1. Laird, Andrew, ‘Sounding Out Ecphrasis: Art and Text in Catullus 64’ JRS 83 (1993), 18–30Google Scholar, at 28 n.28, suggests other examples in the poem of textiles, twines and knots.

2. See Saussy, Haun, ‘Writing in the Odyssey: Eurykleia, Parry, Jousse, and the Opening of a Letter from Homer’, Arethusa 29 (1996), 299–338CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 322, on Zeus’ speech at the beginning of the Odyssey: , returning, for all anyone on Ithaka knows, from the dead, and becoming an object of that special form of remembering called recognition. The whole poem says Zeus to his daughter: “How then could 1 ever forget godlike Odysseus?” (Odyssey 1.65). It is through Zeus’ remembering him that Odysseus is able to set out again for home, is not only begun but contained by anticipation in this one mental act.

3. Recent scholarship has treated the relationship between this ekphrasis and the rest of the poem, especially the many paradoxes and ambiguities that inhere in its contents and focalisations. Gaisser, J.H., ‘Threads in the Labyrinth: Competing Views and Voices in Catullus 64’, AJP 116 (1995), 579–616Google Scholar, at 608, observes: ‘At the heart of the ecphrasis, for both us and the wedding guests, lies a glaring impossibility caused by the chronological contradiction between the frame story (which operates—mostly—on the chronology set in train by Argo as the first ship) and the ecphrasis (which insists on the priority of Theseus and Ariadne). In the strange world of the ecphrasis the laws of time and space established in the frame are compressed and contravened.

4. Quinn, Kenneth (ed.), Catullus: The Poems (London and Basingstoke 1970Google Scholar); Fordyce, C.J. (ed.), Catullus: A Commentary (Oxford 1978Google Scholar); and Thomson, D.F.S. (ed.), Catullus ² (Toronto, Buffalo and London 1997Google Scholar), ad loc., regard the digression ‘a primo carmine’ to have begun at 76, within the ekphrasis—implicitly a digression within a digression. But several points of departure from a primum carmen suggest themselves at this point in an already convoluted narrative. Except as noted, all Catullus quotations in the following discussion will be from Fordyce (= Mynors, R.A.B. [edj, C. Valerii Catulli Carmina [Oxford 1958]Google Scholar), and all translations are my own.

5. The authorial voice must be counted as no more than one of several fictional personae that speak throughout a polyphonic poem containing a ‘plurality of unmerged consciousnesses which is part and parcel of the artist’s design’, as Bakhtin, MM., Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, tr. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis 1984), 9Google Scholar, notes on Dostoevsky’s fictional polyphony. The transitional recusatio (see Williams, Gordon, Tradition and Originality in Roman Poetry [Oxford 1968], 46Google Scholar, and Hopkinson, Neil [ed.], A Hellenistic Anthology [Cambridge 1988], 98–101Google Scholar, on the topos of refusal in Roman poetry) sed quid ego., is echoed precisely by Ariadne at 164: sed quid ego ignaris nequiquam conqueror auris…? (‘But why should I complain in vain to ignorant winds…?’)

6. Scheid, John and Svenbro, Jesper, The Craft of Zeus: Myths of Weaving and Fabric, tr. Carol Volk (Cambridge MA and London 1996), 43f, 101Google Scholar, in their discussion of the myth and cultural metaphor of social fabric, call attention to the lusus Troiae at Virg. Aen. 5.545–602 with its simile comparing the scene’s equestrian choreography to the Cretan Labyrinth, which ‘contained a path, woven [textum…iter].. where ‘the sons of the Trojans entangle [impediunt] their paths, weaving [texunt] in play their fleeing and their fighting’ [brackets in original]. Doob, P.R., [The Idea of the Labyrinth from Classical Antiquity through the Middle Ages (Ithaca and London 1990), 26–30Google Scholar, in analysing this passage notes, at 30, ‘Virgil uses texere twice, and later analogies between discourse and labyrinths presumably reflect their similar status as texts, things woven.

