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‘Breast is Best’: Catullus 64.18

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Richard Hunter
Richard Hunter
Affiliation:
Pembroke College, Cambridge
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Extract

Catullus' use of nutrices for the Nereids' breasts in line 18 of Poem 64 is not perhaps the most important problem in the poem, but it is not without interest and may have significance beyond its narrow context. This ‘weird preciosity’ (R. Jenkyns) has been integrated into a wider reading by Francis Cairns, who interestingly drew attention to Artemidorus 2.37–8 where to dream of Aphrodite emerging from the sea and naked as far as the ζώνη is a good omen for sea-travellers because her breasts are τροΦιμώτατοι. So too, to dream of Nereids and Amphitrite (cf. Cat. 64.11) is also a good omen. Cairns linked this passage to the persistent connections of Aphrodite and the Nereids with marriage, concluding that the Argonauts are presented with a very good omen as they set out and as the prospective bride and groom, Peleus and Thetis, meet. Cairns naturally finds support here for what we might call the ‘positive’ view of Catullus' heroic age, a view now apparently in the ascendant after the doubts created by John Bramble's well-known paper. Problems remain of course – Catullus 64 is not a dream – and the purpose of the present note is to keep debate alive by calling attention to a rather different set of considerations which complicate, rather than undermine, Cairns' reading.

Type
Shorter Notes
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 41 , Issue 1 , May 1991 , pp. 254 - 255
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1991

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References

1 Three Classical Poets (London, 1982), p. 105.Google Scholar

2 ‘The Nereids of Catullus 64.12–23b’, Grazer Beiträge 11 (1984), 95–101.Google Scholar

3 Bramble, J. C., ‘Structure and Ambiguity in Catullus LXIV’, PCPS n.s. 16 (1970), 22–41Google Scholar. For a recent rejection of Bramble's position cf. Heath, M., Unity in Greek Poetics (Oxford, 1989), pp. 60–2.Google Scholar

4 Cairns appeals to oculis in line 17: ‘it may be that Catullus means to imply that this meeting did not take place in a dream…’ (p. 98). The starting-point for discussion should be Arg. 4.855 and, in view of the considerations raised by Cairns, it might be relevant that in the Argonautica Thetis abandoned Peleus ‘ like a dream’ after he interrupted her as she sought to make Achilles immortal (4.877).

5 For the debt see, inter al., Reitzenstein, R., ‘Die Hochzeit des Peleus und der Thetis’, Hermes 35 (1900), 73–105, pp. 89–90Google Scholar; von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, U., Hellenistische Dichtung (Berlin, 1924), ii.299–300Google Scholar; Klingner, F., Studien zur griechischen und römischen Literatur (Zurich, 1964), p. 160Google Scholar; Thomas, R. F., ‘Catullus and the Polemics of Poetic Reference (Poem 64.1–18)’, AJP 103 (1982), 144–64.Google Scholar

6 Cf. Richardson on h.Dem. 236.

7 At 4.871 we are told that during the day Thetis used to anoint Achilles with ambrosia; it is reasonable, I think, to see this as all the nourishment he got.