by Daisy Dunn
Catullus would have been happy to welcome a man like Parthenius into his urbane coterie had he put Callimachus alone to heart, but the man’s knowledge did not stop there. It was as though he had crept into Mithridates’ private library in Pontus, the best part of which now lay on Roman floors awaiting reshelving, and absorbed its lessons until he was ready to make off on his own.6 The books Mithridates owned included works of Stoic literature of the kind that would inspire Virgil when he came to write his great epic, the Aeneid. Parthenius was more interested in what love had to offer a broken soul and how much love he could pack into a compact verse. He had been busily engaged in composing a three-book work in honour of his late wife Arete.
Cinna had kept Parthenius close at hand ever since he freed him and embarked a short time later on a poem entitled ‘Zmyrna’. He was still writing it, but already it was obvious that it was going to be perverse. Both Catullus’ Bedspread Poem and Cinna’s ‘Zmyrna’ were to be written in hexameters, as though they were epics. But war was the stuff of epic, not the forbidden, unnatural love affairs of princesses, the deeds of fallen heroes, forgetfulness, which filled the two friends’ verses. Their comparatively short length would only undermine the epic form further. Both would be compact, such as Callimachus preached, and offer stories in miniature. Aspects of each would be obscure. Catullus and Cinna quite expected that commentaries would be written to render them more readable.7
The miniature epic seldom focused on the war and glory of Homer’s poetry, but sometimes evoked it through its landscapes, characters, and details. Cinna’s ‘Zmyrna’ described the birth of Adonis from a divinely inspired incestuous encounter between Zmyrna, a princess, and her father, the king:
Early morning Dawn caught you weeping
And the Evening Star shortly after saw you cry too.8
Cinna’s Dawn was not ‘rosy-fingered’ like Homer’s, but the picture of the stars watching the lives of men, found also in Catullus’ Poem 7, evoked the spirit of his epics. That spirit faded as the story of Zmyrna’s tear-wrenching predicament unravelled. After falling in love with her father in Cyprus, she metamorphosed into a tree. A first-century BC stone relief sculpture survives in a museum in modern Verona commemorating the life of a youth.9 On horseback, the boy approaches an altar and a tree that blooms with leaves, each of them pointing towards the sky. Cinna visualised in his ‘Zmyrna’ a tree that was pregnant with life. Adonis was born when the trunk split open after full term.
Cinna would only finish writing and editing ‘Zmyrna’ nine years after starting it. Catullus thought it was marvellous. While the Annals of Volusius, another poet, would go no further than the Po Valley and become ‘shit-smeared sheets’ (cacata carta) or wrapping for takeaway fish, Catullus boasted, Cinna’s ‘Zmyrna’ was so compact and brilliant after so many years’ editing that it would travel beyond Italy’s borders to Cyprus, where it was set. ‘The centuries grown old will still be reading Zmyrna’ (Poem 95). He would be sorry to know that it is now lost.
‘Zmyrna’ would be the highlight of his career to date, but Cinna could not help but wonder what else was out there. A year abroad with Memmius was a valuable enough break from life in Rome, but would be far more valuable if used as a beginning rather than an end. If he was to have a political career, now was his chance to make himself look eligible, and this he did, with aplomb. Soon enough, Cinna would reach the tribunate at Rome.10 If Catullus’ father had similar ambitions for Catullus, now that his first son had died, nothing Catullus wrote suggested that he was remotely taken with the idea.
So there he stood, between Cinna and his political ambitions in Bithynia on one side, and the memory of Calvus on the other. Back in Rome, the diminutive poet of Io’s metamorphosis was vainly searching for signs of hair growth as he galloped precociously forward in his legal career.11 Proving himself an ever more capable orator through his dynamic legal speeches, Calvus showed that he had had little need of experiencing Bithynia with his two friends. Quite content to enjoy the region’s exports from Rome, he thumbed Parthenius’ scroll On Painful Romances, descriptions of unusual and tragic encounters.