7. By the end of the fifth century Attic distinguished between the fictional character of , contrasted with non-fictional λόγος, although in Herodotus they are both still unmarked terms for speech. Cf. Plato, Phaedo 61b, with Burnet, J. (ed.), Plato's Phaedo (Oxford 1911Google Scholar), ad loc.: (‘ ..Realising that a poet—if in fact he would prove himself a poet—had to create myths [μύθOυς] and not mere narratives [λóγOυς], and that I was also no composer of myths—it was for this reason that I created poems from the first myths that I could remember, the ones at hand by Aesop that I knew by heart.’)

8. Barthes, Roland, [Mythologies, tr. Annette Lavers (New York 1972), 128Google Scholar.

9. The ‘Chinese box effect’ with antecedents in earlier literature, became especially prominent in the Hellenistic aesthetic that influenced Catullus, as Goldhill, Simon, The Poet’s Voice: Essays on Poetics and Greek Literature (Cambridge and New York 1991), 234f.Google Scholar, observes in connection with Theocritus Idyll 7: ‘This Comatas, a singer within the song within the song within the song is within…a box’ [ellipsis in original]. Thomson (n.4 above), 387, makes mention of the practice as informing the structure of both Catullus Carmina 64 and 68B. In regard to the embedding of meaning, allusion and innuendo in what was written under progressively more repressive regimes during the following century, it is apparent that the complexity of this kind of rhetoric became an essential element in the repertoire of subsequent authors. Bartsch, Shadi, Actors in the Audience: Theatricality and Doublespeak from Nero to Hadrian (Cambridge MA and London 1994), 68CrossRefGoogle Scholar, discusses ‘a kind of Chinese box effect, in which the author’s intention recedes ever further from reach; for once audiences, aware that powerful figures are on the alert for what might be construed as an insult, search the harder for it, the use of innuendo can be that much more subtle.

10. Thomas, R.F., ‘Callimachus, the Victoria Berenices, and Roman Poetry’ CQ 33 (1983), 92–113CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 112.

11. Several examples of rhetorical preciosity at the beginning of Carmen 64 exemplify an innovation of epic diction in extant Latin poetry, such as periods as long as ten lines with subordinate clauses in the first 21 lines (Can this be called a proem?); spondaic lines at 3, 11, and 15; the successive alliterative line endings at 4–7 pubis…pellem…puppi…palmis; at 8 the periphrastic Latin caique summis urbibus for ; and anaphora and polyptoton at 19–21 turn Thetidis…tum Thetis…tum Thetidi.

12. E.g. Apollo’s familiar injunctions in Callimachus’ Aetia 1.25–28 (ed. Pfeiffer, R. [Oxford 1949]Google Scholar) [lunate sigma added in ]: (‘…to tread the paths that wagons do not beat, not to drive your chariot down along the common tracks of others, nor even up the wide road: rather along untrodden ways, though you shall drive a narrower course.’) From a compositional standpoint, with their four wheels can reliably transfer tonnage of epic diction and lexicon but are unlikely to win the palm for inspiration (Apollonius); the individualistic driver of a , (from Hunt’s likely supplement in line 27) can turn more quickly and drive faster along untravelled ways, and his or her , will be more engaging to the audience.

13. Scheid and Svenbro (n.6 above), 83–88, trace the additional cultural associations of cloaks and marriage, implicit in the background of Carmen 64, especially the covering, literally and figuratively, of the couple: ‘The meaning of the term conubium, “marriage” is even more precise: the prefix co- indicates that the bride and groom are “together” beneath the “cover”’ (87).

14. Examples in Scheid and Svenbro (n.6 above), 111–19.

15. Lausberg, Marion, ‘: Zur Bildschreibung bei Ovid’ Boreas 5 (1982), 112–23Google Scholar, in discussing this passage, cites at 117f. Schbl. bT Il. 3.126f. ad loc: (‘the poet has fashioned a noticeable archetype of his own poetic process’). ‘Beim Gewebe der Helena ist umgekehrt das Bild das Modell der Dichtung, allerdings nicht real, da der Dichter selbst das mythische Urbild seines Epos erfunden hat. In der Tat sind die Kämpfe zwischen Troern und Achäern, deren Ursache Helena ist, zugleich auch das Thema der ganzen Ilias…Was fur die Personen des Epos eine Entsprechung zwischen realen und auf dem Gewebe dargestellten Kämpfen ist, ist für den Leser des Epos eine Analogie zwischen Bildbeschreibung und Erzählkontext.’

