ing did not intrigue the Greeks very much.^53 Yet already in Ennius’s adaptation of
the prologue to Euripides’ Medeathere is a huge emphasis on the Argo’s primacy.
Euripides has no word of “first” or “beginning” when he has his nurse wish that
the Argo had never sailed, whereas in Ennius pleonastic language piles up as he
describes the construction of the ship: neue inde nauis inchoandi exordium/cepisset:
“if only from that point the ship had not taken the first step of beginning” (Medea
Exul,fr. 1.3 – 4).^54 We cannot be sure that Ennius spoke specifically of the Argo as
the first ship ever to sail, but certainly when we reach Catullus 64, a key text for
this subject and this chapter, the firstness of the Argo is established and proclaimed
early on: illa rudem cursu prima imbuit Amphitreten(“That ship firstimbued inex-
perienced Amphitrite with her course,” 11).^55
One of the reasons why the first ship is such an attractive idea is precisely that
it elides all of Hesiod ’s gradations into one moment of split. The gradualist view
is very widespread — we have observed it in Dicaearchus, Varro, and Tacitus, and
Roman poets can themselves at times exploit the concept of a series of successive
stages of decline.^56 Regularly, however, the poets focus on a single transition from
Gold to Iron, with all the other metals eclipsed.^57 The conception of the first ship
enables them to represent this single transition as instantaneous — when a tree,
grown in the earth, is cut down by iron and first hits the water to carry human
beings to another piece of earth, that is an irrevocable moment of rupture, one that
launches humans into a new phase of civilization.^58 The first cutting of the earth by
a plow does not have the same degree of dramatic impact, even though plowing
and sailing are regularly conflated, as joint harbingers of the Iron Age: when
Catullus’s Argo plowsthe windy plain with her beak (quae simul ac rostro uentosum
proscidit aequor,12), the verb used does not denote simply “to plow,” but “to plow
unbroken or fallow land.”^59 The end of the Golden Age, then, not only violates old
boundaries as the ship sails from one piece of land to another, but also creates new
ones, by demarcating land in the form of farming, and by splitting gods and
humans, who had mixed in each other’s company before.
Catullus’s interest in the instantaneous nature of the rupture is such that the
beginning of the poem introduces a novel stress on the traditional concept of the
Fall marking an end to the mingling of gods and humans. Men had never seen sea
nymphs before, says Catullus, and the instant they did, it was the last instant: illa
atque haud alia uiderunt luce marinas/mortales oculis... Nymphas(“On that day
and on no other mortals saw marine nymphs with their eyes,” 16).^60 Beginning and
end moments are compressed into one, with Catullus acknowledging the fact that
the transition from Gold to Iron cannot be exclusively isolated as either a begin-
An Instant of Rupture. 119