CATULLUS 68 - Scuola Normale Superiore

caeli … ianua ianua autem est primus domus introitus, dicta quia Iano consecratum est omne principium
(Serv. in Verg. Aen. 1.449): ianua was used for the door of a building, similarly to fores, while porta was
reserved for the gates of a city or a fort. The Romans imagined the abode of the gods in the sky (and also the
nether world) not as a walled city but as a house: compare Enn. Ann. 586 Sk. diuom domus altisonum cael,
Lucr. 6.358 caeli domus and Verg. Aen. 10.101 deum domus alta, and see TLL 5.1.1978.44-70 and 1978.79-
1979.14.
116 Hebe nec Hebe was equated with the native Roman goddess Iuuentas (see Hor. Od. 1.30.7 with
Nisbet & Hubbard 1970 ad loc.) but tends to retain her Greek name in mythological poetry: thus also at Ov.
Met. 9.400, Stat. Silv. 3.1.27, Val. Fl. 8.231 and [Sen.] Oct. 210 deus Alcides possidet Heben.
In O the letters Heb are followed by a high dot with an inverted c-shape around it and below this a small sign
resembling a 2. Thomson in app. tentatively interprets this as Hebe et.
117 Catullus boldly compares the depth (i.e. the profundity, the commitment and force) of Laodamia’s love
with the depth (i.e. the physical depth) of the cave excavated by Hercules.
Fröhlich (1849: 265) would rewrite the verse as sed tuus ardor amore adeo fuit acrior illo, but Hercules is
not in love with Hebe, and lines 117f. show that Laodamia’s love has to be compared not with his feelings
but with the barathrum.
tuus altus amor ‘Your profound love’ for Protesilaus. There is no exact parallel for altus amor, but the
epithet is used regularly of feelings and sensations: compare Verg. Aen. 1.209 premit altum corde dolorem
together with CE 1183.7 = CIL 9.3279 (from Corfinium) hic finem dolor altus habet, Tac. Hist. 4.82.1 altior
inde Vespasiano cupido adeundi sacram sedem, OLD s.v., 15a and TLL 1.1781.5-27.
On tuus amor ‘your love (for somebody else)’ see on line 24.
118 The principal MSS write the first pentameter of this verse as qui tuum domitum, which is patently
corrupt. How should it be corrected? Recent editors have written either qui tamen indomitam ferre iugum
docuit with Heyse and Statius (thus Mynors, Quinn, Goold, Thomson, Perez Vega and Ramírez de Verger)
or qui tunc indomitam ferre iugum docuit with Corradinus de Allio and Statius (Kroll), taking the relative
clause to describe Laodameia’s amor, which is mentioned in the previous line (sed tuus altus amor barathro
fuit altior illo). However, there are a number of difficulties with these reconstructions. Trappes-Lomax
(2007: 241) rightly points out that qui tamen indomitam ferre iugum docuit cannot mean ‘unbroken though
she was, it taught her to carry the yoke’, as “where tamen follows a relative pronoun it implies an opposition
between the content of the main clause and the content of the relative clause so that knowing the former one
would not expect the latter; cf. OLD s.v. tamen 6”. He advocates the solution advocated by Kroll – but tunc
would be a bland and quite meaningless stop-gap (for the dangerous temptation to reconstruct words of this
type see line 91n.). But there is another argument against both these reconstructions. They let the relative
clause in the pentameter qualify a word in the middle of the hexameter: sed tuus altus amor barathro fuit
218