16. As Barthes (n.8 above), 112f., says in regard to these terms, ‘We must here be on our guard for despite common parlance which simply says that the signifier expresses the signified, we are dealing, in any semiological system, not with two, but with three different terms. For what we grasp is not at all one term after the other, but the correlation which unites them: there are, therefore, the signifier, the signified, and the sign, which is the associative total of the first two terms.

17. Scheid and Svenbro (n.6 above), 116, reconstruct the poet’s intentions for this scene introducing Helen, and offer a different interpretation: ‘If Homer were not so little inclined to define his song as “fabric”, it would not be an overinterpretation to say that the fabric was a metaphor for the song itself…[F]abric is no more the metaphor of the poem here than the poem is that of the fabric. At 113f., likewise Rosati, Gianpiero, ‘Form in Motion: Weaving the Text in the Metamorphoses’, in Barchiesi, Alessandro, Hardie, Philip and Hinds, Stephen (eds.), Ovidian Transformations: Essays on the Metamorphoses and its Reception (Cambridge 1999), 240–53Google Scholar, at 245, they consider the proximate speech of Antenor at Il. 3.204–24, in which the (‘to weave speeches and counsels’) is employed at 212— already an established metaphor in epic for intellectual processes and scheming. Cf. R.J. Cunliffe, A Lexicon of the Homeric Dialect (London, Glasgow, Bombay 1924Google Scholar) s.v. (2).

18. Andromache is similarly at the loom in Book 22, before she hears of Hector’s death (440f.): (‘but she was weaving a web in a chamber of her lofty residence, twofold and brilliant, and therein she depicted elaborate designs’). Vincent, Michael, ‘Between Ovid and Barthes: Ekphrasis, Orality, Textuality in Ovid’s “Arachne”’ Arethusa 27 (1994), 361–83Google Scholar, at 368f., stresses the dynamic aspect of textual weaving in Homer and Ovid: ‘It is important in Homer, as in Arachne’s tapestry, that the poet draws attention simultaneously to the action of making, as well as to what is made, as if the narrative movement in time were displaced in the ekphrasis of a static object onto the presumed activity of the maker.’

19. Barber, E.J.W., ‘The Peplos of Athena’ in Neils, Jenifer (ed.). Goddess and Polis: The Panathenaic Festival in Ancient Athens (Hanover NH and Princeton 1992), 103–17Google Scholar, at 114. For contemporary descriptions of such cf. also Plato Rep. 378C and Euthphr. 6B–C (ed. Burnet [Oxford 1924]Google Scholar; Socrates speaks): (‘and do you think that there really are among the gods war with one another, and dread enmities, and battles, and many other things of this sort, which are related by poets, and with which our temples besides are adorned by our good friends the painters, and especially in the Great Panathenaia the peplos replete with such adornments is carried up to the Acropolis?’). See also Vincent (n.18 above), 364–67, on Ovid’s importation of imagery from the west pediment of the Parthenon into the ekphrasis describing Minerva’s weaving in the Arachne episode of Met. 6.75–83.

20. Fordyce (n.4 above), 273. See also Laird (n.l above), 21–24, for an analysis of the technique of several of Catullus’ ekphrastic precursors.

21. Or they may symbolise marriage itself, according to Scheid and Svenbro (n.6 above), 88, who identify the uestis uariata of Carmen 64 and other ornamental cloths with the marriage rite: ‘The cloak is a metaphor for marriage. Or rather, it is the marriage.

22. Todorov, Tzvetan, Theories of the Symbol, tr. Porter, Catherine (Ithaca 1982), 201Google Scholar.

23. E.g. the allegoresis of ancient poetry that began by the time of early Christianity. See Curtius, E.R., European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, tr. Trask, W.R. (Princeton 1953), 205Google Scholar: ‘Homeric allegoresis had come into existence as a defence of Homer against philosophy…It was in harmony with one of the basic characteristics of Greek religious thought: the belief that the gods express themselves in cryptic form—in oracles, in mysteries. It was the duty of the discerning man to see through these veils and coverings, which hid the secret from the eyes of the crowd—an idea which still influences Augustine.’

