CATULLUS 68 - Scuola Normale Superiore

THE TRANSMISSION AND THE RECONSTRUCTION OF THE TEXT
The earliest four surviving manuscripts of the poems of Catullus, except of carmen 62, are the following: 154
O The MS Canonicianus classicus latinus 30 of the Bodleian Library in Oxford. O was written in elegant
Italo-Gothic letters by a calligrapher who was “an abysmally poor Latinist”. 155 It was left incomplete: no
titles and hardly any initials have been added in the empty spaces that have been spared out for them. 156 A
handful of marginal notes have been taken over from the exemplar (see line 66n.). The style of the writing
shows that it was written somewhere in Northern Italy in the 14 th century. 157
G The codex Parisinus latinus 14137 in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris, once conserved in
the abbey of St-Germain-des-Prés, whence its siglum G. The scribe was identified by Giuseppe Billanovich
as Antonio del Gaio da Legnago (ca. 1350-1385), the disreputable Chancellor of Cansignorio della Scala
(1340-1375, ruler of Verona from 1359 onwards). 158 In the subscriptio Da Legnago notes that he finished the
manuscript on 19 October 1375, as Cansignorio lay dying. G too was left incomplete, like O: Da Legnago
left lines empty for the titles, but left most of these empty, and took over only a handful of the marginal notes
that were (as we shall see) present in his exemplar. Cansignorio died shortly after he completed the text of
the MS, and he undoubtedly had more urgent business to attend to. 159
R The codex Ottonobianus latinus 1829 in the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. It was copied by a
professional scribe for Lino Coluccio Salutati (1331-1406, Chancellor of the Florentine Republic from
1375). Salutati then went over the text himself and checked the MS against its exemplar, copying titles and
marginalia (apart from some rare cases in which these had already been added by the scribe), inventing more
titles and making conjectures of his own. Since O and G were left incomplete, Salutati (R 2 ) is our best source
for fourteenth-century titles and marginalia; however, one must try to distinguish those that he copied from
154
For a more detailed account of these MSS see Thomson 1997: 28-38.
155
Thomson 1997: 28.
156
Thomson loc. cit. suggests that “O … may well have been set aside in favour of the more faithful rendering which X
gives of A’s text” – that is to say, O would have been set apart because someone would have realized that it contained
too many mistakes. In fact it is not unusual to find manuscripts in which the titles, the initials and/or the marginalia
were not added: this is also the case with G (see above). If anybody had checked the text of O when it was copied, he
would surely have tried to correct at least part of the mistakes, and there is no trace of this. It simply appears to be due
to chance that O was never completed.
157
Thus McKie 1977: 242, n. 1. Thomson 1997 dates O to “?ca. 1360” in his Introduction (p. 28) and to “ca. 1370?” in
his Table of Manuscripts (p. 81). Either date would be strongly hypothetical.
158
Billanovich 1959: 160-167, who gives more information on this unsavoury character.
159 Thus McKie 1977: 178 and Thomson 1997: 31.
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