A Commentary on Catullus

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(2) of. %. H the University of Oxford. February 1890.

(3) Digitized by the Internet Archive in. 2008 with funding from IVIicrosoft. Corporation. http://www.archive.org/details/commentaryoncatuOOelliuoft.

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(7) Clattnbu. "§tm Btxm. A COMMENTARY ON CATULLUS ELLIS.

(8) HENRY FROWDE. Oxford University Press Warehouse. Amen Corner,. E.G..

(9) (iTlarcnbon tlrcss. ^cvus. A. COMMENTARY ON CATULLUS. BY. ROBINSON. ELLIS, M.A., LL.D.. FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE, OXFORD UNIVERSITY READER. IN. LATIN LITERATURE. SECOND EDITION. '. Oyfof5. AT THE CLARENDON PRESS MDCCCLXXXIX Âll rights reserved. "^.

(10) PA tu. ^1}^ \if^. W'. ^.

(11) TO. GEORGE GRANVILLE BRADLEY DEAN OF WESTMINSTER I. THIS IN. DEDICATE. COMMENTARY ON CATULLUS. GRATEFUL RECOLLECTION OF THREE YEARS PASSED AT RUGBY. UNDER. HIS UNRIVALLED TUITION.

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(13) PREFACE. As. far. back as 1859. I. designed a commentary on Catullus, and only. But the earlier from the first I had accumulated a considerable store of materials, had never been abandoned, and after the publication of my edition of the text in 1867 became the principal object to which my studies were directed. As compared \\ith Vergil ^ and Horace, or even with TibuUus and Propertius, Catullus may almost be said to have been during the past century a neglected book. While each of those poets has found an interpreter of first-rate ability, Doering's edition of 1788 remained without a rival for interrupted. it. to reconstitute the text as a preliminary.. plan, for which. ninety years. How imperfect that edition is is known to every one. Doering's chief merit was his brevity. He carefully avoided all discussion where discussion was more than usually interesting, and when the student was asking for information on the numerous points where the poems touch on the personal or public history of the time, was contented to illustrate his author by quotations from the elegiacs of the ill-fated and interesting, but now forgotten Lotichius. This neglect was certainly not justified by the history of the poems in From Parthenius and Palladius at the end of the preceding centuries. the fifteenth century, to Vulpius and Conradinus de AUio in the former half of the eighteenth, Catullus was edited and reedited by a series of scholars including. some. of the greatest. names. in philology.. The. sixteenth. century alone produced no less than four commentaries of primary importance, those of Alexander Guarinus in 1521, of Muretus in 1554, of Of these the three former Achilles Statins in 1566, of Scaliger in 1577, were published at Venice, with which city Catullus may in modern times Guarinus' edition is now known claim an almost special connexion. No doubt modern but it is for all that a most valuable book. to few taste is offended by the plainness, not to say grossness, of his explanations ; which indeed perpetually suggest that he was illustrating ;. the corruptions of Catullus' time. But. the accident of. in 1. his own. absence of irrelevant matter,. by observations drawn from. in fulness, in general correctness, in the. I. have adopted. its. authorship ^ lastly in. this spelling of the. to the arguments of the ratione, Romae 1594.. Roman. name. its. very. rarity,. the. book. mainly in deference Vergili nominis scribcndi recta. for the present edition. jurist Castalio,. De. ^ Alexander Guarinus was the grandson of Guarinus of Verona, one of the most prominent scholars of the Renaissance, and the son of Baptista Guarinus, whose MS of Catullus, as well as his corrections and interpretations, are several times quoted in According to the Hiographie Univcrselle Alexander was himhis son's commentary. self the father of the well-known author of the Pastor Fido..

