1. See Havelock, E. A., The Lyric Genius of Catullus, New York, 1939, 114ff.Google Scholar; Putnam, M. ‘The Art of Catullus 64,’ HSCP 65, 1961, 169–74Google Scholar; P.|McGushin, ‘Catullus’ “Sanctae Foedus Amicitiae,”’ CP 62, 1967, 85–93Google Scholar.

2. Ferrero, L., Interpretazione di Catullo, Turin, 1955, 99–100Google Scholar, suggests that it was the death of his brother which turned Catullus’ mind to the theme of love sanctified by marriage, perhaps out of desire to replace the lost domus by a new one.

3. The boys’ spotting Hesperus must be meant less as an indication of where they are sitting than as a sign of their emotional state, as is the girls’ response. For a different view see Kidd, D., ‘Hesperus and Catullus LXII,’ Latomus 33, 1974, 22–33Google Scholar, and the commentaries.

4. For the evidence see Mangelsdorff, E. A., Das lyrische Hochzeitsgedicht bei den Griechen und Roemern, Hamburg, 1913, 35Google Scholar.

5. See J. Heckenbach, PW VIII, 2133, s.v. Hochzeit, for the evidence.

6. I assume that the house figures in this pair of stanzas because the activities of stealing and guarding require a specific locus.

7. On kēpos, ‘garden,’ as a metaphor for pubes see Motte, A., Prairies et jardins de la Grèce Antique, Acad. Royale De Belgigue, Mem. De La CI. Des Lett. Coll. in-8°Google Scholar, 2e serie, T. LXI, Fasc. 5, Brussels, 1973, 38ff.; Henderson, J., The Maculate Muse, New Haven, 1975, 135 and n. 147Google Scholar; Merkelbach, R. and West, M. L., ‘Ein Archilochos-Papyrus,’ ZPE 14, 1974, 106Google Scholar. Cf. the cult of Aphrodite Urania discussed in E. Langlotz, Aphrodite in den Gaerten, Heidelberg, 1954, 27–35. The image of a girl as a garden (or meadow: cf. Pindar, Pyth. 9, 37, and Euripides, Cyclops 168f., both metaphorical) is very different in its implications from the image of a girl as a flower. Commager, S., ‘Notes on some Poems of Catullus,’ HSCP 70, 1965, 101Google Scholar, calls the flower a ‘stock simile associated with growth, love, and marriage’ since Sappho. But it is worth noting that I can find no passage specifically comparing a bride with a flower outside Catullus (cf c. 61, lines 21–22, 89, and 186–88, where I think Catullus has a specific scheme in mind). Theocritus, Id. 18, 29–30, compares Helen with a cypress in a garden and with the kosmos, ‘ornament,’ springing up in a rich field (aroura, ‘cropland’). Wheeler, A. L., ‘Tradition in the Epithalamium,’ AJP 51, 1950, 213Google Scholar, who also refers to the comparison of a bride with flower (or fruit) as standard, clearly going back to Sappho, gives no example from the wedding orators (apart from such compliments as ‘cheeks like roses,’ for which see also Theoc, Id. 18, 31). Nor have I found any in Menander, Peri Epideiktikōn, Tract. II, c. 13, Peri Epithctlamiou, and c. 14, Peri Kateunastikou (ed. Bursian, 1882); Ps.-Dionysius, Technē Rhētorikē, c. 2, Methodos Gamēliōn, c. 4, Methodos Epithalamiou (ed. Usener-Radermacher, 1904); or Choricius, Orationes nuptiales, 5 and 6 (ed. Foerster-Richtsteig, 1929), which Wheeler uses (plus Himerius, Oratio I, of which a text was unavailable to me) to reconstruct the traditional wedding-song. Menander, Peri Epithal. 271, suggests comparing the bride with an olive tree or an apple, the groom with a palm tree or a rose. He offers the marriage of trees as an example of the power of Eros (271). And he refers to trees again (Peri Kateunas. 276) when he suggests connecting the time of year with the marriage: ‘If it should be spring … (say) that now the earth adorns itself with flowers and grows fresh with buds, just as you also find yourselves in the spring and peak of beauty, and trees are mingled with trees so that this may become consummation and marriage.’ In other seasons fertility and crops are to be emphasized. The comparison of a bride to a flower would have been natural in the quoted passage, if it were popular. Perhaps the associations with virginity (cf. note 15 below), which the bride was about to lose, on the one hand, and the connection with the fleeting youth of pleasure and the charms of young boys (e.g. Mimnermus 1 West, Hesiod, Theog. 988–89, Theognis 1017–22) on the other hand, made it seem inappropriate. Himerius, according to Wheeler (213), said that to anthos tēs opseōs, ‘the flower of the face’ of the bride, must be praised in the poets’ language. Again, the flower image is confined and kept at the level of a cliché. These arguments from silence constitute no proof that the image of a flower for a bride was not used, but they help buttress the argument I will make that the context of the flower image for a girl is quite different from that appropriate to a wedding. Of course, flowers and garlands figured in the wedding decorations; cf. Theocritus Id. 18, 2 and 39–44, and Sappho LP 194 (= Himerius, Oratio I 4).

