CATULLUS 68 - Scuola Normale Superiore

What kind of help did Manlius ask from Catullus? I will start with a question of detail. Did he make one
request or two? Line 10 is often considered to be ambiguous:
68.10 muneraque et Musarum hinc petis et Veneris.
The phrase munera et Musarum et Veneris very probably means not ‘the gifts of the Muses and of Venus’,
i.e. one single group of gifts coming from all these goddesses, but ‘the gifts of the Muses, and those of
Venus’, i.e. two separate groups of gifts, one from each goddess – and parallels in ancient literature make it
clear that the gifts of the Muses were poetry, while those of Venus were either physical love or some way of
obtaining it (see ad loc.). This still allows for two possibilities: Manlius could have made two requests, one
connected to poetry and the other connected to love, or else he could have made just one that somehow
combined both gifts, e.g. for love poetry. But the latter possibility is ruled out by the last lines of the poem:
68.37 quod cum ita sit, nolim statuas nos mente maligna
id facere aut animo non satis ingenuo,
quod tibi non utriusque petenti copia posta est:
ultro ego deferrem, copia siqua foret.
Line 37 must translate: ‘that you have not been provided with a supply of both things that you asked for’;
utriusque implies two items, and standing in conjunction with copia, a pragmatic term for ‘a stock’ or ‘a
supply’ of something, it cannot possibly refer to two aspects of the same request. Nicolaus Heinsius, Hermes
and R.G.M. Nisbet proposed to emend utriusque away, but the text makes sense and is perfectly idiomatic,
so one should interpret rather than emend.
And in fact this interpretation squares well with the rest of the poem. In his recapitulation of Manlius’ letter
Catullus emphasizes two features of his friend’s present suffering, his sleeplessness due to his erotic
deprivation (lines 5f.) and his inability to soothe his mind by reading the classics (lines 7f.), and where the
central part of his reply falls into two sections, one dealing with love and sex (lines 15-32) 107 and the other
with books (lines 33-36). Attempts to take munera et Musarum et Veneris to refer to one request appear to
have been based not on any aspect of the text, but on the commonsense consideration that Catullus would
have been able to provide a friend with love poetry. That is certainly true; but as the text contains indications
of a different state of affairs, we must give up our preliminary expectations.
107 multa satis lusi (line 17) and totum hoc studium (line 19) are sometimes taken to refer to poetry as well as love-
making – but their context shows that this cannot be the case (see ad loc.). The words non est dea nescia nostri, / quae
dulcem curis miscet amaritiem (17f.), which clearly refer to amorous pursuits, clarify that the games implied by lusi
were erotic, while hoc studium refers back to Catullus’ amorous pursuits.
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