(14) ;. PREFACE.. viii. has a permanent interest literary no less than philological. The commentary of Muretus is slighter, and less minute in the explanation of particular words; but IMuretus possessed what Guarinus did not, a considerable knowledge of Greek ; in spite of which his work is, if weighed by his reputation, disappointing. He did very little for the elucidation of passages where the MSS fail us, or where the allusion is really recondite. Far more important is the commentary of the Portuguese Estago (Statius). In the accumulation of really illustrative passages, drawn from the stores of a most extensive reading, he anticipates the learning of a later period his notes too contain frequent references to inscriptions, a branch of classical archaeology then in its infancy, now perhaps exalted to a position beyond its real importance in philological investigation. The value of Estaô's labours may be estimated by the use which subsequent editors have made of them; even Scaliger seems sometimes to be merely repeating him, perhaps unconsciously. Scaliger's own Castigationes are rather a series of notes on disputed or corrupt passages than a commentary he disdained to linger over what he thought easy or trivial, and contented himself with the discussion of difficulties. Sometimes his critical sagacity has cleared up what had been dark to all before him, as notably in LXI. 189; often his wide knowledge of the whole range of classical antiquity has traced allusions which had escaped even Statius. But his archaeological learning was out of proportion to his critical delicacy and his castigations, valuable as they are, are at times defaced by outbursts of childish self-conceit or reckless infelicities of correction. Partly perhaps this is attributable to the exaggerated estimate which he formed of Cujas' MS, which since Professor Arthur Palmer's^ discovery can no longer be thought a lost treasure. Only as compared with other late MSS of the fifteenth century can the famous Cujacianus be considered a ]MS of firstrate importance for the criticism of Catullus: its readings where they differ from the IVISS of the fourteenth century differ for the w'orse; a single instance is in VIII. 1 5 Scelesta rere, an obvious correction of the genuine reading 7ie te, and as obviously wrong. Even Scaliger's so-called restitution of LXXXVII to its supposed proper place before LXXV, based as it was on the Cujacianus which had Nunc in LXXV. i for Hue of most MSS, plausible though it undoubtedly seems, and accepted though it is by Lachmann, can hardly be considered more than an ingenious guess, in the enlarged knowledge which we now possess not only of the MSS of Catullus, but of the omissions and lacunae of JNISS :. ;. generally. Scaliger's edition was supplemented before the close of the century by the Praecidanea of the elder Dousa, and the Conicctanea of the younger. The Commentaries of Passerat (1608) and Voss (1684) have experienced a singularly different fortune. Passerat's work is little known Voss is quoted more than any other editor. For this there are many reasons. Passerat's Praelectiones were not a set commentary on the whole of Catullus most of the shorter poems are omitted altogether, on others he has left only a few scanty notes even the longer poems are treated un:. ;. :. agree with Prof. Palmer in thinking it beyond doubt that the MS of Catullus, Tibullus, Propertius, and the Priapea, now in possession of Mr. Henry Allen of Dublin, is identical with Scaliger's Cujacianus. See our combined article in Hermathena iii. 124-158. '. I.

