I have observed already on 10 32 with what exceeding frequency his Mss. confuse r and t: let me here mention, as most in point, 36 12 uriosq; O utriosq; G, with 'al uriosq;' written above; 14 18 Curram. Curā O Cur tam G; 66 4 certis G. ceteris 0; 63 27 Attis. atris V; 12 1 Marrucine. Matrucine V: es for eis I need not illustrate. From whatever part of the house Thallus sto le thes things, whether it were the diningroom or another chamber or the Atrium itself, he would have to pass thro' this Atrium to get to the door, and in it servants would naturally be posted to observe what was doing. As our passage is so notorious a Catullian crux, I will not hesitate to quote nearly the whole of Martial VIII 59. The epigram is upon a thievish guest, and Martial could hardly fail, when writing on a similar subject, to remember one whom he loved so dearly and knew so well as Catullus. Aspicis hunc uno contentum lumine... 5 hunc tu conuiuam cautus seruare memento: 10 nec dormitantem uernam fraudare lucerna si nihil inuasit, puerum tunc arte dolosa If our poem was in Martial's thoughts when he wrote this epigram, we might fancy from v. 9 that he supposed the pallium to have been stolen from Catullus' person. But then v. 11 might well be a reference to some such reading as I have given to Catullus. What the 'catagraphi Thyni' were I have not the least notion; but the poem seems to imply that all the articles were stolen at the same time, and it is not likely that they were all taken from Catullus' person or even from the dining-room. I cannot help feeling that the 'Si nihil inuasit' of v. 13 is a reminiscence of our 'quod inuolasti', the force of the two expressions is so similar. If the oscitantes' be the guests, one might suggest 'Murcia ebrios': ebrios first becoming eurios. 6 12 minuta: a popular homely word, like so many others found in Catullus. Besides Cicero's 'minuta nauigia', I have noted down from Plautus 'curculiunculos minutos', Terence 'pisciculos minutos', Vitruuius' minutum theatrum': in the Bellum Africae and the Bellum Hisp., both written in a very plebeian style, I have found 6 or 7 instances of 'minutus' or 'minutatim'. The latter Virgil admits once in imitation of Lucretius; but very many writers reject the word entirely. If the examples too which are given in the lexicons be examined, it will be found I think that the writers employ a homely plebeian style; or else Cicero, like Catullus, is either adopting the popular style, as in his letters to Atticus, or is using the word in a disparaging contemptuous sense. Hence, as in so many analogous cases, bellus and pulcher for instance, while paruus has disappeared, we find minuto, menu, etc. in the different Romance languages. 26 1 The uestra of O and nostra of G leave us uncertain which reading was in V. Baehrens follows 0; Ellis argues for nostra; while Schwabe, tho' unac F quainted with O, prefers to take uostra, even on conjecture. Furius is so shadowy a personage and I am so unable to decide how much or how little truth there may be in Catullus' banter, that I feel reluctant to pronounce a decided opinion one way or the other. But on the whole my feeling is for uestra, as I think that Catullus, tho' he would readily jest with a dear friend like Fabullus on his own poverty (as in 13 8), would be more likely to jeer at a butt like Furius for his lack of means (as he does in 23), than to expose his own. Catullus' contemporary Furius Bibaculus, a poet too of the same school, who elsewhere laughs at the famous grammarian Valerius Cato for his abject poverty, writes a poem on Cato's mortgaged Tusculan villa, which depends, like our poem, wholly on a pun for its point: Catonis modo, Galle, Tusculanum tota creditor urbe uenditabat. unum deficere expedire nomen. en cor Zenodoti, en iecur Cratetis! Whether we read uestra or nostra, our poem has probably some reference to the request of Furius referred to in 23 26. 27 3 and 4 Vt lex Postumiae iubet magistrae ebrioso acino ebriosioris. In 4 O and G have ebriose: the letters o and e are so often interchanged in our Mss. that in V or some predecessor of V they must have been almost indistinguishable. I have collected 50 instances and more of this confusion: not seldom, as we shall see, O rightly offers e where G perversely has o; from which it would follow that in V the two letters must often have been difficult to distinguish. I have touched upon this already at 6 9; and I shall have to recur to it again and again. That, as G and O indicate, Catullus wrote Ebrioso acino' I have little doubt. Gellius VI 20 6 has a curious comment on this line. The Mss. of Gellius are very corrupt there; but Haupt (Ind. lect. aest. 1857: opusc. II p. 121) proves clearly that Gellius meant to say the genuine reading in Catullus was Ebria acina', with a pleasing hiatus of the two a's; tho' some assigned to Catullus Ebriosa acina', others 'Ebrioso acino'. But, while Baehrens accepts Ebria acina' as the genuine reading, Haupt rejects it as a vain fancy of Gellius and reads with most of the Editors' Ebriosa acina'. I doubt the existence of acina at all, and unhesitatingly follow the lead of our Mss. in the persuasion that Gellius is pursuing a mere chimerical crotchet with no more foundation for it in fact than for what he says of Virgil just before. I do not therefore look upon this verse as giving any indication that the text of Catullus, as found in our Mss., had been designedly tampered with in or before or after the time of Gellius: Gellius knew of the reading 'Ebrioso' as well as of 'Ebria'. Again in 37 18 I accept without demur the 'Cuniculosae' of V, in the belief that Priscian who twice quotes that verse, wrote down, through some odd negligence or hallucination, 'Celtiberosae Celtiberiae', and then in one of the two passages copied down what he had written in the other. 29 [Reprinted from the Journal of Philology, vol. ii p. 2—34.] ..... ...My present design is to examine at length and dissect a single poem of Catullus, the 29th, from a wish to abate some shameful scandals which have attached themselves to the fame of the greatest of the Romans, and at the same time to try to rescue from obloquy a humbler man, who yet appears to have been a most efficient servant to two of the first generals in history: perhaps also to mitigate our censure of Catullus himself who has propagated these scandals, by shewing that what looks like foul insult is three parts of it meant only in jest. But first a word or two about the name and, what is of more importance for our immediate purpose, the date of the poet. The unadulterated testimony of manuscripts calls him merely Catullus Veronensis, but we know from Suetonius and others that his gentile name was Valerius. Though there has been more doubt about his praenomen, I thought that Schwabe had settled the question; but I see that Ellis regards it as still open. Jerome, copying Suetonius' words, names him Gaius Valerius Catullus, the word Gaius being written at full length, so as to preclude all possible error in the case of a writer whose Mss. are so very valuable and so independent as those of Jerome: a scarcely less weighty authority than Suetonius, Apuleius terms him in his Apologia C. Catullus: what is there to set against such overwhelming testimony? And yet Scaliger, Lachmann, Haupt, Mommsen and other distinguished scholars de |