24. See Thomas (n.10 above), 106–09, on the tradition inherited from archaic epic and Callimachus, in which ‘elaborate weaving may stand for highly artistic poetic production’ (108), and on the merging of the styles of epyllion and ekphrasis; also Harries, Byron, ‘The Spinner and the Poet: Arachne in Ovid’s Metamorphoses’, PCPS 216 (1990), 64–82Google Scholar, at 75, on Ovid Met. 6.1–145, the competition between Arachne and Minerva: ‘Looseness of form, fusion of Roman and Alexandrian poetic identities, subtlety of allusion and counter-point, subject-matter which is nothing less than an exposé of caelestia crimina in amatory situations, all these elements which so provoke Minerva’s fury are curiously but easily recognisable as established features of Ovid’s extended weaving in the Metamorphoses. It is here that the pictura/poesis analogy comes fully into its own, making Arachne’s tapestry an artistic success because at so many levels it corresponds to, and even represents in miniature, the greater tapestry of which it is a small part.

25. According to Barthes, Roland, Elements of Semiology, tr. Lavers, Annette and Smith, Colin (New York 1968), 26Google Scholar, ‘In clothes as written about, that is to say described in a fashion magazine by means of articulated language [“langue”], there is practically no “speech” [“parole”]: the garment which is described never corresponds to an individual handling of the rules of fashion, it is a systematised set of signs and rules: it is language in its pure state. According to the Saussurean schema, a language without speech would be impossible; what makes the fact acceptable here is, on the one hand, that the language of fashion does not emanate from the “speaking mass” but from a group which makes the decisions and deliberately elaborates the code, and on the other hand that the abstraction inherent in any language is here materialised in the written language. [my brackets]. The highly stylised imagery of clothes and textiles in Carmen 64 similarly does not derive so much from a ‘speaking mass’ of the poet’s cultural contemporaries as from a ‘code’ inherited from his epic and lyric precursors, as well as from the dynamics of the poem’s own evolving .

26. Segal, Charles, ‘Philomela’s Web and the Pleasures of the Text: Reader and Violence in the Metamorphoses of Ovid’ in de Jong, I.J.F. and Sullivan, J.P. (eds.), Modern Critical Theory and Classical Literature (Leiden and New York 1994), 257–80Google Scholar, at 265, discussing the textile symbolism of the Procne and Philomela episode of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, notes the self-referential character of Philomela’s weaving: ‘Behind Philomela’s weaving is Ovid’s own web of words (textus) that recreates events which are spectacular for their suppression of speech. The notae of Philomela’s weaving are virtually the “letters” of a written message—in fact, a “song” or “poem”, carmen, like the present one—which Procne “reads” (legit, 582), as if “unrolling” a scroll (581f.): evolvit vestes saevi matrona tyrannilfortunaeque suae carmen miserabile legit (“The consort of the cruel ruler unrolls the fabric and reads the woeful tale [song] of her misfortune”).

27. See the encyclopedic bibliography of twentieth-century criticism on the poem in Thomson (n.4 above), 438–43.

28. Fitzgerald, William, Catullan Provocations: Lyric Poetry and the Drama of Position (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London 1995), 151Google Scholar.

29. See Quinn (n.4 above), 299f., and Konstan, David, Catullus’ Indictment of Rome: The Meaning of Catullus 64 (Amsterdam 1977), 67–71Google Scholar, for echoes in these lines of ApoUonius and of Ennius’ rendering of Euripides. Gaisser (n.3 above), 580f., observes, ‘We seem to be in a poem about the Argonauts, and one, moreover with Medea as its protagonist, for the allusive signposts at the entrance cite both Euripides’ Medea and the Medea Exsul of Ennius.

30. Slatkin, Laura, ‘The Wrath of Thetis’ TAPA 116 (1986), 1–24Google Scholar, at 9.

31. Bakker, E.J., ‘Storytelling in the Future: Truth, Time, and Tense in Homeric Epic’ in Bakker, E.J. and Kahane, Ahuvia (eds.), Written Voices, Spoken Signs (Cambridge MA 1997), 11–36CrossRefGoogle Scholars, at 33, discusses an important epic antecedent of the ‘memory of the future’ in Hektor’s imagining the ‘tomb [] of his victim, [which] will serve as a sign pointing to the past’ in Il. 7.87–91:

32. Konstan (n.29 above), 32f. Bramble, J.C., ‘Structure and Ambiguity in Catullus LXIV’ PCPS 196 (1970), 22–41Google Scholar, at 38, notes ad loc, ‘Catullus has only given us the negative aspect of a return to the Golden Age: he cheats the reader of the expected description of nature’s automatic beneficence towards man. Labour and agriculture have ceased, but the innocent earth does not submit to the Golden Age formula by producing crops of her own volition.