(15) ;. PREFACE.. ix. and the Coma Berenices have each barely a column omitted entirely only LXI, LXII, LXIV, are treated at The work was published after his death, and we may conjecture length. But where his notes are full they are valuable, that he never finished it. He especially on the two Epithalamia, which require more illustration. is particularly great in accumulating passages which illustrate the meaning but he rarely throws much new light on corrupt or of special words This was the merit of Voss. His notes hitherto unexplained passages. abound with recondite learning. Of all Commentaries on Catullus his is Hence his diatribes have a substantial value indepenthe most erudite. dent of their goodness as explaining the difficulties of Catullus' text; Not that hence too they were and are quoted and read by learned men. Voss is an ideal expounder his learning is often wrong-headed, as for instance on LXIV. 178, where he has a long note on the Thracian Idomene, or again on XXXIV where he tries to show that the Hymn to Diana was written for the ludi saeculares : sometimes he does defiance to metre, as in LXIII. 85, where he rejects Ferns ipse scse adhortans for the impossible Ferns ipse ardore talis. But Voss, besides his abstruse learning, was a great collector of manuscripts, and supplemented his knowledge in one department of philology by his experience in another. To him therefore we are indebted for some of the happiest emendations ; e. g. XXIV. 4 Ulidae dedisses, LXIV. 55 qtiae uisit tiisere credit, the first since confirmed by the Bodleian IMS, the second a wonderful example of happy divination. To the beginning of the same century belong the Asterisms of jNIarcilius (1604), a scholar whose figure has become familiar to Engequally. ;. LXVIII. the Attis. is. LXV. ;. ;. ;. lishmen. in. INIr.. Pattison's graphic. man, was not contemptible. life. but it is that is new. ;. The work,. like the. and can hardly be. said to. of Casaubon. slight,. bring into the field much The seemingly exhaustive commentary of Vulpius (1710) added really very little to our knowledge. It is true he rarely omits anything of consequence in the notes of his predecessors, and that he is always decorous and sober in his interpretations. Anything like ingenious fancy or recondite learning is foreign to his dull, pedantic, over-clerical temperament even his antiquarianism has failed to clear up any of those points which are peculiarly the province of the antiquarian. His notes are made up of piles of citations, generally of the most commonplace kind, and in unnecessary profusion. The defects of Vulpius seem to have prompted the edition of Conradinus de Allio (Venice, 1738), a book now become scarce. Conr. de Allio had a supreme contempt for almost all his predecessors, and a most unbounded confidence in his own discernment. In coarseness he almost equals Alexander Guarinus, in gross prurience of suggestion actually surpasses him. He is over-fond of quotations from Italian poetry, and he is never tired of giving advice to the undoubtedly insufficient lexicographers of his time. Yet he has the merit of seeing that Catullus is his own best expositor instead of heaping quotations from Cicero on quotations from Vergil, he compares Catullus with himself. This naturally led him to the attempt, so common in modern times, of reconstructing the personal history of the poet, a task in which, as might be expected, he has failed. Still it was something to be as much in advance of the mode of his contemporaries as he ;. ;. was. ;. whence,. in spite of. numerous. absurdities, his. commentary. is still.

(16) PREFACE.. X. In one passage (XXXIX. 17) modern criticism has univeradopted his suggestion. The specimen of an intended edition of Catullus which Santen published in 1788, a monograph of 64 pages on LXVIII, is sufficiently copious to make us regret that he did not leave more. Probably the publication of Doering's edition prevented the completion of his design. Of Doering something has been said already: his commentary is so meagre as to make us marvel how it can so long have retained exclusive possession of the field. In the Peleus and Thetis he availed himself of an excellent monograph by Mitscherlich (1786); Valckenaer's disappointing edition of the Coma Berenices did not appear till 1799. Little was done for Catullus at the beginning of the present century. In 1803 Ugo Foscolo published an edition of the Coma Berenices, with a lengthy commentary; Hand discussed some of the disputed passages in his Observationes Criticae (1809); and Sillig gave a collation of the Dresden MS in 1823. With Lachmann's edition of the text in 1829 began a new era. Haupt, in his Quaestiones Catullianae 1837, Observationes Criticae 1841, emended, sometimes with success, the interesting. sally. corrupt tradition of the archetype, as displayed with lucid clearness by Lachmann. The simplicity of Lachmann's apparatus criticus and the admirable style of Haupt's two disquisitions awoke once more the long dormant interest of philologists. The programmes and disquisitions of every kind, all based on Lachmann's text, which now began to multiply, show how many scholars tried their skill on the corrupt passages of Catullus, and how very few achieved anything. In 1855 appeared the admirable translation of Theodor Heyse '; in 1857 lungclaussen's Zur Chroiiohgie der Gedichte des Q. Valerius Catullus; in 1862 the Quaestiones Catidlianae of L. Schwabe. The latter work contains the results of the most minute investigation which has yet been bestowed on the life and chronology of Catullus. Schwabe aspires to fix the period of every important event in the poet's fife, and to tabulate the poems into a historical series. In this attempt he has, I think, only partially succeeded in spite of undeniable devotion and scrupulous care. Not seldom the reasoning is unsubstantial, and the result inconclusive. To estimate the real value of Schwabe's Quaestiones, they should be compared with works like Westphal's CatulTs Gedichte, the extravagance of which at times reaches romance. On the other hand Bruner's dissertation de ordine et temporibus carnmium Catulli published in the Acta Societatis Fennicae for 1863, and quite independent of Schwabe's examination of the same questions, is marked by equal, perhaps greater, soberness of judgment, and must always rank among the best contributions to the history of the poet's life. Ribbeck's C. Valerius Catullus eine literarhistorische Skizze (Kiel, 1863) hardly adds any fact of importance, but contains a fresh and genial criticism of Catullus' poetry; much of it is repeated in Vol. I of the same author's Geschichte der Romischen Dichtung (1887). Couat's Etude sur Catulle is mainly interesting as exhibiting Catullus in his relation to the poets of Alexandria. These works were all written before 1876, when I published my Co)ii^. opportunity of mentioning my own similar work Metres of the Original; Murray, 1871.. I take this. in the. —Catullus. translated.

