LP0113 cat64b Ariadne's Curse Legendary Passages - Greek/Roman Myths

Legendary Passages #0113, The Poems of Catullus, Part II of Poem [64], Ariadne's Curse. Previously, Catullus described a couch covered with images of Theseus and Ariadne. Here the passage continues with her lamentations, her curse, and her rescue, of sorts. Ariadne had hoped for marriage, would have endured slavery, but being left to die alone was the ultimate betrayal by Theseus. She insulted his parentage, complained to the uncaring wind about the evilness of men, and despaired that even if she escaped off the island, she had no where else to go. Her love spurned, her fate sealed, as her final act she cursed Theseus to die alone. Meanwhile, his mind in a haze, Theseus dimly recalled his father Aegeus' parting words to him. Aegeus believed that Theseus would die as had all the youths before him, thus the tribute ship was given a black sail, the color of grief and death. Should a miracle occur, the Minotaur slain and he survive, Theseus was told to hoist a white sail, to let his father know that he yet lived. The final section has Ariadne rescued by the god Dionysus, here called Bacchus, and his strange entourage of followers and satyrs. It is hinted that Bacchus himself compelled Theseus to leave, and the god of liberation declared his own love for Ariadne. Bacchus throws a massive party for their wedding, she became a goddess, and received her happily ever after. Ariadne's Curse, a Legendary Passage from, A. S. Kline translating, Gaius Valerius Catullus, Part II of Poem [64]. https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Latin/Catullus.php#anchor_Toc531846789 But what should I relate, digressing further from my poem’s theme: the girl, abandoning her father’s sight, her sisters’ embraces, and lastly her mother’s, she wretched at her lost daughter’s joy in preferring the sweet love of Theseus to all this: or her being carried by ship to Naxos’s foaming shore, or her consort with uncaring heart vanishing, she conquered, her eyes softening in sleep? Often loud shrieks cried the frenzy in her ardent heart poured out from the depths of her breast, and then she would climb the steep cliffs in her grief, where the vast sea-surge stretches out to the view, then run against the waves into the salt tremor holding her soft clothes above her naked calves, and call out mournfully this last complaint, a frozen sob issuing from her wet face: ‘False Theseus, is this why you take me from my father’s land, faithless man, to abandon me on a desert shore? Is this how you vanish, heedless of the god’s power, ah, uncaring, bearing home your accursed perjuries? Nothing could alter the measure of your cruel mind? No mercy was near to you, inexorable man, that you might take pity on my heart? Yet once you made promises to me in that flattering voice, you told me to hope, not for this misery but for joyful marriage, the longed-for wedding songs, all in vain, dispersed on the airy breezes. Now, no woman should believe a man’s pledges, or believe there’s any truth in a man’s words: when their minds are intent on their desire, they have no fear of oaths, don’t spare their promises: but as soon as the lust of their eager mind is slaked they fear no words, they care nothing for perjury. Surely I rescued you from the midst of the tempest of fate, and more, I gave up my half-brother, whom I abandoned to you with treachery at the end. For that I’m left to be torn apart by beasts, and a prey to sea-birds, unburied, when dead, in the scattered earth. What lioness whelped you under a desert rock, what sea conceived and spat you from foaming waves, what Syrtis, what fierce Scylla, what vast Charybdis, you who return me this, for the gift of your sweet life? If marriage with me was not in your heart, because you feared your old father’s cruel precepts, you could still have led me back to your house, where I would have served you, a slave happy in her task, washing your beautiful feet in clear water, covering your bed with the purple fa