by Daisy Dunn
Cieros was deserted, Phthian Tempe left behind,
The houses of Crannon, the walls of Larisa, empty;
They convened at Pharsalus, to Pharsalus and its homes
They flocked. No one tended the fields. The necks
Of bullocks grew soft through inactivity,
No curved scythe cleansed the soil beneath the vine,
No bull stooped beneath the yoke to cleave the earth,
No hook pruned the shade from the leaves of the trees,
Decay and rust overran the abandoned ploughshares.
(Poem 64, lines 35–42)
With his rich description and powerful tricolon ‘no curved scythe … no bull … no hook’, Catullus painted a teasing picture of the Golden Age trying, but not quite managing, to return. No one was tending the land, and the animals had grown idle, as they had been in the pre-agricultural Golden Age.23
No poet before Catullus had featured Prometheus at the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, but Catullus situated him prominently in the roll-call of guests, recently released from his chains on the Caucasus.24 Before he gave men fire, they had enjoyed life free from work and travel. As an inventor of sailing, Prometheus therefore stood as a symbol of the post-Golden Age world.
Had Prometheus not interfered, and had Thetis married Jupiter instead, there might have been a new age. The moment just before the wedding that Catullus’ poem was describing would have been the optimum time for such a change to take place. For all anyone knew, it might have been a new Golden Age that arose, albeit one that bore rust or tarnish like a memory of the bloodshed that had come before it. In subtle verse such as this, Catullus weighed the Heroic Age against the Iron Age present and Golden Age past.
The more Catullus thought about it, the more he determined to break away from his Greek forebears and their dogged admiration for heroism, or Heroism, at all costs. As he came to imagine in his Bedspread Poem, the Argo’s crossing might rather have been the beginning of the end. Thetis was not particularly enthusiastic about marrying a mortal when she could have had the king of the gods himself. She might not have had to wed Peleus if the Argo had not come. With every ship that sailed in the Argo’s wake came the risk of deaths at sea and beyond, of luxury sown by the desire and newfound ability to sample another land’s treasures, and the need for men to labour at construction. If ships had never been invented, Catullus realised, life might have been simpler.
Set inside this story of marriage and decline, Catullus wove another layer of mythology. He digressed from the wedding to describe in a lengthy ekphrasis (literally ‘a speaking out’, a vivid description that formed a digression) the story embroidered on the vestis, the bedspread that covered the wedding bed of Peleus and Thetis. Its protagonists were a young princess Ariadne and the wine god Bacchus.
In the great treasure trove of myths Catullus kept to heart were tales of the fear Bacchus could instil in mankind. The kings of ancient myth shuddered at his wild influence over their subjects. In India, he quelled all who resisted his lifestyle. In Thrace, he experienced so violent a reception that he had to find solace in the lap of Thetis.
Catullus’ bedspread was coloured brilliant purple with dye extracted from murex molluscs. Woven upon it were Bacchus arriving on the island of Naxos, and Ariadne, daughter of King Minos, gazing forlornly out to sea. The hero Theseus had abandoned her on the lonely island after she helped him to navigate the maze in which the Minotaur was imprisoned. Ariadne was mourning the sudden departure of the man she had loved. Bacchus had come to convince her to love him instead.
The bedspread was a visual web of words. It even had its own frame, adorned with the wedding tale of Peleus and Thetis. Few readers could picture a bedspread embroidered with as much detail and emotion as he described, but Catullus wanted to evoke more than two dimensions; he wanted to evoke an entire world. His bedspread wrapped around the ivory wedding bed of Peleus and Thetis, ready for a night of passion. In true Alexandrian fashion, Poem 64 had become a story within a story: erudite, compact, a miniature epic of the type Parthenius and Callimachus and Cinna admired.
Poets before Catullus and poets after him might have viewed Theseus’ desertion of Ariadne as the necessary sacrifice of a hero. In his Latin epic, the Aeneid, Virgil would have Aeneas make love to the beautiful Dido of Carthage and abandon her to complete his quest to found a new city for Troy’s refugees. The episode would result in Dido’s suicide, but underline in the course of the poem Aeneas’ commitment to his people’s future. The story of Ariadne’s own sacrifice for Theseus had already become proverbial. In Apollonius’ tale, Jason quoted it when he met Medea in order to persuade her to help him to acquire the golden fleece. Medea followed Ariadne’s example, and even killed her brother herself in the process of aiding Jason. Catullus took a more revisionist view of the relationship between hero and lover. He could not help but sympathise with Ariadne’s plight. The princess had abandoned her whole family to help a stranger she loved to achieve heroism.