(17) PREFACE.. xi. mcntary on CatiiUus, seventeen years from the time when it was first At that time (1859) Îr. Thomas Clayton, of Trinity College, was preparing a school edition of the poems the notes for which, short, as might have been expected, and not extending beyond LXIV. no, he made over to me. To these notes, wherever they have been used, I have appended their author's name. But as my purpose was to write a completely new commentary on Catullus, such as might suit the requirements of matured philologists, and as my reading ranged over a very wide field of literature, Greek and Roman indifferently, the stores which I was thus continually accumulating from 1859 to 1876, became so copious that not the least part of my task was to select from this vast number of And, as my references those which illustrated each passage most aptly. aim was to produce a book which in its citations and parallels should projected.. :. represent the philological epoch in which we live, I was careful to draw, if possible, from the predecessors or contemporaries, rather than from the followers of Catullus ; from the less hackneyed writers, such as Plautus, Lucilius, Varro, rather than such as have become insipid by familiarity. ;. Whatever. from Greek its. merits. at least as. much. or defects,. as from Latin.. my commentary. elicited. numerous. from the Continent or my own countrymen. Besides a variety of reviews and dissertations on particular points connected with the poems, among which I signalize the ardcles of K. P, Schulze, and a hostile but suggestive critique by Dr. Magnus of Berlin, it criticisms, favorable or unfavorable,. occasioned at least. five. works, each of distinct value for the study of. The first of these is the Cn'tki'sms and Elucidations of Catullus by H. A. J. Munro (Cambridge, 1879). Accepting Bahrens' hypothesis Catullus.. MS. Oxford {0) and the Paris {G) practically represent all that necessary for constituting the text of Catullus, Munro bases upon these his own recension of some of the poems, generally such as are of a shorter or lyrical character; only in two cases of any length (LXVII, LXVIII). This is accompanied by discussions or dissertations on special points of language or idiom; in many cases suggested by my volume, of that the is. which indeed the Criticisms and Elucidations may be said to form an extended review. IMunro wrote nothing without stamping on it the impress of a mastermind, and this is as true of his Catullus as of his Lucretius and Aetna. I have weighed all his observations with care, even his emendations, which form the least able portion of his volume. Wherever he speaks of grammar or metre, his remarks have the gravity which belongs in all ages to the greatest masters in their respective lines England has produced but one Bentley, and (though in a somewhat more restricted sphere) but one ;. Munro. It may seem strange, therefore, that I so often dissent from his conclusions, even on points of syntax, where he might be expected to speak with absolute authority. I have done so with diffidence ; elsewhere, e.g. in the interpretation of certain disputed passages or, occasionally, of entire that. poems (notably LXVIII),. our views are divergent,. it. must be palpable. to. my. readers. not irreconcileable. The German commentary of Riese (1884) does not exceed the dimensions of a school-book. Though considerably based on my two volumes, it contains many remarks of originality and value. I feel some hesitation in speaking of the Latin commentary of Bahrens if.

