Epyllion as idyll or enigma? Thessaly as a mythico-literary landscape of war in Catullus 64 and in Callimachus’ Hymn to Delos

Abstract

Catullus’ poem 64 is a highly complex text, the interpretation of which has long divided scholarship. In the present paper I look at possible political resonances of the epyllion in its historical context. First, I propose an intertextual reading of two passages from Catullus 64 (the catalogues of mortal and divine guests that attend the wedding at Pharsalus) in the light of Callimachus’ Hymn to Delos. I argue that Catullus uses the Thessalian section of the hymn with the struggle between the river Peneios and the war-god Ares not only as a source for learned mythological and geographical details, but also as a substantial subtext for his dark vision of Thessaly as a landscape foreboding war and civil war. In a second reading, I then look back at Catullus 64 from the perspective of two later Roman poets, Virgil and Lucan, who historicize Catullus’ mythical Thessaly even more specifically in the light of the civil wars. As examples I take the epilogue to the first book of the Georgics and especially Lucan’s Thessalian excursus in the sixth book of his Bellum civile, where he reworks Catullus as well as Callimachus in order to characterize his Thessaly as a literary landscape predestined for the horrors of the civil war battle at Pharsalus.