Catullus described in his poem the moment Ariadne woke at dawn to witness Theseus’ ship departing over the distant horizon. Her skin turned to stone and her heart to a tambourine. She was, Catullus said, ‘like a stone sculpture of a bacchant’. She was the sorrowful inverse of Bacchus who arrived on the island of Naxos with a noisy throng, which Catullus described in a cacophony of heavy consonants and onomatopoeic frenzy, hurling the severed limbs of animals, beating shrill cymbals, tereti tenuis tinnitus, and drums, blowing horns.
He attributed to Ariadne a long speech, which his reader was to imagine was transposed upon the design of the bedspread. She prayed that ‘with the kind of heart Theseus had when he left me’, he might destroy himself and his family. Theseus had promised his aged father Aegeus before leaving on his quest that if he survived, he would change the black sails of his ship for white ones, so that his father could watch from the cliff tops and know that the returning vessel was carrying him home safely. In Catullus’ poem, satisfying Ariadne’s prayer, Theseus forgot these instructions, his father saw his black sails, and ‘threw himself headlong from the top of the cliffs’.
So savage Theseus entered a household
Decked in mourning for his father’s death
And caught the same sort of grief
He had imposed on the daughter of Minos
Through the neglectfulness of his heart.
(Poem 64, lines 246–48)
When he wrote poems for friends in the wake of his brother’s death, Catullus had had to contemplate the kindred nature of love-loss and death. The fulfilment of Ariadne’s prayer in Poem 64 equated again the death of a family member with the loss of a lover. In the earlier part of her soliloquy, Ariadne wept that Theseus had thrown all his ‘promises unfulfilled to the tempest that is stirring’.
These were not the promises you once made
Me in a warming tone, these are not what you bade
My wretchedness to hope for, but a happy marriage,
Longed-for wedding songs, everything
The errant breezes have scattered vain.
May no woman now believe a man when he makes a promise,
May no woman hope the words of her man are true.
While their minds are desirous, desperate to obtain something,
They are afraid of swearing nothing,
There is nothing they won’t promise.
(Poem 64, lines 139–46)
Her sorrowful speech closely echoed the words Catullus put in Lesbia’s mouth in a separate poem:
My lady says that she would rather marry no one
But me, not even if Jupiter himself were to ask her.
She says, ‘But what a lady says to a lover in the moment
Ought to be written on the wind and running water’
(Poem 70)
Here Catullus is like the wounded Ariadne, while Lesbia is the callous Theseus figure.
On Catullus’ bedspread, Ariadne was blinded by love. So, in the myth that inspired Apollonius and
the poet Ennius, was Medea. But the whole world was blind to what it meant to love a hero, or a god. In some myth traditions, Bacchus, Ariadne’s saviour, gave her a crown of stars, a constellation, then left her for another lover. Catullus alluded to the constellation in his poem about Berenice’s lock of hair. In other myth traditions, Ariadne threw herself from a cliff. Even in myth, Catullus discovered, relationships seldom ended happily.
In the outer ring of his Bedspread Poem he found himself unable to remain optimistic about the future for Peleus and Thetis. According to most myth traditions, Thetis bore Peleus a son destined to be the envy of men for centuries to come: Achilles. But the whisper of divinity that flowed through Achilles’ bloodline, Catullus showed, was also what caused mothers in their thousands to weep.
Catullus preferred to linger over Achilles’ violence, not his Heroism, because in his eyes, the two were not necessarily connected. Homer and Homer’s admirers might have upheld the glory of war, whilst recognising also the pain it inspired; but like the Greek tragedians, Catullus found in it something less than heroic. Just before the concluding encomium of the wretched Iron Age, the Fates appeared in his poem – hoary personifications – to sing a wedding hymn. At its heart was a warning for the havoc Peleus and Thetis’ yet-to-be-born baby would grow to wreak. Mothers would beat their breasts in bereavement as Achilles hacked down young Trojans, ‘as a reaper picks thick bundles of corn’. The Scamander river, which flowed into the Hellespont, would grow still narrower by the corpses Achilles would see pile up there. He would slay a virgin at an altar.
