CATULLUS 68 - Scuola Normale Superiore

Santenius, Lachmann, Schwabe, Baehrens and most more recent editors print Nicolaus Heinsius’ conjecture
quaene etiam. This has the advantage of being reasonably close to the transmitted text – but is it good Latin?
The commentators compare the interrogatives at 64.180-184 an patris auxilium sperem? quemne ipsa reliqui
/ respersum iuuenem fraterna caede secuta? / coniugis an fido memet consoler amore? / quine fugit lentos
incuruans gurgite remos? and at Hor. Sat. 1.10.20-24 ‘at magnum fecit, quod uerbis Graeca Latinis /
miscuit.’ o seri studiorum, quine putetis / difficile et mirum, Rhodio quod Pitholeonti / contigit? ‘at sermo
lingua concinnus utraque / suauior, ut Chio nota si commixta Falerni est.’ In each of these cases –ne turns a
relative clause into a question. Here, on the other hand, it is impossible to see what question –ne would
introduce – Catullus can hardly be asking himself whether his brother has died under Troy after all, and not
somewhere else. The conjecture is highly unconvincing.
Ellis prints his own conjecture qualiter id in his two editions and in his commentary, while Thomson
cautiously adopts Marcilius’ quae nunc et in his 1997 edition (in 1978 he had still written quaene etiam).
Ellis’ text does not work: not only does it conserve id, but it duplicates it with qualiter. In fact, the adverb is
not found anywhere else before the Augustan period. On the other hand, Marcilius’ quae nunc et is good
Latin and perhaps not unacceptably far from the transmitted reading. nunc may appear a bit bland, but the
relationship between the heroic past and the present is not without parallel as a theme in Catullus’ poetry
(compare the end of poem 64), and it works well as a hinge that attaches one thematic block of the poem
(Troy) to another (the death of Catullus’ brother). In such an artificial construction the hinges may well be
somewhat recherché. Also, quae nunc here would be echoed by quem nunc in line 97. The problems with it
are that nunc is not too close to uetet, and that it is metrically unattractive – the line begins ponderously with
three long syllables, which mean essentially nothing – but it may be the best candidate on offer.
Let us quickly evaluate the other conjectures that have been proposed. We have already seen the arguments
against conserving id; this rules out Lipsius’ quaene etiam id, of which Nicolaus Heinsius’ quaene etiam is
merely a simpler version, Vossius’ quaemet et id, Huschke’s quin etiam id (Huschke 1792: 96f., advocated
by Trappes-Lomax 2007: 239), Rossbach’s quae uel et id, Heyse’s quae ueterum id (which I found in his
edition of 1855) and quae nuper id (which is sometimes attributed to him), and Macnaghten’s somewhat
absurd qua ualet, id (Macnaghten 1897: 149f.). Calphurnius’ quaeue etiam id also belongs to the category,
but there the pronoun can simply be omitted; one could simply write quaeue etiam, which is discussed
below. Another sizeable group is constituted by those conjectures in which an exclamation of grief is added.
Thus the humanist who copied the MS β first wrote que uetet id but corrected this to que ue etiam id, which
is not far from Sillig’s quae (uae!) etiam. Scaliger conjectured quae, ue, ter (apparently he meant uae),
Dousa proposed quae uae uae et and one of Nicolaus Heinsius’ two conjectures here was uae mihi, quae et
(it is reported by Doering, who writes est, but this may be just a slip). What makes this an attractive idea is
that is that in the 14 th century uae would have been written as uę or as ue, which would go some way towards
explaining the principal MSS’ uetet. Haupt (1841: 12) rejected Sillig’s conjecture on the ground that uae is
never elided, and Raphelengius’ proposal could be ruled out for the same reason – but perhaps Haupt is too
critical here: if uae! is not used elsewhere before a vowel by the poets of the late Republic and the Empire,
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