CATULLUS 68 - Scuola Normale Superiore

this line at himself. But why should he have told anybody to shoulder the burden of an aged parent? After all,
the burden is ingratum, ‘unwelcome’ – presumably neither to the parent nor to the speaker, but to a third
party. The command may simply be negative – Catullus may tell himself not to engage in the scrupulous
meddlesomeness proper to the older generation (cfr. Cat. 5.2f.) and especially to an elderly father or mother.
In this case there would have to stand ne before the imperative (cfr. 62.59 ne pugna), probably at the
beginning of the previous verse; ne could be followed by a participial clause and the line could be closed by
the vocative Catulle. But it is hard to link even the negative command ‘do not take up the burden of a
meddlesome father’ with the contents of the last surviving verse (line 141), ‘it is not fair to compare humans
to the gods’, and the other line that has fallen out may well have contained another explanation of why
Lesbia’s faux pas are even less worthy of attention than those of Jupiter, to the extent ‘nor is it stylish to
make a fuss about things like this’, as an aged father would. The conclusions can be summed up in a
tentative reconstruction:
141 atqui nec diuis homines componier aequum est,
141a
142 ingratum tremuli tolle parentis onus.
It is worthwhile to mention in passing the supplement provided by Goold in his editions of 1973 and 1983,
nec mala, quot Iuno quantaue, nos patimur. / tolle igitur questus, et forti mente, Catulle; in the following
verse he writes opus. These are attractive, lively lines, but they do not solve the problem with tolle … onus.
tremuli The adjective had been applied to the elderly since Ennius (Ann. 34 Skutsch cum tremulis anus …
artubus) and Plautus (Curc. 160 anus tremula) and this vivid image is used by Catullus no less than four
times: thus 61.154f. tremulum mouens / cana tempus anilitas, 64.307 corpus tremulum of the Parcae and cfr.
esp. 61.51 tremulus parens. It remains common in later poetry: see Prop. 4.1.49, 4.7.73, Tib. 1.6.78, Ov. Met.
10.414, 14.143, 15.212, Manil. 2.855, etc.
143 nec tamen ‘But … not’, ‘and anyhow … not’ (Fordyce), ‘and in any case … not’ (Thomson), ‘nor’:
the phrase is hard to translate and troubles most commentators. Fröhlich (1849: 266) and Baehrens (in app.)
are tempted to emend; the former proposes non etenim ‘in fact not’ (but nec here is guaranteed by nec in line
141, which Fröhlich transposes unconvincingly) and the latter nec tandem ‘nor last of all’ (the minuscule
abbreviation of tandem closely resembles that of tamen: tm with a dash above the second letter rather than tn
with a similar dash), while Ellis and Fordyce compare the weakened uses of et tamen without a strong sense
of contrast at Lucr. 1.1049-1051 suboriri multa necessest, / et tamen ut plagae quoque possint suppetere
ipse, / infinita opus est uis undique materiai and 5.1175-1178 aeternamque dabant uitam, quia semper
eorum / suppeditabatur facies et forma manebat, et tamen omnino quod tantis uiribus auctos / non temere
239