Allusions to Grandeur: Catullus 64 and Ptolemaic Court Panegyric

Basil J. Dufallo (University of Michigan)

A perennial interest in Catullus’ play with inverted chronologies and other forms of anachronism in poem 64 (Weber 1983; Gaisser 1995; Schmale 2004; etc.) has nevertheless left one feature of the poem’s chronological illusionism underexplored: the suggestion of Ptolemaic court panegyric implicit in Catullus’ invocation of the heroes and address to Peleus (22-30) and great central ecphrasis of the coverlet depicting the story of Ariadne (50-266). While Catullus clearly writes in the ecphrastic tradition of, e.g., Moschus’ Europa, in which an image of Io described by the poet mirrors the story of Europa that forms his central narrative (for further precedents, see Schmale 2004: 106-124), other Alexandrian poetic techniques attested in poems such as Theocritus 15 and 17 help Catullus momentarily cast himself and his audience in the guise of Ptolemaic court poet and regal patron. Such a fantasy is likely to have appealed to the Hellenophile Roman elite of Catullus’ day, and especially the sophisticated audience for “neoteric” verse (cf. poem 65 with its offer to Hortalus of a translation from Callimachus, probably poem 66, the “Lock of Berenice”). This apparent elevation of Catullus’ Roman audience, while it may seem to run counter to the criticism of the Roman present and its excesses implied in other parts of poem 64 (see esp. Konstan 1977) is nevertheless thoroughly in keeping with what Fitzgerald has called Catullus’ “double relation” to the mythological Greek past, by which he not only removes his audience from the world of the heroes (or condemns both as corrupt) but also locates this audience in “the position of the conquering Roman as the confident consumer and appropriator of Greek culture” (Fitzgerald 1995: 167). In this case, Catullus implicitly constructs the Roman elite as heir to the regal culture of Alexandria, for whom the Argonautic story could likewise function as an ideological underpinning to imperial rule. And yet here, too, lurks potential criticism, since the Ptolemies were hardly an unproblematic moral exemplum for the Roman elite and their imperial ambitions. Thus, together with a distant heroic past, Catullus offers a semblance of Alexandrian regal grandeur for his elite audience to assimilate—or not—to its own experience.

As scholars have long recognized (see Ellis 1889: 287), Catullus’ invocation of the heroes and salutation of Peleus at lines 22-27 (O nimis optato saeclorum tempore nati / Heroes, salvete, deum genus…etc.) suggests not only the valedictory formula of a Homeric or Callimachean hymn to a deity, but also a passage such as Theocritus 17.135-37, with its address to Ptolemy II Philadelphus, its association of him with ἡμιθέoi, its identification of both as the subject of future song, and its linkage of Ptolemy and Zeus. This hint of praise for an Alexandrian ruler becomes magnified in Catullus’ subsequent praise for Peleus’ palace and description of the coverlet on his wedding-couch, a passage whose overall structure and thematics find a close parallel in Theocritus 15, on the visit of two Syracusan women to the palace of Ptolemy and their expressions of wonder at a tapestry depicting Adonis, like Ariadne the mortal love-object of a divinity. And yet if Peleus is thus at some level a Ptolemy avant la lettre, his palace is also characterized as a grand Roman house, complete with a lectus genialis located in the middle of the atrium (Klingner 1956: 173; cf. Pasquali 1920: 8-17). This is indeed, “a strange and baffling place,” not only for being “a Roman atrium in the Thessalian countryside” (Gaisser 1995: 587) but, what is more, for being the object and, as it were, locus of Alexandrian poetic performance. Through his elaborate, atemporal fantasy, Catullus invites his audience as Romans into an objectified and object-rich Greek world. Within this world, the mythical Peleus fills the role of patron-figure, standing in at once for both Hellenistic rulers like those addressed by Theocritus and for the elite Roman who might benefit from Catullus’ poetic efforts in another instance. In this allusive exploitation of visual opulence from a Hellenic past and reliance on dramatic techniques such as the rhetorical tours-de-force of Ariadne’s lament and the Song of the Fates, Catullus 64 fits well within the larger cultural milieu suggested by contemporary Second Style wall painting, as, for example, in the Sala delle Maschere in the House of Augustus (Wiseman 1985: 128-29; cf. Leach 2004: 93-97).