CATULLUS 68 - Scuola Normale Superiore

prefers to follow O and writes uiatorum.) On the other hand, salsus is used for sweat by Virgil in his
description of the miraculous behaviour of the Palladium at Aen. 2.173f. salsusque per artus / sudor iit – but
there the epithet has the point that the sweat of the statue is salty, like that of any human being, it is entirely
natural, while here a reference to the taste of the sweat of the traveller would be rather bathetic, even if one
tries with Nisbet (1978: 114, n. 50) to take salso … sudore in contrast with dulce … leuamen: the relief is
‘sweet’ in the first place because it is pleasant and welcome and not because it consists of a drink of sweet
water.
To sum up, we are faced with a choice between salso, which is bathetic, and lasso, which is ambiguous – at
least if we write uiatori. But is it possible to write uiatorum? We have seen that this reading was preferred by
Baehrens and Riese. In his commentary Baehrens argued that uiatori must be a conjecture by the scribe of G;
this was before William Gardner Hale’s discovery of R, which changed the picture considerably. What
reading can we reconstruct for the archetype A? It had two direct descendants, O and X; O has uiatorum; X
no longer survives but its two direct descendants, G and R, both have uiatori in the text, and in the latter the
variant al’ rum has been added by the second hand; so in any case X must have had uiatori in the text. Is A
more likely to have written uiatorum or uiatori? O is much more conservative, much less prone to conjecture
and much worse at Latin than X, so his uiatorum is a priori a more likely candidate. Why does X read uiatori,
then? It could be a conjecture – but he had no reason to introduce one as the text was not manifestly corrupt.
Alternatively, it could be a variant that he found in the margin of his exemplar A and having taken it to be a
correction, he could have inserted it into his text, as he did with the variant manlius in line 66. Finally, it
could be a mistake. Written in full, -rum does not look at all like –ri, but there is a common minuscule
abbreviation in which it does: the r is written as one single descending line in the shape of a small letter 2,
the bottom line is prolonged to the right and crossed by a vertical line, so the end result is not far from the
sequence ri. This abbreviation must have stood in A; it was copied correctly by O; X first copied it as ri, but
he seems to have become aware of his mistake and added in the margin al’ rum, which was in fact not a
variant but a correction, and this note was subsequently copied by R 2 . X followed the same procedure in other
cases as well, as has already been recognized by McKie (1977: 207f.). This is the most straightforward way
to account for the readings of the principal MSS and given that a similar development is attested in other
passages as well, it seems to cover the truth. Thus the reading of the archetype seems to be uiatorum, and
uiatori appears to be a simple mistake on the part of X.
This simplifies the situation drastically, as we no longer have to account for the potential confusion that
would arise if uiatori would be followed by a form such as basso, lasso or salso. It becomes safe to
reconstruct dulce uiatorum lasso in sudore leuamen. This is an interesting phrase because lasso stands in
enallage: it qualifies grammatically sudor, but in fact the uiator, as it is he who is tired, and not his sweat.
The phrase is the more effective because, as has been shown above, the uiator lassus was a common figure
in Roman poetry, and perhaps also in popular speech.
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