CATULLUS 68 - Scuola Normale Superiore

saepe cum eo ad uillam fui and Plin. Epist. 2.2.2 ad uillam partim studiis partim desidia fruor; but it is not
attested in the sense ‘inside the villa’ (pace Streuli 1969: 5-7; on this and the similar expression apud uillam
see Gagnér 1931: 106 and 116). On the other hand, ad can mean ‘inside’ in the set phrases ad aedem ‘in the
temple’ and ad forum ‘on the forum’, but the apparent anomaly is explained by Gagnér (1931: 114 with 99,
and cfr. Jacobsohn ap. Wackernagel 1928: 237) as follows: originally aedes meant ‘fireplace’ and forum
‘palisade’, and ad aedem and ad forum (like the related phrases apud aedem and apud forum) stood for no
more than ‘at the fireplace’ and ‘at the palisade’; subsequently the meaning of the nouns changed, as aedes
came to stand for the building surrounding the sacrificial fire and forum for the area surrounded by the
palisade; however, the formulae survived and were re-interpreted as ‘in the temple’ and ‘on the forum’. This
may be the reason why in a very limited number of cases ad is indeed used for in with the ablative in other
contexts as well. From Livy onwards it is used with place-names (Gagnér 1931: 114f.) and it is used in this
sense with a common noun in an inscription from Ostia from Marcus Aurelius’ time, CIL 14.376.23f. IDEM
· PONDERA · AD · MACELLVM · ET · MEN / SVRAS · AD · FORVM VINAR · S · P · FECIT. This use of ad
to describe the place where something happens still survives today in French (à Paris, à l’école) and Italian
(a Roma, all’università). Evidently it became more frequent in vulgar Latin; however, apart from the types of
phrases listed above the usage is extremely rare in written Latin texts of any sort, and even the set phrases
apud and ad forum elicited suspicion: Nonius considers them solecisms (522.20-22 M. = 840.8-10 Lindsay
error consuetudinis APUT pro IN utitur. itaque uitiose dicimus, cum nos IN FORO fuisse dicamus, APUT aut AD
FORUM fuisse, cum APUT ‘iuxta’ significet). What matters for our purpose is that ad domum is never used in
the sense ‘inside the house’, nor does ad mean ‘inside’ anywhere else in the poems of Catullus. This speaks
against the interpretation outlined above. Finally, if Catulllus intended domum … ad quam to be taken for
‘the house … in which’, that begs the question why he would not simply have written in qua here as he did
in line 156 below, if by doing so he could have saved the reader from a huge amount of perplexity.
The alternative is to interpret domum … ad quam as ‘the house … at which’. This is the line taken by
Syndikus (1990: 271, n. 135), who notes that “the pair will hardly have stayed exclusively within the four
walls of the house” (“das Paar wird sich kaum ausschließlich innerhalb der vier Mauern des Hauses
aufgehalten haben”). But here ad quam is followed by the words communes exerceremus amores and must
therefore indicate the place where Catullus and his mistress actually pursued their relationship; elsewhere
Catullus says explicitly that they made love indoors (line 156 domus … in qua lusimus) and if they could just
as well do out of doors whatever they did, he would hardly have been unable to meet Lesbia before Allius
found him a house.
Alternatively, one could try to replace the offending phrase ad quam with something entirely different.
Riese conjectured cum qua, Schöll ut clam, Thomas (ap. Lafaye) atque ubi, but one could also write ut iam
(here ut was suggested to me by Stephen Harrison) or indeed in qua. Out of these conjectures, cum qua
communes would provide for a tautologism and an unattractive sequence of three k-sounds, clam would
make a strong point in the wrong place, and atque ubi (‘and a place where we could make love’) would be
tautological after isque domum … dedit. ut iam and in qua appear more innocuous, but each of them strays
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