CATULLUS 68 - Scuola Normale Superiore

for a shipwrecked man but must be accompanied by a specific reference to shipwreck (“necessario …
adiciendum esse, quo agi de naufragio appareat”); consequently he conjectures haustis, which was
subsequently re-proposed by Herzog (1936: 346-348). But haustis is unconvincing because as a perfect
participle it would have to mean not ‘drowning’ but ‘drowned’, ‘submerged’, ‘swallowed by the sea’, as at
Ov. Fast. 3.599f. figitur ad Laurens ingenti flamine litus / puppis et expositis omnibus hausta perit, Liv.
33.41.7 multae eiectae naues, multae ita haustae mari, ut nemo in terram enaret and Tac. Hist. 1.2 haustae
aut obrutae urbes. As for terram dare, it is not attested in this or in any other sense before Vulg. Ezech. 45.8
sed terram dabunt domui Israhel secundum tribus eorum. This casts doubt altogether on the reading terram
dedit and rules out a series of more or less ingenious reconstructions: terram dedit, ubertim (Wetstein:
ingenious but too far from the transmitted aufert), terram dedit audens (Friedrich), terram dedit ac uer
(Walter 1940) and terram dedit Allius (Viejo Otero 1943: 129f., which would be impossible anyway since
Allius has already been greeted in line 155). On the other hand, terram dedit, or terram dedit aufertque,
could well be the conjecture of a pious reader from the Middle Ages. In this case the transmitted text need
not be too close to the original reading – which could be te tradidit, or anything else.
There have been proposed a considerable number of other emendations for terram dedit. It is probably best
to start with a pair of relatively similar reconstructions. Avantius wrote the distich as follows in the first
Aldine edition of 1502 (we have already dismissed his reconstruction of the start of the hexameter):
et qui principio nobis dominam dedit, a quo
sunt primo omnia nata bona
Meanwhile, Perrotta (1927: 145-148) built upon an idea that he found in a humanistic codex (perhaps the
Bologna codex 8, in which the second hand added the readings of the first Aldine or a similar edition) and
proposed the following:
et qui principio nobis se et eram dedit, a quo
sunt primo omnia nata bona
The key idea of these two reconstructions is the repetition of nobis: used originally by the poet in both lines
of this distich, it would have dropped out from the pentameter due to a sort of haplography, a quo would
have been moved from the end of the hexameter to the start of the pentameter to make it metrically complete,
and a complex series of corruptions would have given the hexameter the shape that it has in the principal
MSS. However, this raises several problems. First of all, haplography tends to work in a very different way:
one of a pair of similar words tends to be omitted along with the intervening text, as happened in X at Cat.
92.2-4. Moreover, it is not likely that Catullus should have used twice within the same distich the bland word
nobis for no tangible reason (contrast lines 41f. qua me Allius in re / iuuerit aut quantis iuuerit officiis). Nor
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