33. Anaphoric negation occurs in numerous passages from extant Indo-European poetry, e.g. Iliad 14.315–28, in the (‘beguiling of Zeus’), in Zeus’ catalogue to Hera of his previous amours, which recalls some of Paris’ words to Helen from 3.442–46; also in other works, such as Rig Veda vi, 54, 1–5; Stesichorus’ palinode fr. 192; Archilochus frr. 3, 11, 19, 22, 114, 122, and 133. Of most relevance to Carmen 64’s rhetoric and epic focalisation is Hesiod Works and Days 174–84 (M.L. West ed. [Oxford 1978]):

34. This kind of negation resembles in its operation the scheme of oxymoron or the trope of paradox as described in Hollander, John, Melodious Guile: Fictive Pattern in Poetic Language (New Haven and London 1988), 12Google Scholar: ‘Consider the oxymoron’s general form [a + non-a] (or [a + anti-a]—Shakespeare’s “thou, the master-mistress of my passion” or Shirley’s “See where the victor-victim bleeds” or Catullus’ “Odi et amo”). Contrary to one’s first puzzled feeling that [a + non-a] is merely self-contradictory and can’t make sense, the understanding arises that [a] or [non-a] or both must indeed be figurative.

35. See Whitney, W.D., Sanskrit Grammar ² (Cambridge MA and London 1889), 413Google Scholar (§§1122g-h); Grassman, Hermann, Wörterbuch zum Rig-Veda ⁵ (Wiesbaden 1976Google Scholar), s.v. ná. Cf. the English idiom ‘all but’: e.g. ‘Mozart was all but a musical messiah’ means that he was not a messiah, but much like one.

36. Fordyce (n.4 above), ad loc., observes how the red-white colour motif here anticipates the contrast of the red headbands with the white hair of the Parcae in 309. Konstan (n.29 above), 40f., suggests an ambiguous association of this red colour: ‘The most interesting word, however, is fucus, the last word before the ecphrasis on Theseus and Ariadne. This word, derived from the Greek name for archil, was employed very commonly, even in prose of the classical period, to mean “deceit” or “dissimulation”, from the fact that the red dye which the plant produced could be used to conceal the quality or purity of wool. Konstan argues that this deceitful quality anticipates the character and actions of Theseus which are to follow. Poetic fiction, of course, is the harmless strain of deceit, and it may also be this kind of dissimulation that is being represented, with the dye concealing the wool that conceals the couch.

37. Gaisser (n.3 above), 608f. ad 292f., notes this kind of perspective in the description of the marriage ceremony: ‘Turning Thessaly inside out—or should we say outside in—the gods have brought the outdoors into the house of Peleus, decking it for a wedding feast, but also creating an artificial pastoral landscape.

38. See Quinn (n.4 above), ad 52f. Laird (n.1 above), 20, observes on the ekphrasis: ‘It has often been noted how difficult, or rather, impossible it would be to render on an actual tapestry many of its features. Problems are posed by digressions and flashbacks, by descriptions of thought and movement; and on other levels by audible features of the text: apostrophe, onomatopoeia and alliteration. In any attempt to visualise the described artwork, the very notion of a narrative that begins at one point of time (Ariadne’s discovery of Theseus’ desertion) in the story and ends at another (her rescue by Bacchus) is problematic’ Similarly Gaisser (n.3 above), 593, notes, ‘In the chronology of this poem Theseus’ ship is a logical impossibility.

