The Gods Do Not Visit Our Weddings: Sin and Salvation in Catullus

The Roman poet Catullus has a certain reputation—and, to be fair, he deserves it. His poems are best known for their total unsuitability for polite company, and for intermediate Latin students, the name “Catullus” usually calls to mind a series of poems that are entertaining, if crass. But oddly enough, my introduction to Catullus was not through his best-known poems. Rather, I was introduced to this particular Roman poet in an undergraduate Latin translation course when I read Catullus 64, one of his forays into the world of epic poetry. Catullus 64 is not one of the great names of classical literature. While bringing up David Copperfield or Moby-Dick in conversation often leads to delighted expressions (or at least recognition), mentioning Catullus 64 usually draws polite but blank stares. (I know this from experience.) But it is no exaggeration to say that Catullus 64 entirely reshaped my understanding of not only Roman culture and mythology, but also the relationship between Roman thought and Christian theology.

It is impossible, however, to understand the text of Catullus 64 without some sense of how the ancient Romans were seen by the rest of the world—and even, to some extent, how they saw themselves. In Book 6 of the Aeneid, Aeneas, Virgil’s epic hero and the legendary progenitor of the Roman people, descends into the Underworld and receives a vision of Rome’s future from the ghost of his father, Anchises. Once a lost and tortured man, Aeneas is restored by this vision and rises out of the Underworld a newly invigorated hero. Interestingly, Virgil is writing this scene in the early Empire. By writing this prophecy from the perspective of a Roman living in the Augustan age, Virgil is really reporting what Rome is like in the present. In this prophecy, Anchises tells Aeneas:

Others, I have no doubt,
will forge the bronze to breathe with suppler lines,
draw from the block of marble features quick with life,
plead their cases better, chart with their rods the stars
that climb the sky and foretell the times they rise.
But you, Roman, remember, rule with all your power
the peoples of the earth—these will be your arts:
to put your stamp on the works and ways of peace,
to spare the defeated, break the proud in war.

In this passage, Virgil lists all the areas in which foreigners will surpass the Romans: forming art out of bronze, sculpting statues from marble, engaging in rhetoric and oratory, studying the sky, and making discoveries in the field of astronomy. In this passage, Virgil seems to admit that the entire world is more astute in the realms of art, science, and intellect than the Romans are. But there is one area in which the Romans will surpass them all: “to spare the defeated, break the proud in war.” Rome’s calling, according to Virgil, is “to rule with all [her] power the peoples of the earth,” to conquer the entire known world by the crafts of warfare. At the risk of oversimplifying, this is certainly how Rome’s provinces saw her, although perhaps many of them would not have been quite as generous as Virgil is. Rome is a killing machine, a conqueror, a subduer of peoples. They are not artists. They are not philosophers. They are warriors.

Only with this understanding can we begin to read Catullus 64. Catullus opens by describing a fleet of ships sailing on their way to attend the wedding of Peleus and Thetis. Mythologically, Thetis is a minor goddess, a sea nymph who falls in love with a mortal man named Peleus. Their children, naturally, would be demigods, caught between wielding the power of the gods and suffering the mortality of humans. Catullus places special emphasis on the union of men and gods, telling us that Thetis did “not scorn to wed a human” and even Father Jupiter, the king of the gods, gave his approval to this marriage between a divine being and a mere human.

The wedding between Peleus and Thetis takes place during the golden age of heroes, an early mythological time period that dates back even before the Trojan War. In his description of the marriage between Peleus and Thetis, Catullus even cries out, “O heroes, born in a greatly yearned-for time of the world!” Here, we may begin to sense a hint of foreboding. From where we are, Catullus says, we still yearn for that time. But what do we long for? Amid Catullus’ beautiful description of the wedding thrones that “glow white with ivory,” goblets that “shimmer on table,” a mansion that “rejoices with the wealth of kings,” we find ourselves wondering what has changed between their time and ours. What are we yearning for?

Peleus and Thetis receive a wedding gift, a beautiful, prophetic tapestry that depicts stories from the future. We are told that this tapestry “shows with stunning art the greatness of heroes.” Hearing this, we have no reason not to take Catullus at his word. Naturally, we expect to hear some heroic tale—the labors of Hercules perhaps, or the adventures of Jason and the Argonauts. But Catullus surprises us, instead drawing us into a pitiful scene: a woman named Ariadne, weeping on an island shore, because her lover has abandoned her there to die.

If you are unfamiliar with the myth of Theseus and Ariadne, here is the short version. As a young Athenian, Theseus learns that Minos, the evil king of Crete, every year demands that Athens must send seven young men and seven maidens to Crete, where the poor youths are fed to a monster called the Minotaur. Theseus volunteers to travel to Crete along with the tributes, vowing to slay the Minotaur. When he arrives at Crete, the king’s beautiful daughter, Ariadne, falls in love with Theseus and promises to help him. The Minotaur lives in a labyrinth, and it is impossible for anyone who enters the labyrinth to find his own way out again. But Ariadne gives Theseus a ball of thread which he can use to leave a trail behind him; once he has killed the Minotaur, Theseus is able to trace his steps back to the exit. In return for this aid, Theseus promises to take Ariadne home with him and marry her—but he breaks this promise. When their fleet stops for the night on the shore of Naxos on their way home, he and his men steal away while Ariadne is still sleeping, leaving her alone on the shore.

