lizes chronologies in such a systematic way that its chronological inconsistencies
have become notorious.^92 There are two main crises of mythical chronology acti-
vated by Catullus.
First, Catullus shows us Peleus and Thetis falling in love on the first day of the
Argo’s voyage, when according to the usual story Peleus and Thetis were already
married — and already divorced — before the Argo sailed.^93 This is the point of
Catullus’s anaphora oftumearly on in the poem, repeated at the beginning of three
consecutive lines (19 – 21): it was then, then, thenthat they fell in love, not earlier,
as in the usual version. It matters very much to Catullus that the sailing of the Argo
and the meeting of Peleus and Thetis should be simultaneous, whatever the ac-
cepted chronology. He wants the sailing of the first ship and the meeting of the
earth creature and the sea creature to happen at one and the same time. These join-
ings of opposites, and their consequences, are so momentous that he yokes them
together, smashing at once as many boundaries as he can.
The second problem — a more complicated one — arises from the fact that the
story of Ariadne and Theseus on the coverlet, together with the whole chronology
of the Theseus myth, is incompatible with the concept of the Argo as the first ship.
If Peleus is one of the crew on the first ship, how can one of his wedding presents
be a tapestry showing an earlier story about a famous sea voyage, with Theseus
sailing to Crete, picking up Ariadne, and leaving her behind on the island of Naxos
as he sails back home to Athens? Further, it is clear that Catullus alludes promi-
nently to the usual version of the Theseus myth, especially the one to be found in
Callimachus’s Hecale,according to which Theseus did not go to Athens and meet
his father and then go to Crete until quite a few years afterthe return of the Argo
from its maiden voyage.^94 After Medea comes to Greece with Jason on the Argo,
according to this usual story, she kills her children and then runs away from
Corinth to Athens, where she marries King Aegeus, father of Theseus; she then
tries to trick Aegeus into killing Theseus when he turns up from Troezen as a
teenager to claim his inheritance. So if Theseus was a child in Troezen and had not
even met his father when the Argo sailed to get Medea in the first place, how could
he have sailed to Crete before the Argo sailed?
Catullus carefully highlights the collision of these two temporal frames — the
sailing of the Argo and of Theseus — with his redundant use of two time expres-
sions to describe Theseus’s arrival in Crete: “from that moment, that time when
defiant Theseus.. .” (illa ex tempestate ferox quo tempore Theseus,73).^95 He re-
minds us of the “other” “first time” that his primal Argo is supplanting when he
has Ariadne wish that “Athenian ships had never touched Cretan shores in the first
- Myth into History II: Ages of Gold and Iron