CATULLUS 68 - Scuola Normale Superiore

position to give them; he implies that Manlius would do better to ask them from somebody else. If Catullus
cannot comply with his friend’s request, it follows that he will not do so either; it is not necessary to state the
denial any more explicitly.
Ellis and Kroll put a semi-colon after line 10, instead of the full stop preferred by most editors, and they turn
lines 1-14 into one long sentence. That is not ungrammatical, but it seems slightly better to treat lines 11-14
as a separate sentence as they have a different function from what precedes.
11 sed tibi ne The sequence is irregular: one normally finds the emphatic pronoun after sed ne (as in Cic.
Fam. 2.3.1 sed nec mihi placuit nec cuiquam tuorum and Planc. 55 sed neque tu) and the unemphatic
pronoun after a word further on in the clause (Cic. Ver. 2.2.178 sed ne illud quidem tibi dicere licebit). There
metrically convenient sequence sed tibi ne appears to be unparalleled; however, Catullus may be following
the licence established by Ennius frg. trag. 21 Jocelyn sed mihi neutiquam cor consentit cum oculorum
aspectu.
incommoda ‘Troubles’, ‘misfortunes’ (OLD s.v. incommodum, 2a). During the Republic the word is
present in all registers of Latin, including tragedy (Acc. trag. 350), but it is hardly found in Augustan poetry
(only at Hor. A.P. 169 and Ov. Pont. 4.9.81; cfr. Hor. Epist. 1.18.75 incommodus) and is absent from later
verse and Tacitus. See also on line 21 commoda.
Manli As in practically all his poems that are addressed to someone, Catullus identifies his addressee by
name; only poems 60 and 104 have an anonymous addressee. Here the principal MSS write mali and it is
difficult to reconstruct the name of the addressee, let alone to identify him: most likely he was called
Manlius, and he may have been the L. Manlius Torquatus whose wedding is celebrated in poem 61, but he
could also have been called Mallius (see the Introduction, pp. 34-43). But while no certainty is possible at
this point, we should certainly reconstruct a name, as it serves to characterize the friend as one particular
person, a unique individual whom the poet does his best to treat with tact and consideration, and not as stock
character or a nameless addressee.
The vocative recurs at line 30. It is typical of Catullus to call his addressee by name several times within a
short poem (this also happens in poems 17, 23, 25, 31, 36, 50, 52, 56, 65, 88, 98, 100, 110 and 112): we get
the impression of a speaker doing his best to hold the attention of his addressee. In Augustan poetry multiple
vocatives occur in Propertius’ first book of elegies (in 1.4, 1.7, 1.13 and 1.20) and in Horace’s Satires (in 1.6
and 2.1), but not in the more formal artistry of Horace’s Odes, Epodes and Epistles (except for in close
succession at Od. 2.14.1 and 4.13.1f.; contrast Od. 1.28.2 Archyta and 1.28.23 nauta). Catullus’ vocatives
often coincide with more direct or more emotional passages: here Catullus addresses Manlius first when he
sets out to explain why he cannot comply with his request, and for the second time when he replies explicitly
to a reproach of Manlius’.
Here R contains the variant al’ mauli in the hand R 2 , Coluccio Salutati, who copied variants from R’s
exemplar X but also added conjectures of his own (see also the Introduction, pp. 74f.). Since there is no such
name as *Maulius, in this case we can be practically certain that mauli is a corrupt form of manli. Thus
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