CATULLUS 68 - Scuola Normale Superiore

frigida ... membra Since erotic fervour was associated with heat, frigidus was used regularly to indicate a
lack of passion: thus at Verg. Geo. 3.97 frigidus in Venerem senior (a horse), Ov. Am. 2.1.5 in sponsi facie
non frigida uirgo and 2.7.9f. in te quoque frigidus esse … dicor, Rem. 491f. quamuis infelix media torreberis
Aetna, / frigidior dominae (glacie recentiores) fac uideare tuae, Petron. 20.2 inguina mea mille iam mortibus
frigida (cfr. 129.7) and Mart. 3.34.2 frigida es … Chione. See further TLL 6.1.1329.73-82 with 1322.50-58
and 1339.29-32.
deserto ... cubili It is possible to take deserto with cubili (‘a deserted bed’), but it is better to treat it as a
case of enallage, with the adjective characterizig the owner of each bed, as is the case in line 3 lecto caelibe
(see ad loc.): compare the pathetic fallacy at 64.133 perfide, deserto liquisti in litore, Theseu (which may
echo this passage) and Prop. 1.3.2 languida desertis Cnosia litoribus (cfr. 1.15.17f., 1.18.1, 1.18.32 and
1.17.2) The present phrase is imitated by Ovid at A.A. 3.69f. tempus erit quo tu, quae nunc excludis amantes,
/ frigida deserta nocte iacebis anus, Met. 7.710 deserti foedera lecti and Her. 1.7 non ego deserto iacuissem
frigida lecto.
Here deserto cubili can be interpreted in two different ways: each bed, or rather its owner, could have been
‘abandoned’ (a) by all and sundry, by bedfellows in general, or (b) by a particular partner. Since more beds
and more owners are at stake, and since the latter include Catullus, who has not been abandoned by anybody.
it is almost certain that (a) is correct (see also on 27-30). It is interesting, however, that Ovid could have it
both ways when imitating this phrase: at Ars 3.70 he let desertus mean ‘shunned by all’ (a), and at Her. 1.7
and Met. 7.710 ‘abandoned’ (b) (see above).
The phrase picks up desertum in lecto caelibe in line 6 (see ad loc.). The echo puts what is described in
either verse on a par: as with line 13 merser, Catullus implicitly suggests that his situation is basically similar
to that of Manlius.
tepefactet A difficult crux: how should this word be written, and what does it mean? The principal MSS
OGR write tepefacit, while R 2 (Coluccio Salutati) has added al’ factat in the margin. Thomson (1997: 43)
believes this to be a conjecture of Salutati’s. In fact, the verb tepefacto is unattested elsewhere (its twin form
frigefacto appears in Plautus at Poen. 760 and Rud. 1326) and it does not seem likely that Salutati or any but
the best Renaissance scholars should have conjectured a hapax. It is more probable that he should have
copied this variant from X, and that like al’ mauli in line 11 (see ad loc.) it should reflect an older stage of
the tradition. Since tepefacit is far more common than tepefactat (in Catullus it is also found at 64.340),
tepefacit appears to be a banalization and tepefactat the older form. Elsewhere esse quod always takes a
subjunctive (see on 27-30), so rather than tepefactat we need a subjunctive form of tepefacto. The obvious
choice is Bergk’s tepefactet, which first appeared in Rossbach’s Teubner edition of 1854 (and one should
give Bergk credit for his originality: he cannot have been aware of the variant in R, which was only
discovered by Hale in 1896; at most he could have been using a MS such as 23, which is the only one of the
recentiores that I know of to contain a form of tepefacto). Most editors from the twentieth century print this,
with Quinn and Bardon preferring tepefactat. Lachmann’s tepefaxit (i.e. tepefacsit) is not far from OGR’s
reading tepefacit, but it comes from the wrong verb. So does tepefiat, proposed by Schrader, and this would
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