CATULLUS 68 - Scuola Normale Superiore

Να⌠ακο⎜ω ≥δη, δεσπ〉τι, πρ∫ω λιμϒναω.
The speaker prays to Aphrodite that he may achieve peace and happiness in love. The first epithet through
which he addresses her is γαληνα⇔η, ‘Mistress of the calm waters’, and he picks up the maritime imagery
in the last three lines of the poem, as he states that he is washed by her purple sea and appeals to her to
rescue him and to bring him to the harbours of the Naiads. Here the rough seas stand for the suffering
experienced by a passionate lover in the course of a turbulent love-affair. They clearly cannot stand for any
other sort of adversity, nor for adversity in general. That is characteristic for the Storm of Love: its erotic
implications are always spelled out quite clearly. Another typical feature of the image is irony. It compares
being in love to sailing over rough seas; but there is an essential difference between these two experiences,
namely that one is much more dangerous than the other: love cannot kill a man, at least not directly, while
rough seas can. The distressed lover compares himself to someone who is, by all objective criteria, in a much
more difficult situation, and by doing so he calls into doubt what he is saying: after all, his suffering is
simply the product of his own extravagant passions. The image serves to console the speaker indirectly by
hinting that his situation is not that bad after all, and to entertain the reader and to confront him with the
paradox that while being in love can cause no end of suffering, certain people are prepared to submit to it of
their own accord.
The present passage meets neither of these criteria: it is not clear whether the addressee’s troubles are due to
love, and the use of the image is certainly not ironical. What we have to do is not the motif of the Storm of
Love, but the homegrown Roman image of shipwreck standing for any kind of disaster: as Baehrens puts it,
“naufragium de quauis magna calamitate dicitur”. The examples are too numerous to list; there follows a
selection.
naufragium is used frequently to refer to any kind of disaster or catastrophe, as in inc. trag. 84 naufragia,
labes generis, ignoras, senex?; Cic. dom. 129 in illo rei publicae naufragio, Fam. 1.9.5 rei familiaris
naufragia, Att. 3.15.7 istos labores quos nunc in naufragiis nostris suscipis, Tusc. 5.25 naufragia fortunae
and Sest. 15 totum superioris anni rei publicae naufragium; Liv. 22.56.2 reliquias tantae cladis uelut ex
naufragio colligentem; and see further OLD s.v. naufragium 1b. The phrase patrimonio naufragus is used by
for someone who has squandered his fortune at Sul. 41 ut aliquis patrimonio naufragus, inimicus oti,
bonorum hostis (compare Phil. 12.19 ex naufragio luculenti patrimoni) and, apparently in a development of
the same usage, naufragus alone has come to stand for people who are utter failures, as at Cic. Cat. 2.24
contra illam naufragorum eiectam ac debilitatam manum. Cicero also uses naufragia to mean ‘the ruins of
something, the scattered remains’: thus Phil. 11.36 an cetera ex eodem latrocinio naufragia conligam? and
13.3 illa naufragia Caesaris amicorum (see further OLD s.v. naufragium 2b). The set phrase naufrago
tabulam, ‘a board for a shipwrecked man’ is used literally by Petronius at 115.13 de tam magna naue ne
tabulam quidem naufragum habes, but more often it is found figuratively in the sense ‘help for the
desperate’: thus at Cicero Att. 4.19.2 haec enim me una ex naufragio tabula delectat, Seneca Benef. 3.9
“Dedi tibi patrimonium”: sed ego naufrago tabulam, and within a more elaborate image of shipwreck at Ov.
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