CATULLUS 68 - Scuola Normale Superiore

transdidi used by Fronto (Epist. p. 95.4 Naber = 87.3 van den Hout 2 ). Following the logic of these parallels
here one would have to write transdedit rather than Scaliger’s trandedit, but that is a minor matter:
transdedit could easily have been corrupted to trandedit, and then to terram dedit. However, the spelling
transdare for tradere and the pronunciation that it mirrors appear to have have become extinct by the start of
the 1 st century B.C., after which it is only used by Accius and Fronto, authors prone to archaism. (The OLD
s.v. trado notes that this spelling is also used at FJRA 3.132.16, a contract of purchase from the 2 nd century
A.D., but there tradedisse appears to be a simple spelling mistake.) Nor is it clear why Catullus should have
used an archaism at this point. It is unlikely in the extreme that he should have written tran(s)dedit.
Most correctors, therefore, have worked with Mitscherlich’s te tradidit, which is less close to the transmitted
reading, but we shall see presently that this is not as big a problem here than elsewhere, and the verb makes
good sense here: trado is well attested in the sense ‘to introduce’, ‘to present’, ‘to entrust to the care of’ (thus
Cic. Att. 5.13.2 Philogenem et Seium tradidi, Apollonidensem Xenonem commendaui, Fam. 7.17.2 and Caec.
14, Caes. Ciu. 3.57.1, Hor. Epist. 1.18.78, Ov. Fast. 3.629). Thus the man referred to here would have
introduced Allius to Catullus (nobis te tradidit). Since it was Catullus who needed the help of Allius and not
viceversa, Fröhlich (1849: 266) prefers to write uobis me tradidit, auctore / a quo etc.; here uobis could
easily have yielded nobis, but the change of me to te would be unlikely, and in his words of farewell Catullus
is looking at events from his own point of view.
In the place of aufert one could then reconstruct the name of this person. Scaliger’s conjecture Oufens has
already been ruled out. Munro’s Afer is possible, though perhaps not close enough to the transmitted aufert;
the alternative spelling Aafer, proposed by Schmid, is closer (in a capital script AAFER could perhaps have
yielded AVFER, and thence aufert), but as far as I know, Catullus’ MSS offer no further hints that long
vowels were ever doubled during the transmission of the text. On the other hand, Heyse’s Anser is both
possible and attractive. A poet Anser is mentioned by Ovid (Trist. 2.435) along with Cinna, Cornificius and
(Valerius) Cato, who were all friends of Catullus’. In his note on Verg. Ecl. 9.36 (cfr. 7.21) Servius calls
Anser Antonii poetam, qui eius laudes scribebat. The scholiast adds that the poet received the ager Falernus
from his patron, which seems incredible, but one should compare Cic. Phil. 13.11 de Falerno Anseres
depellantur. It is not impossible that Anser would have been a friend of Catullus’ in the 50s B.C. as a young
man, and that twenty years later he would have become the court poet of Mark Antony. The conjecture Anser
is also attractive on grounds of palaeography and common sense: written in minuscule and with a tall ſ it
would have resembled quite closely aufer, which is not at all far from the reading of the manuscripts; and a
word apparently referring to a goose in the middle of an elegant love poem may be more apt to be corrupted
than most. But it should be kept in mind that this edifice, attractive though it may appear, is built on nothing
more than hypothesis; we cannot be sure that Anser was a friend and even that he was a contemporary of
Catullus’.
One may well expect tradidit to have been followed by the name of the man referred to; Green conjectured
Alli, but if the name of the man was neither Anser nor Allius, it may well have gone lost forever. Alli is not
convincing, for one; it is not required after te and would appear pointless, unlike the other vocatives in this
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