which (as it is told here) was followed shortly afterward by the goddess’ angry departure when her attempts to insure immortality for Achilles were discovered by her husband, is related in a series of flashbacks and speeches, from the different viewpoints of Hera, Thetis, Peleus, and the narrator (Hunter 1993a: 96–100; V. Knight 1995: 297–303). As Hunter has shown, Apollonius has blended elements of two Homeric accounts (Il. 18.429–35, 24.59–63), as well as a number of additional sources, into his depiction of the pair’s relationship. Thetis’ anger, Hunter points out, has an intertextual referent, as it “is a characteristic of the Homeric Achilles which Apollonius has transferred to his mother in the previous generation” (1993a: 99). The couple have only a brief personal encounter (“she drew near and barely touched the hand of Peleus; for he was her husband,” Argon. 4.852–3); and when she leaves after their short conversation, her anger unabated, Peleus remembers, painfully, her earlier angry departure (Argon. 4.865–8). Hunter describes the scene between them as “a powerful manifestation of the gulf between man and god” (1993a: 100).
With this in mind, let us return to Catullus 64 and examine the neoteric poet’s revisionist compression of the episode in his introduction. For this, we need especially lines 11–18:
illa rudem cursu prima imbuit Amphitriten;
quae simul ac rostro uentosum proscidit aequor
tortaque remigio spumis incanuit unda,
emersere freti candenti e gurgite uultus
aequoreae monstrum Nereides admirantes 15
illa, atque <haud> alia, uiderunt luce marinas
mortales oculis nudato corpore Nymphas
nutricum tenus exstantes e gurgite cano.
That (ship) first initiated inexperienced Amphitrite in its course;
as soon as it plowed the windy plain of the sea with its beak,
and the wave, twisted by the oars, grew white with foam,
from the churning surge of the sea the ocean’s Nereids raised up
their faces, marveling at the wonder.
On that day, and no other, mortals saw with their eyes the sea Nymphs,
their bodies bared as far as their breasts, rising forth from the gray-white surge.
While the allusions to Apollonius in this passage have long been recognized, R. F. Thomas (1982: 158–9; cf. Syndikus 1990: 120–3) demonstrated that, in fact, Catullus has conflated in these lines two different passages of the Argonautica. One is from the opening book, where the nymphs of Mount Pelion look down in wonder on the Argo, the world’s first ship, as it embarks on its maiden voyage (Argon. 1.549b–52):
On the topmost peaks the Pelian nymphs marveled
as they looked upon the work of Itonian Athena, and at
the heroes themselves, wielding the oars with their arms.
The other passage is from the episode just described, in the poem’s final book. Despite the story’s many unhappy elements, Catullus has selected a pleasant moment, near the end of the digression, when the Nereids are sporting about in the water, helping the ship along (Argon. 4.933–55). There is even a Catullan play with the Nereids’ attire: Apollonius’ nymphs are described as rolling up their garments to their waists (Argon. 4.948–50), while Catullus’ Nereids are bare-breasted (64.17–18) (Cairns 1984: 100; Hunter 1991). This inversion of detail in Catullus’ account draws the mortals’ gaze to the nymphs and leads directly to the moment in which Catullus interrupts the Argonautica of his predecessor.
By selecting and recombining a moment from the Argonautica’s opening action with a (deceptively positive) moment from Apollonius’ Peleus and Thetis episode, Catullus has successfully condensed the contents of Apollonius’ Argonautica in a manner that serves his own aim of representing the Peleus–Thetis story as one of love at first sight, which occurred when the couple met, during the first sailing of the Argo. And in fact, Catullus’ tendentious representation of actual events in his model’s epic makes his chronological disruption, when read as it is presented on the surface of his own poem, appear to be the next logical phase in the Argonautica’s progress (Clare 1996: 62–5).
