CATULLUS’S CHRONOLOGICAL ANOMIE

In his third Ode Horace does not name the

first man to sail, the primus of 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 of

first 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-

C at u l lu s ’ s C h ron o lo g i c a l A n o m i e

.

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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 of tum early on in the poem, repeated at the beginning of three

consecutive lines (19–21): it was then, then, then that 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 after the 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

de

fiant 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

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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 sacri

fice 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 scienti

fic day, but it is not an event that can

be pinned down. It is an alluringly self-assured single and de

finitive moment, slic-

ing through the chop and surge of myth, but it is a moment that turns out to be not

only unveri

fiable but also in competition with other primary moments.

98

Here we

see Catullus enacting the phenomenal di

fficulty of reaching back to a definitively

originary moment. Such moments can appear de

finitive 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 de

finitively

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

C at u l lu s ’ s C h ron o lo g i c a l A n o m i e

.

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(“When at the appointed time the longed-for lights/day arrived,” 31). Commenta-

tors tell us that

finito tempore = definito tempore according to the simplex pro com-

posito usage, meaning “to mark o

ff a time so as to make an appointment,” and finire

is certainly used in this way.

101

But the verb carries also its primary meaning of

establishing a limit or end, so that the phrase also means “when the time was

ended” and marks the end of a time frame. In this clause, optatae

finito tempore (31)

occupies exactly the same position in the line as the phrase used ten lines before to

describe the time of the heroes, optato saeclorum tempore (22). Catullus here puts

his

finger on one of the evasions of historical nostalgia, by which people look back

enviously to a former glamorous time, forgetting that for the people in that former

time it was nothing but the present, with its own glamorous past and its own poten-

tially glamorous future. Catullus’s readers are looking back with excessive desire

at the time of Peleus when an era ended, but in his own time Peleus was looking

forward with desire to another kind of end of time, the end of his time of waiting.

Nor is Peleus the only one in the poem with a time ’s end confronting him. Ariadne

describes Theseus’s moment of crisis in the labyrinth as his “last time,” as it poten-

tially was (supremo tempore, 151). Her own crisis of abandonment on the beach is

her “edge of time” (extremo tempore, 169), immediately followed in her thoughts

by that “

first time” when Theseus came to Crete, tempore primo (171); her fantasy

of her death closes with the image of her “last hour” ( postrema . . . hora, 191).

Instead of delivering on its apparent initial promise of recovering the clear day

on which everything irretrievably changed, the poem keeps showing a range of

di

fferent demarcations, different beginning and ending moments, in a welter of

irretrievably inconsistent chronologies. A number of crucial demarcations are in

play—the sailing of the Argo, the rule of the

first empire of the sea under Minos,

Prometheus the culture hero.

102

Finally, the war of Troy becomes the poem’s cli-

mactic demarcation moment, with the savagery of the Trojan War evoked by the

song of the Parcae (343–70), as the age of heroes degenerates into wholesale mun-

dane carnage, continuous with our own depravities. The poem leaves us with the

problem of wondering not just “What was that time of partition like?” but also

“When was that time?” The urge to chart a de

finitive rupture in the human status,

an entry into the current condition, so alluring in its appeal,

finally comes to be

seen as a mirage. None of the apparently pivotal moments can be de

finitively fixed;

it proves harder and harder to isolate a moment, or even an epoch, when condi-

tions turned.

103

Wherever he tries to make the cut, Catullus

finds himself, as an au-

thor, enmeshed in time schemes that show humans to be always already enmeshed

in time schemes, inextricably entangled in webs of time. At the end of the poem he

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even imagines calendars in operation at the epoch when gods still mingled with

humans, even though, as we saw above, the usual tradition had it that organized

time was not a feature of the pre-Iron ages, and that the Golden Age did not need

such accommodations in engaging with the divine.

104

Jupiter in person, says Catul-

lus, often saw sacri

fice offered before his temple “when the annual rites had come

on the festival days” (annua cum festis uenissent sacra diebus, 388). Here Catullus

reinforces how hard it is, from our current perspectives, to recover a time before

our implication in time.

If the urge to contemplate the instant of the Fall itself ends in a mirage, then the

urge to communicate with that lost state before the Fall turns out to be a mirage as

well. The poem embodies and evokes an excess of yearning (nimis optato . . . tem-

pore, 22) for that lost past time, a piercing nostalgia that is conjured up by the glam-

orous and romantic atmosphere of so much of the poem.

105

Many other of

Catullus’s poems demonstrate the same obsession with a hiatus between the pres-

ent and a past that is now unreachable, just beyond his recoverable grasp.

106

His

“Peleus and Thetis” makes this obsession global.

SENECA’S ROMAN IRON AGE

Catullus’s main heir in the deployment of the ship as the agent of the Fall is Seneca,

above all in his Medea. In general, Seneca’s work shows a highly developed use of

the Golden/Iron Age matrix to focus on the ensnarements of human technology

and denaturalization.

107

As a Stoic, he brings a new battery of preoccupations to the

issues, for he is intrigued by the intractability of following the Stoic injunction to

“live in agreement with nature” (

oJmologoumevnw" th'/ fuvsei zh'n

) now that humans

have, according to the template we have been investigating, irrevocably left the

natural state behind.

