CATULLUS 68 - Scuola Normale Superiore

have been using not the archetype, but an earlier codex. 167 He transferred the siglum V to this codex, even
though he noted that “[w]hether V was itself the (?Carolingian) ms brought back to Verona or an immediate
transcript of the resurrected Catullus is a separate question that remains to be answered”. 168 He did not give
the archetype any particular siglum; it was christened A (for Archetypus) by Thomson in the introduction to
his edition of 1997. 169 In this case the stemma is as follows:
V
A
O X
G
Rather inconsistently Thomson continued to use V in his apparatus for the agreement of O, G and R, where
one should evidently use A.
The codices recentiores Catullus was read extremely rarely during the Middle Ages, and only by a
restricted group of intellectuals during the 14 th century; but with the flowering of the Renaissance his
popularity increased spectacularly. Thomson lists over 100 surviving manuscripts of his poems from the 15 th
century, though only about 7 from its first third. 170
What is the relationship between these manuscripts and O, G and R? Do they descend from these, or do they
have independent value as witnesses? Hale, who discovered R in 1896, believed that all the recentiores
descended from this codex, apart from a few that displayed signs of the influence of G. His suggestion was
initially received with skepticism, especially by scholars from continental Europe, but after the appearance of
the excellent edition of Mynors, which was based on OGR, it gradually gained ground and has come to
167 McKie 1977: 38-95.
168 Ibid. 88f. Thomson 1997: 26f. is equally cautious. Giuseppe Billanovich 1988: 48f. identifies the recovered
manuscript with X and tells an elaborate story about how it may have arrived in Verona.
169 Thomson 1997: 24-27 (on the relationship of V and A) and 93 (a chart of the stemma).
170 Thomson 1997: 72-91.
R
m
77