Once we recognize the purpose behind Catullus’ conflation of the two Apollonian passages, we can see also that he has signaled his compression with illa atque <haud> alia (Bergk’s correction of the corrupt manuscript is surely right) in 16. These words also find a correspondence in the passage from Argonautica 1: just before the Pelian nymphs are introduced, we learn that “on that day (hêmati keínôi) all the gods looked down from heaven upon the ship and the might of the heroes” (547–8). Catullus’ addition of “and no other” points not only to his conflation of two different occasions in Apollonius’ epic but also to two Homeric passages where Thetis and her sisters appear. One is from Iliad 18.35 ff., when the Nereids leave the sea to comfort Achilles after the death of Patroclus (first noted by Curran 1969: 187); the other appears in Odyssey 24.47–59, when Agamemnon reveals to Achilles in the underworld the details of the hero’s funeral, including the fact that his mother came forth from the sea with her sisters upon hearing of her son’s death. Here again, Catullus signals his continuity with the epic tradition even as he distinguishes himself from his immediate predecessor (and both of these passages, like the Peleus–Thetis episode in Argonautica 4, lend unhappy undertones to Catullus’ happy love story: Curran 1969).
Catullus’ praeteritio (and mini-Argonautica) end, and his new poem begins
We are beginning to gain a better understanding of Catullus’ aims in these opening lines. In order to see the poet’s plan more completely, it is necessary to examine closely not only 22–4 but those lines that follow (25–30) as well:
o nimis optato saeclorum tempore nati 22
heroes, saluete, deum genus! o bona matrum
progenies, saluete iter<um… 23b
uos ego saepe, meo uos carmine compellabo.
teque adeo eximie taedis felicibus aucte, 25
Thessaliae columen Peleu, cui Iuppiter ipse,
ipse suos diuum genitor concessit amores;
tene Thetis tenuit pulcerrima Nereine?
tene suam Tethys concessit ducere neptem,
Oceanusque, mari totum qui amplectitur orbem? 30
O heroes, born in a time of the ages too much hoped for!
Hail, offspring of the gods! O blessed sons of mothers,
Hail again… 23b
You (sc. heroes) often, you I will address in my song.
And you especially, exceptionally blessed by happy wedding torches, 25
pillar of Thessaly, Peleus, to whom Jupiter himself,
the father of the gods himself, gave up his own love.
Was it you whom Thetis, the most beautiful daughter of Nereus, held?
Was it you whom Tethys allowed to marry her own granddaughter,
and Ocean, who embraces the whole world with his sea? 30
Lines 22–4, as both Zetzel (1983: 260–1) and Klingner (1964: 167–8) noticed, allude to the poet’s words at the close of the Argonautica (4.1773–5; cf. also Gaisser 1995: 585):
Be gracious, heroes, born of the blessed gods! And may these songs
from year to year grow sweeter to sing among men.
But there is more going on here; for Catullus’ apostrophe to the heroes is phrased not as a valediction but as a salutation (saluete, 23), which, as Fordyce (1961: ad loc.) notes, belongs to the style of hymns (Zetzel 1983; Gaisser 1995). Here, a recognition of the unusual character of Apollonius’ closing (and opening) proves significant. As Goldhill (1991: 287) points out, performances of Greek epic were regularly preceded by a short hymn, and Apollonius’ epic both begins (Argon. 1.1) and ends with language common to the closing formulas of hymns, “as if the complete Argonautica has become a (hymnic) prelude; as if the pretext to end is – playfully – an epic to come.” Goldhill’s words summarize well the strategy Catullus noticed in his epic model, and which he reworked, to new effect, in his epyllion.
