Catallus, Poem 64

Translated by Jennifer Joseph

Once they say pine-trees born on the heights of Pelion

floated through Neptune’s clear waves,

to the River Phasis and Aeetes’s borders,

with chosen men, oaks of the Argive people,

hoping to steal the Golden Fleece of Colchis

daring to course the salt deeps in their swift ship,

sweeping the blue waters with fir-wood oars.

The goddess herself who guards the heights of the city,

who joined the curving fabric to pinewood keel,

made their ship speed onwards with light winds.

That vessel was first to explore the unknown sea:

so, as she ploughed the windblown waters with her prow,

and whitened the churning waves with foam from the oars,

the Nereids lifted themselves from the dazzling white

depths of the sea, amazed at this wonder of ocean.

In those, and other days, mortal eyes saw the sea-nymphs

raise themselves, bodies all naked, as far as their nipples,

from the white depths.

Then Peleus, they say, was inflamed with love of Thetis,

then Thetis did not despise marriage with a mortal,

then Jupiter himself agreed to Thetis’s marriage.

O heroes, born in a chosen age, hail, godlike race!

O offspring of a blessed mother, hail once more.

Often I’ll address you, in my song.

And I address you, so blessed in your fortunate marriage,

chief of Pelian Thessaly, to whom Jupiter himself

creator of gods, yielded his beloved:

did not Thetis possess you, loveliest of Nereids?

Did not Tethys allow you to lead off her grand-daughter,

and Oceanus, who embraces the whole world with sea?

When at the time appointed the longed-for flames arise,

all of Thessaly crowds together to the palace,

the halls are filled with a joyful assembly:

they bring gifts with them, declaring their joy in their looks.

Cieros is deserted: they leave Pthiotic Tempe,

Crannon’s houses, and Larissa’s walls,

they gather in Pharsalia, crowd under Pharsalia’s roofs.

No one farms the fields, the necks of bullocks soften,

nor does the curved hoe clear beneath the vines,

nor does the ox drag earth outward with the blade,

nor does the sickle thin the shade of leafy trees,

coarse rust attacks the neglected plough.

But the palace gleams bright with gold and silver

through all the rich receding halls.

The ivory chairs shine, cups glisten on tables,

the whole palace gladdened with splendour of royal wealth.

In the midst of the palace a sacred couch, truly joyful

for the marriage of the goddess, gleaming with Indian ivory,

stained with the red dyes won from purple murex.

The cloth depicts in ancient forms, with marvellous art,

in all their variety, the excellence of gods and men.

Here are seen the wave-echoing shores of Naxos,

Theseus, aboard his ship, vanishing swiftly, watched

by Ariadne, ungovernable passion in her heart,

not yet believing that she sees what she does see,

still only just awoken from deceptive sleep,

finding herself abandoned wretchedly to empty sands.

But uncaring the hero fleeing strikes the deep with his oars,

casting his vain promises to the stormy winds.

The Minoan girl goes on gazing at the distance,

with mournful eyes, like the statue of a Bacchante,

gazes, alas, and swells with great waves of sorrow,

no longer does the fine turban remain on her golden hair,

no longer is she hidden by her lightly-concealing dress,

no longer does the shapely band hold her milk-white breasts

all of it scattered, slipping entirely from her body,

plays about her feet in the salt flood.

But, not caring now for turban or flowing dress, the lost girl

gazed towards you, Theseus, with all her heart, spirit, mind.

Wretched thing, for whom bright Venus reserved the thorny

cares of constant mourning in your heart,

from that time when it suited warlike Theseus,

leaving the curving shores of Piraeus,

to reach the Cretan regions of the unbending king.

For then forced by cruel plague, they say,

as punishment, to absolve the murder of Androgeos

ten chosen young men of Athens and ten unmarried girls

used to be given together as sacrifice to the Minotaur.

With which evil the narrow walls were troubled until

Theseus chose to offer himself for his dear Athens

rather than such Athenian dead be carried un-dead to Crete.

And so in a swift ship and with gentle breezes

he came to great Minos and his proud halls.

As soon as the royal girl cast her eye on him with desire,

she whom the chaste bed nourished, breathing

sweet perfumes in her mother’s gentle embrace,

even as Eurotas’s streams surround a myrtle

that sheds its varied colours on the spring breeze,

she did not turn her blazing eyes away from him,

till she conceived a flame through her whole body

that burned utterly to the depths of her bones.

Ah sadly the Boy incites inexorable passion

in chaste hearts, he who mixes joy and pains for mortals,

and she who rules Golgos and leafy Idalia,

even she, who shakes the mind of a smitten girl,

often sighing for a blonde-haired stranger!

How many fears the girl suffers in her weak heart!

How often she grows pallid: more so than pale gold.

As Theseus went off eager to fight the savage monster

either death approached or fame’s reward!

Promising small gifts, not unwelcome or in vain,

she made her prayers to the gods with closed lips.

Now as a storm uproots a quivering branch of oak,

or a cone-bearing pine with resinous bark, on the heights

of Mount Taurus, twisting its unconquered strength

in the wind (it falls headlong, far off, plucked out

by the roots, shattering anything and everything in its way)

so Theseus upended the conquered body of the beast

its useless horns overthrown, emptied of breath.

Then he turned back, unharmed, to great glory,

guided by the wandering track of fine thread,

so that his exit from the fickle labyrinth of the palace

would not be prevented by some unnoticed error.

But what should I relate, digressing further

from my poem’s theme: the girl, abandoning

her father’s sight, her sisters’ embraces, and lastly

her mother’s, she wretched at her lost daughter’s joy

in preferring the sweet love of Theseus to all this:

or her being carried by ship to Naxos’s foaming shore,

or her consort with uncaring heart vanishing,

she conquered, her eyes softening in sleep?