It was comfort he sought from these passages, for sadly he had lost his beloved Quintilia before her time. Catullus must have felt a pang of guilt at having compared her so unfavourably to Lesbia: ‘No grain of salt, in so large a frame.’ As Parthenius mourned his wife’s passing, so Calvus found himself trying to put into words his grief over the lover he had lost. He wrote a poem: ‘Perhaps her very ashes may rejoice at this.’12 Catullus, anxious to help, picked up the same metre, the elegiac couplet, and met him with a poem of his own to lament her death. For all his best efforts, he could not quite achieve the right note:
If anything we place upon the silent grave
In our grief, Calvus, is ever received,
Then through the longing with which we renew former loves
And weep for friendships once thrown away,
I know that the early death of Quintilia is not so much
A source of grief but of joy for your love.
(Poem 96)
A stable relationship was not something Catullus had known, nor, as far as he could imagine, would ever know. Parthenius might have written a wedding hymn that inspired Catullus’ hymns of a kind (Poems 61 and 62); unlike Parthenius, Catullus had had no wife, but somehow he still felt like he had. He mourned her absence as though it was her loss.
His situation might not have been so tragic had the burden to prolong his father’s line not fallen so desperately upon his loins alone. Many of the men he knew were married by now, fathers, too. No fears for them of growing infirm without a child to care for them in old age. As Catullus spent time in the place that Parthenius had once called home, he needed to accept that his future did not lie with Lesbia. While he gathered material for two highly erudite and compact epic works of his own, he had the opportunity to explore from a new perspective what love and commitment entailed.
The starting point for Poem 64, his Bedspread Poem, lay between the landscapes and seascapes of the Black Sea coast and the Aegean, and Catullus’ forebears’ celebration of them in verse. He discovered particularly poignant episodes to draw upon in literature from the era following Alexander the Great. The Argonautica, an epic poem by Apollonius of Rhodes, was among the best of it. In wonderful verse it described the journey Jason and his Argonauts were said to have made across the sea in ancient times. The Argo, their ship, had featured in the poetry of Homer and Pindar, and took centre stage in a Latin poem by Varro, Catullus’ contemporary and fellow Gaul.13
Jason and his Argonauts were said to have plied the Black Sea, the ‘Inhospitable’, with cumbersome oars on a mission to steal the golden fleece of a ram once sacrificed to Jupiter. The fleece lay closely guarded in the coastal town of Colchis. At nightfall, the Argonauts reached the Caucasus nearby. Even if it had been light and Jason had craned his neck until his head rested on the burgeoning muscles of his back, their mountains would still have overwhelmed him. He needed to persevere. He knew that, should he make it back to his royal palace in Iolcus (Volos), south of Larisa on the east coast of Greece, he could present the fleece to the king and usurp him to become lawful ruler of his native land. To obtain the fleece, he would have to rely upon the help, the love, of the king of Colchis’ daughter, Medea.
The story of Jason did not read like an attempt to glamorise an historical journey that no one remembered. History and myth were not necessarily so distinguishable. There were features on this landscape, aspects which were hard to pinpoint exactly, but lay over it like a fine fishing net, which made this part of the world look every bit the setting for Jason’s experience.
There were, for example, men and women who rolled their leggings up above their knees and panned for gold using animal fleeces. The damp gold dust which clung to the coarse hairs of the sheep jackets made the myth of Jason’s golden fleece seem rather more than mythical.14
Then there were the Caucasus, mountains so remote an
d foreboding that it seemed plausible that they housed divine prisoners.15 Jason and his Argonauts were said to have heard a terrible wailing as they approached them in their ship. Chained to the heights of Mount El’brus, in Greek ho Strobilos, ‘the twisted one’, the tallest mountain of the Greater Caucasus range, the Titan inventor god Prometheus was believed to have been forced to feed his ever-regrowing liver to Jupiter’s eagle for 30,000 years. He cried out in pain.
In earlier times, Prometheus was said to have stolen fire from the gods and carried it to earth inside the hollow of the fennel plant. Until that point, mortals had lived simple lives, with no work or illness. After Prometheus gave men fire, they worked and fended for themselves. He was remembered as the fire-giver and teacher of man’s skills and, in a separate tradition, as a creator of men from clay.