8. Note too the pattern of grammatical structure in the girls’ three stanzas: they begin with direct address to Hesperus, move to Hesperus as subject, themselves as object, and finish with themselves as subject (in the third person).

9. Cf. Lucretius DRN 5, 805–20, and Golden Age associations with the girls’ description of fostering nature. (This image is not the same as Ibycus 286 Page: see below, note 16.) Kroll ad 62.14 thinks that the benevolence of the weather reflects the parents’ care for the girl.

10. For a discussion of fertility and barrenness in c. 64 (Thetis and Ariadne) see Curran, L., ‘Catullus 64 and the Heroic Age’, YCS 21, 1969, 174–75Google Scholar. I am simplifying a complex web of associations with flowers in order to draw out the implications of the image as the girls’ chorus uses it.

11. Transformation of the wild flower into art is the one way to capture its essence as one’s own possession (which is what the girls want to do). In Cypria 3 (Kinkel) Aphrodite dons a robe dyed with spring flowers, making their colours both permanent and part of a specifically ‘human’ adornment. The self-justified, sterile beauty of the flower is also used by Mimnermus, especially in 2 West, without any transformation to art. In this poem the Homeric simile of generations like leaves is transformed into one of the brevity of new foliage and combined with metaphors of flowers of youth, spring, and dawn in an intense evocation of joyous young life. But hateful old age follows (7f.): ‘Brief is the fruit of youth, as long as the sun reaches up over earth. But when the thrust of the season changes, straightway indeed to die is better than life.’ The ‘fruit of youth’ (hēbēs karpos) here is only youth itself, nothing that develops from youth, as a reference to childlessness as one of the evils of old age (13–14) emphasizes. The interest in the poem lies in the fact that Mimnermus celebrates this narcissistic, fruitless way of life in youth without any illusions about the consequences. Here is no effort to arrest life at the stage of the flower, only fascination with its brevity (cf. 5 West, 4–5: ‘brief like a dream is honored youth’). The phrase hēbēs anthos (3), ‘the flower of youth,’ is a cliché (see Silk, M. S., Interaction in Poetic Imagery: With Special Reference to Early Greek Poetry, London and New York, 1974, 100 and 102CrossRefGoogle Scholar, note 16), but Mimnermus revivifies it with the change to the plural and the resonant context.

12. See Khan, H. A., ‘On the Art of Catullus Carm. 62.39–58, Its Relationship to 11.21–24, and the Probability of a Sapphic Model,’ Athenaeum 45, 1967, 160–76Google Scholar, for an extended argument that the girls are thinking not of sexual but of religious purity as their ideal.

13. Fraenkel, E., ‘Vesper adest (Cat. LXII),’ JRS 45, 1955, 8Google Scholar, calls the division of the bride’s virginity into three parts a ‘jestingly exaggerated display of arithmetic.’ Quinn, K., Catullus, The Poems, London, 1970Google Scholar, ad loc. calls it very Roman but hardly serious.

