CATULLUS 68 - Scuola Normale Superiore

COMMENTARY
68A: A LETTER TO MANLIUS
[Title] In each of the principal MSS O, G and R the scribe has left out a line above the poem. This space
remains empty in O, but in G and R later hands (G 2 and R 2 ) have added the title Ad Mallium. McKie (1977:
49-53) has shown that G 2 has taken his titles (and everything else) from m, which is a copy of R as modified
by R 2 , that is, Coluccio Salutati. Consequently our only independent witness for the title Ad Mallium is R 2 .
However, it cannot be ancient, as none of the titles above Catullus’ poems go back to antiquity (McKie 1977:
75f. and Butrica 2007: 19-24 – the title given to poem 62 in the 9 th -century anthology T may constitute an
exception, but that has no bearing on the titles in OGR). Ad Mallium must have been made up by somebody
– but by whom, when, and why?
No form of the name Mallius occurs in carmen 68 in O, G and R, which leads McKie (1977: 62) to conclude
that “if the title has been invented from the text, the text at that time read malli and not mali” at lines 11
and/or 30, that is, in this case the title would have been added to the pre-archetype V or to an earlier
manuscript. It may well appear plausible that Ad Mallium should conserve the genuine form of the name of
the addressee, which would have been corrupted at lines 11 and 30 mali. However, it is possible to turn this
line of reasoning upside down. At lines 11 and 66 a marginal note was added to a manuscript at an earlier
stage of the tradition (at line 11 to X or an earlier manuscript, and at line 66 to A or an earlier manuscript).
The reader who added these notes (if we can attribute them to the same author) was clearly an intelligent
person who knew his Latin well, and in fact we know that Catullus was read in the early 14 th century by
humanists in Padua and Verona (see Thomson 1997: 24-27). This reader added forms of the name Manlius –
but if he found a form of the name Mallius in the title of the poem, why did he not add that?
In fact, the title can be accounted for in more ways than one. It could be a conjecture of Salutati’s, who was
sufficiently erudite to know that Mallius was a good Roman name, unlike Malius; who was familiar with the
tendency of the Northern Italian scribes responsible for the archetype and X to make double consonants
single and vice versa; and who had just gone through poem 61, where he read mallio in the text in line 16
(thus OGR) and above which he expanded the original title Epythalamus (sic!) to Epythalamus Junie et
Mallii (see McKie 1977: 51 and 62f.). To be sure, in this case it has to be explained why this thorough and
methodical man did not try to correct as much as possible of Catullus 68 and why he did not add a note such
as al’ malli to his MS at lines 11 and 30. This might not be so surprising if he worked through his text more
or less line by line, because reaching line 11 and finding in his exemplar X the marginal note al’ manli or
mauli he may well have concluded that the name of the addressee may have been marred by more than a
simple spelling error. Similarly, Mallium could be a conjecture by an earlier reader, though this hypothesis
would raise the same objection as that of McKie, that if a correct Latin name was present in the title of the