(“When at the appointed time the longed-for lights/day arrived,” 31). Commenta-
tors tell us that finito tempore= definito temporeaccording to the simplex pro com-
positousage, meaning “to mark offa time so as to make an appointment,” and finire
is certainly used in this way.^101 But the verb carries also its primary meaning of
establishing a limit or end, so that the phrase also means “when the time was
ended” and marks the end of a time frame. In this clause, optatae finito tempore(31)
occupies exactly the same position in the line as the phrase used ten lines before to
describe the time of the heroes, optato saeclorum tempore(22). Catullus here puts
his finger on one of the evasions of historical nostalgia, by which people look back
enviously to a former glamorous time, forgetting that for the people in that former
time it was nothing but the present, with its own glamorous past and its own poten-
tially glamorous future. Catullus’s readers are looking back with excessive desire
at the time of Peleus when an era ended, but in his own time Peleus was looking
forward with desire to another kind of end of time, the end of his time of waiting.
Nor is Peleus the only one in the poem with a time ’s end confronting him. Ariadne
describes Theseus’s moment of crisis in the labyrinth as his “last time,” as it poten-
tially was (supremo tempore,151). Her own crisis of abandonment on the beach is
her “edge of time” (extremo tempore,169), immediately followed in her thoughts
by that “first time” when Theseus came to Crete, tempore primo(171); her fantasy
of her death closes with the image of her “last hour” (postrema... hora,191).
Instead of delivering on its apparent initial promise of recovering the clear day
on which everything irretrievably changed, the poem keeps showing a range of
different demarcations, different beginning and ending moments, in a welter of
irretrievably inconsistent chronologies. A number of crucial demarcations are in
play — the sailing of the Argo, the rule of the first empire of the sea under Minos,
Prometheus the culture hero.^102 Finally, the war of Troy becomes the poem’s cli-
mactic demarcation moment, with the savagery of the Trojan War evoked by the
song of the Parcae (343 – 70), as the age of heroes degenerates into wholesale mun-
dane carnage, continuous with our own depravities. The poem leaves us with the
problem of wondering not just “What was that time of partition like?” but also
“When was that time?” The urge to chart a definitive rupture in the human status,
an entry into the current condition, so alluring in its appeal, finally comes to be
seen as a mirage. None of the apparently pivotal moments can be definitively fixed;
it proves harder and harder to isolate a moment, or even an epoch, when condi-
tions turned.^103 Wherever he tries to make the cut, Catullus finds himself, as an au-
thor, enmeshed in time schemes that show humans to be always already enmeshed
in time schemes, inextricably entangled in webs of time. At the end of the poem he
- Myth into History II: Ages of Gold and Iron