39. In addition to the customary denotations of ‘overwrought’ several of which are suggested in the poet’s use here, there is a likely nonce meaning of the participle, by analogy with numerous other such participles ending in -aught or -ought in English, e.g. fight:fought::write:wrought, i.e. Keats’s Urn is overwritten/overwrought with marble men and maidens. This is consistent with Spitzer, Leo, ‘The “Ode on a Grecian Urn” or Content vs. Metagrammar’. in Hatcher, Anna (ed.), Essays on English and American Literature (Princeton 1962), 67–97Google Scholar, at 88–93, who remarks that the lines of the Ode are written not ‘to’ but ‘on’ a Grecian urn, like a Greek inscription or epigram, the entire Ode belonging to the genre of ekphrastic poetry. For cloths and ‘overwrought’ cf. Yeats’s ‘He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven’:

40. Laird (n.1 above), 24. See also Riemer Faber, ‘Vestis…Variata (Catullus 64.50–51) and the Language of Poetic Description’- Mnemosyne (iv ser.) 51 (1998), 210–15, at 210–12, who relates uariata to the Homeric ποικίλoς.

41. Konstan (n.29 above), 40.

42. Thomas (n.10 above), 109, notes that the ekphrasis, inserted within the account of the marriage, is framed by these lines preceding it, which are mirrored immediately after by talibus amplifice uestis decorata figuris (‘the cloth magnificently embellished with such figures’ 265). The lines immediately following, which introduce Ariadne, namque fluentisono prospectans litore Diae,/Thesea cedentem celeri cum classe tuetur (‘for looking out from the wave-resounding beach of Dia [Ariadne] watches Theseus retreating with his swift ship’. 52f.) form a similar ring (a ring within a ring) with the conclusion of the Ariadne-Theseus section quae turn prospectans cedentem maesta carinam/multiplices animo uoluebat saucia euros (‘[she] then, looking out in her sorrow at the retreating ship, was painfully pondering the manifold cares in her heart’. 249f.). And within this ring there is yet another, consisting of the conclusion to Ariadne’s speech, ..sed quali solam Theseus me mente reliquit,/tali mente, deae, funestet seque suosque (‘ …but with the sort of mind with which Theseus consigned me to isolation, with such a mind, goddesses, may he ruin in death himself and his own’ 200f.) and the conclusion to the Theseus episode, sic funesta domus ingressus tecta paternalmorte ferox Theseus, qualem Minoidi luctumlobtulerat mente immemori, talem ipse recepit (‘so, entering his home’s enclosure in grief from his father’s death, the sort of pain cruel Theseus had inflicted upon Minos’ daughter with his forgetful mind, such a sort he himself felt’, 246–48). The numerous examples of rings, responsions and chiasmus throughout Carmen 64 are intrinsic to the circularity and self-referentiality of its μῡθος, as well as to its central textile imagery and overall nested structure. Such rhetorical schemes may also exemplify in nuce (sc. in ueste) the ‘geometric structure’ of epic analysed in Whitman, C.H., Homer and the Heroic Tradition (Cambridge MA and London 1958), 249–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Courtney, Edward, ‘Three Poems of Catullus’ B1CS 32 (1985), 85–100Google Scholar, at 93f., and Sánchez, M.R., ‘Formal Technique and Epithalamial Setting in the Song of the Parcae (Catullus 64.305–22, 328–36, 372–80)’, AJP 118 (1997), 75–88Google Scholar, at 78–81, on symmetrical repetitive schemes in the poem.

43. Gaisser (n.3 above), 595.

44. Fitzgerald (n.28 above), 140–68, considers the many implications of Ariadne, as both viewed and viewer throughout Carmen 64, e.g. her initial infatuation-with Theseus in 86–93 being an ‘extraordinary overlaying of gazes’ (161), as well as her overall rôle in the poem (149): ‘The figure of Ariadne does double duty: as a frustrated gazer, she duplicates that longing for a lost world that suffuses the poem, but as a female body she provides, in her abandoned longing, the available abundance of the Golden Age. She both opens and closes the rift that separates the belated viewer from his or her fantasies.’

45. Putnam, M.C.J., ‘The Art of Catullus 64’ HSCP 65 (1961), 165–205Google Scholar, at 170, also calls attention to the ‘direct and deliberate verbal irony’ between desertam in sola miseram se cernat harena (‘[she] beholds herself abandoned in her despair upon the lonely sands’. 57) and deseritur Cieros, linquunt Pthiotica Tempe (‘Cieros is deserted; they abandon Tempe by Phthiotis’, 35).