Proving himself to be more cultured than many of his peers would give him credit for, Pompey was among the men who went in search of these ancient myths. The previous decade, as he made his pursuit of King Mithridates through the shadows of the Caucasus near Colchis, at the eastern extreme of the Black Sea, he had sought to learn about the place the Argonauts had visited. In particular, he wanted to see the spot where Prometheus was chained.16
The easiest way into the bowels of the Caucasus was via the Phasis river (River Rioni in Georgia), whose name evoked the pheasants (phasianos in Greek) which still visit its banks and turn the skies white with wings and errant feathers set loose in panicked ascent. Pompey crossed it.
Against these harsh rocks, he could picture Jupiter’s ravenous bird flying overhead, as described by Apollonius of Rhodes, its beak dripping with Prometheus’ viscous liver. Herbs grew here, watered, or so they said, by Prometheus’ spilt blood.17 Medea used them to concoct a balm to protect Jason’s body from the monstrous creatures that guarded the fleece. Under Venus’ spell, Jason and Medea became ill-starred lovers.
Catullus absorbed the mythological elements of the landscapes Pompey visited. He was intrigued also by the ship that first approached them, the Argo, brimming with fine heroes, Jason and his men. Its journey over the treacherous seas was difficult, but humanly possible. The fifty-oared galley that Apollonius described sailed up through the straits of Bosporus against a strong counter-current to reach its destination.18
Catullus found himself struck by the image of the Argo crossing the Black Sea in an age long passed. His predecessors, including Apollonius of Rhodes, believed that other ships had sailed before the Argo, but Catullus preferred to envisage the Argo as the first ever ship. It might have sailed two centuries before the Trojan War, in the fourteenth or thirteenth century BC, or centuries earlier. Catullus could not have explored the bed of the Black Sea for evidence of earlier ships, any more than a diver today can reach its noxious depths to recover its ancient secrets.19 He needed only to imagine that there was a first ship like Jason’s Argo, once. Between the myths he had learned and his own taste of sea travel, he had the material he required to describe what it might have been like.
The flight of the Argo was only the beginning of a tale he had been sowing, if only half-consciously, for years. In Rome, there was admiration for the poet who could take a well-worn theme and make it his own. During his travels across Rome’s new empire, Bithynia and its coastline, Asia, as well as the Cycladic-dotted Aegean, Catullus saw first-hand the particular sights which drove his story onto fresh ground. And it was in Poem 64, his greatest masterpiece, that he gave them life.
They say that pines were born long ago
From the head of Mount Pelion in Thessaly
And swam the sea, its undulating waves
To Phasis, pheasant river, and
The land of Aeetes the king
As young men, plucked from the
Flower of Greek youth in a mission
To steal the golden fleece
Of Colchis
Dared to skim with speeding stern
The salt sea,
Sweeping turquoise waters
With oars upturned like hands.
Divine Minerva, her keep a citadel
In the city’s heights
Streamlined the flying chariot to the breeze
Herself, weaving, joining the pines together
To form a curving keel.
She, the ship, inured the innocent sea
To the flight of ships.
No sooner had she torn the capricious membrane
With her beak and with a twist of the oar
Turned the waters white with foam
Than from the whitening whirlpool there emerged
The unpainted faces
Of nymphs glistening in brine and gazing
In wonder at so novel a contraption.
(Poem 64, lines 1–15)
Using the Argo as the starting point, Poem 64 opened with the vivid image of pine being born from the head – the peak – of Mount Pelion in Thessaly. The image of the birth of pine triggered the picture of the fabled birth of Minerva from Jupiter’s head after he swallowed her mother to ensure that she could never deliver him a son to usurp his throne.
Minerva knotted together the Pelion-born planks of the Argo currus, ‘chariot’ – it was so novel that there was no word for ‘ship’ yet – which the sea would inure to water.20 Catullus reflected the difficulty of a sea journey across the waves in the long, heavy pauses of the dactylic hexameter: caerula verrentes abiegnis aequora palmis (‘Sweeping turquoise waters with oars upturned like hands’). It was the ship’s maiden voyage, but the sea’s maidenhead that was stolen by her flight. The lines echoed both Apollonius of Rhodes’ Argonautica, and the Medea of Ennius, a Latin adaptation of the Greek tragedy, in which Medea ultimately came to wish that Jason had not sailed to her abode at Colchis.
