CATULLUS 68 - Scuola Normale Superiore

(f) All of carmen 68 was composed on one single occasion and was addressed to someone called
Mallius. One should reconstruct this name in all of the above passages, except that one should
write illi in line 50 and illis in line 150.
This was proposed by Pennisi. 55 He suggests that the corruption of illis in line 150 into the aliis in
our manuscripts would have triggered the corruption of illi in line 50 into alii, whence there would
have arisen the phantom name al(l)ius. In the original illi in line 50 would have reflected illius in line
44.
This would result in the following text at lines 49f.:
nec tenuem texens sublimis aranea telam
in deserto illi nomine opus faciat. [and not Alli]
Here the dative illi would clumsily disrupt the prepositional phrase in deserto … nomine; presumably
it would have to be taken as a dative of disadvantage, but the construction would be cumbersome all
the same (‘the spider should not weave its web to his detriment over [his] abandoned name’). The
genitive Alli, transmitted in O, raises none of these problems. In line 150 Pennisi’s emendation illis
would not be so glaringly problematic, but before uestrum … nomen in line 151 one has reason to
expect the name of the addressee: thus Alli.
Nor is the elaborate iter corruptionis proposed by Pennisi convincing: it is implausible that a
corruption (illis to aliis in line 150) should have triggered another one one hundred lines away (illi to
alii or something similar in line 50), especially given that no form of alius would have made the
vaguest sense in the second of these passages.
Both the original text and the mechanism of corruption reconstructed by Pennisi are unconvincing.
His theory can be dismissed.
In short, the only plausible reconstruction of the name(s) of the addressee(s) is the separatist one by which
lines 1-40 would have been addressed to someone whose name was Manlius or something similar, and lines
41-160 to someone called Allius. As many as six explanations have been offered by unitarians for how all of
the poem could refer to one person, but none of these are convincing.
(S 2) The friend addressed in lines 1-40 has asked Catullus for munera et Musarum et Veneris (line 10);
Catullus rejects both requests (tibi non utriusque petenti copia posta est, line 39), so he cannot have sent
the friend any poetry such as 68.41-160.
The evidence for this is inconclusive, and the phrasing of the requests would suit both a unitarian and a
separatist case: see above under argument (3).
55 Pennisi 1959: 232-235.
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