Compare and contrast the two love stories ("Peleus and Thetis"; "Ariadne and Theseus") in Catullus' Poem 64.

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Compare and contrast the two love stories ("Peleus and Thetis"; "Ariadne and Theseus") in Catullus' Poem 64.

Catullus' Poem 64 recounts the blissful marriage of Peleus and Thetis, the narration of which is interrupted by the recounting of another myth. This 'tale-within-a-tale' is the ekphrasis of a tapestry depicting Theseus' abandonment of Ariadne and telling of the ruinous consequences of this act for Theseus. It is this story of betrayed love that is woven into the coverlet of the matrimonial bed of Peleus and Thetis. Although it portends no such betrayal by either Peleus or Thetis, this vivid narrative tapestry dominates the poem and gives mythic idiom to a theme with which Catullus seems to have had much concern throughout his poetry of Lesbia.1 The lament of Ariadne is undoubtedly the centrepiece of the poem, and perhaps "puts into a woman's mouth the grief expressed elsewhere [in the poetry of] Catullus at his own abandonment by Lesbia."2 Theseus' lackadaisical absent-mindedness (made worse by the curse of Ariadne) causes his father's erroneous suicide, and may be indicative of the fecklessness of Lesbia.3 Perhaps then, the Peleus and Thetis narrative is merely a frame for the story of Ariadne.4 Yet,