Chapter 6
Gazing at the Golden Age
Belatedness and Mastery in Catullus 64

Among the poets of Catullus' circle, one learned and virtuosic epyllion (little epic) seems to have been required as proof of the poet's powers, and the spirit of rivalry can be felt in the magnificently extravagant performance sometimes known as "Peleus and Thetis."^[1] Catullus seems to be testing not only his own powers but those of poetry or art itself as he conjures up a mythical age lost forever to the experience of a belated humanity that can only represent that time when gods and humans intermingled. Most of the poem consists in a description of a work of art, an ekphrasis of the coverlet on the wedding couch of Peleus and Thetis, which provides the opportunity for a brilliant display of the representative powers of poetry. The central figure on the coverlet, itself the object of the admiring gaze of the countrymen invited to the wedding, is the abandoned Ariadne, gazing after the ship of the absconding Theseus. I argue that the gaze—satisfied, frustrated, or interrupted—is the main thematic thread of the poem, and that this theme reflects the problematic relation of a belated poet and his audience toward the beautiful but lost world of myth on which they long to feast their eyes.

But first, a synopsis of the poem. Catullus begins with the voyage of the Argo, the first sea voyage, which he interrupts at the point where the nymphs expose themselves to gaze at this novel phenomenon and Peleus and Thetis fall in love. Here the poet pauses to address the heroes:

o nimis optato saeclorum tempore nati
heroes, salvete, deum genus! o bona matrum

progenies, salvete ite[rum] . . .
vos ego saepe, meo vos carmine compellabo. (22–24)

O heroes, born in a time of the ages all too desirable,
greetings, race of gods! O righteous offspring of mothers,
greetings again. . . .
Often I will hail you with my song.

When the long-awaited day of the wedding of Peleus and Thetis comes, the countrymen desert their fields to gaze at the palace and its rich preparations, among which is the marriage couch covered with an elaborate tapestry of scenes from long ago (50–51). The main scene on the tapestry features Ariadne on the beach, gazing (52) after the absconding Theseus, her clothes fallen from her body in her distracted state (63–67). Catullus now tells the story of how Ariadne got to be in this position, how she fell in love with Theseus at first sight (91–93), helped him to kill the Minotaur, and eloped with him. We then return to the deserted Ariadne, who delivers a long speech of recrimination of Theseus (132–201), ending with the prayer

sed quali solam Theseus me mente reliquit
tali mente, deae, funestet seque suosque. (200–201)

but with the same mind with which Theseus deserted me,
with that mind, goddesses, may he kill himself and his dearest.

Ariadne's curse comes true. Theseus' father, Aegeus, had been reluctant to let his son set off to face the Minotaur; he had not yet satisfied his eyes with gazing on him (219–20). Aegeus made Theseus dye his sails black for the journey, but charged him to change them to white the moment he saw his homeland on his return. Theseus forgot to change the sails and Aegeus, watching out for his son from the citadel, saw the black sails and threw himself off the battlements (241–45).

We now move to another part of the tapestry where Bacchus, who has fallen in love with Ariadne, is approaching with his companions; the apotheosis of Ariadne is implied but not described. Back at the wedding, the countrymen of Thessaly, having satisfied their gaze on the tapestry, make way for the gods (267–68). The gods arrive, and also the Fates, who sing a mixture of wedding song and prophecy, celebrating Achilles, the son to be born from this marriage. Closing the poem, Catullus regrets that the depravity of the modern age has caused the gods to withdraw themselves from the light of day (384–408).

My synopsis is intended to bring out the thematic importance of the gaze as well as the self-consciously virtuosic handling of structure. The figure of Ariadne, frustrated gazer and enticing spectacle, dominates the poem, featuring both as a projection of the poet's alienation from the time of the heroes that he hails in his song and as a field for the representational powers and voyeuristic indulgence of the latecomer poet. Myth itself casts the poet in a similarly ambiguous position, for it exists both as a distant, lost world and as a compendium of marvels to be appropriated by the poet at will. For the Roman poet, the heroic age is situated in Greek literature, which makes him doubly belated, and yet this poem confidently displays its representational mastery, appropriating Greek myth as a lavish spectacle to be enjoyed by the belated Roman. Politically and militarily, the Romans had become masters of the Greeks, and, in spite their awe of the cultural achievements of the defeated, the Romans confidently appropriated the earlier civilization's prestigious legacy.^[2] No doubt Catullus' boisterous confidence with respect to hallowed Greek material has contributed to the suspicion in which the critical tradition has held this poem.

The Critical Tradition

For Catullan criticism, the poem has been something of an embarrassment; precious and mannerist in style and bizarre in form, it offers us a feast for the senses while apparently denying us the kind of formal synopsis and thematic coherence that would allow us to fix our minds on higher things. Though it is ostensively about the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, more than half of this poem is taken up by the story of Ariadne, introduced because it features on the embroidered coverlet of the wedding couch. To absolve Catullus of wanton self-indulgence, the poem has sometimes been called an experiment in Alexandrian narrative.^[3] At its most extreme, this emphasis on the poem's Alexandrianism takes the form of arguing that it is an imitation of a lost Greek poem (or two), but even in more temperate versions of this argument the existence of Greek models and parallels has helped to give this sumptuous poem a respectable pedigree.^[4]

Of the literary criticism on this poem, much has focused on the search for a unifying theme that would enable the reader to resist its seductive sensuality. The first major treatment of the work's unity,

Klingner 1964 (originally published in 1956), makes it quite clear that a solid grasp of the poem's carefully concealed unity is the condition under which we can enjoy its surface: "Once one has assured oneself of [the poem's unity], one can abandon oneself with that much more clear a conscience to the enjoyment of the variety and colorful changes that determine the first impression the poem makes on the reader, and that make the unity so difficult to recognize" (213). Klingner found the poem's unity in the theme of the union of gods and mortals, whose dark counterpart is the story of the abandoned Ariadne. Since Klingner, there have been two main lines of interpretation of the poem as a whole. The first takes the moralizing end of the poem for its starting point: Catullus' lament that the gods, disgusted with a criminal humanity, no longer mingle with us as they did in the Golden Age becomes the key to the poem's unity. For the most part, proponents of this line of interpretation stress the irony in Catullus' presentation of a (morally) better Golden Age. The influential article of Bramble 1970 explores the ironies of Catullus' presentation of the Golden Age by following up "clues," apparent to the learned, in Catullus' mythology: the Golden Age, Bramble argues, is seen by a disillusioned Catullus as already corrupt.^[5] The other line of interpretation seeks to reunite this poem with Catullus' lyric oeuvre, and particularly the love poetry; it stems from the conviction that this poet whom the experience of love taught to find his own voice must, in some way, be talking about that experience in his most ambitious poem. The integrity of Catullus, as well as that of his oeuvre, is at stake, and so the betrayed Catullus has been cast as the abandoned Ariadne, which brings into play the moral issues of the elegiac love poetry.^[6]

In the scholarship that exemplifies these approaches, I have found little that engages my experience of reading this luxuriously beautiful and strange poem, and in fact I suspect that the attempts to divert attention from the poem's distinctive surface to a moralizing message, or to neutralize this surface by referring it to Alexandrian literary principles, are strategies of avoidance. What is being avoided is the sensuality of the poem, which has to be redeemed by being made to subserve weightier themes.^[7] The protestations that the poem is more than mere frivolity, artificiality, entertainment, virtuosity, or experimentation, with which interpretations routinely begin, suggest that the scholars concerned are eager to prove that they have not been seduced by the poem's surface. Jenkyns 1982, 94, has spoken appropriately of "a kind of aesthetic puritanism" in this connection, a puritanism that has had the unfortu-

nate effect of obscuring Catullus' fantasizing relation to myth in this poem.

