CATULLUS’S CHRONOLOGICAL ANOMIE
In his third OdeHorace does not name the first man to sail, the primusof line 12,
or give the name of his ship. As we have seen, when Romans did name the first ship
it was the Argo, and we may now return to Catullus’s launching of the Argo at the
beginning of poem 64.^85 The inherently transgressive nature of Catullus’s ship’s
invasion of the sea is wonderfully captured in line 15, when the sea nymphs come
up from the water to look at it, monstrum... admirantes,“in astonishment at the
monstrosity.” Here the “monstrosity” feels misapplied, for the nymphs ought to
be the extraordinary thing rather than the ship, but on this day offirst sailing it is
the ship that is the freakish one, the unnatural portent.^86 For this is the moment of
rupture when the technology and ingenuity of human civilization first definitively
smash the boundaries of nature ordained by God, and in this poem other bound-
aries go down as a consequence — the boundary between land and sea, since Thetis
is a sea creature and Peleus is a human; the boundary between Greek and barbar-
ian, since the captain of the Argo is going to marry Medea.^87
The poem presents itself as a marriage poem, but it is really a divorce poem, and
not just with Theseus and Ariadne on the tapestry.^88 The marriage of Peleus and
Thetis, which provides such narrative connection as the poem bothers to have, is
indeed a very famous marriage, but, just as with Jason and Medea, it is the divorce
of Peleus and Thetis that makes their name.^89 From the start their union is a union
of irreconcilables, as Catullus hints in line 20, Thetis humanos non despexit
hymenaeos,“Thetis did not look down on marriage with a human.” In Latin the
word humanus,“human,” was thought to come from humus,“earth,” since that is
where humans are from, and where they are buried.^90 The marriage of the sea
nymph with this earth creature is anomalous, as is the presence of the earth crea-
ture out of his element, on the sea. Their wedding culminates with an epithala-
mium (323 – 81), and in the light of what we know is going to happen to this cou-
ple we are reminded of what a strange genre the epithalamium is, since any
wedding is an act of hope, a kind of unilateral “optimistic reading” in the face of
the knowledge that even long and happy marriages are not a continuation of the
wedding mood. It is fitting that the poem should begin with the meeting of two
individuals who are doomed to a very long estrangement, since estrangement is at
the core of the myth of the Fall.
With all these violated boundaries the poem creates an atmosphere of anomie,
of chaotic instability.^91 In accordance with this atmosphere, one of the categories
put under intense pressure in the poem is the category of time. The poem destabi-
Catullus’s Chronological Anomie. 123