CATULLUS 68 - Scuola Normale Superiore

ulla ui conuinci posse putabant as well as Cic. Sen. 16 (after a quotation from a speech of Appius Claudius
Caecus’ in Ennius’ Annals) notum enim uobis carmen est, et tamen ipsius Appi exstat oratio.
However, it is surely the easiest to assume that nec here stands in parallel with nec in line 141. Each of these
introduces a reason for which it is not possible to compare the relationship of Catullus and Lesbia to that of
Jupiter and Juno: (i) it is not fair to compare gods to humans (line 141 – though it is hard to see how the lost
lines and line 142 fitted into this); (ii) the two relationships are different because Jupiter and Juno were
married while Catullus and Lesbia are not (lines 143-146). Here nec tamen (which I would translate with
‘nor in fact’: see OLD s.v. tamen, 2b) introduces the more important objection, one that applies not to the
comparison but to the parallel: the two relationships are not similar at all because that of Catullus and Lesbia
is clandestine. This is probably better than Baehrens’ nec tandem ‘nor, last of all’, which appears somewhat
pedantic and quite unlike Catullus.
dextra deducta paterna Catullus has distilled the wedding ceremony to two essential ingredients, the
ceremony of escorting the bride to the house of her husband, for which deducere was the standard term (thus
Pl. Cas. 472 and 881, Caes. Gal. 5.14.1, Prop. 4.3.13, Lygd. = [Tib.] 3.4.31, and see further TLL 5.1.272.80-
273.16) and the approval of the father, who handed over the bride to the groom (Cat. 62.60). In the view of
the jurist Pomponius the act of escorting the bride was an obligatory part of every Roman wedding and if it
did not take place, a marriage was not valid (Dig. 23.2.5); the approval of the father of the bride was also
necessary (Paulus Dig. 23.2.2).
Here dextra deducta paterna can easily be translated as ‘led on by the right hand of her father’. However,
most commentators (including Ellis, Baehrens, Riese, Fordyce and Quinn) find this problematic, because
“the bride’s father did not take part in the formal deductio to her new home” (Fordyce). In fact, it is the
question whether the ceremony had such rigid rules – and even whether it had a name of its own: deductio is
only used by Pomponius loc. cit., and deduco simply means ‘to escort’. Festus p. 245 M. = 282 L. writes that
the bride is escorted by three children both whose parents were alive (patrimi et matrimi pueri praetextati
tres nubentem deducunt, unus, qui facem praefert ex spina alba, quia noctu nubebant, duo, qui tenent
nubentem, which is followed by Rage-Brocard 1934: 24f.) but whatever his source for this information, he
seems to describe an ideal ceremony rather than contemporary practice; it is hard to believe that all weddings
should have involved a torch made from the spina alba. In poem 61 Catullus mentions several torches
(61.114 tollite, pueri, faces) and one praetextatus escorting the girl (61.174f. mitte brachiolum teres, /
praetextate, puellulae). There also survive descriptions of quasi-deductiones: Plautus uses deduco for a slave
bringing a slave-girl to his quarters in a wedding ceremony of sorts (Pl. Cas. 881 ubi intro hanc nouam
nuptam deduxi, recta uia in conclaue adduxi), while Ovid uses it for Erigone being led by her nurse to her
father Cinyras at the start of their incestuous relationship (Met. 10.462). The essential ingredient of the
“deductio” seems to be the act of escorting prescribed by Pomponius in the Digest, and not the presence or
absence of any particular person in the procession. There is no reason to take dextra deducta paterna in any
other way than ‘led on by the right hand of her father’; one need not take dextra … paterna counterintuitively
as an ablative of separation (‘from the manus of her father’, Riese) or deducta even less plausibly as tradita
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