Connections To Homer and Greek Myth
Central to this poem is the story of Protesilaus and Laodamia from the Trojan cycle. Protesilaus and Laodamia were married shortly before the Trojan War, in which he was the first Greek to die. Daniel Garrison connects this story to Catullus’ relationship with Lesbia saying, “Catullus was separated from Lesbia by his brother’s death near Troy, Protesilaus from Laodamia by his own death in the Trojan War.” This connection that Garrison draws explains Catullus’ transition to the death of his brother, who died where the Romans believed Troy to be. Catullus returns to the theme of Lesbia’s infidelity when he compares her behavior to Laodamia’s faithfulness in lines 117 and 131.
Overall, Catullus portrays Troy as a negative place calling it “ill-omened,” “obscene," and “ill-fated." His negative description of Troy is not limited to his grief for his brother’s death but extends to his allusions of the entire war. Theodorakopoulos explains, “In both poems 64 and 68] it is clear that Troy is an abomination, not the glory that contemporary Romans may have been seeking to gain from connection with it. Troy stands for the strangeness of death, for the remoteness of the world of the dead from that of the living.”
Read more about this topic: Catullus 68
Famous quotes containing the words connections, homer, greek and/or myth:
“The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“But it is fit that the Past should be dark; though the darkness is not so much a quality of the past as of tradition. It is not a distance of time, but a distance of relation, which makes thus dusky its memorials. What is near to the heart of this generation is fair and bright still. Greece lies outspread fair and sunshiny in floods of light, for there is the sun and daylight in her literature and art. Homer does not allow us to forget that the sun shone,—nor Phidias, nor the Parthenon.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Mass ought to be in Latin, unless you cd. do it in Greek or Chinese. In fact, any abracadabra that no bloody member of the public or half-educated ape of a clargimint cd. think he understood.”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)
“... if, as women, we accept a philosophy of history that asserts that women are by definition assimilated into the male universal, that we can understand our past through a male lens—if we are unaware that women even have a history—we live our lives similarly unanchored, drifting in response to a veering wind of myth and bias.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)