MEDEA. Loathe on… But, Oh, thy voice. It hurts me sore.

JASON. Aye, and thine me. Wouldst hear me then no more?

MEDEA. How? Show me but the way. ’Tis this I crave.

JASON. Give me the dead to weep, and make their grave.

MEDEA. Never! Myself will lay them in a still

Green sepulchre, where Hera by the Hill

Hath precinct holy, that no angry men

May break their graves and cast them forth again

To evil. So I lay on all this shore

Of Corinth a high feast for evermore

And rite, to purge them yearly of the stain

Of this poor blood. And I, to Pallas’ plain

I go, to dwell beside Pandion’s son,

Aegeus.—For thee, behold, death draweth on,

Evil and lonely, like thine heart: the hands

Of thine old Argo, rotting where she stands,

Shall smite thine head in twain, and bitter be

To the last end thy memories of me.

[She rises on the chariot and is slowly borne away.]

ARIADNE AND THESEUS

‘Poem 64’

Catullus

Translated by Daisy Dunn, 2016

Ariadne, the daughter of King Minos of Crete, has woken alone on the shore of Naxos. She helped an Athenian stranger, Theseus, to navigate a labyrinth to kill her monstrous half-brother, the Minotaur, only to find herself abandoned by him after becoming his lover. The Latin love poet Catullus (c. 82 BC–c. 53 BC), who was born into a wealthy family from Verona and worked in Rome in the mid-first century BC, presented this story as the decoration on a bedspread. We are to imagine each scene as though it were embroidered. Hence the wine god Bacchus is said to fly in ‘from another part of the cloth’. Catullus was left broken-hearted when his own lover, Lesbia, abandoned him. He clearly empathised with miserable Ariadne. In the sixteenth century the artist Titian used this story as the inspiration for his exquisite painting Bacchus and Ariadne.

On the quietly shifting shore of Naxos

Ariadne watches Theseus

Fading with fast fleet and bears at heart

Fears she cannot temper.

Not yet does she believe she is seeing

What she is seeing,

Barely woken from sleep that deceived

To discover she is abandoned

And pitiful and alone on lonely sands.

But the young man is forgetful and fleeing

And pushes the waves away with oars,

Leaving his promises unfulfilled to the tempest that is stirring.

From afar atop the seaweed, with sad little eyes,

The daughter of Minos watches, ah she watches

Him, like a stone sculpture of a bacchant.

She ebbs on currents swollen with pain,

Losing hold

On the fine band on her fair head

And the cloth that envelops her body in a gentle clinch

And the rounded bra that bounds her milky breasts.

All the coverings which have fallen from her body everywhere

The salt waves make sport of at her feet.

But neither headband nor fluttering veils vexed her

When in the fullness of her heart

She was missing you, Theseus,