CATULLUS 68 - Scuola Normale Superiore

without any hint that the investment will ever be reciprocated, as at Verg. Aen. 6.610f. qui diuitiis soli
incubuere repertis / nec partem posuere suis and possibly also at Cic. Flac. 56 quo in oppido uniuersa
pecunia a tota Asia ad honores L. Flacci poneretur. (See the OLD s.v., 14, which however appears to
suggest that the abstract uses of the word should have preceded the concrete ones, but surely one would
expect the opposite.)
posta is a syncopated form of posita, found only here in Catullus; elsewhere he only uses positus and its
compounds (supposita 67.32, oppositast 26.2, compositum 68.98 and positam 63.55) with their convenient
pair of short syllables. Syncopated forms originated in the spoken language and became progressively more
common over time (see Väänänen 1963: 40-45 for a detailed account). The case of positus > postus,
however, cannot be treated as a simple contrast between a conservative literary and a progressive vulgar
form, as the attestations of postus and its compounds have a somewhat curious distribution: the syncopated
form is absent from Plautus and Terence, it is first found in Cato the Elder (Agr. 151.2 expostum and 161.3
posturus alongside 14.5 posita, 105.2 and 154 positum and 46.1 positurus – but unusual forms may have
been regularized in the MS tradition of a prose author) and Ennius (frg. inc. 23 Vahlen repostus) and is used
by many later poets, including Lucilius (frg. 84 Marx compostae), Lucretius (1.1059 and 3.857 posta, 4.150
opposta, etc.), Varro of Atax (frg. 8.2 FPL 3 composta), Horace (Epod. 9.1 repostum), Propertius (4.2.29
imposta) and Virgil (repostum at Aen. 1.26, taken from Ennius according to Servius ad loc.; also 1.249
compostus, Geo. 3.527 repostae, etc.). It appears to be avoided by all classical prose authors, but is found in
inscriptions (e.g. CIL 6.10458 VBE·POSTA·EST – note here the spelling mistake in ube) and from the 4 th
century A.D. onwards also in prose works by Iuvencus, Prudentius and Corippus (see further Neue-Wagener
3.533f.). Wotke (1886: 146) and Norden on Aen. 6.24 supposta treat the poetic usages of postus and
compounds as archaisms that are used for the sake of metrical convenience, mostly at the end of the
hexameter, as here; however, the late and epigraphic uses suggest that postus continued to be used alongside
positus in the spoken language throughout antiquity. Tellingly, it is postus rather than positus that has left its
mark on the Romance languages: compare Italian posto, Spanish puesto, Portuguese posto, Romanian pus
etc.
Since it is hard to make sense of posta est, there have been made since the Renaissance a series of attempts
to emend it; however, a syncopated form is less likely to be the product of corruption, and none of the
conjectures are convincing. The oldest one may well be the best: facta est, which first appears in MS 31 in
the mid-15 th century and is actually found in about half of Catullus’ codices recentiores. copiam facere is
perfectly good Latin: compare Pl. Asin. 848 amanti argenti feci copiam and Curc. 330 argenti rogo uti faciat
copiam, and also Sen. Ep. 39.1 utriusque rei tibi copiam faciam. The problem is that it is hard to see how
facta could have turned into posta. Trappes-Lomax (2007: 231) suggests that this was through “no more than
the accidental substitution of one word by a similar word of the same metrical form”, but such cases tend to
result either in manifest absurdities or in banalizations, and not in a phrase that is surprising but that could
well make sense. On the other hand, as Schwabe (1864: 15) puts it, “in uicem uerbi posta, quod non
intellegebatur, facillime uerbum faciendi in hac formula usitatissimum substitui potuit.” Trappes-Lomax
151