CATULLUS 68 - Scuola Normale Superiore

daughter Tullia (Erskine 1997). Cicero tried to overcome his grief; here Manlius takes the Epicurean line and
tries to console himself with alternative sources of pleasure.
hoc ... epistolium ‘This little letter’. epistolium is the Latinized version of the Greek ⁄πι!τ〉λιον (see LSJ
s.v.), the post-classical but not too rare diminutive of ⁄πι!τολ→. epistola, which was well-established in
Latin by Catullus’ time, had no Latin diminutive. The imported Greek diminutive epistolium is found first
here and does not re-appear until Apuleius, Apol. 6 & 79. Later Hilarius op. hist. fragm. 2.13 writes epistolia,
id est litteras communicatorias and the Glossae Graeco-Latinae 84 v .19 equate the word with ⁄πι!τ〉λιον.
While Apuleius could well have taken the word from Catullus, this can hardly be said of Hilarius, and one
should note the use of ⁄πι!τ〉λιον in a work by that highly Hellenized Roman, the Emperor Marcus Aurelius
(1.7.5): the Greek diminutive may have been well-established in vulgar Latin. Greek words and expressions
appear regularly in Cicero’s letters to Atticus (which is the most informal part of his correspondence) and in
Lucilius’ Satires, and they are used often by Petronius’ freedmen: many Romans must have been as bilingual
in their speech as they were in their culture. In Catullus it is notable that while he does not use Grecisms too
frequently, they often appear in a conversational context, where he is addressing someone: compare 12.3
mnemosynum (a hapax in Latin), 16.2 pathice and 57.2 pathico (the word is found again in Martial and
Juvenal and frequently in Pompeian graffitti), 22.5 palimpsesto (also in Cic. Fam.), 25.7 catagraphos
(another hapax), 98.4 crepidas … carpatinas (carpatinus is a hapax but crepida is found in Cic. Rab. Post.
and regularly afterwards), and perhaps even 64.154 leaena (also found in Varro L.L. and Cic. Glor.).
Here epistolium has the advantage of fitting more easily into an elegiac couplet than the iambic epistolam.
However, the author’s liking for diminutives is well known (see Riese xxv). Here the dimimutive may have
emphasized the brevity of Manlius’ letter, it may have been used in an emotive sense (cf. Coleman 1999: 60)
to emphasize Catullus’ affectionate feelings towards Manlius, or even to express pity (thus Cic. Att. 2.23.1
recreandae uoculae causa, translated by Shackleton Bailey as “to refresh my poor voice”). In Greek, at any
rate, ⁄πι!τ〉λιον need not mean more than ‘a letter’ (thus at M. Aur. 1.7.5).
Trappes-Lomax (2007: 228) suggests that the word should be written as epistolion, as “it is an exotic import
from Greek” and a poet as learned as Catullus could be expected to have retained the original spelling.
However, this is unlikely if, as seems possible, epistolium was already circulating as a loan-word – and Latin
appears to have converted Greek diminutives in –ion quickly into –ium (note that this has happened to all
Plautine characters whose names were originally Greek diminutives of this type). As our word ends in –ium
in the MSS of all authors who use it, there appears to be no reason to emend.
Muretus omits hoc without comment, perhaps by mistake. His omission is rejected by Santenius (“male
omisit Muretus”) but it is accepted by Baehrens ad loc., who notes that hoc epistolium “eius qui scribit
litteras indicat; eius cui respondetur epistulam, etiamsi oculis scribentis est subiecta, nudum ‘epistolium’
satis designat’ ”, and by Trappes-Lomax (2007: 228), who argues that it should be deleted “unless some
parallel can be found for using hic for ‘this letter to which I am replying’ as opposed to ‘this letter which I
am writing’ ”. But the laws of language fix only the meaning of hoc and not what item it should refer to in a
particular context; if with ‘this letter’ one mostly refers to the letter that one is writing, this is due to
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