Theocritus and Calvus molded into a single Virgilian line. 3 Here the poet's purpose is to indicate the active tradition of his own verse, an in some ways to demonstrate the superiority of the poetry which su sumes and transforms that tradition. To that extent the practice i polemical.

What I propose here is an examination of perhaps the most literary and allusive lines of Catullus-the opening of his epyllio The purpose is to expose this portion of the poem as Catullus' majo polemical demonstration of his literary affiliations. Why these lin The reason will, I believe, emerge as we detect the complex of refe ences and allusions that inhabit the opening tableau. But, in any ca the description of the Argo's departure seems deliberately chosen as vehicle for polemical expression. Nowhere else does it play a signif cant part in the account of the marriage of Peleus and Thetis (a matt to which we shall return), and, even more significantly, in its previo treatment, the episode offered Catullus precisely the literary rang which would be appropriate to the creation of an intensely erudite a polemical narrative. On the Greek side, Euripides' Medea, the Argo-nautica of Apollonius and Callimachus' Aetia4-these are the natur stages of influence in the maturation of the high neoteric style. At t same time, archaic Latin poetry, not just the Medea of Ennius, but other Ennian verse, as well as that of Accius, is incorporated in Catullus' proem in ways which, far from constituting mere literar reference, argue for the superiority of the narrative of the New Po It is, of course, by no means a novel observation that the openin of Catullus 64 draws from previous literary expression; Quinn, wit others, notes:" The first sentence is shot through with reminiscences Ennius' version of Euripides' Medea." 5 Nor are all of the allusions with which we shall deal missed by the commentators and critics.