CATULLUS 68 - Scuola Normale Superiore

so in the reading of Ellis, who prints no quotation marks and writes Catullo in both his editions, but states in
his commentary that these verses contain an assertion of the addressee’s – that is to say, he believes that the
addressee has written of Catullus in the third person singular (this is very uneconomical: one would expect
the second person in this case, and that is what we find in the MSS). Now we have seen that these lines
appear to contain no direct quotation. Also, it is implausible that Catullus should have referred to the bed that
he had abandoned with the words deserto … cubili. In this case Latin would require not a bare participle, but
a relative clause (cubile quod deserui), as it is crucial to know who the bed has been abandoned by, while the
participle merely indicates the fact that it has been abandoned.
This leaves us with the first interpretation. We are faced with an accumulation of words indicating amorous
misfortune – frigida membra and deserto … cubili – and alongside these with tepefactet. Evidently each of
the people in question tries to warm up their limbs in an empty bed: unable to warm himself by making love
vigorously he is forced to pile up the blankets. Coppel (1973: 15f.) has seen that there could be a problem
with deserto here, as romantic misfortune does not tend to affect crowds of people at the same time. He
proposes to read these lines as a direct quotation and suggests that Manlius’ grave problem will simply have
been that Catullus left Rome, which put an end to all good cheer among his friends – but Manlius’
misfortune is described in the gravest terms in lines 1-4 (see ad loc.) and it is hard to believe that these could
describe such a petty event. However, Coppel failed to take into consideration another possibility: deserto
need not mean ‘abandoned by somebody’: it can also mean ‘shunned by all’ (see on line 6 desertum).
Manlius is evidently reproaching Catullus for the fact that in his stuffy home-town Verona no fashionable
young man has a love-life to speak of. That is at least his idea of provincial life: the double erotic pursuit
described in poem 100 suggests that in reality Verona may not have been such a stuffy place after all. So
Manlius is reproaching Catullus for having withdrawn to a cloistered existence in a provincial town that
offers in his view not the slightest opportunity for erotic adventures. Veronae and hic refer to the same place,
first from the point of view of Manlius (‘in Verona, where you are staying’), then from that of Catullus
(‘here’).
27 quare quod scribis Thus also Cic. Fam. 12.2.2 quare quod scribis te confidere ... On its own, quod
scribis was clearly a set turn of phrase in Roman letters: it occurs 68 times in Cicero’s correspondence. It
introduces an indirect quotation in every case, save four: at Att. 12.25.2 quod scribis ‘⁄γγ→ραμα’ and
12.34.3 quod enim scribis ‘extremi’ it introduces a one-word quotation, while at Att. 8.15.2 nec me mouet
quod scribis ‘Ioui ipsi iniquum’ and 12.1.2 sed quod scribis ‘igniculum matutinum ’,
γεροντικ⊕τερον est ... it introduces one that is “proverbial and non-personal in expression” (Thomson).
One should contrast Fam. 5.2.3 Quod autem ita scribis, ‘pro mutuo inter nos animo’. Latin writers did not
have semi-colons and quotation marks at their disposal and had to state explicitly when they were about to
make a direct quotation, as Cicero does before the prosopopoeiae in his first speech against Catiline (Cat.
1.18 quae tecum, Catilina, sic agit et quodam modo tacita loquitur: ‘Nullum iam ... ’ and 1.27 etenim si
mecum patria, quae mihi uita mea multo est carior, si cuncta Italia, si omnis res publica loquatur: ‘M. Tulli,
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