(18) PREFACE.. xii. Any one who. takes the trouble to examine this work, will see author is indebted to my pages, and how little acknowledgment he has made of his debts. If he mentions my name it is more often to depreciate than to praise. His own commentary is lengthy and not too attractive in style; crowded too with impossible emendations, which waste many pages and much time. As an interpreter, Bahrens often begins with discarding the views of all his predecessors as unlikely, and ending with a suggestion which either as diction or conjecture is impossible in a choice of interpretations he sometimes singles out for preference the least plausible in poems of chronological or historical difficulty, e.g. the Co7na Berenices, neither his knowledge of Greek nor his command of historical information was competent to clear up what Nor can he bear comparison with his predecessors had left unsolved. any of the really great interpreters, with the many-sided erudition of Mayor's Commentary on Juvenal, the inductive richness of W. L. J. E. B. Newman's Commentary on the Politics of Aristotle, or, to take an example from Bahrens' own countrymen, with the profound learning and fine feeling of language which mark Otto Jahn's unique Conwientarins in Persinm. Yet, though German thoroughness will hardly acquiesce in his commentary as final, it will doubtless remain for many years a largely read and often-quoted book. The edition of Eugene Benoist (1882) follows me so very closely that it might almost seem a reproduction of my work in the French language. but the introductions, Its accomplished author left it only half completed critical and metrical, which are prefixed to each poem, have a special value partly as containing M. Bonnet's careful re-collation of the Paris Gy partly as a re'siime' of most that is critically important for the constitution of the text of the poems. Benoist accepts, Uke IMunro, the Bahrensian hypothesis of the unique position of G and O as adequate representaa view which I have never accepted, and tives of the whole body of INISS to which the present volume will be found to raise many objections. That hypothesis however gives a simplicity and clearness to Benoist' s, as In regard to explanation of difficult passages, I to Bahrens', edition. confess, not without regret, that I have found very little that is new. Of more consequence as contributing many fresh points of view and bringing into revived prominence some questions which had too lightly. (1885).. how. greatly. its. :. ;. ;. MS. :. been treated as settled is the recent (1888) Tauchnitz edition of Bernhard Schmidt. This is not a commentary, but the text of the poems, with Prolegomena (pp. i-cxxxvi) discussing (i) Catullus' Hfe, (2) the textual criticism The life is probably the best which has yet appeared. of the poems. Schmidt has worked up the Qiiaestiones of Schwabe and the comparatively little known treatise of the Scandinavian Edward a Bruner into a studied monograph of great practical utility. He is however at times open to the charge of building upon insufficient or unsubstantial proofs as if they solid foundation. I must, here, once again express to M. Schmidt my grateful thanks for the more than courteous manner in which he has. formed a. spoken of my own labours. It is unnecessary here to mention particularly the smaller treatises which I have used for my new edition. In every case where I have taken anything from them, they are quoted with the author's name. The present edition differs from the former, as in other points, so.