14. von Wilamowitz, U., Hellenistische Dichtung II, Zurich, 1924 (1973), 278–80Google Scholar, derives the Catullan image from Sappho’s apple fragment because he thinks availability is the critical factor in both versions. Ferrero (above, note 2), 328, thinks Catullus used both fragments and adds (325–26) that Alexandrian and Roman elements make up the boys’ song. Fraenkel, ‘Eine Stileigenheit der Fruehgriechischen Literatur,’ Wege und Formen Fruehgriechischen Denkens, 2nd ed., Munich, 1960, 44, uses Catullus as evidence for Sappho. Among commentaries, Quinn thinks Catullus used 105c as a model, Ellis remarks on the same resemblance, Kroll refers to it noncommittally, Fordyce finds it ‘far from striking,’ and Merrill does not mention it. Khan, H. A., ‘Observations on Two Poems of Catullus,’ RhMus 114, 1971, 167–71Google Scholar, thinks that the parallel is rather with Euripides’ Hipp. 73–81 and Sophocles’ Trach. 144–50 (and cf. note 12 above). On the Hippolytos passage, see my text, p. 95.

15. For the flower representing virginity, or at least sexual naiveté, see Archilochus PC7511 (discussed on p. 95); Hesiod 132 Merkelbach-West; Aeschylus, Suppl. 663fi. where I think it is part of the metaphor). Cf. the Homeric Hymn to Ge, 30, 14–15, and Anth. Pal. 5.144 (where the girl is called a pais ‘child’). It is implied in the connection between flower-picking and rape. Flowers are also found in descriptions of Aphrodite’s appeal, e.g., Pindar N 7, 53; Euripides, Medea 841; Cypria 3 and 4 (see above, note 11). In Aeschylus, Ag. 743, in a chorus full of images of innocence changing to destruction, Helen is called erōtos anthos, ‘flower of love.’ On flowers associated with Aphrodite see Roscher, Myth. Lex. I.1.397f. Roses are especially connected with Aphrodite because they can refer to the female genitals, a metaphor based on visual rather than mythic or structural analogy (see Henderson, above, note 7, 46). Flowers come with the spring, the turning point of the year, and presage the earth’s fertility without themselves being part of it, while individually they are fragile and brief. Thus they provide an image for newness, emergence, beauty, love, for the personal epiphany of the newly-grown individual before he becomes enmeshed in the tangle of reality. Mimnermus 2 W, 3–5, speaks of rejoicing in the flowers of youth ‘knowing neither evil nor good from the gods.’ The flower/youth is not engaged with the world.

16. The contrast of flower and fruit is not a commonplace in early Greek thought. I think it is an undercurrent: see p. 95 and below, note 36.

17. Foster, B. O., ‘Notes on the Symbolism of the Apple in Classical Antiquity,’ HSCP 10, 1899, 39–55Google Scholar; McCartney, E. S., ‘How the Apple Became the Token of Love,’ TAPA 56, 1925, 70–81Google Scholar; Trumpf, J., ‘Kydonische Aepfel,’ Hermes 88, 1960, 14–22Google Scholar; Frazer, J., The New Golden Bough, ed. T. Gaster, New York, 1959, 182–83Google Scholar (notes for 107). Cf. Aristophanes’ Peace 1320ff., where the pun on sukon, ‘fig,’ connects fruit and fertility of the earth with marriage and sex.

18. The spirit of (presumably) this fragment is given by Himerius, Or. I, 16 (translated by Bowra, M., Greek Lyric Poetry, 2nd ed., Oxford 1961, 221Google Scholar): 'Sappho compared the girl to an apple which has delighted those who were eager to pluck it so much that they could not taste it with the tip of a finger, but kept its youth blooming for him who in season intends to gather the apple.’

19. See previous note.

20. Wilamowitz (above, note 14), 280, gives this explanation of the hyacinth fragment, as does Mangelsdorff (above, note 4), 35, who thinks that virginity was the subject of an agon before the bride left home. Bowra (above, note 18), 220, argues from analogy with Catullus 62 that Sappho gave the simile to a girls’ chorus defending vhginity in a song before the bridal chamber. Page, D., Sappho and Alcaeus, Oxford, 1955, 121–22Google Scholar, agrees that both 105a and 105c may have come from a wedding hymn.

21. Hence the clarity of self-perception often remarked, e.g. Page (above, note 20), 27; Bowra (above, note 18), 184. The effects I am tracing are the outcome of the social and ritual aspects, which have been emphasized recently, of such feminine associations (see e.g. Gentili, B., ‘II Partenio di Alcmane e l’amore omoerotico nel tiasi spartani,’ QUCC 22, 1976, 59–67Google Scholar).