For Catullus, lines 22–4 serve a dual role, both as an ending and as a new beginning; and we are meant to hear echoes of both the closing and opening (again Argon. 1.1 is meant) of Apollonius’ epic. The transition in Catullus 64 is signaled by the repetition of saluete in 23 and 23b; and the hymnic resonance of these lines suits Catullus’ intended subject, a wedding celebration. More significantly, we are also meant to hear an additional echo of Apollonius, signaled by the reduction of uos to te at the start of lines 24 and 25 and, more pointedly, by teque adeo in the latter. As both Fordyce (1961: ad loc.) and Quinn (1973a: ad loc.) note, adeo is used in line 25 to mark a climax. But what sort of climax? The opening passages of Vergil Eclogues 4 and Georgics 1, both adduced as parallels by Fordyce, serve as especially suggestive points of comparison. In Eclogue 4, a poem whose intertextual associations with Catullus 64 are well established, a series of expressions announcing a new age culminates in line 11, which begins teque adeo and singles out the consulship of Pollio as the contemporary moment that begins an age of renewal in Rome. (This is followed, anaphorically, by te duce at the start of line 13, a verse that echoes Catullus 64.295.) At the opening of Vergil’s Georgics, the poet invokes, in hymn form, a long list of deities, culminating with Augustus, who is addressed with tuque adeo at the start of line 24. In Vergil’s passages, therefore (which may, especially in Ecl. 4, find their models in Catullus 64), teque adeo and tuque adeo mark the climax of a series. This is the manner in which teque adeo is meant to be understood by Catullus in 64.25 as well. As he closes his mini-Argonautica, the poet-narrator invokes the poem’s heroes, then immediately proceeds to single out Peleus among them. The repetition of saluete, further emphasized by iterum in 23b, drives home the point.
Catullus has, therefore, announced the true beginning of his poem with a multiple Apollonian allusion, pointing not only to the first and final lines of his model but also to the beginning that, as we saw earlier, was privileged by Apollonius as his own contribution to the Argonaut legend: the catalogue of heroes. Catullus, then, has closed his praeteritio with a reversal of his predecessor’s use of the same rhetorical ploy, drastically reducing Apollonius’ catalogue to a sole representative, just as Apollonius had reduced his depiction of the legendary ship to one line.
The fact that 25–30 constitute, for Catullus, a second and new beginning is further marked by the duplication, in this passage, of his first, brief narration of the Peleus and Thetis story in 19–21. As Quinn (1973a: ad loc.) notes, a second anaphora begins with teque in 25, continued by tene…tene to open 28 and 29; and this recalls the anaphoric tum in 19–21. While the polyptoton of Thetis in 19–21 is not repeated exactly, a similar effect is produced by Thessaliae…Thetis…Tethys in 26, 28, and 29. There is in the second version of the story, signaled by language repeated from the earlier lines, an emphasis on different details, to mark a transition from the courtship, related within the mini-Argonautica, to the wedding itself, the first event of Catullus’ new poem.
The final element in the first story (21) is the report that Jupiter, expressed as pater ipse, “felt” (sensit) that Peleus and Thetis should be joined. In the new version, this event is relayed in a different manner, in a direct address to Peleus, and it receives two lines: in 26–7 Jupiter is introduced by name, and ipse, repeated in epanalepsis at the end of 26 and start of 27, recalls pater ipse from 21 and defines it more specifically, with diuum genitor, “father of the gods.” With concessit (27) replacing sensit (21), emphasis is placed on the marriage to Thetis as a special favor granted to Peleus by Jupiter. There is also an allusion in both passages, more pronounced in the second, to the role that paternity played in Jupiter’s decision. The question in 29, while it places proper emphasis, in a wedding context, on the extraordinary beauty of the bride, also recalls, and appears to query further, the lukewarm expression of Thetis’ eagerness for the wedding in 20 (non despexit). There is also here an implicit reversal of the tradition, best known from Ovid (Met. 11.217–65), that Thetis herself was notoriously difficult to grasp. The description of Peleus as incensus…amore in 19 is replaced in 25 with a different kind of flame (taedis felicibus aucte, 25), and amor itself is transferred to Jupiter. Finally, 29–30 add details not present in the earlier story, as they trace Thetis’ lineage back to her maternal grandparents, Oceanus and Tethys.
