Cl assical reception implies two interrelated sets of cultural practices. One is the use of speciWc classical sources in literary works, paintings, systems of thought, "cultural events," and other forms of cultural production, the whole gamut of citational techniques constituting what is usually addressed by "classical reception studies." Another-often harder to identify with speciWc ancient sources-is the staging of receptivity to the classical past, a notionally passive state but very much dependent on active behaviors and tied, like the Wrst kind, to the occupation of certain social, cultural, and political roles within a given society. Displaying receptivity to the ancient world is intermingled with citation as a guarantee of its collective import, even as such display divides those who are receptive in the same way from those who are not. Indeed, any act of classical reception both invites and excludes other participants. Invitation and exclusion can occur in the same gesture, even with the same audience as their target. When Keats, for example, hears and allows us to hear his Grecian Urn declare, "Beauty is truth, truth beauty," he makes a statement about receptivity to ancient Greece over which learned debate, a sense of not quite being "in" on the meaning of this ultimately cryptic pronouncement, has long continued. 1 Staging receptivity to antiquity is a political practice with a complex history extending back to our classical sources themselves, and so forms a natural complement to the study of reception within a volume such as this one. To underscore this idea, I have chosen to concentrate on a culture among the earliest receivers of the Greek classics, ancient Rome, and, further, on a series of Wctive objects existing in the imagination of an ancient poet and his audience: the Argo, the royal palace of Peleus, and an embroidered coverlet depicting the story of Ariadne, all as described by Catullus in his famous "epyllion" on the