Saturnian contexts of “sadness, anxiety, despair” with “elation, joy and hope” (121).
For chronological distortions in particular see Versnel 1994, 130, 177, 188.
Fundamental discussion in Weber 1983; Gaisser (1995) and O’Hara (forthcom-
ing) add much to the debate over chronological inconsistency. As Tony Woodman
reminds me, this is not to deny the careful overall structure of the poem, which is
meticulously divided into different time zones: Traina 1975, 148 – 51.
In the Argonautica,for example, Apollonius shows us the wife of the Centaur
Chiron holding up the baby Achilles to wave good-bye to his father as the Argonauts
head out to sea for the first time (1.557 – 58); and on the return voyage there is a meet-
ing between Peleus and Thetis, who have clearly been divorced for some time (4.851 –
68: see n. 89 above).
Weber 1983, 264 – 65, gives details. Theseus’s father refers to him as “returned
to me in the extreme limit of my old age” (217), an allusion to Call. Hec.fr. 234, where
Aegeus says to Theseus, “You have come against expectation.”
Reading Baehrens’s supplement ofex.
96.Utinam ne in nemore Pelio... ,Enn. Medea Exul,fr. 1.1. W. S. Anderson
reminds me that Ovid likewise refers to the Argo as the first ship (prima carina) in the
last line ofMetamorphoses6, even though he has already told of another journey by
ship (carina) earlier in the book (444, 511): Anderson 1972, on Met.6.721. Likewise,
Wheeler (1999, 138) shows how Ovid reactivates the chronological problems of the
marriage of Peleus and Thetis in Metamorphoses11.
For Minos as the first thalassocrat, Thuc. 1.4.1; Call. Aet.fr. 4, kai; nhvswn
ejpevteine baru;n zugo;n aujcevni Mivnw"(“and Minos stretched a heavy yoke on the neck
of the islands”). This is a doubly primary moment in Callimachus, for it is part of the
first aetion in the Aetia,explaining why the Parians sacrifice to the Graces without
flutes and garlands. Phaedrus plays on the issue in 4.7: he produces a parody of the
opening of the Medea,with the sailing of the Argo, the first ship (6 – 16), only to pro-
voke a retort from the reader that this is “dumb and falsely spoken” (insulsum...
falsoque dictum,17 – 18), since Minos had long before tamed the Aegean with the first
empire (18 – 20).
The apparently unemphatic quondam,the second word of the poem, now looks
much more powerful. “Once upon a time” in the first line is a generic marker for this
kind of poem already in Callimachus (Hec.fr. 230), but now quondamreally does mean
“at some indefinite time in the past.”
Well discussed by Theodorakopoulos (2000, 139 – 40), who also has excellent
remarks on the metapoetic implications for Catullus’s own project of originality (126 –
27). Cf. Malamud and McGuire 1993, 196 – 97, on the cognate issues in Valerius Flac-
cus’s Argonautica:“In both Catullus and Valerius, as the Argosails, it comes upon traces
of earlier voyages — even for the first ship, it turns out that there is nothing new under
notes to pages 124 – 125