1. I benefited from perceptive comments about this painting from panel members and the audience at the Classical Association Conference, Liverpool, 2008. I am grateful for fresh perspectives upon the parrot as the joker in the myth at various airings of this paper. Particular thanks go to my colleagues in administration at the Open University who attend my occasional lunchtime seminars on research and teaching in Classical Studies.

2. Verducci, F., Ovid’s Toyshop of the Heart: Epistulae Heroidum (Princeton 1985), 245Google Scholar.

3. For the wide range of depictions, see ‘Ariadne’ in Lexicon lconographicum Mythologiae Classicae (LIMC) III.1 (1050–1070). Gaisser has a helpful footnote on the traditions in her essay ‘Threads in the Labyrinth’, in Gaisser, J.H. (ed.), Oxford Readings in Classical Studies: Catullus (Oxford 2007), 217’58Google Scholar, at 234 n.49.

4. Plutarch Life of Theseus 20.1 includes this suicidal end for Ariadne amongst variants on her fate. Homer Od. 10.324 alludes to her slaughter by Artemis, but the majority of Greco-Roman sources narrate her rescue by the god and her eventual immortality (the elevation to the skies of her starry crown). The catalogue entry for an oil painting of Ariadne, exhibited by Southall in the 1904 Oldham Spring Exhibition, followed the Plutarch version in which Ariadne hangs herself. For Ariadne as subject but also a multi-faceted symbol in painting, music, literature and performing arts from the Renaissance to the 20th century, see Ziolkowski, T., Ovid and the Moderns (Ithaca 2005)Google Scholar, esp. ch. 1, ‘The Lure of Ariadne’ (3–17), and ch. 12, ‘Ovid in the New Millennium’ (212–25). For 19th and 20th century visual representations of Ariadne, see Elizabeth Prettejohn’s entry and essay in Prettejohn, E.et at. (eds.), J.W. Waterhouse: The Modern Pre-Raphaelite (exhibition catalogue) (Groningen/London/Montreal 2008–10)Google Scholar.

5. I am grateful to Janet Huskinson for this observation.

6. However, during summer 2010, an exceptionally talented and resourceful Ariadne for the 21st century appeared in cinemas. In the film Inception (dir. Christopher Nolan) Ellen Page plays architect Ariadne who helps an industrial espionage team create dream cityscapes where they manipulate the minds of their victims. This Ariadne designs flexible and labyrinthine localities but also rescues the hero from the nightmare mazes inhabited by his dead wife, as dangerous and uncanny as any Minotaur.

7. The wedding of Peleus and Thetis is also depicted in mediis rebus but prefaced by a ‘love at first sight’ meeting between the heroic mortal and minor deity during the Argo’s journey. Elsner, J., Roman Eyes: Visuality and Subjectivity in Art and Text (Princeton 2007)Google Scholar, devotes a great deal of his ‘Ekphrasis and the Gaze’ chapter (67–112) to the poem for its motifs of watching and wondering. Elsner gives a characteristically subtle discursus on the levels of looking that occur within the text and within the reader as viewer, bringing both Ovid and Propertius into the equation. He introduces Lacan’s paranoia of the panoptic gaze (82 n.57) to illuminate his discussion on the shift Catullus initiated from the ekphrasis and its creation to the viewer and reader response which complicates the roles and identities of the spectator.

8. Catullus’ Ariadne does rehearse her role in Theseus’ exploits but she teeters between empowering her image and emphasising her vulnerability. S.H. Lindheim takes an interesting Lacanian line on this tension and Ovidian heroines’ strategies to eroticise their situation and re-arouse their lovers’ desire in Mail and Female: Epistolary Narrative and Desire in Ovid’s Heroides (Madison WI 2003)Google Scholar. She focuses upon Ariadne in the chapter ‘When Lacan Meets Ovid: Readings in Feminine Desire’ (89–114). A modern replay of the erotic gazing of the Theban youth in 64 was recorded in the 2008 Cornell Campus News when a stolen statue of sleeping Ariadne was discovered in an off campus Fraternity House. The ‘horny boys’ had given her a place of (dis)honour in their revelries!