108

In his Medea, Seneca focuses, like Catullus and Horace, on the vital moment of

rupture represented by the sailing of the

first ship, when humans left the state of

nature and entered the de

finitively human state. He does not involve himself in

Catullus’s eddying temporal confusions but concentrates obsessively on the di-

vorce between humans and nature as actualized through the ship’s embodiment of

transgressive technology.

109

The sailing of the Argo is emblematic of human

beings’ attempt to press the natural world into service, violating ordered patterns

in order to try to impose their own patterns, as part of “civilization’s paradoxical

dislocation of the world to produce order.”

110

A brilliant moment in the Medea’s

second choral ode encapsulates this perspective and represents a true leap of imag-

S e n e c a ’ s R o m an I ron A g e

.

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think, torn between their status as a great naval power and their inability to escape from
dominant Greek aristocratic ideologies of landed wealth: Gri

ffith 1999, 185.

74. As Chris Kraus points out to me, such a mentality leads to the attempt to locate

the city of Rome in an ideal situation, neither too close to nor too far from the sea (Cic.
Rep. 2.5–10, with Zetzel 1995, 162–63).

75. He is thus widening his focus from the previous poem (Carm. 1.2), which had

used the end of Georgics 1 as a way of concentrating on the more circumscribed topic
of Roman national guilt for the civil wars: Nisbet and Hubbard 1970, 16–17.

76. Mynors 1990, 28.
77. Horace ’s primary lyric model, Alcaeus, is regularly cast by him as the sailor

(Carm. 1.32.7–8; 2.13.27).

78. Rosen 1990, 104, on Hesiod’s metaphorical activation of farming and sailing; I

thank Stephen Hinds for this reference, and for alerting me to the issue. On this pro-
grammatic dimension to Horace ’s poem, see Basto 1982 and Sharrock 1994, 112–14.

79. I quote the translation of D. West (1995).
80. As Sharrock (1994, 113) puts it, in the course of an enlightening discussion. She

well brings out how the poem combines an understanding at once of “progress, the
attempt to push back the boundaries of human civilization,” and “transgression, which
attempts to burst the boundaries of human nature and the condition of man” (115).

81. On Valerius Flaccus’s exploitation of the similarity of

flying and sailing in his

treatment of the Argo’s ending of the Golden Age, see Feeney 1991, 330–32.

82. Nisbet and Hubbard 1970, 57: “The long

final vowel is an archaism.”

83. W. S. Anderson per litteras kindly points out to me another striking departure

in this portion of the poem, “the daring enjambement between 32 and 33, which acts
out the Latin corripuit gradum. It is the only case where the fourth line [of the stanza]
does not come to a full stop in the poem.”

84. It is interesting to see what the great commentary of Nisbet and Hubbard said

about this poem in 1970: “Horace turns to an attack on human inventiveness in gen-
eral. The ancients by no means lacked appreciation of such enterprise”; they give
examples: “Yet poets and moralists regularly stressed the other point of view, not nec-
essarily with any overwhelming conviction. Prometheus was too often the symbol not
for man’s conquest of nature, but for impious de

fiance of the gods” (Nisbet and Hub-

bard 1970, 44). “Man’s conquest of nature” was a phrase that could still be used in
straightforward approbation in 1970. Their further comment (45) sounds genuinely
ironic early in the next, steadily warming, millennium: “The diatribe against enterprise
has none of the universal validity which we expect from Horatian commonplaces, and
though no more foolish than the conventional praises of poverty, it sounds particularly
unconvincing to modern ears.” Syndikus 1972, 62–63, o

ffers a more sympathetic view.

85. Note, however, that Catullus “refrained from mentioning the Argo by name”:

266

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R. F. Thomas 1982a, 148. It is of course by no means straightforwardly the case that the
sailing of Catullus’s Argo takes us simply from the Golden to the Iron Age: as we shall
see, the confusion of the various eras is vital to Catullus’s project, and the “heroic race”
of Hesiod is as much at issue as the “Golden Age” (Syndikus 1990, 105–6, 188). Still,
he is undoubtedly capitalizing on the crucial concept of a turn from a blessed to a fallen
state, however much the apparent transparency of this concept is put under pressure as
he proceeds. Marincic (2001, 484, 488–89) provides a convincing framework for this
problem, arguing for Catullus’s blending of Hesiodic and Aratean paradigms of degen-
eration. For the possible in

fluence of Dicaearchus on Catullus’s conception of a falling-

o

ff from proximity to the divine, see Della Corte 1976, 128 n. 29.

86. Cf. Fitzgerald 1995, 151. In Apollonius, when the nymphs look on in wonder at

the

first sailing of the Argo, they do so from mountaintops, not from the sea (1.549–

52): Clare 1996, 63.

87. This is very di

fferent from Apollonius’s Argonautica, as is well pointed out by

Clauss (2000, 25 n. 55), who remarks that Apollonius “does not appear to envisage sea-
faring per se as a symptom of a fall from grace.” On the hidden presence of Jason and
Medea in the poem’s opening, see Zetzel 1983, 258–61.

