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"Nonetheless, Catullus’ description of Attis’ identity and role are not without ambiguity. Perhaps the most prominent of these uncertainties is found at 63.27, where Attis is described as a notha mulier. This line has often been taken as a denial of Attis’ femininity: Green, for instance, renders the predicate as “woman no woman,” and Lee translates it to “false female.”

It is unnecessary, however, to take notha as such a strongly negative qualifier. While the word in its general meaning can be taken as “bastard” or “false”, it may also have the more neutralsense of “mixed” or “hybridized.”

It is therefore premature to
conclude that notha, as Catullus uses it, is indeed a negation of Attis’ being a mulier: the meaning of the term is ambiguous, and it can equally be taken to imply that Attis is a woman of unusual origins, or with hybrid male and female characteristics, so as to imply that they are not a woman at all.

While it is difficult to speculate as to the author’s intent, the use of falsa would have much more clearly conveyed the sense of negation taken by Green and Lee and would be metrically equivalent.

More concretely, the “mixed” or “uncertain” sense of notha corresponds quite well to the single other use of mulier within the text, in which it is placed in an uneasy coexistence with seemingly contradictory identities:

ego mulier, ego adulescens, ego ephebus, ego puer, ego gymnasi fui flos, ego eram decus olei

“I a woman, I a youth, I an ephebe, I a boy, I have been the flower of the gymnasium, I was the glory of the oil.”

While these lines are undoubtedly biographical, it is difficult to determine the chronology of the line, that is, which of these identities coexist or succeed others at any given moment in Attis’ history.