CATULLUS 68 - Scuola Normale Superiore

CATULLUS 68A: THE ADDRESSEE
We have just seen that while in lines 41-160 (that is, Catullus 68b) there appears a friend of Catullus called
Allius, lines 1-40 (that is, poem 68a) are addressed to a different person, whose name begins with an M. Who
is he, and what is his name?
He is addressed in lines 11 and 30, where the primary manuscripts (O, G and R) all write mali. There was no
such Roman name as *Malius, but mali could easily be a corrupt form of manli (especially if written as māli)
or of malli (through haplography from malli), which are the vocatives of the Roman gentile names Manlius
and Mallius. Both the omission of an n after a vowel and the use of a single consonant for a double one are
well attested in Catullus’ manuscript tradition. An m or an n is omitted regularly in the principal MSS, as at
9.2 antistans (OGR have antistas), 28.9 o Memmi (O has omne mi: GR have omnem mi; Mynors reconstructs
omē mi for the archetype) and 31.13 gaudente (for gaude in O and gaudete in GR) 60 , while a single
consonant is used for a double one with equal facility, as at 25.11 conscribillent (even if it is incorrect,
conscribilent in OGR must surely descend from this form), 61.129 uilicae (iulice O: uillice GR) and 23.17
mucusque (muccusue OGR). This is to say that mali in lines 11 and 30 could come either from Manli or from
Malli. Alternatively, Morgan has suggested in a recent article that the addressee was called Manius Curius,
whom Catullus would have addressed by his praenomen as Mani. 61 In this case, mani would have been
corrupted either to manli or to malli, either of which could have yielded the archetype’s mali. No other
Roman names suit the metre and the manuscript evidence, and the correct form is surely one of the three.
We may well start with the most exotic candidate of the three, the praenomen Manius. It is advocated by
Morgan on the basis of a complex set of arguments. He states that “the unusual praenomen ‘Manius’ was
vulnerable to being corrupted to the common gentilicia ‘Manlius’ or ‘Mallius’ by scribes already in late
antiquity”. 62 He illustrates this with one single example, Livy 2.19.1. In fact there the corruption appears to
have had a different cause, but it is certainly imaginable that an excessively zealous reader or scribe should
have turned mani into manli. 63 Morgan also argues that the praenomen would be acceptable as a form of
60
Bergk’s conjecture gaudente is rightly defended by Goold 1958: 94.
61
Morgan 2008.
62
Morgan 2008: 141.
63
Livy 2.19.1: Morgan 2008: 149 n. 4. Livy wrote consules Ser. Sulpicius M’. Tullius, where M’. Tullius was restored
by Sigonius with the help of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, while his MSS read m. manlius tullus (M), m. mālius tullus
(PH), m. manlius tullius (O), m. mamlius tullus (F), m. m alius tullus (B), m. manilius tullus (RD), m. mimlius tullus (L)
and m. manilius tullus (V); in each of these save L and B there stands a horizontal line above the free-standing letter m
to indicate that it is an abbreviation, while in B there stands such a line above the second free-standing letter m (see the
Oxford Classical Text of Conway and Walters, and that of Seymour).
This cluster of corruptions probably arose as follows: (i) the gloss manius was added in order to explain the rare
abbreviation m’ ; (ii) a copyist incorporated this gloss into his text, which now read m’ manius tullius; (iii) somebody
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