time” (utinam ne tempore primo/Cnosia Cecropiae tetigissent litora puppes,171; dizzy-
ingly, his language here exploits the diction used by Ennius to describe what now
feels like the “other” other first time, the original sailing of the Argo).^96 One may
detect yet another “first time” lurking in the allusions to King Minos. His status as
the first thalassocrat, the first ruler to exercise command of the Aegean Sea, is an
important issue in the tradition and in Catullus’s poem and is not casually intro-
duced: the penalty of human sacrifice that Theseus sails to halt is one that was
imposed on Athens by Minos during an imperial punitive expedition (76 – 79).^97
Here we have an allusion to another important demarcation moment in human his-
tory, anchored not on the first sailing of a ship but on imperial command of the sea,
and this moment is one that might be more important than the sailing of the Argo
or of Theseus.
The sailing of Catullus’s ship looks like the divide between the chaos of un-
chartable events and the clear light of scientific day, but it is not an event that can
be pinned down. It is an alluringly self-assured single and definitive moment, slic-
ing through the chop and surge of myth, but it is a moment that turns out to be not
only unverifiable but also in competition with other primary moments.^98 Here we
see Catullus enacting the phenomenal difficulty of reaching back to a definitively
originary moment. Such moments can appear definitive and sharp, but they are
always blurred on closer inspection, and less primary than they appear at first.^99
The illusory clarity of that first and last day is described in natural terms as a
“light” (illa atque haud alia... luce,16), and this alluring image of the definitively
bright light of day recurs throughout the poem. The day of the wedding itself is
described as optatae luces,the “longed-for lights” (31); the day after the wedding is
described as oriente luce,the “rising light” (376). The very last words of the poem
are lumine claro,“bright light,” but this is now a lost light, describing the bright
light of day in which humans used to see the gods face to face, the bright light from
which the gods now withhold themselves (nec se contingi patiuntur lumine claro).
The poem’s beginning moments multiply, and each of them is also an ending
moment. As the poem evokes the lost time of the past, it deploys many words of
time to mark the end of diverse time frames within the poem, each of which is the
loss of what went before. The heroes are described as born in “the excessively
longed-for time of ages” (nimis optato saeclorum tempore nati,22); saeclorum,
“ages,” is strictly redundant and is there to highlight the theme of successive
epochs that have been lost.^100 Shortly thereafter, the moment of the wedding of
Peleus and Thetis is described with an odd phrase that calls attention to the wed-
ding as an ending moment in time: quae simul optatae finito tempore luces/aduenere
Catullus’s Chronological Anomie. 125