The emphasis in both passages on Jupiter’s paternal role, and the mention of Thetis’ father and grandparents in 28–30, evokes for the reader, both directly and allusively, the complicated familial relations involved in the couple’s wedding story. Jupiter’s description as diuum genitor (27) points to the prophecy that Thetis’ son would be greater than his father, which would, in Jupiter’s case, mean his potential displacement as supreme ruler of the gods. Diuum genitor also, however, recalls deum genus (and matrum progenies) in 23–4 and reminds us that Jupiter is well known as a progenitor of heroes as well as gods. Furthermore, Jupiter’s surrender of his beloved to Peleus brings its own complications. When we learn the names of Thetis’ father and (maternal) grandparents, we are encouraged to recall the groom’s lineage as well, including not only his father, Aeacus, but also, and more significantly, his grandfather, who was, according to tradition, Jupiter himself (through a union with the daughter of a river god). The similar constructions of lines 27 and 29, including the repeated verb concessit with the same object expressed in different terms (suos…amores [27] becomes suam…neptem [29]), further highlights the awkward relations between the couple’s families.
Juno/Hera is notably absent from either Catullan account; her presence is felt, however, since the choice of Peleus as Thetis’ mortal husband is typically attributed to her (not Jupiter, as in 21). Apollonius’ Hera in particular lies behind the description of Peleus as “raised up by the wedding torches” (25), which echoes Hera’s recollection that she herself had raised the bridal torch in honor of Thetis’ loyalty (Argon. 4.808–9). Hera’s own relationship to the bride might also be suggested by the mention of Oceanus and Tethys in 29–30. Hunter, in his discussion of the scene between Hera and Thetis in Argonautica 4, pointed out that Hera’s speech has, in addition to the Homeric intertexts in Iliad 18 and 24, “a further Homeric model which flickers over the Apollonian surface” (1993a: 98). He refers here to Hera’s “Deception of Zeus” in Iliad 14 and, more specifically, to the speech of Hera to Aphrodite (Il. 14.200–10, later repeated in part to Zeus at 301–6), in which the goddess claims, falsely, that she is embarked on a mission to reunite her foster parents, Oceanus and Tethys, who have been separated for years after quarrelling. In Argon. 4.790–2, Hera represents herself as a foster mother to Thetis in words her Homeric counterpart used to describe the care she received from her adoptive parents (Il. 14.202–3). The similarities between the story in the Iliad and that of Peleus and Thetis in Apollonius’ epic, as well as Hera’s role as would-be conciliator in both, are clear. Catullus’ diuum genitor in 19, and his allusive juxtaposition of the respective grandparents of the wedding couple, may provide a link with Hera’s story in Iliad 14: in line 201, she refers to Oceanus as theôn genesin, “progenitor of the gods.”
It is, of course, the lineage of Peleus that serves most readily as a figure for Catullus’ relationship with his epic predecessors. This is not meant to be overly tidy. Even so, it is tempting to see in the figure of Jupiter the tradition’s beginning in Homer; then, when Jupiter, fearful of the son who might overthrow him, surrenders the object of his affection to his grandson, the subject of Catullus’ poem is created: the marriage of Peleus and Thetis. The elision of the link between grandfather and grandson, Peleus’ father Aeacus (and perhaps also the suppression of the son Jupiter and Thetis might have produced), parallels the suppression in Catullus’ poem of his immediate epic model.
Catullus’ Epyllion Begins: The Wedding of Peleus and Thetis
We have reached what has always been recognized as the true starting point of Catullus’ poem. As Apollonius did with Homer, now Catullus, by structuring his opening in response to Apollonius’ Argonautica, has made the earlier poet’s epic the touchstone for his epyllion. Apollonius’ epic will serve as the primary intertext and structural model for the rest of his poem as well. While the brief space of this chapter does not allow for a full reading of the poem in this light, there is sufficient space to demonstrate, at least in broad outline, how Catullus has restructured elements from the Argonautica to new effect, as well as to suggest a few of the ways that a recognition of the particularly strong relationship between these two epics contributes to a fuller understanding of Catullus 64.
Once the poem begins anew at line 25, its structure, at its most basic, is twofold: the main story, the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, also serves as the frame for an inset narrative, the story of Ariadne and Theseus, related through an (extraordinarily) extensive ecphrastic digression. The story on the uestis, with its complex structure, juxtaposition of visual and verbal media, and representation through multiple viewpoints, occupies the narrative space of, and stands in for, the Argonautica itself. While there is not space to examine it in detail, we will return to consider its significance later. For now, however, our focus will be the frame.
