CATULLUS 68 - Scuola Normale Superiore

When I started working on this volume, I wanted to assemble a variorum edition, in which the views of all
scholars of note on every problem would be quoted. This project soon turned out to be impracticable: since
the editio princeps of 1472 there have appeared many scores of editions of Catullus, dozens of
commentaries, and prodigious amounts of scholarly studies; those on Catullus 68 alone fill many thousands
of pages. I have had to skip and to omit; in compensation, I have tried to make the bibliography as complete
as possible.
The following pages will show only up to a point how much I owe to earlier Catullan scholarship, in
particular to earlier commentaries. One source of inspiration were the great Renaissance triad of Muretus,
Statius and Scaliger. Among more recent commentators Ellis and Kroll excel in erudition, Thomson in
familiarity with the primary manuscripts, and Fordyce in lucidity and common sense. Finally, I should
mention the work that this volume hopes to supplant. There has only appeared one commentary on Catulus
68 so far, a thin book published in 1788 by the Dutch scholar Laurentius Santenius in preparation for a
commentary on all of Catullus that he never wrote. He is not well known today, but his commentary on
Catullus 68 is an excellent achievement: where necessary, he listed the readings of an impressive number of
manuscripts (he appears to have come quite close to discovering O, almost eighty years before it caught the
eye of Ellis) and displayed laudable judgement in commenting on the text.
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It was my supervisor, Gian Biagio Conte who set me working on this topic; I would like to thank him for
having made this match and for having supported me throughout this project. I owe much of what I know
about textual criticism to his seminars. Philip Hardie, Stephen J. Harrison, Arnd Kerkhecker, John D.
Morgan and Ernst A. Schmidt read parts of this dissertation in various stages of completion and made helpful
comments, as have Glenn W. Most and participants of his research seminar at the Scuola Normale. In the
autumn of 2007 James J. O’Hara invited me to present part of the thesis as a talk at the Department of
Classics at the University of North Carolina; he and his colleagues and students proved a responsible and
congenial public, and I have benefited much from their comments. In Pisa my friends Gianfranco Adornato
and Federico Biddau advised me on questions of iconography and spelling, respectively; Gianfranco also
procured a picture of a capsa. Christian Kaesser, Jürgen Leonhardt, R.G.M. Nisbet, John M. Trappes-Lomax
and Michael D. Reeve advised me on various matters, David S. McKie allowed me to use his excellent
doctoral dissertation, while D.F.S. Thomson helped me to track down the Hale-Ullman Papers. Part of the
proofs were read with characteristic acumen by my grandfather, Kálmán Ruttkay, who brought an outsider’s
eye to Latin scholarship and made many helpful criticisms.
I did the bulk of the work in the well-stocked library of the Scuola Normale Superiore, first as a visiting
scholar and then as a perfezionando. At a time of economic difficulties for the Republic of Italy I was given
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