22. Lanata, G., ‘Sul linguaggio amoroso di Saffo,’ QUCC 2, 1966, 71–72Google Scholar, speaks of Sappho’s cultivation of an ‘impossible love’ and her use of the ‘love and death’ motif to express it. She sees flowers as connected with Aphrodite (68–70) but does not include them as part of the poetic creation of an ‘impossible love.’

23. Page (above, note 20), 40, supposes that a real place is described.

24. For another approach to the idealization see Turyn, A., ‘The Sapphic Ostracon,’ TAPA 73, 1942, 308–18Google Scholar. Cf. Lanata (above, note 22), 68.

25. For the garden as a sexual metaphor see above, note 7. In Frg. Adesp. 926 Page, where Bacchic choruses of delicate maidens are found in divine meadows of varied flowers by deep woods, an almost blatant sexual metaphor and a magical remoteness are combined, as they are also perhaps in Inc. Auct. Frg. 16 LP mentioning an altar and Cretan women dancing on flowers.

26. See M. Mayer, PW, 2te Reihe, vol. 9, 436, s.v. temenos. He gives citations for specific prohibitions against pasturing animals in the land immediately attached to the temple, as well as prohibitions against agricultural or foraging activities. Cf. also Barrett, W. S., Euripides’ Hippolytos, Oxford, 1964, ad 73–76Google Scholar.

27. For the horse as a sexual metaphor, see Gentili, B., Anacreon, Rome, 1958, 186–87Google Scholar, discussing Anacreon 60. In the picture here (6–9) of the girl pasturing in the hyacinth field where Cypris binds horses the two metaphors of horse and flowery field are combined in a mutually reinforcing way: the girl is found in a sexually inviting situation waiting to be seduced. The effect is very different from Sappho’s.

28. For an altogether different view of the working of the simile, see McLeod, C. W., ‘Two Comparisons in Sappho,’ ZPE 15, 1974, 217–20Google Scholar.

29. Cf. LP 154 describing a full moon as women are standing around an altar. Like a flower the moon is feminine, romantic, erotic, and unpossessable. It is fitting that the moon should have a lover who sleeps perpetually, a theme which Sappho treated, according to the scholiast to Ap. Rhod. 4, 57 (= LP 199). In LP 95 flowers and dew appear as features of Hades.

30. According to Page (above, note 20), 139, note 3, agan is suspect because it makes no sense; the meter is unknown.

31. Cf. Hesiod fr. 26 M-W; Euripides, Helen 241f. and Ion 887f.; Theocritus Id 11, 25–27; Moschus, Europa 63f., and see Buehler, W., Die Europa des Moschus, Hermes Einzelschr. 13, 1960Google Scholar, ad loc.

32. See Motte (above, note 7), 42ff. on maidens who are reported to go flowerpicking just before marriage. On rape in meadows and its connection with divine marriage see Motte 42–48; Bremer, J. M., ‘The Meadow of Love and Two Passages in Euripides’ Hippolytus,’ Mnem. 28, 1975, 268–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Henderson, J., ‘The Cologne Epode and the Conventions of Early Greek Erotic Poetry,’ Arethusa 9, 1976, 163 and 167Google Scholar. The prototype of the hieros gamos in literature is Zeus and Hera in Iliad 14, 292–351. Hera comes to Zeus as if for the first time, and the flowers that spring up about them as they make love express all the sweetness of fresh love and the beginning of the cycle of fertility which Hera is able ever to renew (cf. Pausanias II 38.2, and for Hera Antheia, Pausanias II 22.1). For the ‘garden of the gods’ see Barrett (above, note 26) ad 742–5l.

33. See S. Eitrem, PW, 2te Reihe, vol. 32, 1721ff., s.v. Narkissos. There is no old evidence for the Narcissus myth, though the name is pre-Greek. The narcissus grew around Colonos: cf. Sophocles, OC 681ff., where the description of the grove makes a striking contrast with the description of the olive trees of Attica. Eitrem refers to Geop. XI 25, where the narcissus is called ‘cold’ because it blooms very early in spring, and suggests that hence it is associated with death rather than fertility. The narcissus is often interchanged with the hyacinth, also with a pre-Greek name and a myth of early death. The two may share the same aura of associations.

