CATULLUS 68 - Scuola Normale Superiore

Morgan is a separatist, while Lachmann, Schmidt, Kroll and Mynors are unitarians; they also have to
account for the alternate use of the praenomen and the gentilicium within the same poem. Within the
surviving body of Latin poetry there is only one possible parallel, Ovid’s ex Ponto 4.1, where the
poet addresses Sextus Pompeius first as Pompeius and as Sextus (lines 1f. Accipe, Pompei, deductum
carmen ab illo, / debitor est uitae qui tibi, Sexte, suae) and then only as Sextus (line 35 sic ego pars
rerum non ultima, Sexte, tuarum). 48 But Ovid’s strategy there is significantly different from the one
used here by Catullus according to Lachmann. Ovid uses first the praenomen and the gentilicium,
which identify the addressee, and then the praenomen alone, to achieve variation, intimacy or both.
We have no poems in which a man is addressed now by his praenomen and then by his gentilicium,
and in prose it is extremely rare: the only example may be Cicero, pro Quinctio 37-40, where Sextus
Naevius is addressed now as Sexte and then as Naeui. 49
In Lachmann’s reconstruction of the poem praenomen and gentilicium are used indiscriminately: we
have the more formal gentilicium in lines 41 and 50 in close company with the familiar praenomen
in line 66 (and also in line 30, but that passage has a very different tone). This is mitigated in the
variant proposed by Bernhard Schmidt, in which forms of the praenomen are reconstructed only in
lines 11 and 30. In that case the praenomen would be banished from the more elevated central
section of the poem (lines 41-148) to the informal introduction (lines 1-40). However, the metre calls
for the vocative of the gentilicium Allius also in line 150 in the informal epilogue (lines 149-160),
which thus cannot stand in true symmetry with the introduction, as a unitary reading would require.
Even Schmidt’s variant leads to an inconsistency in tone between different parts of Catullus 68. It
could be salvaged if we interpreted Catullus 68 with Ellis as two different poems (1-40 and 41-160)
written on different occasions, but concerned with the same person, who is addressed by his
praenomen in the first poem and is referred to by his gentilicium in the second. However, there do
not appear to be any grounds for identifying the friend addressed in lines 1-40 with the friend praised
and addressed in lines 41-160 other than the possible unity of the poem.
To sum up, Lachmann’s idea that the addressee was called Manius Allius and that Catullus
addressed him and referred to him alternately by his praenomen and by his gentilicium does not
work. Address by the praenomen alone is not found anywhere else in Catullus and only rarely in
Roman poetry. The alternation between the praenomen and the gentilicium is even more rare, and it
would appear to imply changes of tone that simply cannot be detected within the text.
48
Helzle 1989: 44 suggests that the introductory combination of praenomen and gentilicium is analogous to the form
with which Cicero introduces his essays that he dedicates to his friends, and that in line 44 „[p]resumably Ovid uses
Pompeius’ praenomen because he did not have a cognomen”. Perhaps Ovid simply needs to identify his friend, and he
wants to avoid using the fateful name Pompeius.
49
See n. 44 above.
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