1. "Epyllion" is a term invented in the nineteenth century to designate the genre of the miniature epic; it has no ancient precedent. See Most 1981, 111, especially note 9. Lyne 1978 argues that the the mannered miniature was the distinctive genre of the neoteric "school" and describes the epyllion as a ''brief, highly wrought epos which more or less ostentatiously dissociates itself from traditional epos , concentrating on unheroic incidentals in the sagas of heroes, or on heroines as opposed to heroes, or on otherwise offbeat subject matter; employing a narrative technique that was often wilfully individual and selective; and yet largely maintaining epic language, metre and style" (172-73).

2. Gruen 1992 passim.

3. A form whose characteristic feature is "the desire to avoid the expected connection, the logical train of thought: to surprise the reader by constant change of view-point, of time scale, of addressee" (Williams 1968, 227). See also Fordyce 1961, 274.

4. Pasquali and Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, cited by Klingner 1964, 161, note 2, both see a Hellenistic original behind this poem. For a more recent study of the poem's Alexandrianism, see Thomas 1982.

5. See also Konstan 1977, 108: "Catullus . . . by a subtle use of imagery and ambiguity, allusions, responsions and startling juxtapositions—in fact through all the devices of Hellenistic mannerism—creates a pervasive tension in the epyllion which is not that of antithesis . . . but of irony. Catullus exposes the contradictions and corruption of life and values of the upper class, at least, in Rome, not so much by contrast with some viable ideal, but rather from within, revealing the failure of Roman culture to meet the moral requirements of his time." Harmon 1973, 331, argues that the poem exposes the seeds of decay in the heroic and old Roman codes, but concludes that Catullus looks back with nostalgia to an age that, for all its faults, "offered at least an approximation of the life for which man's nature yearns." For an argument against the moral interpretation, see Dee 1982, rejected by Schmidt 1985, 77-86, who summarizes the evidence for a moral reading.

6. Putnam 1961 is the first sustained and thoroughgoing interpretation along these lines; Most 1981, 120, sees the poem as a combination of themes from all of Catullus' poetry, "a profound meditation on love and loss, on felicity and despair, on the relations between man and man, and man and god." See also Forsyth 1976, Glenn 1981, and Konstan 1977, 78: "Our epyllion, too, I believe, reflects Catullus' abiding concern with the problem of how private passion, which was tangential to the sphere of traditional morality, could be the basis of an enduring relationship".

7. Typical of the tendency to subordinate the poem's visual opulence to a higher meaning is O'Connell 1977, whose title is "Pictorialism and Meaning in Catullus 64." O'Connell concludes: "In a way that we can recognize as essentially Roman, Catullus employed the Alexandrian fascination with poetic pictorialism to create a poem that is serious and, in its indirect way, ultimately moral in concern" (756).

8. See Bryson 1990, 39-40, on the "Second Style," roughly contemporary with Catullus (from about 60 B.C.E. ). Granarolo 1972 argues for a common spirit between Catullus 64 and contemporary wall painting, and there are some excellent remarks on aspects of the second style relevant to Catullus' poem in Martin 1992, 155-56.

9. Granarolo' 1972, 430-31, describes the relation between the approaches of Schefold and Klingner. Schefold's analysis of decorative ensembles in Pompeian wall painting has been extended by Brilliant 1984.

10. Veyne 1988, 117-18, situates the world of myth in a time that is the object of longing— optato , as Catullus puts it at the beginning of this poem (22):

Its [sc. Myth's] essence is to call up an oneiric temporality, situated "before" our history and lacking substance. . . . This time without consistency is situated at some inestimable distance from our years, for the unit of measurement is not the same. We feel in some obscure way that we are separated from it less by a form of duration than by a change in being and truth. A nostalgia overcomes us at the idea of this cosmos, so like our own, but secretly so different and as inaccessible as the stars. Its strangeness would be even greater if those places that were myth's theater really existed and if Pelion and Pindus were mountains visible to our gaze. In what dream century was our Pelion criss-crossed by centaurs, and what kind of phantom mountain must it have been to be able to participate in this other form of temporality?

11. Johnson 1982, 159, provides the best formulation of this approach:

Here in the complex fusion of lyric monologue and lyric narrative, feelings of guilt for past innocence betrayed and feelings of anger and radical inferiority find their focus in Ariadne, in whom the victim of love, the unmanned poet, finds an answering metaphor for his impotence, for his intolerable feminization: Ariadne, the quintessential victim, the woman who, having risked all for love, is betrayed and abandoned and shrieks her outrage and her suffering to the deaf winds and the deserted beach.

12. Examples of the sleeping woman exposed can be found in Marcadé 1968, 34, 42, 43, 51. For representations of Ariadne on Pompeian wall paintings, see Reinach 1992, 111-13, and Richardson 1974, 193.

13. The classic treatment of this is Mulvey 1975. Catullus' description of the distraught, abandoned, and semi-naked Ariadne corresponds to Mulvey's contention that the woman in mainstream cinema is presented as inadequate or castrated. Silverman 1988, 1-41, adds that it is the male viewer's exclusion from the site of filmic production, itself a form of castration, that motivates the presentation of the woman as castrated. The parallels (described below) between the description of the semi-naked Ariadne in lines 63-65 and the description of the countryside unworked by the (phallic) plough, hoe, and sickle in lines 41-43 provide a striking confirmation of Silverman's argument.

In describing in this chapter the relation of the reader (or potential viewer) to the poem and its sights, I assume that this reader is cast by the poet as male. There may certainly be readers who refuse this role or read the poem from different perspectives than what is offered to them (though this is not necessarily true of all women readers).

