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THE NEW POETS AND THEIR ANTECEDENTS
love becoming the impassioned, masterful woman - her sentimental education
is the achievement of Apollonius in his Argonautica. And Euphorion, as did
Catullus and Virgil after him, learned from Apollonius. An instructive fragment
is preserved. J Apriate, while being hotly pursued along a precipice by the hero
Trambelus, unburdens herself of an erudite and disdainful speech, and then —
in a single hexameter — throws herself into the sea: the occasion of an aiTiov.
Euphorion is not interested in narrative, he is interested rather in obscure
mythological allusion and the emotional state of his heroine: his procedure
consequently, like that of Catullus in his epyllion (64), is elliptical and abrupt.
2. 'THE MARRIAGE OF PELEUS AND THETIS*
An epyllion was more or less expected of the complete New Poet; 2 and Catullus
would have been eager to emulate Cinna, whose Zmyrna he so extravagantly
admired. The Marriage of Peleus and Thetis, as 64 is usually called, is Catullus'
longest and most ambitious poem, undoubtedly his intended masterpiece; a
beautiful poem only partially successful but necessary to an understanding
of Catullus. Catullus did not spend nine years working on it (is there a note of
banter in his compliment to Cinna?); but he did not write it in a single mood of
excitement, nor easily. 64 is learned and laborious, a specimen of strictly premeditated
art.
Formality is established at the outset, and a sense of remoteness from
experience:
Peliaco quondam prognatae uertice pinus
dicuntur liquidas Neptuni nasse per undas
Phasidos ad fluctus et fines Aeeteos. . . 0~3)
On Pelion's crest once long ago pine-trees were born, and swam {men say) through
Neptune's liquid waves to Phasis' waters and the borders of Aeetes. . .
In these lines there is nothing of the apparent easiness with which, for instance,
50 begins: Hesterno, Licini, die otiosi.. . ' Yesterday, Licinius, at our leisure. . .';
so might Cicero have begun a letter to an intimate friend, the rhythm of the
hendecasyllable being so close to that of ordinary cultivated speech.
It is of the essence of this poetry that there should be no dissimulation of the
means by which its effect is attained. Certain features would have been recognized
immediately by an ancient reader:
Peliaco quondam: an ornamental adjective with an adverb to summon up die dateless
past; a formula invented by Callimachus for the beginning of his Hecale and then
imitated by Theocritus and Moschus. 3
1
Easily accessible in Page (1940) 495—7. The tale is essentially the same as that of Britomartis
(Dictyna) and Minos, told by Callimachus, Hymn 1.189-100, which Valerius Cato probably used
for his Dxtynna.
1
Furius Bibaculus and Ticidas appear to have been exceptions; Cornificius wrote a G/aucus.
> Biihler (i960) 47.
187
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