poem's languorous beauty. 'As soon as the ship ploughed the windy plain with her beak and churned by
the oars the wave whitened with spume, there emerged strange faces from the shining deep, the Nereids
of Ocean marvelling at the apparition. In that and no other dawn mortals saw with their own eyes
nymphs with bared bodies protruding to their breasts from the white deep' (64.12 ff.). Such was the first
encounter of the mortal Argonaut Peleus with the divine sea-nymph Thetis, and the rest of the poem
depicts the celebration of their wedding. Pindar says that Peleus then achieved the highest happiness
known to mortals, but even he was doomed to sorrow: the child of the marriage, Achilles, was to die
young at Troy. Catullus' poem cannot be understood unless we remember both the supreme felicity of
the occasion and the implicit undercurrent of sadness.
After recording the arrival of the guests, Catullus turns to the splendours of the scene, in particular a
tapestry on the bed that depicted the story of Theseus and Ariadne (5off.). First we see a windswept
heroine on the shore of Naxos as she gazes out to sea at her departing lover. Then a flashback describes
how she had first met Theseus and how he had slain the Minotaur. Then we return to Naxos and hear an
emotional soliloquy from Ariadne on her lover's forgetfulness. Next comes a projection of Theseus'
return to Athens: he had forgotten to signal his victory by hoisting white sails, an arrangement
expounded in another flashback, so his father Aegeus jumped over a cliff. Then back to Naxos again,
where Bacchus approaches Ariadne with his outlandish revellers. The happy ending is hinted at rather
than stated: every literate person knew that the god would marry the heroine and translate her to the sky.
The presentation of this digression illustrates important characteristics of the Neoteric poets and their
Hellenistic predecessors. The dislocations of chronological order show a lack of interest in story-telling
for its own sake: organic unity of action now matters less than the effects of diversity and surprise, and
the aesthetic balance of the composition as a whole. The significant moments are caught in a series of
colourful tableaux which suggest the influence of a pictorial art that was romantic in conception and
ultra-realistic in execution. The love interest is neither Homeric nor traditionally Roman but derives
from the psychologizing of some Hellenistic poets, especially Apollonius in his Argonautica: so too the
attempt of a male-dominated world to enter into a rejected woman's feelings, an approach that went back
to the Medea of Euripides and was to influence Virgil's portrayal of Dido. The sheer length of the
episode may seem curious (it takes up more than half the piece), but such digressions were regular in
poems of this type. Nor need we speak of irrelevance unless we apply inappropriate criteria: in ancient
poetry descriptions of works of art often include elements that foreshadow something in the main action,
and Ariadne's change from misery to happiness, while it reverses the movement of the poem as a whole,
underlines the vicissitudes of human experience.
The action resumes with the departure of the wedding guests, which is described in a simile which no
earlier Roman poet could have written:
hic, qualis flatu placidum mare matutino
horrificans Zephyrus procliuas incitat undas,
Aurora exoriente, uagi sub limina Solis,
quae tarde primum dementi flamine pulsae
procedunt, leuiterque sonant plangore cachinni,