88. Cf. Bramble 1970, 36–37; Munich 2003, 48: “While the ship brings about the

occasion for Peleus’s and Thetis’s meeting and is responsible for their union, it is also
an agent of separation—pine trees are uprooted, man is separated from land, and the
sea nymphs abandon their usual home.”

89. On the rich literary tradition concerning the wedding, see Syndikus 1990, 113;

for the iconographic tradition, see LIMC VII.1, s.v. “Peleus,” 265–67. In book 4 of
Apollonius’s Argonautica we see an encounter between Peleus and Thetis that is the
only depiction of a conversation between a divorced couple that I can think of in
ancient literature, given that in the plays of Euripides and Seneca Jason and Medea are
still in the stage of custody dispute, and that in Odyssey 4 Menelaus and Helen are rec-
onciled and “remarried.” It is not much of a conversation, since Peleus sits and listens
in silent shock while Thetis tells him what is going to happen to the ship (4.851–68).
She even begins by addressing him in the plural, as if addressing the ship’s company
(856–61), before switching to the singular (862–64).

90. Prisc. Gramm. 2.79.8, ab humo humanus; Maltby 1991, s.vv. humanus and humus;

see Ahl 1985, 108, on Varro Ling. 5.23–24.

91. Best captured in the analysis of Gaisser (1995). The powerful arguments of

Versnel (1994, 90–227) on crises of inversion and reversal associated with Cronus and
Saturnus do not provide a model with which to solve the problems of poem 64, but his
analysis of the total ambivalence generated in these moments of transition and caesura
is very good to think with for students of the poem, not least for those interested in its
ambiguities of moral judgment: note his evocation of the coexistence in transitional

n o t e s t o p a g e 1 2 3

.

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Saturnian contexts of “sadness, anxiety, despair” with “elation, joy and hope” (121).
For chronological distortions in particular see Versnel 1994, 130, 177, 188.

92. 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 di

fferent time zones: Traina 1975, 148–51.

93. 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).

94. 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.”

95. Reading Baehrens’s supplement of ex.
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 of Metamorphoses 6, 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 Metamorphoses 11.

97. 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).

98. 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 quondam really does mean
“at some inde

finite time in the past.”

99. 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 Argo sails, it comes upon traces
of earlier voyages—even for the

first ship, it turns out that there is nothing new under

268

.

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the sun. By the time Valerius inherits it, the myth of the Argo has become a trope for
the impossibility of discovering an origin; for Valerius it seems also to be a metaphor
for the impossibility of creating a truly original text. . . . The Argo myth which seems
at

first glance to be about origins, exploration, and innovation, becomes in Valerius’

hands a vehicle for exploring the endless repetitions and variations of a profoundly
derivative literary world” (emphasis added).

100. So Godwin 1995, ad loc.
101. OLD s.v. §5a; see Kroll 1922, ad loc., for the simplex pro composito

construction.

102. On the importance of Prometheus in the cultural history of the poem, see

Gaisser 1995, 609–10.

103. Cf. Bramble 1970, 24: “The demarcation between heroic past and sinful pres-

ent is deliberately blurred”; Gaisser 1995, 613: “All ages may be the same.”

104. Above, p. 118.
105. Fine discussions in Fitzgerald 1995, 140–68, and Munich 2003. Syndikus

(1990, 104) well remarks on how unlike “bourgeois” Theocritean or Callimachean
epyllia Catullus’s poem is in its fascination with the glamorous and grand heroic (how-
ever quali

fied).

106. Especially Catullus 68, and 8, 58, 72, 76: see Putnam 1961; Traina 1975, 150–

51; Mazzoli 2001, 136–37; Marincic 2001, 485, 488.

107. Good treatments are available in Fyfe 1983, on Medea; P. J. Davis 1983 and

Boyle 1987, esp. 18–24, on Phaedra; and Segal 1983, in general.

108. On this article of the Stoic creed, see Long and Sedley 1987, 1:400–401.
109. In the Natural Questions, likewise, his discussion of the winds turns into a long

denunciation of the abuse of winds to enable sailing (5.18.4–16), ending with the
observation that “di

fferent people have different motives for launching a ship, but none

has a good one” (non eadem est his et illis causa soluendi, sed iusta nulli, 16).

110. Fyfe 1983, 87.
111. Tony Woodman attractively suggests that pingitur aether may be a reference to

a model of the night sky.

112. In Epistle 90, to which we turn shortly, Seneca o

ffers a wonderful counterpart

to this moment, contrasting the fake ceilings above modern heads with the “remark-
able spectacle of the nights,” which were there for early man to gaze upon (insigne spec-
taculum noctium, 42).

113. It is worth remarking that this kind of perspective is no part of Seneca’s coun-

terpart in Greek, Euripides’ Hippolytus.

114. P. J. Davis 1983, 114–15; Boyle 1987, 18–19, on Hippolytus’s assertion of vio-

lent control here.

115. Note how Theseus, the “normal” man par excellence, marks time through agri-

n o t e s t o p a g e s 1 2 5 – 1 2 8

.

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