CATULLUS 68 - Scuola Normale Superiore

68a and in Curius’ letter to Cicero is not simply due to chance: Catullus 68a is a letter in verse, Curius’ letter
is a prose letter, and letters are an important source for colloquialisms. Catullus 68a contains many more set
expressions and colloquial turns of phrase; and it is safe to include de meliore nota among these because
nota is used within similar expressions by a range of authors including Horace, Ovid, Columella, Petronius
and Seneca the Younger. 68 The two attestations of de meliore nota come within a decade or so from each
other – the phrase may have been rather shortlived, like many modern colloquialisms. In short, the fact that
de meliore nota only occurs in Catullus 68a and in a letter of Manius Curius’ does not enable us to identify
its addressee with Manius Curius.
In default of the possibility of identifying the addressee with any known individual, we have to build upon
the evidence provided by the text as best as we can. Here we should have a look at the evidence for the
names not only in lines 1-40, but in all of Catullus 68, which appeared as a unitary piece of text already in
the archetype A, in the pre-archetype V, and plausibly already for some time before that, and as we shall
presently see, the names in lines 1-40 influenced how those in 41-160 came to be written. 69 I list all the
occurrences of the names of Catullus’ friends in 68a and 68b as reported by the three principal MSS. I
highlight all forms starting with an M.
Title Ad Mallium R 2 mG 2 : om. OG 1
68.11 mali OGR: al’ mauli R 2
68.30 mali OGR
68.41 quam fallius OGR: qua me Allius Scaliger
68.50 alli O: ali GR
68.66 allius O: (ue)l manllius O 1 ad fin. uersus: manlius GR
68.150 aliis OGR: Alli Scaliger
Here we encounter rather perplexingly traces both of Manlius and of Mallius. I discuss the points of interest
one by one (see the Commentary for a full discussion of each passage).
68
Parallels for nota: see line 28n. Colloquialisms and set expressions in lines 1-40: note preliminary quod (lines 1 and
27) and how it is taken up by id (line 30) and id gratum est (line 9), the stereotypical contrast between turpis and miser
(line 30), quod cum ita sit (line 37) and the contrast between petenti and ultro (lines 39f.).
69
McKie 1977: 38-95 conducted a thorough study of the divisions between individual poems and the titles above them
in the last stages of the transmission of the text of Catullus (the pre-archetype V, the archetype A and its descendants O,
X, G and R). He drew the convincing conclusion that during these last stages, all of which except for V can be dated
securely to the 14 th century, the number of divisions increased steadily; that is, where there is no division in the present
MSS, there will have been none in V either.
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