Catullus 64 Catullus 64 Catullus 64 is an epyllion or "little epic" poem written by Latin poet Catullus. Catullus' longest poem, it retains his famed linguistic witticisms while employing an appropriately epic tone. Though ostensibly concerning itself with the marriage of Peleus and the sea-nymph Thetis (parents of the famed Greek hero Achilles), a sizeable portion of the poem's lines is devoted to the desertion of Ariadne by the legendary Theseus. Although the poem implies that Theseus and Ariadne were in love, in reality the text never explicitly states that Theseus even looked at Ariadne. Told through ecphrasis, or the depiction of
Bacchus and Ariadne (poem) Ariadne" was toned down and contained a "sociability" that was mentioned in the preface of Hunt's "Foliage". When placed into a sequence following "Hero and Leander", the "Bacchus and Ariadne" is a consolation to the themes of the first. Bacchus is able to save Ariadne, whereas no one was able to save Hero. Hunt relied on the story from Ovid's "Heroides" to base his poem, but Hunt describes an end result to the story that Ovid leaves untold. A major connection between Hunt's and Ovid's version is that they begin at sunrise. Ovid uses the sunrise to show that Ariadne