9. Elsner (n.7 above), 70f.

10. For a refreshing and relatively iconoclastic interpretation on how ekphrasis works (or does not!) see W.J.T. Mitchell, ‘Ekphrasis and the Other’, in Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago 1994). Mitchell asks (156): ‘How can ekphrasis be the name of a minor poetic genre and a universal principle of poetics? The answer lies in the network of ideological associations embedded in the semiotic, sensory and metaphysical oppositions that ekphrasis is supposed to overcome. In order to see the force of these oppositions and associations we need to reexamine the Utopian claims of ekphrastic hope and the anxieties of ekphrastic fear in the light of the relatively neutral viewpoint of ekphrastic indifference, the assumption that ekphrasis is, strictly speaking, impossible.’

11. Nonnus Dionysiaca 47.665–67. Laird, A., ‘Sounding out Ecphrasis: Art and Text in Catullus 64’, JRS 83–84 (1993–94), 18–30Google Scholar, notes that the simile anticipates ‘her assumption by Bacchus’ (20). The proleptic nature of the ekphrasis reminds the knowing reader of the alternative unhappy ending for Ariadne on the island as well as casting a dark shadow over the future of Peleus, Thetis and the child of their union. See Harrison, S.J. (ed.), Texts, Ideas and the Classics (Oxford 2001)Google Scholar, who discusses the Catullan ekphrasis in ‘Picturing the Future’ (84–87) and the tradition of an Ariadne punished for being unfaithful to Bacchus (86).

12. There is a good deal of scholarship on the nature of the ekphrasis in Poem 64. Eisner (n.7 above), 70–72, notes the rich referentiality of the coverlet and its role in the interplay between the legendary figures and themes in 64. The embroidered bedspread in the opulent boudoir focuses attention on the significance and symbolism of sleeping chambers in general. It is interesting to trace the persistence of the bedroom as the site of female identity (from Titian’s Venus through Manet’s Olympia, culminating perhaps in the statement of [fragmented] self made by Tracy Emin’s controversial art ‘installation’ statement, My Bed). When the private interiors of this intimate female space are exposed the inhabitant may choose to outface the viewer and call the bluff of the voyeur.

13. See E.W. Leach’s discussion of Seneca Suasoria 1.4 as a model for Ariadne, Ovid’s in A Study in the Sources and Rhetoric of Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women and Ovid’s Heroides (Diss. Yale 1963), 347Google Scholar.

14. Elsner (n.7 above), 73–77; quotations at 75.

15. In one of a number of interesting moves made in the debate upon Ovid’s development of the ekphrasis, Norton, Elizabeth Anne, Aspects of Ecphrastic Techniques in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Diss. Kent 2010), 122Google Scholar, discusses his use of the Catullan motifs, especially the stone-flesh dialectic, in the Metamorphoses. I hope to see sections of this thesis, which I had the privilege of examining, published in due course.

16. This is the pronouncement of John Ruskin. See Breeze, G., Joseph Southall 1861–1944: Artist-Craftsman (Exhibition Catalogue, Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery [Birmingham 1980], 11f.)Google Scholar. For Southall’s devotion to tempera and the challenges of the medium, see Treble, R., ‘London, Victorian and Post-Victorian Paintings’, The Burlington Magazine 122 (1980), 784–88Google Scholar. South-all kept his own chickens to ensure the freshness and quality of the egg yolks. He also lovingly carved his own frames. See Breeze, G., ‘Decorative Painting—For the Common Good and Beauty of our Towns’, in Crawford, A. (ed.), By Hammer and Hand: The Arts and Crafts Movement in Birmingham (Birmingham 1984), 61–83Google Scholar.

17. See Treble (n.16 above), 784.

18. Breeze (n.16 above Southall), 16.

19. Bessie, Southall’s wife, writes: ‘Modern French Art is not what we like,’ a rare testament to her husband’s view of contemporary painting which appears in her Diary of a Visit to Venice 1925, Paris 30th May (Birmingham City Archives MS 588/10).

20. For an in depth analysis of de Chirico’s philosophical and personal obsession with Ariadne, see Ziolkowski (n.4 above), 3–8. Southall’s depictions of Ariadne, at least in terms of composition and colour, are clearly indebted to Greco-Roman traditions (across a variety of media from statuary to mosaics) but also Renaissance and 19th century paintings. Nevertheless, Southall has also been described as ‘a natural born surrealist’ by Russell Taylor, J., ‘Artist with Authentic Strangeness-Joseph Southall, Birmingham Art Gallery’, The Times (9 September 1980), 13Google Scholar: ‘There is undoubtedly an authentic strangeness in the way he saw things, which comes out most powerfully in his tempera paintings of contemporary life, but also casts a weird light over many of his watercol-ours…we are much more likely to find ourselves thinking of Magritte and Balthus and Chirico than of anyone nearer to this apparently stick-in-the-mud Arts and Craftsman.’