Myth, Gaze, and Body: The Boscotrecase Panels

By way of introducing a different model for understanding the poem's relation to myth, I would like to consider a work of Roman visual art representing stories from myth. The relation between contemporary painting and Catullus' poem has been remarked on before, and certainly the almost obsessive transitions between levels of reality in the poem's imbricated structure remind one strongly of Campanian wall painting.^[8] But I have chosen this particular ensemble, the two remaining panels of a set of three from a room at Boscotrecase, because in these panels the relation of the spectator to the world of myth is engaged through the spectacle of the human body. In all sections of Catullus' poem, the female body features as an object of fascination (the Nereids, Ariadne, the Fates, Polyxena), and clearly it plays an important role in Catullus' visualization of the world of myth.

The panels (now in the Metropolitan Museum, New York) are narrative paintings of Polyphemus and Galatea and of Perseus and Andromeda respectively; they are particularly relevant to Catullus' poem because, like the poem, they establish thematic relations between two mythological scenes, both of them erotic. Klingner's influential analysis of Catullus 64 is based on the kind of thematic parallels and contrasts between the myths that Karl Schefold had found in ensembles of Roman painting.^[9] The Boscotrecase panels have recently been studied from this perspective by Eleanor Leach 1988, who begins by pointing out the similarity in the compositions of the two paintings:

Each composition centers about a lofty seaside crag that has been detached and brought forward from its background by dramatic highlighting of angles and planes. Thus focused, our attention falls next upon the principal figures set off by the crags: Polyphemus and Andromeda. Comparing the two panels, we notice that their placement of the principal masculine and feminine figures is in reverse. The position of the savior, Perseus, hovering on the wings in the one panel, is analogous to that of Galatea floating on her seabeast in the other. In each case the secondary action appears in the upper right-hand corner; the Cyclops stoning the ship of Odysseus has its coun-

terpart in the meeting of Perseus and Andromeda's royal father. The one panel thus contrasts a peaceful foreground with an outbreak of savage violence [Polyphemus watching Galatea / stoning Odysseus'ship], while the other lets us anticipate a violent physical contest in the foreground with a royal marriage as its outcome (364–65).

Leach performs a subtle "interassociative reading" of these two panels: she points out that the violence of the secondary scene in the Polyphemus panel reminds us that the apparently peaceful scene between Perseus and Andromeda's father in the other panel is the prelude to violence, for Andromeda is already engaged, and Perseus will have to fight again after freeing Andromeda. Furthermore, there is a play in these paintings on the contrasts between heroic nature and civilization:

The tension between major and minor incidents in each panel shows us the contrast between an uncomplicated love romantically sought by sword or song in a natural setting, and the deception or violence of a harsher civilized reality perilous to illusions of innocence and good faith (367–68).

This is a fruitful line of approach which, by showing us the sensibility that unites art and literature, tells us much about the Roman attitude to mythology. But it needs to be supplemented by a study of the way that these panels solicit our gaze as they provide images from a mythology that is, above all, a world of fantasy.^[10] Leach points out that the placement of the main masculine and feminine figures in the two paintings is reversed. But to the (implicitly male) viewer, this is not simply a matter of spatial disposition. Andromeda, her arms open and shackled to a rock whose shape opens up to echo the availability of her body, is central to the composition in a way quite different from the figure of the Cyclops, twisting toward the semi-naked form of Galatea on her sea beast, and almost nailed to the center of the composition by the tall column that rises behind him from the rock on which he sits. The column behind Polyphemus and the fanning, slightly cavernous rock behind Galatea are not just allusions to the respective sexual organs of the male and female figures, they also relate to the gaze of the spectator in contrasting ways and so sexualize that gaze. ln the Andromeda painting, the other figures frame her: the sea monster rising from the bottom left and Perseus floating in from the top left channel our gaze at the chained Andromeda, a gaze that is gathered into the shadowed concavities of the rock behind her. The group of Perseus and Andromeda's father on the top right, and a female figure, either a nymph or Andromeda's mother, on the bottom

right complete the symmetry. By contrast, the Polyphemus painting is much less static in composition. Its main movement is a diagonal from Galatea on the left, below the seated Polyphemus, to Polyphemus himself, in another story, throwing boulders at the ship of Odysseus, cut off by the edge of the panel, on the right above the seated central figure. If the Andromeda painting is about availability, the Polyphemus painting is about frustration. The eye settles easily on the central figure of Ariadne, but it cannot settle at all in the Polyphemus painting, for the central figure cannot be isolated from the diagonal movement, and this movement itself ties together two stories of frustrated desire, one of which revolves around blindness. The tension between the figures of Galatea—even more enticingly presented than Andromeda—and Polyphemus exists on both narrative and visual levels, for as we look at Galatea our gaze is distracted by the larger and more prominent Polyphemus, who in turn expresses a hopeless longing. Above Polyphemus on the right, his blinded self lifts a boulder to throw at a ship, half of which is cut off from our view.

Between them, the two paintings create a contrast in the visual experience of the viewer, and the choice of these particular mythological themes makes an issue of our own spectatorship and of our desire for the fantastic world of mythology. The story of Andromeda becomes one of wish fulfillment, of the conjuring up of desirable images about which the viewer can float with a sensation of omnipotence represented in the painting by the figure of Perseus. Perseus and the sea monster may be about to fight, but their visual function in the composition has nothing to do with conflict; rather, the exuberant lifting of the monster's head from the sea and the exhilarating fall of Perseus from the sky serve to focus our relationship to the figure of Andromeda. By contrast, the deformed Polyphemus, whose harsh world is tangentially and frustratingly related to the heroic story of Odysseus, and to the erotic world of the sea nymphs, is a poignant image of our own alienation from the world of myth.

The Figure of Ariadne

In the Boscotrecase panels, the figure of Polyphemus duplicates the viewer's removal from the represented world, whereas the figure of Andromeda suggests the availability of that world to the omnipotent viewer. Catullus' Ariadne, frustrated gazer and enticing spectacle, combines these two opposing relations to the world of myth. But

in recent years it has been more common to find in the figure of Ariadne reflections of Catullus' own experience of betrayal at the hands of Lesbia.^[11] Commenting on Wiseman's version of this identification, Griffin 1985 cites the following lines:

non flavo retinens subtilem vertice mitram,
non contecta levi velatum pectus amictu,
non tereti strophio lactentis vincta papillas,
omnia quae toto delapsa e corpore passim
ipsius ante pedes fluctus salis alludebant. (64.63–67)

not keeping the delicate headband on her golden hair,
nor swathed in the light dress touching her breasts,
her milky nipples no longer bound by the smooth halter,
all of which fallen completely from her body in all directions
the waves of the sea played with before her very eyes.

