The narrative devices, however, varied somewhat.  Some poets discarded all idea of form.  They roamed through the woods by any path that might appear.  This is the way that Tibullus likes to treat a theme.  Whatever semi-apposite topic happens to suggest itself, provided only it contains pleasing fancies, invites him to tarry a while; he may or may not bring you back to the starting point.  Other poets still adhere to form, though the pattern must be elaborate enough to hide its scheme from the casual reader, and sufficiently elastic to provide space for sentiment and pathos.  In his sixty-eighth poem Catullus employs what might be called a geometrical pattern, in fact a pyramid of unequal steps.  He mounts to the central theme by a series of verses and descends on the other side by a corresponding series.  In the sixty-fourth poem, however, the epyllion which the author of the Ciris clearly had in mind, Catullus used an intricate but by no means balanced form.  The poem opens with the sea voyage of Peleus on which he meets the sea-nymph, Thetis.  Then the poet leaps over the interval to the marriage feast, only to dwell upon the sorrows of Ariadne depicted on the coverlet of the marriage couch; thence he takes us back to the causes of Ariadne’s woes, thence forward to the vengeance upon Ariadne’s faithless lover; then back to the second scene embroidered on the tapestry; and now finally to the wedding itself which ends with the Fates’ wedding song celebrating the future glories of Peleus’ promised son.

The Ciris, to be sure, is not quite so intricate, but here again we have only allusions to the essential parts of the story:  how Scylla offended Juno, how she met Minos, how she cut the lock, and how the city was taken.  We are not even told why Minos failed to keep his pledge to the maiden.  In the midst of the tale, Carme suspends the action by a long reference to Minos’ earlier passion for her own daughter, Britomartis, which caused the girl’s destruction, but the lament in which this story is disclosed merely alludes to but does not tell the details of the story.  The whole plot of the Ciris is in fact unravelled by means of a series of allusions and suggestions, exclamations and soliloquies, parentheses and aposiopeses, interrogations and apostrophes.

In verse-technique[2] the Ciris is as near Catullus’ Peleus and Thetis as it is the Aeneid:  indeed it is as reminiscent of the former as it is prophetic of the latter.  The spondaic ending which made the line linger, usually over some word of emotional content, (l. 158): 

  At levis ille deus, cui semper ad ulciscendum