21. Breeze (n.16 above Southall), 42. Cf. ibid. 43: ‘There seems to be no particular reason why the story of Ariadne so appealed to Southall.’

22. These faces on the border simply fill out the scene. Christian, John in his Last Romantics Exhibition Catalogue (Barbican Art Gallery [London 1989], 105)Google Scholar dubs them ‘chorus figures’ but they could possibly personify winds, bringing Bacchus to the Naxos shore.

23. I am thinking particularly of Frederick Sandys’ 1868 Medea.

24. The chronology in Catullus 64 is notoriously complex, attracting the inevitable epithet ‘labyrinthine’. Commentators have conjured creatively with the skewed sequence of mythical events, especially the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, the voyage of the Argo (and Jason in Colchis) and the temporal relationship with Theseus at Crete. Gaisser (n.3 above), 223–44, gives a good summary of the challenges, concluding (244): ‘But it is not only time that is turned inside out. The story is, as well, for parts of the frame have been pulled through into the center.’

25. ‘…the brilliant plumage of the parrot rhyming perfectly with the foliage and floating flowers and the bowl of fruit at the left’: Verdi, Richard, The Parrot in Art: From Diirer to Elizabeth But-terworth (Birmingham 2007), 80Google Scholar. The fruit, flowers, leaves and vases in the painting could be analysed for their broader cultural symbolism—see such compendia as Hall’s, J.Illustrated Dictionary of Symbols in Eastern and Western Art (London 1994)Google Scholar—but I suspect this would only yield a random list of representational meanings for this particular painting.

26. Treble (n.16 above), 784. She notes: ‘This painting of his late maturity embodies all his obsessions: the sizzling patterns of striped cloth and chequered floor, the sailing ship floating hypnotically on an impossible blue Aegean bay, the minutely-detailed outlining of the pots, fruit and parrot with which he typically furnished his tableaux.’

27. Nonnus Dionysiaca 47.456–69, in telling Ariadne’s story, describes a bridal chamber decked out by Eros with flowers and the foliage of spring with a wreath of red roses. Such a bower might rival the boudoir of Peleus and Thetis in Catullus 64.

28. In Apuleius’ novel, Psyche will be taken by force by the invisible ‘husband’ who ‘murders’ her virginity (Met. 5.4). Of course, Ariadne has already given herself to Theseus so the situation is only vaguely similar to Psyche’s but Psyche’s story did lend itself rather readily to other mythic paradigms once she entered into the artistic canon.

29. William Holman Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience (1853–1854) is famous for displaying the kept woman in a cluttered and gaudy nouveau-riche setting, a parlour which reflects her entrapment as she gazes outwards to the viewer in a moment of self-realisation.

30. On the two meanings of ekphrasis as verbalising art (for the modern critic) and verbalising the visual (for the ancient commentators), several scholars have engaged with and expanded upon the issues Laird raises in his article of 1993 (n.l 1 above). His parting remark (30): ‘How can we be sure that the outer sections of the poem (1–49, 266–408) which recount the marriage of Peleus and Thetis are not describing an artwork as well?’ would allow for the instability of boundaries between the wedding chambers of the sea goddess and the Cretan princess in a painting like Southall’s. If both settings are equally real or unreal, they will inevitably intersect.

31. Glenn, J., ‘Ariadne’s Daydream (Cat. 64.158–163)’, CJ 76 (1980’81), 110’16Google Scholar.

32. Theodorakopoulos, E., ’Catullus 64: Footprints in the Labyrinth’, in Morales, H. and Sharrock, A. (eds.), Intratextuality: Greek and Roman Textual Relations (Oxford 2000), 115’41Google Scholar, gives a subtle analysis (121) of Ariadne fragmenting and falling to pieces for lack of a frame against the background not just of the inset narrative but also in the context of the palace which dissolves into the distance in a poem that has boundary issues: ‘And the pain, which ought to be inside her, appears to have been turned into the waves that engulf her. Similarly, Ariadne appears to be turned inside out, literally beside herself with pain (externavit, 71).’