Often loud shrieks cried the frenzy in her ardent heart

poured out from the depths of her breast,

and then she would climb the steep cliffs in her grief,

where the vast sea-surge stretches out to the view,

then run against the waves into the salt tremor

holding her soft clothes above her naked calves,

and call out mournfully this last complaint,

a frozen sob issuing from her wet face:

‘False Theseus, is this why you take me from my father’s land,

faithless man, to abandon me on a desert shore?

Is this how you vanish, heedless of the god’s power,

ah, uncaring, bearing home your accursed perjuries?

Nothing could alter the measure of your cruel mind?

No mercy was near to you, inexorable man,

that you might take pity on my heart?

Yet once you made promises to me in that flattering voice,

you told me to hope, not for this misery

but for joyful marriage, the longed-for wedding songs,

all in vain, dispersed on the airy breezes.

Now, no woman should believe a man’s pledges,

or believe there’s any truth in a man’s words:

when their minds are intent on their desire,

they have no fear of oaths, don’t spare their promises:

but as soon as the lust of their eager mind is slaked

they fear no words, they care nothing for perjury.

Surely I rescued you from the midst of the tempest

of fate, and more, I gave up my half-brother,

whom I abandoned to you with treachery at the end.

For that I’m left to be torn apart by beasts, and a prey

to sea-birds, unburied, when dead, in the scattered earth.

What lioness whelped you under a desert rock,

what sea conceived and spat you from foaming waves,

what Syrtis, what fierce Scylla, what vast Charybdis,

you who return me this, for the gift of your sweet life?

If marriage with me was not in your heart,

because you feared your old father’s cruel precepts,

you could still have led me back to your house,

where I would have served you, a slave happy in her task,

washing your beautiful feet in clear water,

covering your bed with the purple fabric.

But why complain to the uncaring wind in vain?

It is beyond evil, and without senses, unable

to hear what is said, without voice to reply.

It is already turning now towards mid-ocean,

and nothing human appears in this waste of weed.

So cruel chance taunts me in my last moments,

even depriving my ears of my own lament.

All-powerful Jupiter, if only the Athenian ships

had not touched the shores of Cnossos, from the start,

carrying their fatal cargo for the ungovernable bull,

a faithless captain mooring his ropes to Crete,

an evil guest, hiding a cruel purpose under a handsome

appearance, finding rest in our halls!

Now where can I return? What desperate hope

depend on? Shall I seek out the slopes of Ida?

But the cruel sea with its divisive depths

of water separates me from them.

Or shall I hope for my father’s help? Did I not leave him,

to follow a man stained with my brother’s blood?

Or should I trust in a husband’s love to console me?

Who hardly bends slow oars in running from me?

More, I’m alive on a lonely island without shelter,

and no escape seen from the encircling ocean waves.

No way to fly, no hope: all is mute,

all is deserted, all speaks of ruin.

Yet still my eyes do not droop in death,

not till my senses have left my weary body,

till true justice is handed down by the gods,

and the divine help I pray for in my last hour.

So you Eumenides who punish by avenging

the crimes of men, your foreheads crowned

with snaky hair, bearing anger in your breath,

here, here, come to me, listen to my complaints,

that I, wretched alas, force, weakened, burning,

out of the marrow of my bones, blind with mad rage.

Since these truths are born in the depths of my breast,

you won’t allow my lament to pass you by,

but as Theseus left me alone, through his intent,

goddesses, by that will, pursue him and his with murder.’

When these words had poured from her sad breast,

the troubled girl praying for cruel actions,

the chief of the gods nodded with unconquerable will:

at which the earth and the cruel sea trembled

and the glittering stars shook in the heavens.

Now Theseus’s mind was filled with a dark mist

and all the instructions he had held fixed in memory

before this, were erased from his thoughts,

failing to raise the sweet signal to his mourning father,

when the harbour of Athens safely came in sight.

For they say that when Aegeus parted from his son,

as the goddess’s ship left the city, he yielded him

to the wind’s embrace with these words:

‘Son, more dear to me than my long life,

son, whom I abandoned through chance uncertainty,

lately returned to me in the last days of my old age,

since my fate and your fierce virtue tear you away

from me, against my will, whose failing eyes

are not yet sated with my dear son’s face,

I don’t send you off happily with joyful heart,

or allow you to carry flags of good fortune,

but start with the many sorrows in my mind,

marring my white hairs with earth and sprinkled ashes,

then hang unfinished canvas from the wandering mast,

so the darkened sail of gloomy Spanish flax

might speak the grief and passion in my mind.

But if the one who dwells in sacred Iton, who promised

to defend the people and city of Erectheus, allows you

to wet your hand with the blood of the bull,

then make sure this command is done, buried in your

remembering heart, not to be erased by time:

that as soon as you set eyes on our hills,

strip the dark fabric fully from the yards,

and hoist white sails with your twisted ropes,

so that seeing them from the first, I’ll know joy

in my glad heart, when a happy time reveals your return.’

These words to Theseus, once held constantly in mind,

vanished like clouds of snow struck by a blast of wind

on the summits of high mountains.

But when his father, searching the view from the citadel’s height,

endless tears flooding his anxious eyes,

first saw the sails of dark fabric,

he threw himself head first from the height of the cliff,

believing Theseus lost to inexorable fate.

So fierce Theseus entered the palace in mourning

for his father’s death, and knew the same grief of mind

that he had caused neglected Ariadne,

she who was gazing then where his ship had vanished

pondering the many cares in her wounded heart.

But bright Bacchus hurries from elsewhere

with his chorus of Satyrs and Silenes from Nysa,

seeking you, Ariadne, burning with love for you.