CATULLUS 68 - Scuola Normale Superiore

PREFACE
“Über das 68. Gedicht Catulls zu schreiben fordert nachgerade ungewöhnlichen Mut.”
Hugo Magnus 1
Catullus 68 is a text out of the ordinary. In less than two hundred lines of an almost perfect elegance the poet
addresses a distraught acquaintance, he praises a friend who has helped him to start a relationship with his
beloved, he describes her beauty as she arrived at the rendez-vous, he compares her to the mythical heroine
Laodamia, speaks of the Trojan War and laments the death of his brother. This caleidoscope-like text
contains highlights such as the studiedly casual address to the Muses (lines 41-52) and the simile of the
refreshing stream (lines 57-62). Over two thousand years after it was composed, it can still reward the reader.
Unfortunately, it is also an extremely problematic piece of text, more so perhaps than any other surviving
poem of Catullus’. It has been badly damaged in transmission: even in the earliest surviving manuscripts it
contains at least three lacunae and countless corruptions, some of which have not yet been corrected. Its
interpretation remains highly controversial even after half a millennium of modern Catullan scholarship, and
after the publication of a very considerable amount of secondary literature devoted to it. It is not even agreed
how many poems it consists of – one, two, or three?
The aim of this volume is to provide an analysis of Catullus 68 based on micro-philological study of the text.
This is the opposite of the approach that has been followed by many earlier interpreters of Catullus 68, who
started by interpreting the text as a whole and dealt with problematic details only in a second phase by fitting
them into the framework that they had established. This has been the case not only in many articles, but also
in the two most exhaustive discussions of the text to date, in Sarkissian’s book, which is essentially a running
commentary, and to a lesser extent also in the detailed study by Coppel. 2 In itself, such an approach is not
without merit. This is how most people deal with most kinds of texts, after all – when we are reading the
morning paper, it does not trouble us too much if we fail to understand a rare adjective, since the meaning of
the article probably does not depend on that word, and since the journalist has probably set out the essentials
of the story quite clearly. But poem 68 is different in a number of respects. It has been marred by textual
corruption, which calls for remedies not used by the average newspaper reader. Even if it had survived intact,
it would probably have presented us not with just one difficulty, but with several – some of these at crucial
junctires. I will also argue that in the first forty lines of the text we cannot even trust Catullus to have
informed us fully of the essentials of the story, since these lines were not intended for the general reader in
1 “Writing about Catullus’ poem 68 requires almost extraordinary courage.” Magnus 1908: 876.
2 Sarkissian 1983; Coppel 1973.
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