As a case study, this paper proposes a focus on Catullus' poem 64, a small-scale epic poem (epyllion) in which the conciliation of differences - existential, religious, cultural, linguistic, stylistic - is thematised, and is thus refracted throughout the many layers of the text itself. From a standpoint located at the heart of the present age 'of iron', devoid of justice and of the gods, stems the yearning for the opposite condition, which the poem's narrator identifies in Greek myth and, more precisely, at the heart of the heroic age. The narrator's utterance is a sort of poetic ritual which, availing itself of a number of Greek models and of procedures aquired from other genres (the cult and the rhapsodic hymn in particular) seeks to evoke the gods, summoning them to become manifest for men to behold again as once in the theoxenic age, which had been inaugurated by the marriage of a mortal man (Peleus) with a goddes (Thetis).