As Griffin points out, Catullus is quite separate from his Ariadne here, "savouring the spectacle of her distress which is soon to be consoled" (98). One is reminded of a common type of scene in Roman wall painting: a male figure (Pan or a satyr) has come across a sleeping woman (nymph or Baccant) and has lifted her clothes to feast his eyes on her naked body; the woman has woken and turned on her side; as the man gazes at the woman's front, sometimes partially clothed by a band covering her breasts, the spectator is treated to a naked rear view. Several Pompeian paintings show the abandoned and sleeping Ariadne revealed in this manner.^[12] Griffin's "savouring" is a good word for what is going on here: the incantatory rhythm of the first three lines, with their subtle variations of grammatical structure, seems to hold Ariadne in a soft focus as the camera turns around her in slow motion; the repetitive emphasis on the lightness of the clothes that have fallen to the ground (subtilem, levi, tereti) allows the viewer the pleasures of transparency as well as nudity. The language of film immediately suggests itself in connection with this passage, which includes a closeup (Ariadne's nipples, 62) and even the thoroughly filmic shot of the water playing with the fallen clothes.

Recent discussions of spectatorship in cinema have emphasized the way that the camera produces particular kinds of relations between the viewer and the viewed that are quite as significant as the relations between the images; it has also described how visual pleasure is implicated in certain kinds of relation to the female body.^[13] Feminist film theory provides a useful framework for understanding the role of Ariadne in this poem. Kaja Silverman has argued that the classic cinema's viewer

is excluded from the point of the film's discursive origination; devices such as cutting and framing remind us that the reality reflected by the film has been seen by another, absent eye that has presented to our eyes an impression of reality.^[14] This exclusion is particularly disturbing for the male viewer, whose subjectivity is constructed through identification with discursive power, or the phallus. Classic film deals with this situation, which is a projection of earlier fears of castration, by simultaneously transferring the viewer's weakness onto the female characters and making the female body the site of receptivity to the male gaze. Catullus' Ariadne, whose distracted and abandoned state renders her an object of the male gaze, fits this model exactly. But Catullus also provides us with the figure of the "castrated" viewer in the countrypeople who abandon their agricultural work to gaze at the wedding preparations, leaving the earth deprived of their phallic ministrations:

non humilis curvis purgatur vinea rastris,
non glebam prono convellit vomere taurus,
non falx attenuat frondatorum arboris umbram, (39–41)

The low vine is not weeded by curved hoes,
the ox does not tear up the clods with the driven plough
the pruners' sickle does not thin the shade of the tree,

The rhetoric of this passage is recalled in the lines describing the seminaked Ariadne:

non flavo retinens subtilem vertice mitram,
non contecta levi velatum pectus amictu,
non tereti strophio lactentis vincta papillas, (63–65)

The similar use of negatives in these two passages establishes a connection between the suspended work of the awed rustic gazers and the abandoned state of Ariadne that exposes the delights of her body. As a result of the rustics' removal to the palace, the countryside is neglected, but this is expressed in an ironic allusion to the Golden Age theme that cultivation was unnecessary: nature returns to its original state, and even the necks of the beasts of burden grow soft again (mollescunt colla iuvencis, 38).^[15] In this ironic Golden Age, the expected visual pleasures of a generous and abundant earth are replaced by the spectacle of a spreading rust:

squalida desertis rubigo infertur aratris. (42)

A rough rust appears on the abandoned ploughs.

It is the body of Ariadne that provides the positive visual spectacle of abundance that should accompany the Golden Age negatives and compensates for the ineffectuality of the male gazers.

The gold of this Golden Age is to be found not in the country but in the city, where the palace shines with a literal gold and silver (44), drawing the farmers from their tasks, a fact that is quite alien to the morality of the Golden Age topos. There is more to this than an ironic comment on the morality of the age of heroes: the perversity of the reference to Golden Age topoi and the anachronistically urban setting make this passage a self-conscious reflection on the representation or conjuring-up of a Golden Age. The literalization of the metaphor of the Golden Age emphasizes the attractive power of gold, which draws the farmers away from their work on the earth; the absence of work, epitomized by the rusting of the plough, points us to the gold that is elsewhere, not in a renewed countryside but in the visual pleasures of the town. Migrating to the city, the farmers reverse the movement of the urban poet who, drawn by another kind of attraction, calls up a rural Golden Age. What is most striking in this use of the Golden Age topos is the disjunction between the absence of work and a vision of abundance; in this case, they occur in different places, country and town respectively. All this, then, produces a very self-conscious presentation of the Golden Age whose unconventionality draws attention to the mutual curiosity of town-dwellers and countrypeople about their counterparts, a curiosity that motivates the topos in the first place.^[16]

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. In the figure of Ariadne, the desiring gaze itself becomes an object of visual satisfaction, displayed on the female body that exposes itself in its preoccupation with gazing. This satisfaction rectifies the unfortunate way that the farmers' desire to gaze is registered on the body of the earth, which they have neglected in order to gawk at urban opulence.

Virtuosity and Wonder

Enclosing all of the longing and gazing in the poem is Catullus' relation to the heroic age that he is conjuring up with his voice,

the longed-for age (nimis optato . . . tempore, 22) when the gods appeared to humans, for afterward human depravity caused them to shun our sight:

quare nec talis dignantur visere coetus,
nec se contingi patiuntur lumine claro. (64.406–7)

Therefore they no longer deign to visit such gatherings,
nor do they allow themselves to be touched by the bright light.

Human impiety begins traditionally with the voyage of Argo, the first ship, which dared to ignore the natural divisions of the earth and made possible a new scale of human greed and violence. The voyage of the Argo is both the moment of supreme cooperation and mingling between gods and mortals and the beginning of their separation. But if this impious voyage began the process that took the gods from our sight, it was also a display of virtuosity and daring that caused the nymphs to expose themselves in wonder to human eyes:

illa rudem cursu prima imbuit Amphitriten;
quae simul ac rostro ventosum proscidit aequor
tortaque remigio spumis incanduit [V] unda,
emersere freti candenti e gurgite vultus
aequoreae monstrum Nereides admirantes.
illa, atque [haud] alia, viderunt luce marinas
mortales oculis nudato corpore Nymphas
nutricum tenus exstantes e gurgite cano. (11–18)

The Argo first initiated the untried Amphitrite [a nymph] with
                                   sailing;
and as soon as it ploughed the windy sea with its beak
and the wave churned by the oars grew hot with foam,
from the white flood of the sea the Nereids
raised their faces, wondering at the miracle.
On that day, and no other, mortal eyes saw
the nymphs with bodies bared,
standing out from the hoary foam up to their breasts.

