Commentary on Catullus (Latin) Machine readable text

Commentary on Catullus (Latin)
By E. T. Merrill
Edited by: E. T. Merrill

Cambridge Harvard University Press 1893

Perseus Documents Collection Table of Contents

Introduction.
   Early Lyric Poetry at Rome.
   Catullus.
   Date of birth and of death.
   Family and circumstances.
   Education
   Lesbia.
   Journey to Bithynia.
   Later years. Relations with Caesar.
   Poems.
   Manuscripts.
   Friends and foes.
   Metres.
   Prosody.

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Introduction.

[sect. 10]

Manuscripts.

[53]

53. The popularity enjoyed by Catullus among the Augustan elegiasts did not preserve his memory alive through the declining centuries of the Roman empire. The scholars and poets of the latter half of the first millennium after Christ had forgotten even his name. Only Rather, bishop of Verona, in a sermon delivered there in 965 A.D., confesses that he had just become acquainted with his writings; and an anthology of Latin poets written at about the same time (now cod. Thuaneus, Parisinus 8071) contains a single poem of Catullus (c. 62). Then he drops cut of ken once more till the opening of the 14th century when a writer of Vicenza, Benvenuto Campesani (who died before 1330), celebrated in a few enigmatic verses (cf. Critical Appendix ad fin.) the rediscovery of the text of Catullus 'under a bushel,' apparently at Verona. From this MS., or from copies of it, numerous Italian scholars, among them Petrarch, early learned to know the poet. The original MS. soon disappeared, and has never been found; but two descendants of it, apparently not more than one generation removed, are preserved to us, and form the basis of the present text of Catullus. One of these copies, ordinarily called G (now No. 14,137 in the National Library at Paris) was made in the year 1375, and the other, O (No.30 of the Canonici Latin MSS. in the Bodleian Library) at about the same time. (Cf. also introductory note to Critical Appendix.)

[54]

54. The earlier editions of Catullus, however, were based upon interpolated MSS., and though displaying great erudition and classical taste left much to be desired in the way of true principles of textual criticism. The edition of Karl Lachmann (Berlin, 1829) first established the text of Catullus upon a scientific basis, though the two MSS. on which he mainly depended, D and L (in the Royal Library at Berlin), are far inferior to G and O. These became first known to the world, G in 1830 through I. Sillig (Jahrb. fr Philol. xiii. p.262 ff.), and O through Robinson Ellis in his first edition of Catullus (Oxford, 1867). During the last quarter of a century, then, the constitution as well as the elucidation of the text of Catullus has made its most marked advances.