CATULLUS 68 - Scuola Normale Superiore

characterize the gift and not the giver. It is hard to believe that there should have been such a clumsy pair of
lines in such an elegant poem.
The other alternative would be to take quam with domum. Here the words between the antecedent and the
relative pronoun would pose an even larger problem, as one of them (dominam) would be of the same gender
and number as the pronoun. It helps up to a point if one adopts Fröhlich’s emendation dominae:
68 isque domum nobis isque dedit dominae
69 ad quam communes exerceremus amores
If domina stands in the dative, she has to be a recipient of the domus along with Catullus (nobis), that is, she
must be Catullus’ mistress; and if Catullus and his mistress made love ad something or somebody, then that
something or somebody cannot be his mistress; hence quam must refer not to dominae, but to some other
word in the feminine; and the only available candidate is domum. It is still a problem that this line of
reasoning is rather complicated: reading Catullus tends to require less effort. In fact, Fröhlich (1849: 264)
suggested isque domum nobis atque dedit dominae, which is one step further away from the transmitted text.
However, let us ignore these problems for the moment and try to interpret the text that we get if we write
dominam. In that case we would have to take quam with domum. But what does domum ad quam mean? One
possibility is to interpret it as domum in qua ‘the house in which’, as do Santen, Weise, Kroll, Streuli and
possibly also Quinn, who does not comment on ad quam but writes dominae. Kroll calls this use of ad quam
“inconspicuous” (“nicht auffällig”), but in fact none of his parallels show that it is possible at all. This
interpretation is defended at greater length by Streuli (1969: 5-10), who uses the detailed investigation of the
use of apud and ad with the accusative instead of in with the ablative by Gagnér (1931: 94-116) in order to
show that ad domum can indeed mean in domo. Whether or not this can be the case is a complex question
that has to be considered in some detail.
Elsewhere ad domum means as a rule ‘to the house’, as at Cat. 63.19f. simul ite, sequimini / Phrygiam ad
domum Cybebes, Pl. Rud. 116 aduenire ad alienam domum, Cic. Ver. 2.1.69 omnes ad eam domum …
profecti sunt, Ov. Met. 8.816 ad iussam delata domum est, Prop. 2.29.20, Liv. 39.51.3, etc. On rare occasions
ad domum can mean ‘at the house’: thus Sen. Contr. Exc. 3.3 reliquit me tantum ad paternam domum, where
the person mentioned was not allowed to enter, and Quint. decl. min. 364 pauper ad diuitis domum nocte
conuiciari solebat, where the poor man was evidently never invited inside (likewise, B. Schmidt conjectured
ad domum for domo at Sen. H.F. 1143f. prostrata domo / corpora, but the transmitted text should probably
be preserved: see Fitch 1987 ad loc.). The range of ways in which ad uillam can be used are similar: it
normally means ‘to the villa’, as one would expect, but sometimes ‘at the villa’, that is, near it, as at Varro
R.R. 3.3.2 piscinas … quae … habent pisces ad uillam, 3.3.5 and 3.11.2 as well as Petr. 61.9 contubernalis
ad uillam supremum diem obiit (surely not in the main building, where the proprietors were staying); and
sometimes it means ‘at the villa, whether inside or outside’, ‘in and/or around the landhouse’, as at Cic. Rosc.
Am. 44 ut esset in agro ac … aleretur ad uillam and Tul. 20 dominum esse ad uillam, Varro R.R. 3.17.5
183