33. Parrots are occasionally depicted with ribbons in ancient art, especially parrots on parade, as it were, in mosaics and friezes. Ariadne’s ribbons, however, echo a distinct Victorian style of classicised dress. The placing of the pink bands across the bosom and tied loosely around the pudenda is suggestive of a coyly seductive Ariadne. Alternatively, Southall could be conveying a potentially stronger-willed heroine who is keeping her clothes as well as her wits about her. There is no sense in which this heroine is falling apart either emotionally or sartorially. In some ways she reprises a Walter-Crane-like vision of the classical woman as Liberty or Justice, a familiar figure on Labour Movement emblemata. On trades union banners, certificates and posters the female form represented various Virtues, including the ennobling cause of socialism. The universal woman dignified agitational struggles. Crane’s influence can be detected in the classicised ‘abstract’ woman on Southall’s book plate and copper engraving designs listed in Breeze (n.16 above Southall), 98–100. Breeze points out (13) that Southall ‘never possessed the haunting, melancholy quality’ of Burne-Jones and that although Southall used idyllic female types his women ‘tend to be more robust’. The sash was also sported on banners and posters by the Suffragists who made their own polemical emblemata.

34. Verdi (n.25 above), 80.

35. The blue-fronted Amazonian was not imported into Europe until the fifteenth century. This observation, courtesy of George Learmonth,is noted in Breeze (n.16 above Southall), 43.

36. See the splendid survey of the parrot’s significance in art and literature in Boehrer’s, Bruce T.Parrot Culture: Our 2,500-Year-Long Fascination with the World’s Most Talkative Bird (Philadelphia 2004)Google Scholar.

37. See Huskinson, J.A.R.,.‘Theatre, Performance and Theatricality in some Mosaic Pavements in Ar.tioch’, BICS 46 (2003), 131–65Google Scholar (142–150 on depictions of Dionysus).

38. The following summary draws upon the introduction and the general methodology employed in Courtney, J. and James, P. (eds.), The Role of the Parrot in Selected Texts from Ovid to Jean Rhys: Telling A Story from an Alternative Viewpoint (Lampeter 2006)Google Scholar.

39. See Forbes Irving, P.M.C., Metamorphosis in Greek Myths (Oxford 1989)Google Scholar, ch. 4 (‘Birds’), esp. 118–27, and his concluding comments on birds always pointing to a world beyond or opposed to our own.

40. Bushnell, Rebecca, ‘Reading “Winged Words”: Homeric Bird Signs, Similes and Epiphanies’, Helios 9 (1982), 1–14Google Scholar (quotation from 10).

41. As Bushnell (n.40 above), 2, notes, each species is marked as, for instance, predator, as a messenger of a particular deity or as differentiated by abnormal or prodigious actions. She draws upon Thompson’s, D’ArcyA Glossary of Greek Birds (Oxford 1966)Google Scholar for her examples of birds associated with particular deities.

42. The parrot as prophet could prefigure the song of the Parcae (Fates) in Catullus 64.

43. Ovid’s Ariadne seems to be benefiting from Theseus’ ‘leaving his bedroom furniture behind’ (Leach [n.13 above], 418f.); and Verducci (n.2 above), 263, adds: ‘It is certain that the pictorial tradition, however diverse and logically incompatible its scenic effects may sometimes have been, never placed languida Gnossia on a domestic seaside divan.’

44. Pieter Breughel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus alludes to another part of the Cretan narrative, the escape of Daedalus and his son from their island prison. Breughel’s treatment of his mythical subject is close to comical and there are some strange correspondences in Southall, not least the positioning of the sailing ship. In Breughel, the significant spectator of the tragedy (amongst so many turning away from or not noticing the drowning boy) is the partridge (the form taken by the vengeful Talos, the nephew Daedalus murdered). For the Hellenistic topos of a watching bird and Ovid’s focus on the perdix in his Daedalus and Icarus narrative (Met. 8.256–59) see Pavlock, B., ‘Daedalus in the Labyrinth of Ovid’s Metamorphoses’, CW 92 (1998), 141–57Google Scholar, esp. 156f.