46. The reflexes of the weid- root throughout Indo-European languages attest both senses, e.g. the Homeric aorist infinitive (F) (‘to see’), perfect infinitives (F)ίδμεναι, (F)ίδμεν (‘to know’), Latin uidere and uideri (sibi) able to mean ‘observe’ or ‘think’ See Pokorny, Julius, Indo-germanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch (Bern and Munich 1959), 1125–27Google Scholar; Chantraine, Pierre, Grammaire homérique, Tome I: phonétique et morphologie (Paris 1973), 140, 420f.Google Scholar; Cunliffe (n.17 above), s.v. εἲδω.

47. This is one of several instances of the ‘Chinese box effect’ within this ekphrasis upon the purpura; another is at 163 when Ariadne fantasises to the absent Theseus of ‘spreading your bed with a purple cloth’ (purpureaue tuum consternens ueste cubile). In his Brutus Cicero employs the metaphor of garment as style several times. See Douglas, A.E. (ed.), M. Tulli Ciceronis Brutus (Oxford 1966Google Scholar), ad 274.12: ‘[T]he image is probably derived from the visual arts rather than directly from the human form and its clothing. Clinging…and apparently translucent garments met as technical triumphs in sculpture with an approval not accorded to their equivalents in real life.. Catullus may have been resurrecting and refiguring a contemporary dead metaphor in his portrait of the deceived and disrobed Ariadne as a statue. Cf. Brutus 262, in which Cicero praises the un-embellished style of Caesar’s writings: ualde quidem, inquam, probandos; nudi enim sunt, recti et uenusti, omni ornatu orationis tamquam ueste detracta (‘They are indeed admirable, I said; for they are nude, straightforward and elegant, with every oratorical ornament, like clothing, stripped away’). Laird (n.1 above), 21, observes on the description of Ariadne, ‘[T]he image of Ariadne is already embroidered in the vestis. Now this image is compared to a statue—an impression of one form of visual representation is conveyed by actually describing another.

48. Putnam (n.45 above), 175, compares the similar stance that the poet adopts in Carmen 76.3f.: nee sanctam uiolasse fidem, necfoedere nullo/diuum ad fallendos numine abusum homines (‘neither to have violated any sacred trust, nor in any pact to have exploited the gods’ power for deceiving men’).

49. E.g. the scene of hair-loosening and breast-beating at 348–51 (the song of the Parcae):

Often mothers at their sons’ funerals shall acknowledge his [Achilles’] extraordinary bravery and famous deeds, when they undo the unkempt hair from their white heads, and mottle their shrivelled breasts with feeble palms.

50. Scheid and Svenbro (n.6 above), 96f.

51. Barthes (n.8 above), 84–87; the quotation is from 84f.

52. And Ariadne is careful to keep her remaining garments out of this water ‘infected’ with Theseus: [perhibent]…tum tremuli satis aduersas procurrere in undaslmollia nudatae tollentem tegmina surae.. (‘[they say]…that she then ran out into the opposing waves of the agitated sea, lifting the pliant covering of her exposed calf.. 128f.).

53. See Wills, Jeffrey, Repetition in Latin Poetry: Figures of Allusion (Oxford 1996), 401f.Google Scholar, on passages in the poem using triple anaphora.

54. See Skinner, M.B., ‘Rhamnusia Virgo’. ClAnt 3 (1984), 134–41Google Scholar, at 139.

55. Doob (n.6 above), 24, on the nature of labyrinthine imagery observes: ‘There is…a pronounced tension between the maze as complex order and the maze as chaos. This characteristic ambiguity and convertibility of the maze, perceived as an inextricable prison one moment and as great art the next, is often encountered in later labyrinthine art and metaphor.’

56. Putnam (n.45 above), 178, notes two other significant expressions of nequiquam connoting the vanity or hopelessness of a speaker: Carmen 101.4 in the elegy to his brother’s ashes, and Carmen 65: ‘Merely the fact that his brother cannot reply to him in 101 and 65 makes it ail the more important that he answer the dicta of Ortalus in the latter poem. Whatever they were, they deserve reply. Just as Ariadne must complain in vain to the unknowing breezes, so Catullus insists to Ortalus that (65.17): ..tua dicta vagis nequiquam credita ventis (“your words were entrusted in vain to the wandering winds”).