The lascivious detail "nutricum tenus" (up to the breasts) reminds us of the way that Ariadne is (or will be) observed in the passage I quoted above, and in fact the word nutrix , meaning "nurse," and here signifying "breast" by analogy with the Greek titthos ("breast," cognate with titthe , "nurse") calls to mind the "lactentis . . . papillas" ("suckling" or "full of milk") of Ariadne. I will return to the interesting neologism nutrix in a moment. What strikes one about this passage is that the expected relation between sea and sailors has been reversed: the Argo

"initiates" the sea and is itself described as a monstrum for the sea nymphs, who appear in familiar guise as objects of prurient interest and as potential mothers. Sailing is here a novel experience for the sea rather than the sailors. This paradox is sharpened by the word imbuit , used of the Argo's initiation of the sea; the primary meaning of this verb is "drench" or "wet," and so one might expect the sea to be its subject not its object.^[17] The reversal has been made possible by the feminization of the sea, which appears as the nymph Amphitrite, and by the sexualization of the act of sailing (proscidit, 12). Not only does the ship initiate the sea, it also seems to conjure up the nymphs, who appear as soon as the prow has cut the surface and the water has been twisted into foam by the oars (tortaque remigio spumis incanduit unda, 13). Quinn 1970 remarks: "torta suggests that the flecks of foam (spumis ) produced by the twisting action of Argo's oars are actual curls (and the oars, if we like, the curling tongs)" (303).^[18]

The voyage of the Argo is like the voyage of the poet into a myth that he brings to life, penetrated, like a woman's body, by his desire and conjured out of the froth of a language by the will to beauty (in this case, hairdressing). Athena builds the ship, or rather weaves it (pinea coniungens inflexae texta carinae, 10) as a curiously wrought artifact like the poetic style of the poem itself, causing the desirable figures of an imagined Golden Age to arise and reveal themselves, their bodies stripped (nudato corpore, 17) in bare wonderment. Virtuosity—the miraculous ease of Athena's fabricating—is the monstrum that attracts wonder, and in the figures of the nymphs Wonder itself appears to us, an hypostasized version of our own wonder in a form that projects its own desirability. The emerging of the nymphs from the water is also the emergence in the Latin language of the desirable world of Greek art, for the breasts of the nymphs are an allusion, a neologism appearing in the Latin language to give us a glimpse of Greek (see above).^[19]

Frustration and Compensation

The rustic guests come from the country bearing gifts and, on their faces, a smile that gives their joy away. Everything about these yokels is up-front:

dona ferunt prae se, declarant gaudia vultu. (34)

They bring gifts in their hands and declare their joy in their faces.

The house too declares its joy as it meets the gaze of the visitors:

tota domus gaudet regali splendida gaza. (46)

The whole house rejoices resplendent with royal treasure.

And yet the house and the guests cannot meet on equal terms, for the house beams in gold and silver; its spacious vistas do not so much open up for these people as recede:

ipsius at sedes, quacumque opulenta recessit
regia, fulgenti splendent auro atque argento. (43–44)

The king's own quarters shine with silver and gold
As far as the palace in its opulence receded.

Opulence recedes with the halls, for opulence is precisely what these viewers cannot have. What they can have is an image, but an image of desiring itself, of Ariadne watching Theseus recede. Paradoxically, they feed on this image:

quae postquam cupide spectando Thessala pubes
expleta est, sanctis coepit decedere divis. (267–68)

Once the youth of Thessaly was satisfied in its eager
gazing it began to make way for the sacred gods.

This conception of gazing as a fierce kind of desire that needs to be satisfied in an almost physical way, itself an idea that has the flavor of the heroic age (Od . 4.47), finds a tragic instantiation in the story of Aegeus, father of Theseus:

quandoquidem fortuna mea ac tua fervida virtus
eripit invito mihi te, cui languida nondum
lumina sunt gnati cara saturata figura . . . (218–20)

Because my fortune and your burning courage
take you from me against my will, although my tired eyes
have not yet sated themselves on the dear face of my son . . .

Aegeus has the departing Theseus' sails dyed (obscurata ferrugine Hibera, 227) to signify his grief. If he returns safe from the Minotaur, Theseus is to change his sails to white as soon as he catches sight of the hills of his homeland, so that his father may know the good news as soon as possible. But Theseus, sailing blithely away from the angry gaze of Ariadne to the eager gaze of his father watching from the citadel (241),

forgets to change the sails and causes his father's suicide. The dyed sails represent a loss within the household; conversely, the colored coverlet on the wedding couch of Peleus and Thetis draws attention to the hope of that house for future offspring. But whereas the coverlet offers visual satisfaction to the guests, for whom the opulence of the house recedes before their gaze, the visual interest of the stained sails only obstructs the purity of the gaze of father to son in which the former would saturate his eyes. It is the breaking of this gaze before saturation that is the beginning of the story told by the coverlet, on which the rustics feast their eyes. The gaze, at first frustrated or interrupted, then satisfied, thematizes in the fictional world the double relation of the poet and his readership to the world of myth.

Ariadne, Victim of Art

Watching Theseus recede, Ariadne delivers a tirade ending with a curse, which, we are told, Jupiter will bring about (200–201). The fulfillment of this curse is not represented on the tapestry, but it is described by Catullus: the father anxiously watching for his son's return compensates, in the experience of the reader, for the unreturned gaze of Ariadne after the deserter. The relation between the reciprocity and symmetry of the story as completed by the narrator and the unreciprocated gaze of Ariadne is established by the lines that round off the story of Theseus and Ariadne:

sic funesta domus ingressus tecta paterna
morte ferox Theseus, qualem Minoidi luctum
obtulerat mente immemori, talem ipse recepit.
quae tum prospectans cedentem maesta carinam
multiplices animo volvebat saucia curas. (246–50)

So entering the funereal house Theseus, wild
from the death of his father, was struck with grief
such as he had brought on Ariadne with his unmindfulness.
She, looking out sadly then at the receding ship,
turned many sorrows over in her wounded mind.

The neat reciprocity of the story as completed by the narrator is juxtaposed to the distraught figure of Ariadne as seen by the guests, a juxtaposition that draws attention to the different satisfactions of de-

scription and narrative. The viewer's pleasure is always to some extent at the expense of the figures in the picture, who are unconscious of the whole, narrative or compositional, into which they fit; it is a pleasure that depends on our oscillation between entering the particular scene and knowing the whole story. In this case, there are two kinds of resolutions of which the abandoned Ariadne is unaware, one narrative and the other compositional. Catullus provides the compositional, or visual, resolution to the scene of the abandoned Ariadne in the balancing tableau of the riot of Bacchus and his attendants, represented on another section of the tapestry (250–64). We are given two different kinds of completion to the yearning, frustrated gaze of Ariadne: on the one hand, Theseus sails off the tapestry into the world of narrative resolutions, where the unreciprocated gaze of Ariadne and the dissipated energy of her anger are gathered into an economy of poetic justice; on the other hand (at parte ex alia, 251), there is the Bacchic riot, drawn to Ariadne (te quaerens, 253) as she watches Theseus draw away from her, and balancing the desolation of the Ariadne tableau with its jostling gaiety. Through the figure of the helplessly immobile Ariadne, the poet's versatility and virtuosity are displayed while the reader's mobility is confirmed.

