CATULLUS 68 - Scuola Normale Superiore

that might simply be because it is relatively rare, and it does stand before a vowel in Plautus, who always
appears to elide it in this position (thus certainly at Capt. 650, Per. 270 and Stich. 594, and probably also at
Asin. 273 and Capt. 885). In any case, it is the question whether quae (uae!) would be effective just two lines
after Troia (nefas!). Raphelengius’ conjecture is unconvincing also because (if I am not mistaken) uae uae is
not found anywhere else before the Vulgate; and Scaliger’s ter is no more plausible – it would presumably
have to go with miserabile, but the distance between the two words makes this very unlikely. The most
idiomatic of these conjectures may well be Nicolaus Heinsius’ uae mihi, quae et, but that strays very far
from the transmitted text.
There still remain a number of alternatives. Several editions attribute the conjecture quaeue etiam to
Calphurnius. In fact he wrote quaeue etiam id, as has already been mentioned, and even that may not have
been a conjecture: his edition reads Quæ ue ēt (i.e. etiam) id nostro, but ēt looks suspicious because he uses
no abbreviations in his text apart from the sign &, and even in his preface, where he uses abbreviations more
freely, he never writes ēt for etiam. In the preface he complains about the numerous printer’s errors that have
crept into his text, and this looks like one: an ē may have crept into the printer’s box of es – and given rise to
a ‘conjecture’. Later editors detached id and attributed to Calphurnius the proposal quaeue etiam, which is
close to the transmitted text but implausible, as –ue does not introduce any sort of alternative. Meanwhile,
Avantius’ first Aldine edition of 1502 has quae nempe et, but nempe ‘no doubt’, ‘to be sure’ is used as a rule
to accompany a statement that might appear controversial (see OLD s.v.), while the devastation caused by
the Trojan War and the death of his brother are unquestionable facts in the eyes of the poet. Haupt (1841: 12-
14) proposed quare etiam, but one can hardly speak of a causal relationship between the death of Catullus’
brother and the Trojan War. In Bergk’s quae uel sic (ap. Rossbach) it is not clear what could be the force of
uel. Hertzberg proposed quaeque itidem, but quaeque could not mean ‘and who’ without a preceding
relative. Palmer’s quae uelut his would be awkward without a subsequent et. Ribbeck (1862: 378) proposed
quae uitai nostrae, but this involves changing nobis as well, which is not manifestly corrupt, and the
emendation is strongly implausible not as much on account of the archaic genitive –ai, normally scanned as a
spondee and unparalleled in Catullus, which is easily corrected to –ae, but because uitae nostrae would not
make sense; it could hardly go with fratri. As for H.A. Koch’s haec etiam, it is too far from the transmitted
text to convince. All these conjectures can be crossed out.
This leaves Passerat’s quae nuper; queis ueluti proposed by Fröhlich (1849: 265); and C. Paucker’s quin
eadem et. These are possible in theory, but none has the right mixture of elegance and closeness to the
transmitted reading so as to convince. Marcilius’ quae nunc et is not perfectly elegant, but I think that it is
acceptable. Rather hesitantly, I put it into the text.
letum miserabile letum is an archaic word that survived in a solemn formula still used at public funerals at
this time, as Varro L.L. 7.42 tells us: in funeribus indictiuis (i.e. those announced by a herald), quo dicitur
‘ollus leto datus est’, quod Graecus dicit λ→ψηι, id est obliuioni. The word seems to have entered the
language of poetry from this formula, witness Ennius trag. 283f. Jocelyn quorum liberi leto dati / sunt in
bello and Pacuv. trag. 148 is quis est? – qui te, nisi tu illum occupas, leto dabit, and compare the text of a
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