Table Of ContentCATULLUS
Edited with a
Textual and Interpretative
Commentary by
D.F.S. Thomson
This work contains a major revision of Douglas Thomson's Catullus: A
Critical Edition (1978), with the addition of a full commentary and a wholly
new introduction. For the introduction and for each of the poems there is an
extensive and current bibliography.
In the introduction, apart from sections on the life of Catullus, on the
arrangement of the poems, and on their literary background, there is a
lengthy discussion of the history of the text, as well as a review of the
progress of Catullan studies from the editio princeps to the present day.
There are about seventy changes from the previous edition in the text
of the poems. The critical apparatus has also been extensively revised.
In addition, the Table of Manuscripts, which has come to be regarded as
standard, has been updated without alteration to the numbering sequence.
Though this is not primarily intended as a 'school edition,' the commen
tary includes, in addition to critical judgments, translations and interpre
tations of words and phrases that may help to illuminate readings in the
text.
Catullus offers readers a new text of the poems, with a commentary, a
codicology of the manuscript tradition, and a thorough review of Catullus
scholarship.
Douglas F.s. Thomson is Professor Emeritus of Classics, University of
Toronto, and author of Catullus: A Critical Edition.
PHOENIX
Journal of the Classical Association of Canada
Revue de la Société canadienne des etudes classiques
Supplementary Volume XXXIV
Tome supplémentaire XXXIV
CATULLUS
Edited with a
Textual and Interpretative
Commentary by
D.F.S. Thomson
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS
Toronto Buffalo London
www.utppublishing.com
© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 1997
Toronto Buffalo London
Printed in Canada
Reprinted with corrections 1998
Printed in paperback 2003
ISBN 0-8020-0676-0 (cloth)
ISBN 0-8020-8592-X (paper)
Printed on acid-free paper
National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Thomson, D.F.S. (Douglas Ferguson Scott), 1919-
Catullus / edited with a textual and interpretative commentary
by D.F.S. Thomson.
(Phoenix. Supplementary volume ; 34)
Includes bibliographical references and indexes.
ISBN 0-8020-0676-0 (bound).—isbn 0-8020-8592-X (pbk.)
1. Catullus, Gaius Valerius - Criticism, Textual.
I. Catullus, Gaius Valerius II. Title.
III. Series: Phoenix. Supplementary volume (Toronto, Ont.) ; 34.
PA6276.T51997 874'.oi C96-931284-9
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing
program of the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council.
This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities and Social
Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council of Canada.
To my wife
ELEANOR
'{ 'his page intentionally left blank
CONTENTS
Preface ix
INTRODUCTION 3
General: The Poet's Life, Works, and Literary Environment 3
Life and Chronology 3
The Arrangement of the Poems 6
The New Poets and the Alexandrians: Parallels and Influences 11
The History of the Text 22
Chronology of the Text 23
Excursus. Variant Readings in the Hand of R 2: Suggested Origins 38
The Progress of Catullan Studies from the Editio Princeps
to the Present Day 43
BIBLIOGRAPHY 61
General 61
On the History of the Text 65
CHANGES FROM THE TEXT OF THE CRITICAL EDITION OF 1978 69
TABLE OF MANUSCRIPTS 72
Supplementary List (Short Fragments or Extracts) 89
'Ghost' Manuscripts 91
STEMMA CODICUM 93
SOURCES OF EMENDATIONS CITED IN THE APPARATUS 94
viii Contents
SIGLA 97
CATULLI VERONENSIS LIBER 99
COMMENTARY 195
INDEXES 557
Metres 559
First Lines 560
Names in the Text of Catullus 563
Renaissance and Modern Scholars and Writers 569
PREFACE
The text of Catullus offered here replaces my University of North Carolina
Press edition of 1978, with the addition of a Commentary devoted in part
to textual, in part to interpretative matters. In more than a few places, the
object of the Commentary is to make clear the reasoning that lies behind
the constitution of the text; it is, at all events, directed in some degree to
those who are seriously interested in the textual side of Catullan studies.
Especially in the Introduction and Apparatus Criticus, I have also sought to
identify and discuss the readings of the fourteenth-century manuscripts and
to ascertain the relations among them.
From what I have just written it will be clear that this book is not in the first
place intended for the use of beginners, as a 'school edition.' Nevertheless,
I have included in the commentary a certain number of observations, and
renderings into English of words and phrases, that may appear rather too
elementary for more advanced scholars. I have done this for two reasons.
First, a translation of a word, or a comment on the meaning of a line or a
phrase in the text, is sometimes a valuable instrument for the defence of
the text itself. In the second place, for practical purposes it can scarcely be
doubted that the graduate readers, at whom the work is primarily aimed, will
themselves have students who may seek guidance of this sort; and to these
students I hope the commentary may prove at least indirectly useful. Such
notes, again, will often (perhaps usually) indicate my disagreement with
versions or interpretations commonly adopted and presumed to be correct.
In the commentary, I have tried to do two things especially: first, to
take account of all the more recent contributions of scholarship to Catullan
studies, and secondly to notice points that are not made in the editions
generally available in classical libraries, in particular those of Fordyce
and Quinn. Where I found that a particular problem was most helpfully
X Preface
illuminated in editions long out of print, I have tried as a rule to give the
gist of what they say. In general, I have not sought to reproduce the kind
of detailed information - e.g., on the history of individual Latin words,
or on Greek literary parallels - that was readily to be found elsewhere,
except in cases where such information served the purpose of immediate
understanding. On such topics as the two just mentioned, the editions of
Kroll and Fordyce provide a great deal of information in an admirably
concise form. Both of these, however, are out of date in textual matters,
and my hope is that the present edition will in this respect, as well as by
virtue of its more comprehensive and up-to-date bibliography, be held to
fill a gap. Where manuscripts are concerned, recent codicological research
has made it imperative to revise, in several places, what I published in
1978. In the interim, a number of emendations, suggested or revived by
scholars of the present day, have found at least some degree of favour; and
information has accumulated concerning some of the manuscripts in my
Table. Full descriptions of forty-two manuscripts containing Catullus have
been published in James L. Butrica, The Manuscript Tradition of Propertius
{Phoenix, Supplementary Volume xvii, Toronto 1984); I have listed these in
a new column in the Table. Above all. Dr David S. McKie of Cambridge has
written a doctoral dissertation (The Manuscripts of Catullus: Recension in a
Closed Tradition, Cambridge University dissertation, 1977) that supersedes
a part of the introduction to my earlier edition; I am indebted to this
fundamental study for correcting at many points the account I previously
gave of the history and internal relationships of the cardinal Mss. Where -
occasionally - 1 find myself unable to accept its conclusions, I have noted the
fact in the Commentary.
One further function of the new commentary is to explain and defend,
not only readings in the text (as I have suggested above) but also remarks
made - in a necessarily abbreviated form - in the Apparatus Criticus., In
this connection, the readings of m (the first manuscript to be copied from
R) are no longer cited in full; to publish them once, in my 1978 edition,
was an inescapable duty, since a proper collation was wanting, but m is
after all a codex descriptus (see the Introduction, p. 35). Accordingly I
have for the present edition decided not to give the readings of m except
where these tell us something of interest or importance about m's exemplar,
namely R as modified by R2; in such cases, a note will usually be found
in the Commentary. The readings of the second hand in G (G2), which
were imported into G from m, and scrupulously follow those of their parent
manuscript, have been eliminated for a like reason.
Throughout the Introduction and Commentary, in writing of the poet I
use the abbreviation C. unless this seems to involve possible ambiguity. To
certain standard editions of Catullus I refer by initial:
