With this ambiguity about the public face of Roman Hellenism in mind, let us return to the work with which we began, Catullus’ elaborate miniature epic on the wedding of Peleus and Thetis which Thomas especially has made a showpiece of Catullan learning (see DeBrohun, this volume). Indeed Thomas suggests that the poet’s motive for beginning with the construction of the Argo was the opportunity it gave him to show off his mastery of its abundant literary manifestations. I want to turn that argument around by suggesting that the Argo story, rather than simply offering a corpus uile for the display of literary scholarship, provides a framework for contextualizing and exploring the nature of that scholarship. For the story’s significance in the world of Greek myth closely meshes with the poet’s treatment of his own personal story. Jason’s objective was a golden fleece that would allow him to obtain the kingship in his native city of lolcos, an object that easily symbolizes the wealth and power that Roman armies were winning for themselves in the very same geographical regions of Asia Minor during Catullus’ lifetime. But, like all great mythical blessings, the fleece comes accompanied by a more ambiguous possession: the woman Medea, whose cunning, knowledge, and sorcery will be both Jason’s salvation and his destruction as, again in pursuit of golden wealth and kingship, he violates his promise to her and she avenges herself on him by killing his children.11 The Medea myth, like the story of Ariadne that appears within the poem’s ecphrastic core, thus bears a close connection to the themes of betrayal and oath-violation that feature prominently in Catullus’ elegiac poetry. This mythical voyage to the East elsewhere provides the imagery in which Catullus describes his own expedition to Bithynia in the entourage of the governor Memmius (4), an adventure from which Catullus professes not to have brought back heroic riches. The second great eastern expedition mentioned in the poem, the campaign against Troy, features as well in the poet’s personal story to emblematize the loss of his brother, the tragic reverse of the light-hearted mock epic of how Catullus and his friends failed to strike it rich in the provinces.
The links between the mythical content of poem 64 and these significant themes from elsewhere in the poet’s work have often been observed,12 but not as much attention has been given to how these narratives relate to contemporary anxieties about the social effects of Hellenization. In sketching this stage in my argument, I want to turn from the beginning of the poem to its conclusion. Here the poet moves from the Fates’ prophecy of the birth of Achilles, which paints the Trojan War in the blackest terms, to draw the explicit contrast between the mythical past and the contemporary Roman present.13 In those long-ago times the gods showed themselves directly to man (64.384-6) - a point the poet supports with a brief catalogue of the contexts of divine epiphany in Greek myth. Now, however, we have all ‘‘put justice to flight from our greedy minds’’ and rejected any bounds that obligations to the gods or one another place on the fulfillment of our desires (398). And so the gods ‘‘do not deign to look upon such intercourse and do not allow themselves to be touched by clear light’’ (407-8).
The first thing to notice about this ending is how it links the ills of contemporary Roman society to the problems arising from empire, specifically greed, the avarice that, as the historian Livy will describe (pref. 12), comes from the increase of wealth.
And that golden fleece has brought with it countless reminders of Medea in the form of murderous fathers and incestuous mothers. The intellectual legacy of conquest figures here in two ways, as a metonym for material riches that cause decline, and as a consequence of our fallen state. For the first, Asia Minor, Jason’s route to the mythical Colchis, was the source for many of the instruments of Roman learning. We have already discussed Cinna’s Aratus manuscript from Bithynia, and its human interlocutor Parthenius: other literary treasures, from the library of the Attalids and the dynasts of Asia Minor, were making their way to Rome at the same time. And, as texts were an important element of eastern riches, so the initial sign of those riches in the poem looks very much like a text. This is not so much because of the specific properties of the fleece itself - though animal skins were a physical medium of writing particularly associated with Asia Minor: the Greek word for them derives from the city of Pergamum - but through the intermediary of another textile which appears in the poem as a source of mythical knowledge. For the tapestry that adorns the nuptial couch, and does closely approximate Catullus’ written text in the narrative it bears, also resembles the golden fleece in its opulence and especially in its association with products of the East. The cloth is dyed with luxurious scarlets: the couch is wrought of‘‘Indian ivory’’ (64.48-9).
But if Greek learning becomes a sign of wealth, and indeed provides the mythical language in which to paint Rome’s decline as elsewhere it provides the language for adorning its triumphs, that decline in turn gives a new urgency to learning. The last lines of the poem describe the obscurity in which the gods have cloaked themselves, in striking contrast to the luminous moment at the poem’s beginning when men and divinities gaze upon one another. And the explicit display of literary learning with which the poem commences highlights another important feature of those now lost epiphanies: the gods Catullus mentions wear forms made familiar by earlier literary works. His Mars and Athena appear as if in the Iliad, and his Dionysus - though the Delphic context most directly suggests his sculptural representation in the pediment of Apollo’s temple (Thomson 1997: 435) - seems to have stepped out of the Bacchae. Through texts, then, we escape to a place where we can see the gods in clear light. Or rather where we can imagine seeing them, for the important corollary to Catullus’ exaltation of the mythical past over the historical present is the fictional nature of that past. Catullus describes the age when heroes beheld nymphs with their own eyes merely as an epoch ‘‘too much hoped for’’ (nimis optato saeclorum tempore, 64.22). And the poem is full of little contradictions reminding the audience of how difficult it is to fit this past into authentic history. The Argo appears as the first ship, yet the coverlet makes us see an even earlier ship fading into the distance from the perspective of someone betrayed by false promises; the song that the Fates sing at the wedding prophesying the glory of Achilles also raises overlapping issues about the truth of myth: in a lost drama of Aeschylus, Thetis accuses Apollo of lying for singing a similar song on the same occasion precisely because he never mentioned the death of her son, and Plato in turn upbraids Aeschylus for the intimation that the gods could lie (Aesch. fr. 350 Radt = Pl. Resp. 2.383b). Thus Catullus has here ‘‘corrected’’ the myth by falsifying the tradition that preserves it - or perhaps the problem was that Apollo, like the Fates, always told the truth but that Thetis, like so many other figures in this poem, just didn’t understand his meaning.14 Indeed even the desirability of that golden mythical world appears questionable, for, as many commentators have realized, the precise charges against contemporary Roman society are but permutations of the crimes of myth, and no greater exemplum of the devastating qualities of forgetfulness of duty can be found than Theseus.
Thus retreat into Greek textuality as an escape from the present is a strategy that the poem itself questions even as it embraces it. What one learns when ‘‘entering the text,’’ as the central ecphrasis, focalized through another ‘‘seeing’’ character, Ariadne, compellingly invites the reader to do, is how chancy a thing reading is, and how bound up with the present circumstances of a text’s reception. Sometimes, misunderstanding comes from the partial perspective of interpreters like Ariadne, who simply looks the wrong way and therefore doesn’t notice that her narrative is not a tragedy of abandonment but a triumphal tale of apotheosis to be realized at the arrival of the approaching Dionysus. (Is Catullus’ narrator himself an ‘‘Ariadne’’ in his view of contemporary morality in the greatest age of conquest Rome was ever to know?) Sometimes the authors themselves are negligent, like Theseus who simply forgets to change the sails (another deceptive cloth) and so causes his father to kill himself in despair. In either case the image of a scholar-poet dealing corrections to his predecessors and uncovering true etymologies seems less likely in such a context than a revelation of the kaleidoscopic power of texts to distort the past and mislead the present.
This deceptiveness of verbal and visual signs is intimately connected with their status as the products of foreign cultures and as clues for interpreting overseas conquest. For, like the golden fleece, many of the crucial hermeneutic moments in the poem are prompted by or refer to foreign expeditions. The tapestry is an eastern product, representing a god coming from the East. Theseus’ sails - dyed with ‘‘Spanish’’ rust - are designed to show whether he has succeeded or failed in his expedition against the Cretan Minotaur. The Fates’ song raises the question of whether the Trojan War should be seen as glorious or destructive. Nor can the hermeneutic problems such texts raise be separated from their materiality. The tapestry that presents a glorious vision of how the union with the East exalts (amplifice, 265) the West also seduces with an almost sexual physicality. It ‘‘embraces’’ the nuptial couch with its image of a partly clothed bride sexually available to another internal viewer (266). Not surprisingly, the Thessalian observers look on desirously ( cupide, 267); yet the very same adjective describes the frame of mind that has driven a divine maiden, ‘‘justice,’’ away from the coetus (‘‘assembly’’)15 of present-day men. Thus the physical presence of this foreign artistic product creates the corrupt desire which for the narrator makes the past represented in those images all the more desirable as an alternative to the present.
How this legacy of Hellenic culture becomes both Medea and Muse, an import at once indispensable and corrupting and an immortal refuge and escape from contemporary society, emerges especially from the epigram that most explicitly comments on poetic preferences for Alexandrian refinement, the praise of yet another monument (monimenta) of the poet’s friend Cinna (95.9).16 The ‘‘monument’’ in question, a formidably learned poem telling how Zmyrna, having consummated her incestuous desire for her father, is transformed into a myrrh tree and gives birth to Adonis, is contrasted with three other verbal productions: the poems or speeches of Hortensius, the annalistic poems of a certain Volusius, and the notoriously long-winded bad boy of Hellenistic literary criticism, Antimachus. The terms and imagery Catullus deploys in this comparison testify to his own learning, for they reproduce closely those of Callimachus in the association of bad poetry with a muddy river, but, as translated here, direct attention to the role of such Hellenized preferences in Roman culture. Learning again becomes a criterion for social winnowing, positioning Catullus closer to his amicus, farther from those who oppose his tastes, and ‘‘monumentalizing’’ both moves through a text that itself, as in poems 1 and 50, participates in a socialized network of reciprocal composition, a text returned for a text.17
But Cinna and Catullus are not the only characters whose words make social claims. Whatever Hortensius produced a thousand of in so short a time - the lost line may have alluded to erotic Hellenized poetry spewed out at a banquet, a logorrheic epic, or the voluminousness of Hortensius’ oratory - he, like Suffenus, thinks well of his fluency and was indeed among the most distinguished aristocrats of his day. Volusius was not so prominent a figure, but if he personally lacked the prestige of a Hortensius, his work was almost certainly an account of Rome’s public history, a record of military triumph like its great antecedent the Annales of Ennius. With the last comparand, Antimachus, we move from the present to the past, and yet this Greek figure’s popularity is expressed in Roman political terms. Nothing like as broad a swath of the Roman population as populus implies read any Antimachus. The characterization of his reception as ‘‘popularity,’’ though, helps to clarify a symbiosis of the social and the literary diametrically opposite to the one put into practice by Catullus’ poem. Hortensius’ words and Volusius’ in different ways offer textual manifestations of Roman prestige; Antimachus’ literary reputation appears as political success.
If we assume Catullus is doing more here than mechanically applying Callimachean aesthetic criteria, what, precisely, sets Cinna’s poem apart from those other works? If it is primarily its separation from what we may conveniently call public life, why and on what terms is this good to reject? Our best resource for approaching these questions comes from the imagery of the poem itself. As we saw in the napkin poem, a rejection of physical abundance coincides with vast expansion in time and space. The nine winters Cinna has labored over the Zmyrna contrast with Hortensius’ monstrous fertility, but also with the annalistic scope and structure of Volusius’ poem, which would similarly have unrolled over the course of years. But Hortensius’ celebrity will perhaps be limited to a single season, as Volusius’ works will ‘‘die’’ at the shores of his native Po. The ‘‘people’’ who rejoice in Antimachus too are a notoriously fickle lot. Ease of birth implies ease of death, and the more any literary work has invested in popular success, the emptier it is.
But if Hortensius’ and Volusius’ works move from somethings to nothing, Cinna’s poem seeks throughout an abiding material presence: to become a monument, a term that implies at once a preservation of the past and a reminder of its passing away. Indeed Cinna’s poem, as Catullus’ presents it, seems bred in the same world as that described at the end of poem 64. The very plot of the poem begins with a tale of incest. And the illicit sexuality of its content becomes, thanks to Catullus’ brilliance, a metaphor for its own production. As Kenneth Quinn observes, the ninth harvest (messem) of the first line easily suggests the ninth month (mensem) of gestation (1973a: 431). If the poem is born, not made, Cinna becomes at once Zmyrna, going through labor like his protagonist, and the begetter of Zmyrna, assuming that the poem as product is like the child, a doubling of roles not far from incest. However, the story that begins in corruption ends with a birth - the birth, moreover, of a figure associated with the futility of sexuality and with mortality, yet also a quasidivine figure ritually reborn every year.18 Hence the next reference to the Zmyrna., which will be sent to the ‘‘channeled streams of the Satrachus,’’ the Cypriot river in which Aphrodite bathed the young Adonis, a gesture perhaps to be connected with his immortalization.19 Thus Catullus’ celebration of the poem tracks its progress toward immortality as a monumentum in terms that recall the mythical content of Cinna’s own text.
This link between obscure Hellenistic learning and transcending a single age at once reminds us of the similar connection between erudition and permanence in poem 1 and suggests a way of contextualizing Catullus’ rejection of the teeming poetic products he uses as foils. In those other cases, as we have seen, the cultural accomplishment appears subordinated to the adornment of empire, to the verbal forms within which success measured in conventional Roman terms was won and expressed. From this perspective, the poem recalls not only Callimachean concerns but Ciceronian ones as well, most particularly those explored at the conclusion of the De re publica, where, in the dream of Scipio, the temporal and spatial limitations of Roman power and of the fame earned through political victory are made plain through the vision of true immortality revealed by Greek philosophical constructs. Here too, Cinna’s escape into a mythical past opened by literary scholarship seems to break free of the socialized and materialized culture of a Hortensius or Volusius. But just as Scipio’s instruction only makes him a wiser and more dedicated statesman on his return, so too Cinna’s monumentalization, as accomplished through the poetic compliment offered by his sodalis Catullus, brings him back to earth, re-placing him within a temporal social network, but one whose difference and specificity we now more clearly recognize.
World History