Curiously enough, the immobile Ariadne is actually compared to a Bacchant:

saxea ut effigies bacchantis, prospicit, eheu,
prospicit et magnis curarum fluctuat undis, (61–62)

Like a stone image of a Bacchant, she watches, alas,
she watches and seethes with the great waves of her sufferings,

Ariadne is Bacchic in the intensity of her gaze and the turmoil of her feelings, but she lacks the crucial element of any Bacchic figure, movement. Though gazing, Ariadne's only action, is in itself hardly Bacchic, the empathetic words of the observer—"she watches, alas, / she watches" (prospicit, eheu, / prospicit)—create the same feeling of trapped motion as does a sculpture of a Bacchant.^[20] These words are spoken not only of Ariadne but also of the figure of Ariadne in the tapestry, trapped by the medium itself in a moment of unbearable yearning; the pathos of the observer's words fuses the narrative level (Ariadne's longing) with the visual level (the figure's suspended animation), and so creates a mode of existence equivalent to that of Myth, in which Ariadne stands, the epitome of the abandoned woman, ready to be cited. Jenkyns appositely compares Keats' invocation to the lovers

forever about to kiss in the Ode on a Grecian Urn ; but it is not just the freezing of a transient moment that links these two poets at this point, for Catullus, like Keats, has realized a mode of experience for his Ariadne that corresponds to her artistic status (Ariadne the mythical exemplum ); the sympathy of the viewer (eheu) is sympathy for what "Ariadne" is within Myth and for how she is within Myth. Catullus' simile draws our attention not to how Ariadne looks but to how we feel looking at her representation, projecting back onto the level of narrative what we feel in looking at the representation. Because it is the viewer who endows the representation with the frustrated will to transcend its own medium, the figure of Ariadne presents the poet and his audience with a projection both of their impotence and of their power. Just as they long for a time they have missed and call upon its figures (c.64.24) across an unbridgeable gap, gazing at a represented world they can never enter, so Ariadne longs for a Theseus disappearing across a sea on whose fringes she must remain. But if the audience fears that it will become trapped in its frustrated and longing gaze at a lost world, then the antidote to this fear is to remind itself of its power to project life into, for instance, the statue of a Bacchant, to create the pathos of another's motion trapped in stone. The comparison of Ariadne to the statue of the Bacchant also reminds us that, as we can move freely in the space in which the Bacchant can't, so we can track to another part of Catullus' coverlet to find Bacchus and his thiasus swooping in to claim her (at parte ex alia, 251). Our position is rather like that of Venus in Horace's Europe ode, telling the abducted heroine to dry her eyes because she has a glorious future (c.1.27.66–76).

In the end, Ariadne is abandoned by Catullus, for he does not recount the story of how Bacchus came to console and deify her, although the god is sighted, coming from another part of the visual field across which the eye of the viewer passes. Leaving Ariadne behind, the viewer encounters a real Bacchic scene, dominated by noise, and we are reminded of the fact that noise is as inaudible in a tapestry as movement is imperceptible:

pars obscura cavis celebrabant orgia cistis,
orgia quae frustra cupiunt audire profani. (259–60)

Some thronged in worship of the sacred objects hidden in their
                                   baskets,
the rites that the uninitiated desire to hear in vain.

As with the immobility of the Bacchic statue and the figure of Ariadne, the silence of this noisy scene for those who view it is given a narrative

projection: the uninitiated are frustrated in their desire to hear the rites.^[21] In the context of the poem's distinction between a time when the gods were visible to human sight and a present when moral decline has caused the gods to avoid us, we are the profane, for whom the rich verbal music of Catullus' lines expresses our vain desire to hear:

plangebant aliae proceris tympana palmis,
aut tereti tenuis tinnitus aere ciebant;
multis raucisonos efflabant cornua bombos
barbaraque horribili stridebat tibia cantu. (261–64)

Others were banging tambourines with their long palms,
or stirring a faint ringing from the rounded bronze;
many blasted a rough booming from their horns
and the barbarous pipe screeched an uncouth melody.

The inconsolable and immobile Ariadne, at the center of all of the transitions that carry the spectator smoothly over the surface of the poem, is herself, though she does not know it, about to pass from one man to another. And this point is crucial to the significance of the lamenting Ariadne—a figure of great importance in Western art, music, and literature—for the passage of Ariadne from one man to the other becomes the myth of the comforts and compensations of art.^[22] Through her abandoned performance of her abandonment, Ariadne is elevated to the status of diva by the appreciative Bacchus; her lament, expressing the emptiness of (Theseus') words and rhetoric, becomes a display of their power. To begin with, this lament expresses the despair and disillusionment of one who has been deceived by false promises of bliss:

at non haec quondam blanda promissa dedisti
voce mihi, non haec miserae sperare iubebas
sed coniubia laeta, sed optatos hymenaeos,
quae cuncta aerii discerpunt irrita venti.
nunc iam nulla viro iuranti femina credat,
nulla viri speret sermones esse fideles;
quis dum aliquid cupiens animus praegestit apisci
nil metuunt iurare, nihil promittere parcunt:
sed simul ac cupidae mentis satiata libido est,
dicta nihil metuere, nihil periuria curant. (139–48)

But these were not the promises you once gave me
with flattering voice, nor this what you told me to hope for
but a happy marriage, the wedding that I desired,
all of which the airy winds tear into nothing.

from now on let no woman believe the oath of a man,
let no woman hope that the protestations of a man are reliable;
when their lustful mind craves to get something
they have no fear to swear or promise anything:
but as soon as the desire of their lustful mind is satisfied,
they have no fear of what they have said, they care nothing for
                                   perjury.

Ariadne has experienced the emptiness of rhetoric (blanda . . . voce, 139–40); she has fallen into the gap opened up within desire by the male orgasm (145–48), and the discontinuity that she has experienced is final, the emptiness of her environment complete. She laments, but she knows that words are futile in the deserted and unresponsive nature that reflects her abandonment (164–66, 184–87). And yet Ariadne's lament is the great set-piece of rhetoric, whose elaboration is a function of the extremity of her situation; it is the aria of Ariadne (one of the founding figures of opera) that makes her a diva when the pleasure-loving god Bacchus comes looking for her (c.64.253), seduced by her lament. Paradoxically, this lament over the emptiness of words and the discontinuity of human pleasure is a celebration of rhetoric that effects Ariadne's smooth transition from one lover to another. In her lament, Ariadne dramatizes her situation from every angle, moving around this situation with the same thoroughness as the eye of the observer that records her clothes slipping from her body in lines 63–67. The lament is introduced by a passage that frames it with a variety of shots of Ariadne against different backdrops, lingering over the tone of her voice, her facial aspect, her clothes, and what they reveal:

saepe illam perhibent ardenti corde furentem
clarisonas imo fudisse e pectore voces,
ac tum praeruptos tristem conscendere montes,
unde aciem [in] pelagi vastos protenderet aestus
tum tremuli salis adversas procurrere in undas
mollia nudatae tollentem tegmina surae,
atque haec extremis maestam dixisse querellis,
frigidulos udo singultus ore cientem. (124–31)

They say that often in the fury of her burning mind
she—poured out shrill laments from the depths of her heart
and then in her sorrow she scaled steep mountains
from—which—she—could—cast—her—gaze—over—the—sea's expanses;
then she ran into the incoming waves of the restless sea,
raising the soft folds of her dress and baring her thigh,

and grieving she said these things in her last lament,
forcing cold little sobs from her tearful face.