34. See C. Segal, ‘The Myth of Bacchylides 17: Heroic Quest and Heroic Identity,’ Eranos forthcoming.

35. I am not certain of this. I have no undeniable evidence of such a metaphorical progression, and Fraenkel (above, note 14) 45, thinks that fruit and flower were interchangeable evocations of feminine sexuality before Ibycus. But perhaps the pomegranate seed that Persephone tastes before leaving Hades in this Hymn (372, cf. 393ff.) is emblematic of her new status as wife (as the flower reflected her virginity), for it binds her to Hades. Pindar speaks of the young men contending for the hand of Antaios’ daughter, who wished to pick the ‘flowering fruit of her gold-crowned youth’ (Pyth. 9, 109–11). The expression captures the girl’s freshness and her potential as a wife at the moment of transition. In the Suppliants (996–1002) Aeschylus has Danaus warn his daughters not to shame him, for they are of a season delightful to men: ‘tender fruit (opōra) is never easily guarded’ (998). Three lines later Danaus again refers to ‘fruit’ (karpōmata). Unfortunately 1000–1002 are corrupt (see the notes ad loc. in J. Vuertheimōs edition, 1967). The use of these metaphors suggesting ripeness is meant perhaps to undercut the Danaids’ insistence on virginity, so is of a piece with the handmaidens’ warning against slighting Aphrodite in the following chorus (1018ff.) and the Danaids’ inappropriate appeal to Zeus as the one who released Io from travail (e.g. 1062ff). The contrast is explicit in Ibycus 286 Page: the poet juxtaposes a garden of virgins where in spring the quinces and vine-flowers bloom with the searing wind that is his experience of love. The flowers here are not so much significant in themselves as reminders of the fruit to follow, as Fraenkel (44–45) remarks, citing Wilamowitz. Fraenkel thinks that Ibycus is reworking Sappho to produce a definite progression of flower to fruit that she had not used. But both the use of flower and fruit as stages of feminine development and the dissociation of erotic love from fertility seem to me so strikingly similar to Sappho that I would prefer to say that Ibycus was condensing terms that Sappho had used. Bremer (above, note 32), 271–72, and Trumpf (above, note 17), 21–22, both treat Ibycus’ garden as a garden of love, ignoring the fact that, as it is a garden of virgins, Parthenōn kāpos akēratos (3–4), it is unrealized as a locus of love.

36. See Bremer (above, note 32).

37. See most recently the text and discussions in The New Archilochus, Arethusa 9.2, 1976, J. van Sickle, ed.

38. It is not clear that the girl is not actually seduced. See Henderson (above, note 32), 169–74, who argues that she is. I would argue (in addition to other objections) that on his interpretation 9–10 mean ‘there are many delights for young men outside marriage,’ a fact of which the girl is already well aware.

39. Braga, D., Catullo e i Poeti Graeci, Messina, 1950, 62–67Google Scholar, thinks c. 62 is meant to contrast Sappho’s dreaming sentimentalism with Catullus’ vigorous sensibility (sentimentalismo vs. sentimentalitá) in a lusus between lyric charm and sane realism. He makes the observation that Catullus used both of Sappho’s images to create his flower image and calls it a clever furtum.

40. Sappho probably also compared a girl with a grape. See Reitzenstein, R., ‘Die Hochzeit des Peleus und der Thetis,’ Hermes 35, 1900, 96Google Scholar, who cites Eratosthenes, And Alcaeus LP 119 contains an extended image of a grape-harvest which may refer to a woman’s sexuality (although Page [above, note 20], 242, note 3, suggests a political meaning). Cf. Svennung, J., Catulls Bildersprache, Uppsala, 1945, 79Google Scholar.

41. Wilamowitz (above, note 14), 280, observes that c. 62 contains tension between Catullus and Sappho: Catullus is contradicting Sappho’s female viewpoint.

42. Ferrero (above, note 2), 324–25 and 334–36.

43. For the inversion of sex roles and its implications in the metaphor see Putnam, M., ‘Catullus 11: The Ironies of Integrity,’ Ramus 3, 1974, 79–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

44. See Rubino, C., ‘The Erotic World of Catullus,’ CW 68, 1975, 289–98Google Scholar, for the ‘schizophrenia’ of trying to straddle just this boundary.