It has long troubled Catullan readers that the wedding appears to have two separate parts (e.g., Klinger 1964: 29–31; Gaisser 1995: 590–1, 608; Lefèvre 2000a). The first begins at 31 with the arrival of the Thessalian guests and ends just after the ecphrastic digression, when we are explicitly informed that, having satisfied their desiring gaze by viewing the wedding coverlet, the mortal guests depart (267–8). Afterwards, the divine guests arrive and the second part of the wedding commences, leading to the song of the Fates. Once our attention has been directed by Catullus to Apollonius’ Argonautica, and especially to Book 4, we can see that Catullus found his model for the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, with its inset digression, in the two-part wedding of Jason and Medea, the episode which, significantly, directly follows the Peleus and Thetis digression in Apollonius’ poem. The strong intertextual resonances between the wedding in Catullus 64 and that in Argonautica 4 have, of course, been noticed (esp. Braga 1950: 160; Klingner 1964: 30; Konstan 1977: 69; Zetzel 1983: 260; Clare 1996: 65–6). What has not been fully appreciated, however, is that, as he did with other aspects of Apollonius’ poem, Catullus has taken over his predecessor’s narrative structure and created from it a new story that is, while obviously different, also closely related to its model, not only in structure but also in content and spirit.
An outline of Apollonius’ narrative will again be useful for an understanding of what Catullus has done. Shortly after the Argonauts land on Phaeacia, they learn that the Colchians have also arrived by a different route, to demand Medea’s surrender and return to her father (Argon. 4.1001–7). When King Alcinous promises his protection to the couple if they are already married, a quick wedding is arranged. The ceremony (Argon. 4.1128–60) is held in a sacred cave (and is well known to Vergil’s readers as a model for Aeneas’ marriage to Dido in Aen. 4, a story that draws from both Apollonius and Catullus 64). The wedding couch is covered with the golden fleece itself, “so that the marriage might be honored and made the theme of song” (1141–3), and this, as readers have long recognized, is the primary inspiration for Catullus 64’s uestis. Nymphs (sent by Hera) and the Argonauts comprise the guest list, and Orpheus is reported to have sung the wedding-song (1159–60). After a brief interlude (to which we will return), a second phase of the wedding takes place the next morning when, after Hera has sent forth a “true report” of the news (1184), the entire city celebrates. Alcinous affirms the union and is faithful to his promise of protection for Medea (1170–1205). As Hunter (1993a: 73) notes, Apollonius’ wedding of Jason and Medea has among its own models earlier poetic accounts of the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, the unhappy results of which, as noted above, Apollonius’ readers have just encountered in the Argonautica’s preceding episode (cf. Vian 1974–81: III.49–50; Byre 2002: 134–9, 146).
Let us consider now the brief interlude that separates the two parts of the wedding of Jason and Medea (Argon. 4.1161–9):
It was not in the land of Alcinous that the heroic son of Aeson had desired to complete his marriage, but in the halls of his father, after his return to Iolcos; this also, Medea had intended, but necessity forced them to join at that time. For never, in truth, do we tribes of suffering mortals tread joyfully with a full step, but there is always some bitter pain that accompanies our happiness. And so it was that they, too, although they were warmed by their sweet love, were fearful whether the judgment of Alcinous would be accomplished.
