1.

Like the Iliad and Odyssey, like the Argonautica, Catullus 64 is a poem highly self-conscious about the relationship of the present to the past. How does this theme reveal itself in the poem? What view of the past heroic world emerges in comparison to Catullus’ own present day? What familiar figures of epic, human and/or divine, are present and how are they represented? If there is, as many believe, an analogy between Catullus’ backward glance over the mythological past and his self-consciousness about his own relationship to the tradition of past epic poetry, what image of Catullus as poet emerges? Does this remind you of any other texts we have read?

2.

Catullus 64 radically inverts the relationship between epic narrative and the conventional "digression," giving us the framing story of the marriage of Peleus and Thetis in 166 lines (1-49, 267-383), while the inset description of the coverlet on their marriage bed occupies 217 lines (50-266). What is the relationship between these sections of the poem? What artistic choices might have motivated this exceptional foregrounding of ecphrasis? How does Catullus’ ecphrasis compare to those in Homer and Apollonius?