Ancient
Weddings
by Jennifer
Goodall Powers, SUNY Albany
Original text
© 1997 Jennifer Goodall Powers
Catullus and His
Wedding Songs
Si
tamen e nobis aliquid nisi nomen et umbra
restat, in Elysia valle Tibullus erit.
obvius huic venias hedera iuvenalia cinctus
tempora cum Calvo, docte Catulle, tuo ...
Yet if human survival means more than a ghostly reputation,
Tibullus must surely dwell in Elysium,
Welcomed by young Calvus, ivy-garlanded,
by Catullus poet and scholar ...
Gaius Valerius Catullus
fell in love with a married woman in the first century B.C. and
then chronicled the affair in his poetry. Many of Catullus' poems
are dedicated to the woman called Lesbia whom he loved with his
whole life. Out of this relationship and influenced by Greek
poets, a new Latin genre was created. Catullus and his fellow
Roman poets, however, added a dimension of devoted love to their
poems that was rare in Hellenistic poetry. Influenced by the
changing morality in Rome and his subsequent love affair, Catullus'
poems disclose not only his own emotions (as one of the first
poets to write this in depth about his love affair), but also
this new Roman attitudes towards marriage and women.
Marriage at
the Time of the Elegiac Poets
Towards the end
of the Republic, Rome enjoyed an unprecedented, even luxurious,
prosperity. Sympomatic of the social stresses that accompanied
prosperity, Roman women began to pursue a more independent lifestyle.
At the same time, elegiac poetry was developing and these poets
no longer saw marriage as an end. One classicist observed that:
to these
poets the 'eternal union', foedus aeternum, between a
man and a woman no longer seems possible nor desirable within
a legal marriage; it can only be realized in the ideal love-affair.
Indeed, an ideal
love-affair, not an ideal marriage, is what stimulated Catullus'
relationship with Lesbia. Yet Catullus was not completely reconciled
with this new morality, and instead of making a clean break with
the traditional values of marriage,he transformed his mistress
into his "wife" in his poetry.
Epithalamia
Catullus wrote two
wedding songs that provide ample material for exploring the evolving
wedding ceremony in the late Republic. These poems, Carmen 61
and Carmen 62, are clearly influenced by Sappho's epithalamia.
Another poem, Carmen 64, however, can not be overlooked for its
details about the wedding of Peleus and Thetis and desertion
of Ariadne.