Changing his focus from the Argo and its perilous voyage to one of its lesser-known sailors, a mortal named Peleus, Catullus soon found a fresh angle. In Apollonius’ tale, Peleus had already married and had a son before he set sail. Catullus, by contrast, proceeded to describe the moment Peleus spied from the Argo a beautiful bare-breasted nymph, Thetis, emerging from the sea foam. Her grandparents were Tethys, a water goddess, and Ocean, god of Oceanus, the river which men imagined encircled the perimeter of the earth. Poem 64 would be, in one part, the story of their subsequent marriage, and the prospective birth of their son, Achilles.
For centuries, the Greeks had celebrated the heroism of Jason and his Argonauts, and of Achilles and the warriors of the Trojan War. Through Achilles, Catullus would link the world of the Argonauts to that of Troy, as if creating his own epic, albeit in miniature form. The quests of these men belonged to the Heroic Age, the fourth in the sequence of five eras against which writers mapped their semi-mythical history.
Time, as Catullus and the ancient poets liked to contemplate, began with a Golden Age, an Edenic, peaceful paradise in which man did not work or venture overseas, but lived off the produce of the land which grew freely and amply. They lived in close harmony with the gods, free from disease, greed, and women.21 There was no technology, so no agriculture, and no ships. Saturn was god and ruler.
Soon after Saturn’s son Jupiter usurped him, the trickster Titan Prometheus intervened in the divine order by giving men fire and the means to acquire all skills, including shipbuilding. Catullus and later Horace believed Prometheus established seafaring among men.22
With his gifts, Prometheus symbolised the end of the Golden Age and laid the path for the next era, an inferior Age of Silver. This flourished until Jupiter felt compelled to overthrow it because its people failed to sacrifice to the gods. Following the violent Bronze Age was the Heroic Age, a respite from the downward spiral, welcoming the Trojan War and flight of the Argo. For all its glory, its Heroes perished, and the wretched Iron Age came about. It was in the Iron Age that the poets, from Hesiod, Homer’s near contemporary, to Catullus and beyond, believed they lived.
When he came to write the end of his Bedspread Poem, Catullus chose to do so with imagery that evoked
this miserable modern Iron Age:
All things speakable and unspeakable, muddled together in evil fury,
Have turned the just minds of our gods away from us.
(Poem 64, lines 405–06)
Murder, adultery, injustice, and careless disregard for the gods were rife. Near the beginning of the poem, in contrast, Catullus praised the Heroic Age: ‘Heroes, born in the moment most admired beyond measure of all Ages, godly race, offspring of a noble mother.’ But he did not complete this work before he had experienced some second thoughts on the relative merits of each age.
Jupiter, Catullus remembered in his poem, had once desired Thetis, the alluring sea nymph, for himself. But as the playwright Aeschylus had revealed in a trilogy of tragedies put on in fifth-century BC Athens, Prometheus warned Zeus (Jupiter) of a prophecy that said that any son the nymph should bear him would be greater than him, and therefore capable of toppling his throne. In this family, sons had succeeded many times in usurping their god king fathers. Jupiter’s father had castrated his father to snatch his throne. Venus was among the offspring born when his semen spilt in the sea. Saturn, after succeeding his father, swallowed most of his children whole so that none could usurp him. Jupiter, who was fortunate to survive when his mother concealed him in the cave, grew up to usurp his father Saturn. Against the backdrop of such a bloody family history, Jupiter was right to heed Prometheus’ warning against coupling with Thetis. As it was, he had to swallow one wife and deliver their daughter Minerva from his head. Marrying Thetis off to a mortal was the only way he could ensure that history did not repeat itself.
The last time the divine order was overturned, with Jupiter’s usurpation of Saturn, the Golden Age had segued to Silver. In Poem 64, Catullus flirted with the idea of what might have happened if Thetis the nymph had not married the Argonaut Peleus. Had Thetis had a child by Jupiter instead of Peleus, might another new age have taken root? The lavish wedding ceremony was taking place at a royal palace in Pharsalus, in Greece. Outside its grand walls, something close to a new Golden Age was beginning to unfurl:
