“cum diva mulier aries ostendit oscitantes,”
Every translation I have viewed of this line has been vastly different. It seems to me that there are two nouns in the nominative case, mulier and aries. Is diva mulier in the vocative case?
Merrill notes that “the verse is unintelligible, and no satisfactory emendation has yet been suggested.”
Apparently the 1958 Oxford edition reads “mulierarius”, which doesn’t really help much. 
Hi,
I happened to buy The Poems of Catullus, A Bilingual Edition, by Peter Green the other day. In this book the line and its translation are given as follows.
cum diva Murcia ebrios ostendit oscitantes
whenever heavenly sloth reveals the tipsy diners nodding
The Note accompanying this line is, significantly:
“Murcia: An obscure minor goddeess of sloth: the correction is highly speculative.?
Cheers,
Int
… It seems to me that there are two nouns in the nominative case, mulier and aries. Is diva mulier in the vocative case?
I read diva as nominative, translating it “When the goddess/woman/ram manifests (herself/himself) to those yawning”. Merrill thinks it may be a reference to the night-time hours when Thallus does his dirty work.
Chiarini translates the Oxford edition’s line as “quando la luna ti mostra qualche donnaiolo distratto”, which I read as “when the moon (diva) indicates to you some inattentive ladies’ man”, reading “mulierarius” for “mulier aries”, implying that Thallus looks for marks whose attentions are turned elsewheres (i.e. away from their possessions).