The emotional resonance of these lines with the spirit of Catullus 64 is obvious. More to the point, however, in the creation of his wedding poem Catullus has once again taken a number of cues from Apollonius’ epic and recombined them for his own purposes. Most obviously, Catullus has taken over Apollonius’ structure of a two-part ceremony with interlude and replaced Jason and Medea with Peleus and Thetis in his frame. This choice was motivated by the implicit comparison of the two pairs through their representation in successive episodes in Argonautica 4. Then, with the same audacity with which he drastically compressed his model’s Peleus and Thetis episode for his opening praeteritio, here he expands – even more dramatically – Apollonius’ very brief interlude, transforming it into a fully developed inset narrative introduced with the wedding couch and its coverlet, and replacing Jason and Medea with Theseus and Ariadne. This decision was inspired especially by Apollonius’ suggestive description of the purpose which lay behind the choice of the golden fleece as wedding coverlet for Jason and Medea (“so that the marriage might be honored and made the theme of song”) and, as we saw earlier, by Apollonius’ manipulation of the Theseus and Ariadne story as an example, as well as by the recognition, on the part of both poets, of the potential for creative juxtaposition inherent in the similarities and differences between the traditions surrounding the two couples.
The interlude in Apollonius played a role for Catullus as well. While the argument need not be pressed too far, in this short passage Apollonius casts a shadow over the wedding, and the future of Jason and Medea, in much the same way that he does with the Ariadne example. The expressed desires of the couple to marry after the Argo’s return, in Aeson’s house, remind the reader of the exceptionally unhappy future that awaits them in their later literary-mythological tradition. The interjection of the poet-narrator’s voice in reaction to the couple’s fear, and his extension of their situation to all mortals, finds reflection in Catullus’ poem in his division of the mortal and divine guests at the wedding of Peleus and Thetis immediately after the ecphrasis is completed. For, as the words of Apollonius’ narrator remind us, it is mortals, not gods, for whom the images on the tapestry have meaning.
While Apollonius places the wedding of Jason and Medea in Argonautica 4 just after the digression which relates the unhappy result of Peleus’ and Thetis’ union, Catullus reverses this order in his poem: the first part of the wedding, which includes the arrival of the Thessalian guests, then the long ecphrastic digression and its exclusive viewing by the mortals, has as its primary correspondence the wedding of Jason and Medea in Apollonius’ poem. (Even the juxtaposition of two peculiar versions of the Golden Age in 64.35–42 and 43–9, one evocative of Hesiod’s “Myth of the Ages” in the Works and Days, the other characterized by the opulence of Peleus’ palace, finds a parallel in Apollonius’ description of the kingdom of Phaeacia, the site of his wedding. Phaeacia is first introduced with the story, most familiar from Hesiod’s Theogony, of Cronos’ mutilation of his father [Argon. 4.982–6; the story provides an etymology for the island’s name Drepane, “sickle”], but is also the home, of course, of the Odyssean palace of Alcinous.)
What, then, of the second part of Catullus’ wedding in poem 64? For this, the ceremonial banquet, Catullus has followed traditional versions of the Peleus and Thetis story (though of course, with his own revisions in the divine guest list), according to which all the gods attend the wedding, but no mortals apart from Peleus himself (Lefèvre 2000a: 187–9). The use of an elaborate Homeric simile to describe the departure of the mortal wedding guests is meant to signal to Catullus’ readers that we have entered not only a new part of the wedding but also a new allusive world (64.269–77). For it is no longer Apollonius’ Argonautica but now Homer’s Iliad that serves as the primary intertext, especially for the telling of Achilles’ future in the song of the Fates (Klingner 1964: 30–1; Stoevesandt 1994/5; Od. 24.35–97 is also a likely source, for Agamemnon concludes his description of Achilles’ funeral with: “but what pleasure is this to me, that I have wound up the spool of war?”).
Apollonius’ epic does offer, in Hera’s speech to Thetis, a prophecy concerning Achilles that is not included in the Fates’ song (indeed, it cannot be, since it involves a character suppressed in Catullus’ poem) but would naturally follow their vision of Achilles’ future and provide a direct link not only between Peleus, Thetis, and Medea but also, thematically, between all three pairs in both poems (Argon. 4.810–17):
“But come, let me relate a tale (Greek: mythos) that is infallible. When your son comes someday to the Elysian plain,…it is fated that he will be the husband of Medea, daughter of Aeetes. Therefore help your daughter-in-law as a mother-in-law should, and help Peleus himself.”
