CATULLUS 68 - Scuola Normale Superiore

It has been hard to decide whether to follow Cremona’s recommendations, as far as I found them acceptable.
In principle I am strongly in favour of his approach, not only for the sake of precision, but also because it
would be closer to how the words originally sounded, with interesting consequences for the poem: note the
assonance in quom nequeo in line 32 and the alliteration in qui quom in 121. But Cremona’s proposals only
affect a part of the orthographical problems posed by Catullus’ text, and they raise some questions. How
should we spell a Greek loanword with an intervocalic s: as Musa or as Mussa? As of now, I do not have the
competence to solve questions of this type, and in matters of spelling I prefer to follow previous editors by
and larde. I have continued to write cui, cum and causa, and have only changed the orthography if individual
words, where necessary.
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