Ariadne then begins her lament by turning her despair into melody:

sicine me patriis avectam, perfide, ab aris
perfide, deserto liquisti in litore, Theseu?
sicine discedens neglecto numine divum
immemor a! devota domum periuria portas?' (132–35)

Have you left me thus, faithless man, abducted from my father's altars
faithless Theseus, have you left me on the deserted shore?
Thus do you leave me, disregarding the power of the gods,
ah heedless, and take home your accursed perjury?'

There is something similar about these two passages, the one primarily visual, the other auditory. In the introductory passage, a system of parallels and contrasts plays across the boundary between human and natural: "the depths of her heart" from which Ariadne pours her voice contrasts with the "steep mountains" that she climbs; similarly, the tremulous water into which she runs is cognate with the cold sobs that come from her wet mouth. The beginning of the lament, an intricate melodic theme and variation, catches the narrative completion of Theseus' story in the melody of Ariadne's abandonment, for Theseus heedlessly bringing home his perjury is presented as a melodic variation of his abandonment of Ariadne (sicine . . . sicine . . .?). These effects contradict the ruptures that provoke Ariadne's lament, both the rupture between Ariadne and her deserted environment and that between Theseus and herself; these are effects that are quite common in literature, but in this context they draw attention to the fact that Ariadne exists in a work of art, just like the tapestry on which the wedding guests see her figure, and that in a work of art there are no discontinuities. The two passages weave a seamless texture out of the rhetoric that expresses Ariadne's abandonment and isolation. Perhaps the most virtuosic element of Catullus' poem is its dazzling and unpredictable handling of transitions, between the various levels of the poem, between one story and another, and between the senses addressed; this element of Catullus' art suggests an affinity with the illusionistic wall painting of the contemporary second style.

Ariadne is both fictional figure and artist; her voice is heard both as lament and as poetry. Paradoxically, Ariadne's lament establishes a connection between the experience of extreme rupture and discontinuity,

dramatized by the intensity of her rhetoric, and the smooth transitions allowed by the poetic medium.^[23] In his Europe ode (c. 1. 27), a poem that features the distress of another abandoned woman from myth, Horace goes further than Catullus and makes overt irony of his heroine's distress: Europe's lament culminates in a prayer for death; the listening Venus smiles and, when she has enjoyed herself enough (ubi lusit satis, 69), tells Europe that she is the wife of Jupiter and should learn to enjoy her good fortune, for she will give her name to part of the world (c. 1. 27. 66–76). "Ubi lusit satis": Venus cuts Europe off and returns her to the mythological toybox from which the poet took her; lusit reminds us that it's all a harmless bit of mythology, of poetical lusus , at the same time that it endows Europe with pathos as the object of Venus' trifling (lusus). Horace's turn to geography, which is the presence of myth for those who are belated, moves—like Catullus' "at parte ex alia" (251)—from the drama of an event to the picturesque tableau of myth laid out as a kind of map. This double perspective on the fable, as both drama (which we may wake into life or reenact) and component of "mythology" (a list of resonant names, a series of picturesque tableaux, a storehouse of exotic marvels) can be referred to the opening of Catullus' poem. There the age of heroes is both a time that the poet calls upon across a rift in history and a box of marvels and decorations that is his to open. It is this kind of double seeing, inherent in the status of myth, and not immaturity on the poet's part, that accounts for the combination of pathos and preciosity in the poem.

The Power of the Spectator

The double seeing that I have been describing is an effect that springs from, and accentuates, the experience of the spectator who can shift his or her relation to the spectacle at will. When the wedding guests leave, making way for the gods, Catullus lavishes a long, gorgeous, and stunningly virtuosic simile on the dispersal of the guests;

hic, qualis flatu placidum mare matutino
horrificans Zephyrus proclivas incitat undas,
Aurora exoriente vagi sub limine Solis,
quae tarde primum clementi flamine pulsae
procedunt leviterque sonant plangore cachinni,
post vento crescente magis magis increbescunt,

purpureaque procul nantes ab luce refulgent:
sic tum vestibuli linquentes regia tecta
ad se quisque vago passim pede discedebant. (269–77)

Then, as the West Wind, roughening the calm sea
with a morning breeze hurries the tumbling waves,
when Dawn rises at the threshold of the wandering sun,
and the waves, pushed by the gentle breeze, slowly
advance and their laughter sounds as they break lightly,
and then as the wind gets up they grow bigger and bigger,
and swimming far off they gleam with crimson:
so the guests, leaving the royal forecourt, dispersed
in all directions to their several homes with wandering feet.

The content of this simile inverts the scene of Ariadne on the shore on which the guests had been feasting their eyes: now the wave brings to shore a bounty of sounds and images rather than bearing away an t object of desire, and morning begins with a crescendo, not a sudden awareness of loss. But all this is to describe the dispersal of the guests, and the careful marshalling of the crescendo toward a climax of light and sound is then applied to the random scattering of the crowds.^[24] Further, the comparandum is actually part of the comparatum , for the manner in which the crowd disperses homeward does not echo anything in the description of the incoming waves, rather it completes that description, with the division of a mass into individual streams (now of people) disappearing up the shore. The distinction implied by the qualis . . . talis structure is dissolved by this continuity overlaid on the comparison. Above all, the application of the simile contradicts our expectations: after being told that the guests gave place to the gods, and then being launched into a set-piece simile beginning "Then, as . . .," we naturally suppose that what is being described is the arrival of the gods. Not only are we disappointed but we experience the arrival of the gods as an anticlimax after this magnificent picture of movement.

Like the opulent recession of the house, this voluptuous retiring of the guests before the arrival of the gods expresses the poignant pleasures of an age that compensates for its belatedness, in relation both to the heroic age and to Greek literature, with a celebration of its own representational powers. The simile, like the description of Ariadne's seminakedness, overlays a sensuous experience on action that it in some sense contradicts. Catullus' emphasis here on the retiring of the guests before the gods' arrival is odd in view of the fact that he glorifies the heroic age as the time when gods and humans mingled. According to the moral-

izing school of interpretation, Catullus is implying that there never really was an heroic age, or that it was already debased.^[25] But perhaps, by diverting the poetic effect we would expect for the arrival of the gods to the glorious retiring of the guests, Catullus makes of the very distance between humans and gods an aesthetic experience characteristic of those who nostalgically conjure up the world of myth.

A more striking example of the interference between the action narrated and the vision of the spectator is the extraordinary overlaying of gazes in the following passage, where Ariadne falls in love with Theseus at first sight:

hunc simul ac cupido conspexit lumine virgo
regia, quam suavis exspirans castus odores
lectulus in molli complexu matris alebat,
quales Eurotae praecingunt flumina myrtus
aurave distinctos educit verna colores,
non prius ex illo flagrantia declinavit
lumina, quam cuncto concepit corpore flammam
funditus atque imis exarsit tota medullis. (86–93)

Immediately the royal girl caught sight of him with
longing look (the girl whom a chaste bed redolent with sweet odors
nurtured in the soft embrace of her mother,
as the myrtles fringe the banks of the Eurotas
or the spring breeze brings out various colors),
she did not turn her burning eyes from him
before she caught the flame throughout her body
to the depths, and her inmost marrow was all ablaze.