As Byre (2002: 136–7) noted, Hera’s promise of a kind of immortality (combined with marriage) for Achilles and Medea suggests an alternative fate for both characters not dissimilar to that of Ariadne.
Conclusions (and Catullus’ Epilogue)
Apollonius’ Argonautica is not, of course, the single key to understanding Catullus 64. Versions of the Theseus tradition, for example (especially, one suspects, Callimachus’ Hecale), are of great importance for the interactions between the two stories presented in the ecphrasis, one on the surface, the other barely beneath (see Knox, this volume). There is, however, much to be gained from a recognition that Apollonius’ epic is not only a source of specific allusive references but also, and more importantly, a model for the complex structure of Catullus’ poem and for the extraordinary character of its narrative. A recognition that 1–30 comprise an introduction constructed in direct response to Apollonius enables us to answer, once and for all, why a poem on the wedding of Peleus and Thetis starts with the Argo. And once we see that dicuntur in line 2 leads us specifically to the opening of Apollonius’ second proem, we are primed to seek Apollonius (or, in some instances, another allusive source) behind every authority formula, even less clearly authorized ones such as the innocent-looking locatur in 47, when the coverlet is first “placed” in the middle of Catullus’ poem (cf. sedibus in mediis, 48). We are now better assured that these lines mean to lead us, through allusion, to the placement of the couch over which the golden fleece is laid for Jason and Medea in Argon. 4.1141–3 (the responsibility for which is also not explicitly stated in Apollonius’ poem).
Undoubtedly the most striking aspect of Catullus’ restructuring of Apollonius’ Argonautica is his complete suppression, in his own narrative, of Jason and Medea, and his notable abandonment, once his introduction is finished, of the Argo legend itself. It was suggested in the introduction to this chapter that this extreme combination of allusion and suppression is a means to convey the tension between the poet’s desire for continuity with the literary tradition and his recognition that a break with it is necessary if he is to establish a place for himself. It was further suggested that this tension is figured by the poet as a problem of (murderous) family relations. One effect of Catullus’ placement of the Peleus and Thetis story at the opening of his narrative proper is to straighten out chronology in his frame story, which now moves neatly from the wedding of Peleus and Thetis to its most important result, Achilles. In literary-historical terms, Catullus has placed himself early in the Homeric tradition, and his “Marriage of Peleus and Thetis” becomes, in a sense, “father” to its own “grandfather,” Homer’s Iliad, a family connection strengthened by the emphasis on Achilles (with Homeric allusion) in the final section of the poem. To accomplish this effectively, the poet had to eliminate his own “father,” Apollonius, as well as the Argo legend itself, in what might be viewed as a kind of literary-historical patricide.
Of course, Catullus also expects us to recognize that literary forefathers do not surrender easily to their sons. Catullus’ attempt to replace Apollonius’ Argonautica with Theseus and Ariadne, and to enclose it within the bounds of a narrative digression, has decidedly (and deliberately contrived) mixed results. At one level, the suppressed Argonautica still holds onto its proper position, between the wedding of Peleus and Thetis and the Trojan War; and the extraordinary length of the digression gives the impression that the (barely) hidden Apollonian epic is itself attempting to burst its confining frame. But of course, the Argonautica is also not there: Theseus and Ariadne are.
While the ecphrastic centerpiece has not been the focus of this chapter, it shares and exemplifies the concerns of the poem as a whole. Within the ecphrasis, the tension between continuity and rupture is figured, at an intertextual level, as a tension between the Theseus and Ariadne story and that of Jason and Medea. When Catullus’ language (or that of his characters) directly evokes the contradictions between the two stories (as when Ariadne refers to the Minotaur as her brother), he means for his readers to notice not only his own disruption of the tradition, but his predecessor’s similar behavior in using Theseus and Ariadne as an exemplum in his own epic; thus, of course, he establishes a continuity between himself and Apollonius.
