Catullus: Poem 64, Gail Trimble (ed.), Cambridge Classical Texts and Commentaries, Cambridge University Press, £136

As a brilliant classics undergraduate, Gail Trimble attained national fame in 2009 when she captained the victorious Corpus Christi College team on BBC TV’s University Challenge, answering the majority of the questions herself with astonishing range and rapidity. Unimpressed by the blandishments of celebrity, she subsequently became an Oxford Classics don and dedicated much of the following decade and a half to completing her doctoral thesis, a commentary on the text of Catullus’ poem 64. The resulting book runs to nearly 900 pages, and Cambridge are to be congratulated for publishing the magnum opus uncut: it is a triumph of painstaking yet imaginative scholarship, and an extraordinary mine of knowledge about Latin and Greek literature and literary culture.

What kind of poem is Catullus 64? In the early 19th century the poem was designated an ‘epyllion’, a miniature epic; fragmentary Hellenistic Greek epyllia, hexameter poems with mythical content, exist, but Trimble is wary about the term, noting that no comparable poems survive in Latin. Its 406 lines of Latin hexameter verse (the metre of Virgil’s Aeneid and other epics) are unique for its time, and arguably in all literary history, for the way they tell several ‘stories within a story’ and conclude with a vehement authorial statement. Deceptively, the opening lines introduce the story of the voyage of the ship Argo (in my translation):

The pine trees bred on Pelion’s mountain top

once swam aloft, they say, through flowing seas

as far as River Phasis and the realm

of King Aeëtes. Young men, Argos’ pride,

aiming to take the Golden Fleece, sailed forth

to Colchis, braved salt waves in their swift ship,

cutting white streaks in blue with pinewood oars…

As Trimble comments (the notes on these lines alone run to 14 pages), this prelude seems to lead ‘in the wrong direction’, heralding either an epic Argonautica or the tale of Medea. Indeed, Euripides’ tragedy of that name began with the words ‘If only the Argo had never winged its way to the land of Colchis.’ However, there’s an immediate shift of viewpoint, when a group of Nereids (sea-nymphs) pop up out of the water to gaze admiringly at the vessel. They are naked, and when a hero on board the Argo, Peleus, spies the lovely Thetis, it is love at first sight (one might perhaps detect a touch of wry humour about the young hero’s enthusiasm). By line 21 Jove has blessed the union, and the ostensible theme of the poem emerges: the joyful Wedding of Peleus and Thetis  – though it has a dark side, since they are destined to become the parents of the deadly and doomed warrior Achilles.

However, Catullus’ misdirection does not end there. He depicts guests divine and human flocking to the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, bringing gifts, including a marvellous tapestry that is spread on the couple’s wedding bed. The description of this object (technically called an ecphrasis) takes up more than 350 lines, the majority of the poem. The images woven thereon are presented with narrative immediacy: the story of Theseus and Ariadne – how the latter helps the hero escape the labyrinth after he kills the Minotaur, is abandoned by him on Naxos, awakens alone on the shore, and cries out in anguish as he sails away; how Ariadne’s curse creates a tragedy when Theseus returns to Athens, since he forgets to change his black sails to white, so that his father Aegeus believes he has died and throws himself from a cliff into the sea (thence the Aegean). Catullus weaves together these and other myths with themes of love, abandonment, broken promises, and the consequences of forgetting one’s duties to lovers and family, leaving the final 45 lines for a bitter personal epilogue – a lament for human wickedness and moral decay that contrasts the heroic past with Catullus’ own degenerate age.

A textual commentary on this complex, varied, and often moving poem is necessarily a technical enterprise, and its main usefulness will be for academics in the field. The general reader is likely to find some aspects of the format, abbreviations, and technical terminology baffling, but it is worth the effort of tackling them. In any case, this is not the kind of book one can read cover to cover; one must dip in to it, both as a guide to the details of language and context of the poem and the poet that it discusses, and as a cumulative aid to understanding the poem. It is a truism that to write a truly expert commentary on a text, one must know everything one might hope to know about the significance of every word of that text. In this regard, one feels that Trimble has accomplished that goal and is generous to share some of her findings with readers.

The introduction (at nearly 100 pages, a publishable pamphlet on its own) is comprehensive and lucid, detailing the literary and historical contexts of the poem, sketching its political and cultural connections, not least to the visual art of the period, and then looking in more depth at its myths, content, form, style, and reception. But the true promise of such a commentary, as Trimble observes, is that ‘by paying attention to every word of a text it also implies an attempt to come to terms with that text as a whole’. Rather than a simple concluding summary, she provides a sophisticated 30-page Epilogue, in which she explores themes of space and time in the poem, the subjectivity accorded to its characters, and how Catullus’ contemporary world is reflected by its themes. In producing this monumental commentary, Trimble has successfully addressed the considerable challenge of offering a fittingly magnificent tribute to Catullus’ masterpiece.