Achilles would never have been born had the Argo not sailed. Had Prometheus not reported the prophecy that warned Jupiter away from Thetis, perhaps their son would have toppled his father then spread not warfare but peace in a new Golden Age. With the coming of Rome’s first emperor, Augustus, Virgil would draw upon Catullus’ lines to pronounce a return of Saturn’s glorious Golden Age. Catullus’ Bedspread Poem was panegyric in reverse. He entertained little optimism for the present or future, but little optimism for the second-best Age of Heroes in the past, either.
The greatest symbol of decline remained for him the ship. At the beginning of his poem, Catullus was explicit in describing the Argo as the first ever ship. Yet, on his bedspread, Theseus sailed away on a still earlier craft.25 Ariadne wished this ship had never come. Catullus subtly placed his focus here, urgent for all to know that ships, symbols of the end of Golden Age living, could never truly bring glory or love, assurance of survival, or even, as he discovered at the end of his year in Bithynia, true material gain.
Carried through many nations and over many seas,
I have come for this sorrowful funeral, brother,
To give you the final gift of the dead
And to address your mute ashes. There will be no reply,
Since fate has stolen you from me.
Poor brother, snatched from me unworthily.
But accept these sad offerings now, which are handed
To the dead, in the ancient custom of our elders,
Much moistened by a brother’s tears.
For now and forever, brother, farewell.
(Poem 101)
THE BOXWOOD ARGO
And so he put his trust in a light ship and gentle breeze
And came before haughty Minos
And his magnificent enclosure.
(Poem 64, lines 84–5)
AFTER HE HAD PAID his brother his last respects, Catullus made his way inland from the shore of Rhoeteum until he reached the belly of Asia. He had about his shoulders a large woollen cloak, which rode up as he walked and brushed obtrusively against his neck. His shoulders felt the weight of his baggage, in which he had stored his money, maps, and wax tablets. His bread had crumbed in its corners, and clung rudely to his fingers each time he reached inside.
It was a pity that he had such coarse fabrics and painful blisters to distract him from the beauty of the land. Without them, he might have forgotten he was mortal at all as he wandered over the vast, sheep-rearing country, dipping his toes into the River Lycus before it vanished into the earth, only to reappear several stadia away.1 While Mount Ida thundered morosely into the sky, no wanderer could doubt that the stories men told were true: a formidable goddess drove a chariot through its luscious glades.
Cybele, the Great Mother, had been worshipped in Smyrna (Izmir) and across Asia since very ancient times as a bountiful earth goddess. The Romans had regarded her cult with varying degrees of reverence and abhorrence ever since they established it in their city in 204 BC in a moment of desperation. They were at war with Carthage (in modern Tunisia) at the time, a great power that had formerly controlled much of Sicily. The Romans had since taken the island and transformed it into a Roman province. Carthage’s forces expanded into Spain while Hannibal, one of Carthage’s most able generals, invaded Italy with a large army and elephants. Over many years, his forces had slaughtered tens, perhaps even hundreds of thousands of people across Italy. The Romans had been at a loss as to how to extricate themselves from his grip.
An oracle told them that, if ever a foreign enemy should invade, Hannibal could be overcome if the Mother was carried into Rome. No strangers to oracular riddles, the Romans understood that they needed to welcome the Great Mother into the city. While her spirit wandered Mount Ida, her body rested in Pessinus, in Asia, in the form of a stone.
They needed to receive the goddess in ‘chaste hands’, the oracle blithely informed them.2 So they carried her over high seas past Rhoeteum, Tenedos, Lesbos, Crete, skirted Hannibal’s Africa, and passed into the mouth of Italy’s Tiber at Ostia. The city’s best men were waiting there, ready to beach her, but suddenly her ship faltered, trapped knee-deep in mud. It settled, Ovid said, ‘like an island fixed, balanced, on the middle of the sea’.3 A girl stepped forward. She was beautiful, though blighted by rumours of easy virtue. With a hearty tug at the rope, the girl succeeded in dislodging the heavy vessel and carrying the Great Mother safely to land.