It is time, at last, to introduce into the discussion the additional members of Catullus’ (dysfunctional) literary-historical family. As Catullan readers know, it is through allusions not only to Apollonius and Homer, but to many other texts as well, that Catullus evokes the multiple additional poetic voices (including especially Euripides, Ennius, and his own lyric ego), along with the additional perversions of literary or mythological relationships those voices convey, all of which work together to produce his richly complex masterpiece. It is to this cacophony of voices, expressed and suppressed, and most notably to the suppressed voices of Apollonius and his main characters, Jason and Medea, that Catullus refers in his closing epilogue (64.397–408):
But after the earth was initiated with unspeakable crime,
and all mortals banished justice from their desiring minds,
brothers soaked their hands in brothers’ blood,
the son stopped grieving for his dead parents, 400
the father hoped for the death of his young son,
so that he might be free to enjoy the flower of an unwed stepmother,
and an impious mother, spreading herself under her unknowing son
did not fear, impious as she was, the pollution of her family gods.
All things, speakable, unspeakable, confounded by an evil madness, 405
turned away the justice-wielding mind of the gods from us.
Therefore they do not condescend to attend such gatherings,
nor do they allow themselves to be touched in the clear light of day.
There could be no more apt expression of the juxtaposition, combination, and suppression of Catullus’ allusive creation than omnia fanda nefanda permixta (“all things, speakable, unspeakable, confounded,” 405). In their lament both for an irretrievable past and for the thorough degradation of familial relationships in the present, these lines express two of the chief concerns expressed by Catullus, both narratively and allusively, throughout his epyllion: the problem of belatedness, and the perversion of family relationships that has caused the rupture between the present and the past. In societal terms, Catullus was no doubt aware that his readers would find (as critics have done) in contemporary Roman society all too many possible reference points for the kinds of incestuous relationships his epilogue describes. In aesthetic terms, however, Catullus’ lament is also a proclamation of his own poetic achievement. His fellow neoterics would have recognized it as such: Cinna and Calvus, whose epyllia Catullus may also mean to evoke here, had very likely thematized the tension between continuity and rupture similarly in their epics; and their subjects (the incestuous love of Myrrha; Jupiter’s rape of Io) suggest that the perversion of relationships might well have been one of the strategies their poems shared with that of Catullus.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
I am grateful to Michael Putnam, Stephen Hinds, and James Kennelly for their helpful comments and suggestions.
NOTES
1 Mynors’s OCT text is quoted throughout, with my own translations.
GUIDE TO FURTHER READING
Catullus 64 has benefited in the past half-century from a great renewal of scholarly attention, beginning most notably with Michael Putnam’s “The Art of Catullus 64” (1961) and Friedrich Klingner’s “Catulls Peleus-Epos” (1964), two articles which revived scholarly appreciation of the poem and opened questions and controversies that continue to drive critical readings today. On Catullus’ intricate reworking of his allusive sources, R. F. Thomas (1982) and Zetzel (1983) are exemplary. Gaisser (1995) offers a rich and detailed exploration of the poem’s complex narrative, and Bramble (1970) is the best starting point for an exploration of the epyllion’s thematic ambiguities and pessimistic undertones. Putnam (1961) and Wiseman (1985) provide insightful readings of the poem’s interactions both with Catullus’ lyrics and with the other long poems, including especially the shared themes of love, betrayal, and loss. There has been an increased recognition that Catullus’ concern with the moral degradation of human society, expressed most pointedly in the poem’s epilogue, has an aesthetic component as well (Konstan 1977; Theodorakopoulos 2000; Martindale 2005). Fowler (1991) on the relationship between ecphrasis and narrative, and Laird (1993) on the ecphrasis in Catullus 64, have contributed much to our understanding of Catullus’ self-conscious juxtaposition of visual and verbal media in his poem’s centerpiece, and Fitzgerald (1995: 140–68) explores the central role played by viewing throughout the epyllion.
A good starting point for those interested in Apollonius’ Argonautica, apart from the studies already cited, is the collected essays in Papanghelis and Rengakos (2001). The standard text is the Budé edition of Vian (1974–81); and for Book 3, see also Hunter (1989). For the Greekless reader, Hunter’s translation (1993b) is more approachable than the Loeb edition.
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