The passionate gaze of Ariadne at Theseus is here suspended as we linger over the virginal bed of Ariadne, feeding our senses unhurriedly while she catches on fire. Ariadne seems to project with the intensity of her gaze (cupido . . . lumine, flagrantia . . . lumina) the fire that will return from Theseus to inflame her; we are reminded of certain ancient theories of vision according to which, as Konstan explains, "the eye is a kind of lantern emitting a current of fire, which transmits the motion of any illuminated object in its path back through the body and into the soul, and this results in visual sensation."^[26] Konstan points out that Catullus has substituted this natural description, based on the ancient theory of the physics of the gaze, for Apollonius' arrow of Cupid (Arg. 3.286–88). But the agency of Ariadne is suspended as we savor the breathing of her bed and the wafting of scents, emanations quite different from the current of fire that streams from her gaze. The description shifts

its focus from scent, which cannot be represented in a picture any more than in a poem, to sight, via the grammatical ellipsis "odores . . . quales myrtus," and this introduces the variegated colors of spring in the following line. This slippage, and the dissolve from one sense to another, is the play of the spectator's fantasy in the suspension of Ariadne's fierce gaze. The scents that in this context are the virginal passivity of Ariadne allow the fantasizing, or poetical, transition from mother's embrace to the analogically containing fringe of myrtles and on to the aura ("breeze" and also "fragrance") that picks out (educit, 90) the various colors of the spring flowers. Educit , with its connotations of child-rearing, suggests an analogy between the colors of the flowers picked out by the breeze and the emerging charms of the nubile Ariadne. In the suspension of the narrative at Ariadne's desiring gaze, which marks her emergence into a potentially assertive womanhood, the poem plays back a soft-focus, slow-motion scene of ariadne in her virginal bed. The power of the viewer is asserted over the agency of the main fictional character, and the flow of light, or fire, passing between the mythical figures is interrupted by the breeze that figures the presence of the viewer, empowered to "pick out" the budding charms of the young Ariadne.

Seeing the Fates

The poem ends, apart from a short moralizing coda, with the song of the Fates at the wedding feast of Peleus and Thetis. This song is very puzzling, for it focuses on the son who will be born to the couple, and specifically on his "outstanding merits and famous exploits" (egregias virtutes claraque facta, 348), which consist in the massive slaughter he inflicts at Troy. That Achilles' achievements should be attested by the mourning of mothers (349) is disturbing enough at a wedding, but the fact that the career of Achilles, as told by the Fates, culminates in the cruel sacrifice of the virgin Polyxena at his grave (362–70) is even less appropriate to the occasion. In other versions of this wedding, it is Apollo or the Muses who sing, and it is clear that Catullus has gone out of his way to produce this incongruous effect. This passage is crucial for those who interpret the poem as an ironic reflection on the Golden Age,^[27] and it is similar in effect to the story of Theseus and Ariadne, which also casts an ironic light on the virtues of the heroic age. Certainly, the song is strange, and its strangeness, I think, is due to the disturbing physicality

of this combination of epithalamium and prophetic chant. Beginning with a voluptuous description of the wedding night (328–32), the song proceeds, through the slaughter by Achilles that chokes the Scamander with corpses, to the sacrifice of Polyxena, visualized in very physical terms (362–70). But Catullus' own epithalamia remind us that the wedding, an occasion that precedes the spilling of blood, is not so far removed from the world of war.^[28]

As seers, the Fates are able to truncate time, juxtaposing scenes temporally distant from each other and widely different in character. But as a spectacle, they are themselves subjected by the poet to the same kind of kaleidoscopic seeing. The unsettling physicality of this final section of the poem begins with the very vivid description of the Fates themselves. As Jenkyns 1982, 141, points out, the application to old women of language that more commonly suggests youth and beauty is a feature of this rather detailed description:

cum interea infirmo quatientes corpora motu
veridicos Parcae coeperunt edere cantus.
his corpus tremulum complectens undique vestis
candida purpurea talos incinxerat ora,
at roseae niveo residebant vertice vittae,
aeternumque manus carpebant rite laborem. (305–10)

Meanwhile shaking their bodies with a tremulous motion
the Fates began to give voice to their soothsaying songs.
A white dress hugging all of their shaking bodies
covered their ankles with a purple border,
and pink bands rested on their snow-white heads,
and their hands duly pursued their endless task of spinning.

Jenkyns draws attention to the tightness of the robes on these aged bodies and to the use of red and white, characteristic of descriptions of a girl's complexion. I would go further and argue that the Fates, singing and shaking their limbs, are here grotesquely reminiscent of the dancing girls who put on erotic shows at the banquets of rich nobles.^[29] The context is right, for the Fates are introduced immediately after the gods have sat down before the lavish banquet (303–4).^[30] But as well as singing and dancing, these old women are working, and there now follow ten lines containing a detailed description of the eternal labor (310) of spinning. The Fates, who can see everything, are themselves the object of a way of seeing that mixes what would otherwise be separated in time or place: they are young and old; dancing and working (singing might

appropriately accompany both activities); sexy and repulsive; goddesses and entertainers; dancing girls and spinning Roman matrons. What we experience here is the uncanny quality of the old woman, who is both fascinating and disturbing to the Romans, as is clear from the gloating, almost hysterical quality of much of the vetulaskoptik (invective against old women) so common in Roman literature.^[31] Catullus' description of the Fates exemplifies this attitude to the old woman as a paradoxical, uncanny sight.

If the Fates themselves have a sensuality that anticipates the wedding night of which they sing, so does their work:

atque ita decerpens aequabat semper opus dens
laneaque aridulis haerebant morsa labellis,
quae prius in levi fuerant extantia filo:
ante pedes autem candentis mollia lanae
vellera virgati custodibant calathisci. (315–19)

and all the time the tooth cleaned and smoothed the work
and bitten tufts of wool stuck to the dry lips,
tufts that before had protruded from the smooth thread:
but at their feet soft fleeces of white wool
were held in wicker baskets.

The soft wool bitten off by the monosyllabic tooth and still hanging on the dry lips, the soft white wool in the baskets woven from twigs—these tactile contrasts are brought to mind when the Fates sing of the coming night:

adveniet fausto cum sidere coniunx,
quae tibi flexanimo mentem perfundat amore
languidulosque paret tecum coniungere somnos,
levia substernens robusto brachia collo. (329–332)

the spouse will come, with the lucky star,
to drench your mind with a love that sways the soul,
ready to join her langorous slumbers with yours,
stretching her smooth arms beneath your strong neck.

Both the diminutive form and the sound of languidulos (langorous) recall "laneaque aridulis" (316), and the whole of line 316, with its bites and its lips, acquires a curious eroticism from the association. The postcoital sleep of the newlyweds is described in terms of the same hard/soft contrast that dominates the lines from the spinning passage. As with Ariadne, then, the "seeing of" the Fates, those uncanny and

paradoxical figures, by others is overlaid on the subjective "seeing of" the Fates, namely, their vision of erotic happiness and slaughter.