14. Silverman 1988, 28-32.

15. Two kinds of Golden Age can be distinguished in ancient literature, a soft Golden Age in which the earth produced its bounty without human toil, and a hard Golden Age in which toil and virtue went hand in hand. Reckford 1958.

16. Bryson 1990, 48, shows how this self-conscious attitude to the sophisticated staging of country life in the Villa Rustica of the late Republic manifests itself in the decorative scheme of a wall painting in Boscoreale.

17. The text is a little uncertain here, and Baehrens 1885, 364, reads "illa rudem cursu proram [O] imbuit Amphitrite [O corr]" to get the more conventional disposition of subject and object. Baehrens is followed by Quinn 1970. But Merrill 1893, Mynors 1967, Kroll 1929, and Fordyce 1961 all print "illa rudem cursu prima imbuit Amphitriten."

18. I like this very much, evidently more than Quinn 1970, who rejects the reading of the manuscripts' incanduit (grew hot) in favor of the renaissance conjecture incanuit (became white), which recalls Homer's polios and avoids an echo with candenti in the next line. Incanduit would confirm the association of the oars with hot curling tongs, but perhaps even the emended text, with candenti on the next line, already suggests the same idea.

19. The detail may be learned, but attention to detail has its own erotic or voyeuristic dimensions, as witnessed by this poem on the explicator of Calvus' notoriously thorny Zmyrna :

Uni Crassicio se credere Zmyrna probavit.
     Desinite, indocti, coniugio hanc petere!
Soli Crassicio se dixit nubere velle
     Intima cui soli nota sua extiterint.

               (Suetonius, de Gramm. 18)

To Crassicius alone has Zmyrna agreed to entrust herself.
     Cease, you unlearned, to seek her in marriage!
To Crassicius alone has she promised to be married
     For only to him have her intimate secrets been revealed.

20. Grimal 1984 (3d ed.), 376, compares the appearance of a statue (Ariadne) in the tapestry to the mixing of artistic modes in the ars topiaria of the Roman garden, whose aesthetic Catullus reflects:

It looks as though the poet is describing a setting in the manner of the gardens. . . . And the constant passage from a pictorial art to statuary can only be explained, we believe, within an aesthetic where each genre fails to recognize its own limits, in order to put itself at the service of something other than itself: in this case to create, by all means, this atmosphere of an enchanted and divine world that we have already encountered in the gardens.

Boucher 1956, 200-1, speculates on the sculptural type that Catullus may have had in mind. He points out that there is a maenad in the Capitoline Museum with the same superimposition of erotic grace onto fury as in Catullus' description of Ariadne.

21. Compare Apollonius, Arg. 1.763ff.

22. On the importance of the lamenting Ariadne in seventeenth-century music, see Bianconi 1987, 204-19; for Ariadne in literature, see Lipking 1988. It is striking that Richard Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos is probably the most self-reflexive of all operas, and, with its opera-within-an-opera plot, it bears comparison with Catullus' poem.

23. This effect reminds us of the tapestry itself, for the figure of Ariadne on the tapestry might at one time hold our attention, and at another appear as an element in our scanning of the whole composition.

24. The contradiction of movement between comparatum and comparandum is complemented by an intertextual contradiction, for this simile is modeled on two Homeric similes, one describing the Greeks advancing in waves like breakers crashing on the headland ( Il. 4.422-60) and the other describing the opposing ranks of the Greeks and Trojans, whose bristling spears are like the sea rippling before the rising West Wind ( Il. 7.63-64). In both Homeric cases, the simile is describing a confrontation between two groups, whereas in Catullus the guests are giving place to (decedere, 268) the gods.

25. Bramble 1970, 29.

26. Konstan 1977, 57. It is interesting to see that Christian Metz has appropriated this ancient theory of vision to explain the process of watching a film; Silverman 1988, 23, cites him as follows: "Watching a film is a constant process of projection and introjection, of sending out 'a sort of stream called the look' so that objects can travel back up the stream in the opposite direction.'"

27. Bramble 1970, 24-17.

28. As the girls' choir of c.62 put it, "What do the enemy do that is more cruel when they have captured a city" (quid faciunt hostes capta crudelius urbe? 24)? The Fates turn from their prophetic song, culminating in the sacrifice of Polyxena, to the epithalamium with the words " dedatur cupido iam dudum nupta marito" (let the wife be handed over immediately to the longing husband, 374); the italicized word is regularly used for the surrender of a city or the handing over of someone for punishment, but it also seems to belong to the language of the wedding hymn (c.61.58). Both the Roman wedding and the Homeric capture of a city are symbolic rapes. Editors cite Achilles' "oioi Troies * kredemna * luoimen'' (let us loose the veil of Troy on our own, Il. 16.100) in connection with nam simul ac fessis dederit fors copiam Achivis
urbis Dardaniae Neptunia solvere vincla
alta Polyxenia madefient caede sepulcra; (c.64.366-68) for, as soon as Fate will have given the power to the tired Achaeans
to loosen Neptune's chains around the city of Dardanus,
the high burial mound will be drenched with the blood of Polyxena;

Possibly, the sacrifice of Polyxena supplies the erotic violence implied by the Homeric phrase.

29. See Wiseman 1985, 44-48, for details on these entertainments.

30. For tremulum used of deliberate, erotic motion, see Martial's description of a dancing girl at 14.203.1 (tam tremulum crisat).

31. See Richlin 1992a, 109-16, 1984.

32. Compare "unguibus ora soror foedans et pectora pugnis" ( Aen. 4.673).

33. Parallels for such a use of variare to aestheticize bruises can be found only in the gallows humor of the characters of Plautus ( Miles 216, Poen. 26).

34. See Gruen 1992. Zetzel 1983 points out that there are references to the story of Medea in Catullus 64 that are taken not from Greek literature but from Ennius' tragedy Medea Exul.