CATULLUS 68 - Scuola Normale Superiore

The apparatus criticus I should clarify how I have put together my apparatus criticus. Since I base my
edition on O, G and R, I report all significant readings of these MSS, and omit negligible variants of spelling.
I only quote the recentiores where they offer an attactive reading or one that is illuminating in some way.
This is to say that I effectively treat the recentiores as sources of conjectures. I naturally try to attribute each
such variant to the source(s) where it is first attested, with one condition: if a variant is attributed to only one
MS in apparatu as well as in the commetary, that means that I could find it only in that one MS.
Mynors used the Greek letters α – θ to refer to readings that derived from eight annotated manuscripts; he
used α and β to refer to such a manuscript itself and γ – ζ to refer groups of manuscripts that descended from
such a codex, while η and θ were used both for the parent MS (nos. 122 and 52, respectively) and for their
descendants. This ingenious system of reference was conserved by Thomson, and I continue to use it here.
With γ Mynors and Thomson meant ‘all the MSS of the γ class, or several’; I only use it to refer to all the
MSS of that class.
For the rest, I refer to the recentiores not by their name (e.g. Ricc. 606 or Riccardianus), but by an
underlined numeral (e.g. 31), which is their number in the Table of Manuscripts in Thomson’s edition of
1997. 176 I provide a list of the MSS in the Sigla (pp. 82-84).
I have studied O, G and R and most or all of the recentiores conserved in Budapest, Florence, Oxford, Paris,
Rome, Tübingen and Venice myself. For the other MSS quoted in my apparatus I used the Hale-Ullman
Papers, a set of notes on the MSS of Catullus (including collations or transcriptions of 114 of them, as of
2008) and on those of some other authors, that is conserved at the Department of Classics of the University
of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. In general, I have been able to add little to Thomson’s excellent account of
the principal MSS, especially of G and R, in his 1997 edition, but it has been possible to improve
considerably on his account of the recentiores.
When I started working on this volume, I intended to quote in the apparatus all conjectures that have ever
been made. This turned out to be impracticable, as two groups of sources defied such a treatment. The
codices recentiores are a valuable source of conjectures – in fact, a majority of those that I accept first appear
there – but for every good reading they contain ten or twenty worthless ones. This, and the sheer number of
recentiores that we have, means that one has to be selective in quoting them even in a detailed study such as
this one. Almost equally intractable are the editions that were published between the middle of the 16 th and
the middle of the 19 th century. Before Lachmann, editors were by and large unable to assess the value of
manuscripts; they quoted them pell-mell and often gave undue weight to readings that have appeared since
then to lack all authority. Some such readings, such as copia facta est in line 39, continued to be quoted and
176 Thomson 1997: 72-91.
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