57. Cf. Clytemnestra’s last speech, filled with irony and double entendre, to Agamemnon after she has persuaded him to walk on the tapestries and before she kills him (Aesch. Ag. 958–60):

58. Putnam (n.45 above), 186.

59. Ziegler, Konrat and Gärtner, Hans (eds.), Plutarchus Vitae Parallelae ⁵ (Munich and Leipzig 2000Google Scholar). Cf. Diod. 4.61.4; Hygin. fab. 41.

60. Several cultural associations may be considered concerning Carmen 64’s complex , involving Theseus’ return to Athens and a ship with a signifying sail, which, upon its sighting in the harbour, portends an old man’s death. Well into the period of the Roman republic, the Athenian Greater Panathenaia continued to be celebrated with its magnificent processions, in which an embroidered ‘peplos was apparently displayed like a sail on the mast of a ship placed on wheels and drawn through the city like a float’ (Barber [n.19 above], 114). Perhaps the most memorable single death of an old man in antiquity, the execution of Socrates in 399, also occurred in the context of a ship, associated with Theseus, returning to Athens. There was a lag between Socrates’ sentence and its execution, owing to the Athenian observance of refraining from capital punishments before a ship, commemorating Theseus’ Cretan triumph, returned from Delos (Plato Phaedo 58A–C):

61. Gatsser (n.3 above), 582, suggests that ‘dicuntur acknowledges less the fame of the Argo legend than its status as a fiction’

62. Bernabé, From A. (ed.), Poetae Epici Graeci: Testimonia et Fragmenta, Pars I (Leipzig 1987), 38–45Google Scholar.

63. See West, M.L. (ed.), Hesiod: Theogony (Oxford 1966), 33f.Google Scholar, 36, on the Hesiodic Eris.

64. Cf. Skinner (n.54 above), 139: ..[A] full realization of the intended poetic effect of the epithalamium may have depended on a reader’s presumed familiarity with the account of Peleus and Thetis’ wedding contained in the Cypria. The aposiopesis of the whole narrative at the conclusion of this song presupposes an awareness of what apparently occurred immediately thereafter in the epic poem: Eris’ interruption of the wedding feast and the hurling of the Apple of Discord into the midst of the assembled guests.

65. With perfidiae (322) construed as descriptive genitive with aetas. Some translations construe perfldiae as genitive of charge with arguet.

66. Fordyce (n.4 above), ad 323–81.

67. Rosati (n.17 above), 245–47 notes, ‘In Latin the most common image for writing poetry is deducere (carmen), drawn as is well known from the technique of spinning…This sense is easy to understand: if on the one hand the image of spinning, as a careful task, implies the idea of a precise, meticulous and refined task (frequently noted is the leuitas (“lightness”) of the thumb that handles the wool), on the other hand the length of the thread that flows from the spinner’s hands suggests the idea of continuity and extension, of a product that is progressively given substance as long as the labour is continued.

68. Gaisser (n.3 above), 611.

69. The poem uses the device of abrupt monostich descriptions of killing elsewhere both at 110 (sic domito saeuum prostrauit corpore Theseus, ‘so Theseus conquered the body and laid low the beast’) and 244 (praecipitem sese scopulorum e uertice iecit, ‘[Aegeus] hurled himself headlong from the cliffs’ summit’).

70. Putnam (n.43 above), 194.

71. Quinn (n.4 above), ad loc.

72. Konstan (n.29 above), 8If., discusses the poem’s ambivalence toward the marriage of Thetis and Peleus, and offers an alternative translation of 379f.: ‘There was a story, however, that Thetis lay but a single night with Peleus, and then in anger departed forever from his side. An alternative and perfectly natural reading of our verses will support the idea that Catullus is alluding to this story: “her mother, saddened by the separation of her daughter from her husband, will continue, despite her anxiety, to hope for dear grandchildren”

73. This paper originated as a response to a provocative series of lectures given at Yale in 2005 by Shadi Bartsch, who afterwards shared with me many helpful insights for developing these ideas. Later drafts were read and commented upon by Susanna Morton Braund, Barbara K. Gold, Haun Saussy, and the editors of Ramus, all of whom I acknowledge with the deepest gratitude.