In his description of the coverlet in poem 64 Catullus describes Ariadne on the shore with her clothes falling off, a scene not required by the story but explicable if the text was the libretto for a danced performance, as suggested in Chapter 4. This chapter collects the evidence for erotic entertainment on the Roman stage, occasions when actresses and dancers (mimae) might perform naked. The sources make it clear that the modern distinction between poetry and performance did not apply in the Roman world: poetry was categorized as ‘dramatic’, ‘narrative’ or a ‘common or mixed type’ in which ‘the poet himself speaks and speaking characters are introduced’. Just as epic was an example of ‘the common or mixed type’, so too was Catullus 64, too short to be an epic in the Homeric sense but still a mythological narrative to be performed, whether in speech, song, dance or any combination of the three. As was normal in the ancient world, the written text on papyrus was a secondary phenomenon.

It is an error to suppose that Latin literature was restricted to a small literate elite; performance before a large public audience (e.g. at a festival or the ludi scaenici) was often the primary form of ‘publication’, prior to the distribution of a written text in a book. Catullus’ poems 62 and 67, both written in dramatic form, were presumably meant for performance; poem 61 is a marriage hymn, sung by two choruses as part of the bride’s procession; poem 63 is a narrative hymn, sung and danced probably at the ludi Megalenses. There are good reasons to believe that poem 64, normally cited as the defining example of an ‘epyllion’ (a genre invented by modern scholarship), was composed as the libretto of an elaborate stage performance. Poems 68a and 68b are entirely separate from each other, addressed to different recipients: 68a is a letter of apology, 68b an elaborate mythic celebration of the poet’s doomed love affair, addressed to Allius but in the hope of reaching a more extensive audience.