CATULLUS 68 - Scuola Normale Superiore

esemble a communis opinio. 171 Thomson has only discussed part of the problem in the introduction to his
edition of 1978, and in the table of manuscripts and the stemma in both his editions (the introduction to his
1997 edition contains no section on the recentiores at all). 172 There clearly remains room for scepticism here,
as has been pointed out by M.D. Reeve in a memorable review of Thomson’s 1978 edition: as he put it,
“suspicious natures may consider it a little too neat that out of 100-odd manuscripts all the rest should derive
from the only three that antedate 1395.” 173 It would be possible to prove this right or wrong with reference to
the readings of OGR and to those of the recentiores – but nobody has done so, nor is it difficult to see why.
We are dealing with over 100 heavily interpolated manuscripts; drawing up a full stemma may not be exactly
an “impossible task”, as was suggested by McKie, but it is certainly not something that is easily done. 174 In
the absence of such an investigation one has to treat the recentiores with caution. They appear to contain
very little that is not found in OGR and that cannot easily be attributed to conjecture and corruption. While
only a thorough study could bring certainty, on the basis of the experience of others and myself with the
recentiores I believe that the text of all of them may very well be based on OGR, especially on R, but on
occasion they may show the influence of older manuscripts from the same tradition, such as the prearchetype
V. One salient case is line 3 of poem 34, which is missing in OGR but is found in MS 106 (the
Vatican codex Urbinas lat. 812) and in the first Aldine edition of 1502. It is first attested in 1496 in the
commentary of Palladius, who claims to have found it ‘in uetustiore exemplari’, ‘in an older copy of the
text’. There may well be other cases of this type. 175 However, it is clear by all accounts that Catullus’
Renaissance readers were prepared to make a big effort to correct his text, so if we find an attractive textual
variant in a manuscript from this period, the default assumption that we should make is that it is probably a
conjecture or a mistake. In Catullus 68 the recentiores certainly offer no variants that cannot be explained
like this.
171
Mynors 1958: viii solved the problem in a rather cavalier way by asserting that “[q]uod ad ceteros codices attinet, …
omnes a codicibus OGR originem aut duxerunt aut, quod nobis idem ualet, duxisse possunt”. Goold 1958: 95
commented that “Mynors’ edition solves this problem once and for all by providing enough ms readings to prove Hale’s
hitherto unsubstantiated claim (TAPA 53 [1922] 111) that ‘all the manuscripts except O G R are derived from these
three, and … we may and must cut off the whole web below the manuscripts O G R.’ ” Mynors has certainly not proven
this, and his words indicate that he did not care whether or not it was the case; he simply believed that in any case it was
possible to base an edition on OGR, since they enabled one to reconstruct the lost Codex Veronensis.
172
Introduction: Thomson 1978: 33-41. Table of manuscripts: Thomson 1978:44-63 and 1997: 72-91. Stemma:
Thomson 1978: 69 and 1997: 93.
173
Reeve 1980: 179f.
174
McKie 1977: 28.
175
Until the last quarter of the 20th century, the recentiores found champions on the European continent such as
Francesco Della Corte (1951: 3-191) and Catullus’ editors for the Teubner series, Schuster, Bardon and Eisenhut. Della
Corte’s position was demolished by Zicàri (1952), while the Teubner editors disbelieved Hale’s stemma and treated
Lachmann’s Datanus (4) as an independent witness well after it had been demonstrated by Ullman (1960: 1052f., cfr.
Thomson 1978: 35-41) that this codex was a copy of the Riccardianus (31).
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