The entrance of the strange, eastern goddess confirmed that the hands of the young woman were unsullied by any man. The Clodii Pulchri were said to be her descendants, as Ovid later acknowledged by describing the ‘ready tongue’ with which the beautiful girl spoke to ‘severe old men’, an allusion to Catullus’ kiss poems for Lesbia.4 It was a pity that Clodia did not have the same opportunity as her forebear to shed her own lascivious reputation.5
The Great Mother, whose powers were such that the Romans ultimately defeated Hannibal and the Carthaginians, travelled by chariot with lions and Galli – a rowdy band of self-castrated priests. With the exception of the goddess’ eunuch priests, few could countenance such fanaticism as this. Instead, they celebrated the cult each April with an optimistic but comparatively restrained religious festival. The Great Mother’s temple stood beside Clodia’s villa on the Palatine Hill, but greater excitement was to be found at the games and lavish feasts around the city.
How a man could castrate himself was something Catullus struggled to understand. The absolute commitment of the eunuch priests to the goddess’ cult perturbed him, repulsed him, fascinated him. And to think that Clodia’s family played a part in the cult’s history. In Poem 63, Catullus took one of the goddess’ followers, Attis, as his subject. In a rare and curious metre, ‘galliambics’, he captured the frenzy with which Attis castrated himself in logic-defying reverence to the cult, only to wake the next morning to regret it. As in his Bedspread Poem, Catullus drew heavily upon the strangeness of fresh landscapes and the ease with which they complemented the emotions of loss and heartbreak. As soon as Attis castrated himself to become the goddess’ servant, Catullus stopped referring to him as a man. ‘He’ became ‘she’:
The moment Attis replayed in her mind what she had done
And clocked, clear-headed
Where she was
What she lacked
She made her way back to the shore again.
Her heart was rippling.
Watching, there, a desert of sea with tears in her eyes
She spoke to her country in a voice that was sad, miserable, like this:
‘Oh my country, my maker, my mother, my country oh
How rueful when I left you, as runaway slaves escape their masters
So my feet took me to Mount Ida’s groves,
To be mid-snow and ice-riven beast lairs
And to approach, quite witless, their dens in the shadows.
Where do I believe you lie, my country? Or on which plots?
My very pupils burn to turn their gaze to you
While for sharp season my mind is free of rabidity.
Am I to be uprooted from my home to these backwoods?
Am I to retire from my country, possessions, friends, parents?
Am I to retire from the forum, palaestra, racecourse, gym?
Helpless, helpless, heart, more, more, must you weep.’
(Poem 63)
In the frenetic rhythm of the piece, the play of short, light syllables upon the tongue and unexpected heavy beat intruding like a distant drum upon an orchestra of cymbals, a reader or listener could feel Attis’ terrible sense of displacement. In severing a part of his body he had severed himself from himself and from the only life he had known. There was no way out, no way back. She could rove Ida’s groves in despair, but could never escape from herself, her lack of self.
Catullus brooded empathetically on the inevitability of Attis’ future, in service to an unfeeling female. He found again the sympathy he had felt over the plight of Ariadne as he pictured emasculated Attis dripping blood over the grasslands of Asia. In myth, one character had always to suffer in subservience to another, and Catullus had learned by now which pole he was more likely to be attracted to.
He might have taken years to finish composing and editing Poems 63 and 64, refining his allusions and inhabiting the world of his characters. In these poems, the landscapes of Asia and the Black Sea remained trapped in their past. Only when Attis lamented her departure from ‘the forum, palaestra, racecourse, gym’, did Catullus allow the landscapes of the civilised world to encroach upon the otherness of Phrygia. Although he might never have been able to write of these exotic places with such precision and passion had they not fallen to Roman control, he preferred to describe them as though he had experienced them centuries before they came within the burgeoning sphere of empire. In a later poem, he would document Rome’s expansion across the globe with some excitement. For as long as he travelled the provinces through the lens of his mythological characters, however, he seemed to find no glory in their newfound Roman identity.
