Animus Classics Journal: Vol. 1, Issue 1

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ANIMUS VOL. 1
twisted into threads.” 37 The juxtaposition is telling: the storyteller creates
thread and a story intertwined together. And as each sister frames each
narrative, their well-structured stories, framed in turn by wool-working,
so offend Dionysus that he turns them into bats (who cling to the eaves
of houses, truly becoming domisedae) as vines grow up over their looms,
ceasing both wool-work and storytelling together. 38 The Minyades’ spinning
represents storytelling and creation rooted in order, the opposite of Bacchic
chaos.
Spinning was also the Fates’ method of ordering the lives they
controlled. (Figure 5 is a relief from Rome of the Parcae; the leftmost has
her distaff and spindle in hand.) In Carmen 64, Catullus describes how the
Fates, and thus a Roman, spun: “In their left a distaff wound with supple
wool, / While the right hand spun the threads and, with angled fingers, /
Shaped them, then with a flat thumb twisted them / And turned the spindle
with its smooth-running wheel.” 39 They even the fibers with their teeth, so
wisps of wool stick to their dry lips, and at their feet are baskets heaped
with the thread of lives. As they spin, they chant prophecies, stories about
Peleus and Thetis’s marriage and Achilles’s life, how he will be born, fight,
kill, and die. Each prophetic verse is capped by the phrase, “Run, spindles,
tease out the threads, run on.” 40 The Fates’ spinning represents the stories
they are prophesying, especially since the poem also contains an enormous
ecphrasis of a bed-covering tapestry, a complex device to tell heroic stories.
1st century CE copy of a 1st century BCE original, Museo Archeologico Nazionale,
Naples. Image, Kravitz-Lurie (2016, 132).