This scene on the tapestry is where Catullus chooses to draw our attention, and his point is clear, even if we are still unsure why. Look, reader—here is the greatness of heroes. Theseus has killed the Minotaur and saved his comrades, but he has also betrayed the faith of a woman whose only crime was loving him. There is something rotten here. Somewhere, somehow—between the wedding of Peleus and Thetis and Ariadne weeping on the shore—something has gone wrong.

But Catullus lets us wonder for just a little longer. He jumps back from the tapestry to the wedding, listing the gods who arrive as wedding guests: Chiron, the famous hero-trainer; Peneius, a river god; Prometheus, the Titan who gave fire to mankind; and then Jupiter, the king of the gods, along with nearly all of the Olympians. This is a wedding between a man and a goddess, a union between heaven and earth, and the gods are attending, mingled with humans, conversing and eating and drinking and laughing alongside mankind. Again, we readers may feel an anxiety growing in the pit of our stomachs. What happened? What went wrong?

As it turns out, even the three Fates have attended the wedding, and they begin to sing “a song [that] no later age shall convict of falsehood.” They predict harmony and love for Peleus and Thetis, and then prophesy the birth of their future son Achilles, “who, so often a victor in the shifting battle, will outstrip in swift sprints the burning tracks of the deer.” Achilles, it is clear, will be the greatest hero of his time. Although at first, the Fates praise Achilles’ “spectacular greatness and brilliant deeds,” their prophecy soon grows darker. They describe the mothers who will attend the funerals of their children, killed by Achilles, “where they will tear at the unkempt white hair of their heads / and bruise their fallen breasts with their infirm palms.” They describe how Achilles “will fell the bodies of the Trojan-born with deadly iron,” and how he will fill the river with bodies, “choking its flow with heaps of cut-down corpses.”

Once again, a chill runs down the reader’s spine. Here, somewhere in all this blood and carnage, lies the greatness of heroes. Alongside incredible power sits a devastating evil, a darkness spreading through the world. If, up till this point, Catullus has kept his cards close to his chest, he reveals them all in this astounding conclusion:

Those who dwell in the sky were then accustomed
To visit in person the pure homes of heroes, to show
Themselves to mortal assemblage—devotion not yet being scorned…

But after the earth was stained with unspeakable crime
And all chased justice from their desirous minds,
And brothers suffused their hands with brother’s blood,
And son abandoned mourning of dead parents,
And father yearned for funeral of eldest son
To freely…own the springtime of a daughter-in-law unwed,
And godless mother lay herself beneath unknowing son
And, godless, did not fear to pollute the gods of hearth and home:
Then all things speakable, unspeakable, jumbled in evil madness,
Turned the gods’ mind of justice away from us.

Therefore they do not deign to visit such throngs
Nor allow themselves to be touched by day’s bright light.

While Thomas Banks’ translation is excellent, in my opinion, his translation of this last couplet misses something essential. The word which Banks translates as “throngs” also means “unions,” or even “weddings.” Catullus is not simply telling us that the gods no longer walk among men. He concludes with the horrifying realization that the gods who once attended the wedding of Peleus and Thetis do not deign to visit our weddings anymore. The union that once existed between god and man has been shattered. The gods do not marry us, and they do not attend our weddings. They do not even allow themselves to be touched by the light of day, and why? Because “the earth was stained with unspeakable crime.” Because the world has sinned, and the gods have abandoned us.

When Catullus writes that “brothers suffused their hands with brother’s blood,” we must remember that the Roman founding myth—the story they told about themselves—is a story about fratricide. Twin brothers, Romulus and Remus, set out to found a city, but only one survived. Romulus killed his brother and founded a city that, for years, was an asylum for criminals. In its earliest years, Rome was a haven for the worst of the Italic tribes, a city of brutes who had murdered and stolen their way to Roman citizenship. The story of a people is the story they tell about themselves, and the Romans were acutely aware of the original sin that lay squarely in the center of their own story. They knew there was something rotten that could be traced back to the beginning of their people, something that had poisoned them and caused even the gods to run away in horror.

In this poem, Catullus offers the Romans no hope or consolation. What he does instead is paint a brutally honest picture of their plight. But that fact is, after all, perhaps the most intriguing thing about this poem: the fact that Catullus does not urge his fellow citizens to purge their own sin. Instead, he lets the reader sit with the fact of that sin, a problem for which Catullus does not provide a solution. If the Roman people are to be saved, something has to happen, but we do not know what. We know that we are broken. Someone, please, come and fix us.

In his letter to the Corinthians, St. Paul writes: ‘In a favorable time I listened to you, and in a day of salvation I have helped you.’ Behold, now is the favorable time; behold, now is the day of salvation.” If you will indulge me, I think it is worth mentioning that just about sixty years after Catullus wrote this poem, Christ was born into the world. Catullus lamented that the gods do not visit our weddings anymore, but Christ visited a wedding, where he even turned water into wine. Catullus wrote that the gods do not allow themselves to be touched by the light of day, but Christ walked for days in the burning desert sunlight. Catullus thought that “all things speakable, unspeakable, jumbled in evil madness, / turned the gods’ mind of justice away from us,” but Christ ate and drank with sinners until the day when he offered his own body and blood for them to eat and drink. Perhaps, after all, there is a reason why the favorable time and place just happened to be in an ancient Roman province during the reign of Augustus. “Those who dwell in the sky were then accustomed / to visit in person the pure homes of heroes,” but do not be afraid, Catullus. The one who dwells in the sky is coming to visit again.

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