[50] With this verse begins the episode of Ariadne's Lament, which extends through v. 266, thus forming more than half of the entire poem, and setting in striking contrast the unhappy love of Ariadne with the happy love of Thetis. Episodic digressions of a similar character, depicting actions represented in graving or embroidery, are as old as the description of the shield of Achilles (Hom. Il. 18.478ff.), and are multiplied in later writers. With the episode of Catullus may be compared the story of Ariadne as told by Ov. AA 1.527ff.; Ov. Her. 10.
Catullus. Catullus. E. T. Merrill. Cambridge. Harvard University Press. 1893.
The National Endowment for the Humanities provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.