CATULLUS 68 - Scuola Normale Superiore

Meillet s.v. cinis), but the Italian word ‘cenere’ does not (here Latin cinera would have yielded *‘cenera’).
This suggests that in Latin the feminine will have been the more popular and the masculine the more literary
form.
A number of other explanations have been proposed for the use of the word in the feminine. Walde-Hofmann
s.v. cinis compare fauilla; Klotz (1931: 344f.) thinks that Ennius must have used the word in the feminine in
a lost passage in imitation of the Homeric word !ποδι→ (Od. 5.488); Ernout-Meillet s.v. cinis suggest that
the poets may have used the word in the feminine to let it correspond to κ〉νι!; and Lunelli (1978: 91-93)
argues that cinis is used in the feminine by Catullus, Calvus and Lucretius in imitation both of !ποδι→
(which is found in Callimachus as well as in Homer) and of κ〉νι!, for reasons of metrical convenience and in
a marriage of poetic refinement with a popular element, as this was the gender of the word in vulgar Latin.
But the attestations of cinis in the femine in technical texts and in a range of inscriptions make it impossible
to see it as a refined Grecism. We are evidently dealing with a colloquialism that was filtered out of the
literary language in the Augustan period.
It is surprising to find cinis both in the masculine and in the feminine within a relatively short and rather
polished poem: acerba cinis here clashes with cognatos … cineres eight lines below. A methodical textual
critic would want to write cognatas … cineres below, or even acerbu’ cinis here (the ecthlipsis of the s may
have been rare, but it often provoked corruption) – but the inconsistency of the text is confirmed by the
testimony of Nonius. To be sure, Nonius’ text of Catullus could have been corrupt: Gellius’ manuscripts
contained no less than three different versions of Cat. 27.4 (Gel. 6.20.6), and Nonius was writing two and a
half centuries later. In fact, there survives no text in which both the feminine and the masculine are
metrically guaranteed, and the two forms do not seem to occur side by side in any inscription; nor does there
seem to be any other example of the same word being treated both as a masculine and as a feminine within
the space of ten lines in a carefully written text. However, one should compare the word finis, which is used
by Virgil both in the masculine (13x) and in the feminine (8x); for example in Aeneid 5 it is masculine in
lines 82, 225 and 630, but feminine in lines 328 and 384. This fluctuation is already found in Virgil’s oldest
manuscripts, and is confirmed by Gellius 13.21.12, who states that the poet made the word masculine or
feminine according to the requirements of euphony. What we do not find anywhere else in ancient literature
is the use of a word in two different genders within such a short piece of text.
91-96 Much of these lines has been copied and re-adapted from lines 19-24 in poem 68a: see the detailed
discussion there.
91 quae nunc et A difficult textual problem. The principal MSS write que uetet id, in which que, that is,
quae could well be taken with Troia in the previous line; uetet makes no sense; and id could be taken with
letum miserabile, but as was rightly pointed out by Haupt (1841: 11), this would have the perplexing
implication that Catullus’ brother would have died in the same way as the Greek and Trojan heroes slain
during the Trojan War.
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