CATULLUS 68 - Scuola Normale Superiore

quid agis? ...’). In general, scribo tends to be used in the same way as dico and most other verbs of saying
(except inquam and, on occasion, aio), which always introduce an indirect quotation.
Note the epistolary quod ‘as to the fact that …’, introducing a new subject that has been brought up by the
addressee (see lines 1-10, with commentary). It is not picked up by id in line 30 (see the note there) and it
does not refer to what Manlius is writing, but to the fact that he is writing it: ‘As to your writing that in
Verona ...’
Catullo The primary MSS write the vocative catulle, which is defended by Santenius (‘si inter duo
commata legatur, vulgato non deterius est’); but see on lines 27-30 for the case (definitive, I think) that we
have to do with an indirect quotation here, which requires the dative. “The change is almost nothing, and no
change is more frequent in our MSS. than the assimilation of terminations, even when the sense is completely
ruined by it” (Postgate 1888: 251 with 267): the alteration of turpe catullo to turpe catulle would have
parallels such as 4.2 nauium celerrimus ] –ium -imum A, 23.24 tu commoda ] tua A, cursu dea menstruo ]
menstrua A, 53.3 meus crimina Caluos ] meos A and 61.227 munere assiduo ] –e –e A. Alternatively, the
corruption could be due to the customary carelessness of copyists at the end of the verse, to a scribe’s
perplexity at Catullus’ reference to himself in the third person, or simply to the obscurity of the passage.
Catullus often speaks of himself in the third person: see line 135 below, and also 6.1, 7.10, 8.12, 11.1, 13.7,
14.3f., 38.1, 44.3, 49.4f., 56.3, 58.2f., 72.1, 79.3 (following on a second-person address in the previous
verse) and 82.
28 quod hic Fröhlich (1849: 263) conjectured quoad ‘insofar as’, but that would be unmetrical (it is
monosyllabic in all three of its attestations in poetry during the 1 st century B.C., at Lucr. 5.1213 and 5.1433
and Hor. Sat. 2.3.91) and would not make sense.
quisquis Here this would have to mean not ‘whoever’, but ‘everyone’. The difficulty was already
recognized in the Renaissance, when Perreius proposed to add est after nota at the end of the verse, but that
does not go well with the subjunctive that is usually reconstructed in the following verse (and with good
reason: see on tepefactet); and for the same reason one cannot tacitly add est with Fordyce. A variety of
conjectures have been proposed: quisque (a variant from the Renaissance, but it would be unmetrical),
quisquam (Muretus) and quiuis (Lachmann in app.). But as is pointed out by Kühner-Stegmann 2.199, “just
as quisque can have the meaning of the relative quisquis, so viceversa, quisquis too can be used in an
indefinite sense” 189 (perhaps we have to do with a series of mistakes rather than a rule) – and their examples
show that this is not only possible in the neuter (thus Pl. Trin. 881 unum quicquid singillatim, ‘everything,
item by item’, Lucr. 5.264 primum quicquid, etc.) and in set phrases such as quoquo modo (Cic. Mil. 9, Tac.
Ann. 15.53, etc.), quoquo pacto (Ter. Eun. 1083) and quaqua de re locuti (Tac. Ann. 6.7 etc.), but also in the
masculine: thus at Cic. Fam. 6.1.1 quocumque in loco quisquis est (P. Manutius conjectured quisque), CIL
1.593.13 (Tabula Heraclea: the text of a legal statute enacted probably under Julius Caesar) quod quemquam
h(ac) l(ege) profiteri oportebit, Liv. 8.38.11 in suo quisquis gradu obnixi (quisque in the codex O is an
189 „Wie quisque im Sinne des relativischen quisquis, so steht umgekehrt wieder auch quisquis in indefinitem Sinne.“
137