45. Gaisser (n.3 above), 227, believes that the viewer/reader is drawn into the recesses of a Roman atrium incongruously set in the Thessalian countryside.

46. Gaisser (n.3 above), 236, suggests that the bare-breasted Ariadne gazing at the ship evokes Thetis and the Nereids in the mainframe narrative: ‘The likeness of Thetis to our Ariadne, if too partial and fleeting to convince, still lingers in the mind.’ The most obvious link between Ariadne and Thetis is the focus on the bed and bedspread which Ovid has his heroine apostrophise in lines 51–58. Elsner (n.7 above) addresses all these correspondences. As Verducci (n.2 above), 267, points out: ‘Ovid has turned Catullus’ ecphrasis inside-out and upside-down. His Ariadne is. quite literally, a deserted maiden sitting on a bedspread on a bed while addressing the bedspread of that very same bed.’

47. Verducci (n.2 above), 244f., discusses Ariadne’s function as an ‘abstract universal’, a favourite figura communis; the rehearsal of her suffering became close to an exercise in therapy as well as poetry in the hands of Catullus and later elegists. Armstrong, R., Cretan Women: Pasiphae, Ariadne and Phaedra in Latin Poetry (Oxford 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 55f., comments: ‘It is often remarked that the ethical concerns of the Ariadne ecphrasis reflect a similar obsession with the morality of remembrance in Catullus’ personal poems…. However, when the poet himself (or his outraged persona) utters an Ariadne-like threat [in poem 30, 11–12] the poem has to end there with silence, and without emphatic fulfilment.’

48. Fulkerson, L., The Ovidian Heroine as Author: Reading, Writing and Community in the He-roides (Cambridge 2005), 151CrossRefGoogle Scholar, comments on Ovid’s use of language similar to that of his deserted heroines when he appeals from exile to the better nature and mercy of the emperor Augustus: ‘Seen through the lens of the Heroides, Augustus becomes not only elegy’s unreasonable puella, but also—far more damning—the callous and distasteful abandoning hero, who either does not have time to read poetry (whether it be a letter from the woman whose heart he has broken, or the Ars Amatoria ) or (even worse) who is not clever enough to understand what he has read.’ Gail Trimble, Classical Association Conference, Liverpool, 2008, argued persuasively in her paper, ‘Thesea fide: Heroic Faith and Faithlessness in Ovid’s Exile Poetry’, that ‘his rhetoric of powerless isolation on the seashore types him not as hero but as an abandoned heroine, in the tradition of the Heroides, and particularly of the foundational Latin text for such figures, Catullus 64.’

49. Elsner (n.7 above), 74.

50. Conte, G.B., The Rhetoric of Imitation (Ithaca 1986), 60–62Google Scholar (quotation from 61).

51. Lindheim’s (n.8 above) Lacanian reading has been noted. She concludes (182) that ‘Ovidian heroines are even more profoundly manifestations of the male imagination’ and that Ovid reduces various heroines of mythology and literature to a single pattern. However, Spentzou, E., Readers and Writers in Ovid’s Heroides: Transgressions of Genre and Gender (Oxford 2003), 95CrossRefGoogle Scholar, believes that Ovid’s Ariadne has a defiant awakening, one of many of the heroines ready to ‘condemn and renounce their placid role as mythical exempla’. Armstrong (n.47 above), 233, argues that Catullus stereotypes or even silences Ariadne with his larger than life portrayal whereas Ovid restores her girlish persona.

52. In my chapter, ‘Two Poetic and Parodic Parrots in Latin Literature’, in Courtney and James (n.36 above), 1–32, it is suggested (11) that ‘Catullus’ exasperation with the mercurial nature of her [Lesbia’s] love and loyalty to him might have encouraged Ovid to “best” the sparrow with the more substantial parrot as a comment on his dominant relationship to Corinna’.

53. I am indebted to George Breeze, biographer of Southall, who offered me the following observations: ‘Southall was keen to write notes on his life, especially his importance in the tempera revival, the need for English cities to decorate their buildings as Italian cities did, and campaigning against what he saw as inappropriate painting conservation. It would be wonderful to know why he chose the subjects he did for his mythical/romantic/allegorical paintings, but he seems to have kept frustratingly quiet on the issue.’ The two classical books Southall owned were Liddell’s Greek Lexicon and Seyffert’s Dictionary of Classical Antiquities.