The aging female body is visualized again in the song of the Fates celebrating the future exploits of Achilles:

illius egregias virtutes claraque facta
saepe fatebuntur gnatorum in funere matres,
cum incultum cano solvent a vertice crinem,
putridaque infirmis variabunt pectora palmis. (348–51)

his outstanding virtues and famous deeds
will often be confessed by mothers at their sons' funerals,
when they loose their unkempt hair from their heads,
and bruise their crumbling breasts with infirm hands.

Here the standard emblem of mourning, women beating their breasts, is visualized in a most disturbing fashion: the breasts are decaying, possibly crumbling, and the hands are weak or shaking. The topos usually cashes in on the visual, erotic potential of such a scene by describing the disfiguring of beautiful breasts, which must therefore be visualized in their pristine nakedness.^[32] Here the reverse is the case, for the verb used to convey the bruising is one of aesthetic enhancement, the same verb that is used to describe the tapestry (priscis hominum variata figuris, "variegated with the ancient figures of men," 50).^[33] In fact, the breasts of the mothers are the medium in which the deeds of Achilles are recorded, deeds acknowledged (fatebuntur, 349) by the acts of mourning. This puts the breasts of the bereaved mothers in the same category as the tapestry, which also proclaims the prowess of heroes (c.64.51), and the first thing that strikes the eye on the tapestry is the body of Ariadne, whose nakedness is the sign of Theseus' desertion. So from the half-naked bodies of the nymphs that mark the wonder of the first sea voyage to the sacrifice of Polyxena in honor of the dead Achilles, it is the woman's body on which the exploits of the heroes are registered and whose vulnerability compensates the viewer's debilitating longing for what has passed.

The sacrifice of Polyxena with which the song of the Fates ends is itself a kind of wedding, for the sacrificed virgin was to be the bride of Achilles in the underworld, but it is not only with the wedding and its erotic violence that this sacrifice is associated; compare

denique testis erit morti quoque reddita praeda,
cum teres excelso coacervatum aggere bustum
excipiet niveos perculsae virginis artus. (362–64)

finally the booty rendered even to his corpse will witness [his virtues]
when the rounded mound piled with a high earthwork
will receive the white limbs of the slaughtered virgin.

to

qui [sc. divi] postquam niveis flexerunt sedibus artus
large multiplici constructae sunt dape mensae. (303–4)

after the gods had relaxed (folded) their limbs on the white seats
the tables were built up generously with many courses.

The architectural generosity of the feast spread for the gods is a mark of honor that is echoed by the similarly piled-up tomb of Achilles, and the limbs of the gods relaxed on the white chairs are grotesquely brought to mind by the white limbs of the struck Polyxena, whose headless body falls as her knees crumble (summisso poplite, 370; compare 'flexerunt artus,' 303). The relaxation of the gods on their chairs is also associated, via the echo of flexerunt in flexanimo (330), with the postcoital relaxation of the wedding couple. Of the wedding song of the Fates, one might truly say "all things speakable and unspeakable were confused," which is Catullus' indictment of his own godforsaken age (omnia fanda nefanda . . . permixta, 405). What is so disturbing, and at the same time strangely voluptuous, about the Fates and their song is the simultaneity of vision, the mingling of modalities, the dissolution of boundaries and of temporal succession. In the final moralizing tirade, it is the breakdown of succession in the family, with the generations losing their proper relations (400–405), that marks our own impious age. But the mode of seeing is quite different; the rhetoric of moral indignation gives us a firm perspective on the mingling, a mingling that is itself credited with causing a clear periodization of history. The lament for the rupture in our history that retired the gods from intercourse with humans provides a relief from the intensity and simultaneity of the vision of the Fates; it leads us out of the kaleidoscopic vision and blurred physicality of the preceding section, restoring our focus and allowing the magical world that the poem has conjured up to fade into the distance.

I have not so far addressed the question, much disputed in the criticism, of Catullus' attitude to the age of heroes. This question has always been cast in moral terms: does Catullus believe in a more virtuous past, or does he in fact describe the heroic age as already containing the seeds—even displaying the full flower—of the moral decadence of his own time? To what extent is the mythical part of the poem a reflection

of the moral problems of contemporary Rome? By now it should be clear that I do not believe that Catullus casts the relation between the contemporary world and the world of myth in moral terms; the mythical world is a fantasy world that engages the reader's desire to visualize, and the reader is far too invested in the contemporary world's power to represent and manipulate the scenes of myth to be in a position to judge its relation to his or her own world in moral terms. The issue that Catullus engages for the spectator/reader is one of the representative adequacy of contemporary art when confronted with the potentially debilitating fact of its belatedness.

I have suggested that the moralistic periodization with which the poem ends leads us out of the phantasmagoric seeing of the song of the Fates. Bryson 1990 has provided a helpful model for understanding the ideology of representation in Campanian painting, a model that, not surprisingly, works very well for this poem:

Wealth and representation function here as cognate terms, so that to adorn the chamber with xenia and trompe I'oeil is to display not only one's wealth but the very principle of that wealth: the outstripping of necessity and limitation. But visual ideology organises this excess of wealth and of representation by creating visual structures that permit the return from even remote regions of unreality and simulation, back to the limits of the given world: the movement is not one of headlong flight from the real, as with Trimalchio, but of carefully graduated transitions and liaisons between reality and representation (52).

The luxuriousness of Catullus' poem, its virtuosity, its imitation of visual art, its play with frames and with different modes of representation, all suggest that it is celebrating the same kind of representational power as the wall paintings. The mythical world, associated here with a great technological feat (sailing), is the object of a visual longing that is richly satisfied by the representational virtuosity of the poem, at the same time as the poem thematizes the desiring gaze in its narrative, producing a complex interplay between viewer and viewed, between the act of representation and the action represented. The matter of Catullus' epyllion is Greek myth, so the Roman reader is doubly removed from the world of heroes, both temporally and culturally; and yet counterpointing this removal is the position of the conquering Roman as the confident consumer and appropriator of Greek culture.^[34] If this poem reflects its context, it does so not so much through the issues of morality and the breakdown of social order as through the peculiar character of Roman

cultural consumption. Again, Bryson has relevant words about Campanian xenia (still life):

There seems no reason to doubt that the Campanian xenia sincerely invoke the earlier, still religious, Greek ethos of hospitality; but they then move in to explore the Roman aesthetic of secondariness, belatedness and excess in relation to Greek culture and art. They are not just pictures of food, but Roman pictures of Greek pictures of food; not just representation, but representation raised to a higher power, where Greek art is absorbed into Roman patterns of luxury consumption. In this doubling or multiplying of mimetic distance, the xenia participate in the lavishness of the Roman economy; they provide images of consumption itself as it moves in the Roman world between the poles of simple need and exuberant—delirious—excess (53).

By casting this story from Greek mythology in terms of gazing, longing, and appetite, Catullus presents us with a world that is the object both of alienated longing and of confident indulgence; in this double relation he displays his true Roman genius.