(19) PREFACE.. xiii. particularly in recalling the attention of scholars to the earliest period of Catullian criticism, the latter half of the fifteenth and beginning of the. sixteenth century.. how much we owe. In the Introduction to his Lucretius Munro has shown to Niccolo Niccoli, Avancius, Pius, Marullus, for the. right understanding of that difficult poet.. Hardly. less signal is the service. rendered by the Guarini, Poliziano, Avancius, Aldus IVIanutius, to the criticism and elucidation of the Veronese. In 1496 Avancius, himself a native of Verona, published his in Val. Catidhun el in Priapeias emendaiiones, a copy of which work, now excessively scarce, is in the possession of my friend, Mr. Ingram Bywater, and has been throughout at my disposal. This little book in eight short folio pages proves how well Catullus' diction and metre were already studied and understood in A very large number of Avancius' the last decade of the fifteenth century. corrections are indisputably right.. His. later. and. little. known. edition. dedicated to the youthful Cardinal Farnese early in the pontificate of Pope Paul III (circ. 1 534-1 540) contains among many emendations which are unnecessary or improbable (see Vol. I. pp. Ixviii-lxxv), several anticipations of later scholars, e.g. XVII. 24 Si pole siolidis, XXIX. 8 Adofiius, XXIX. 17 Paterna p7-i7na, LVII. 9 Riuales JcaV, LXI. 102 Lenta qui?i, LXII. 63 Tertia pars patri, pars est data tertia matri, LXIIL 4 Stimiilatiis ibi, 49 Patriain allocuta maesta est ita uoce miser iter, LXIV. 13 Tortaque, LXVI. 2^ at te ego, 92 affice, LXVIII. 81 noni, not to mention others which are less certain. It is strange enough to find a contemporary of already emending XXIX on the assumption that none but pure Leo iambi could be admitted in any part of the verse: it is even more strange to reflect that this indubitably right assumption has been questioned by several modern critics of authority. But in fact, as early as the middle of the fourteenth century, when the Renaissance under Petrarch and Boccaccio begins, the scholars of Italy, whether ranking themselves under the banners of the Church, or in declared opposition to it, had entered on that course of Classical Research which, as its first fruits, brought to light so many Latin authors long buried and lost, and in its later stage, not only after the taking of Constantinople in 1453 but before that date, revived the study of Greek, and re-endowed the exiled professors of Greek culture. Hence it is that before the close of the fifteenth century Italy had attained to an exactness and a refinement in its knowledge of Latin which other countries could only claim much later. Hence it is that Constantius^ of Fano in his Hecatostys published 1507, and his In Ibin Ouidii Sarritiones 1508, could correct the corruptions of Latin, occasionally even of Greek texts, with a felicity which after the lapse of 400 years is still admirable. This however is not the place to enlarge on a topic to which ]Mr. J. A. Symonds' History of the Rejiaissance in Italy has called new attention, and on which my own researches in editing the Ovidian Ibis enable me to speak with more knowledge than most of my contemporaries. It is introduced here with one purpose, and one only. I wish to contrast the amount of certain gain obtainable from these early Italian correctors of the text of Catullus (most of them before 1540) with the emendations of later critics, French, German, Dutch, or English. In comparison with Italy, how little that is certain can even France claim to. X. '. In Ciris 165 Constantius anticipated the conj. of Scaliger gelidis Edoiiiim for Sidonwn of MSS, in 169 Sicyonia, the conj. of Leopardus, for sic omnia.. §elidi.

(20) ;. PREFACE.. xiv. have contributed in that splendid period of classical learningwhich produced Muretus, Turnebus, Scaliger, Lambinus, Passerat, Casaubon, Salmasius. In extent of knowledge, it is true, in the amount they had read and remembered, these giants of learning tower high above their earlier rivals; this was natural and inevitable when printed books took the place of MSS. But in nice perception of language, and sometimes even in delicate feeling for what was probable in metre, the earlier generation much outstript their successors. Only two conjectures of Scaliger's (LXI. 196, LXIII. 78) can be thought certain some few are probable the remainder forced and without verisimilitude. Voss made three emendations which are accepted as final (XXIV. 4, LXIV. 55, 211) one of these is now found to have the support of the Oxford MS of Catullus, and may have been thus suggested ;. ;. :. None. of Bentley's conjectures on Catullus (even in LXVI) and the same may be said of those of Heinsius. It may be doubted whether any eighteenth century correction of Catullus will stand, except perhaps Nunc Celtiber es in XXXIX. 17. In the present century Hand's MelUtus XXI. 11, Lachmann's Grata LXVI. 58, resiihdt LXVI. 70, Haupt's anxiis LXI. 46, Frohlich's aes imaginosum XLI. 8, perhaps A. Palmer's Perspecta est igjii ttivi C. 6, approximate, though only Graia attains, to certainty. I say nothing of my own restitutions, though I believe myself to have divined the truth in LXXVI. 11, perhaps to is. in. its. author.. more than probable. LXVIII.. ;. 55. calculation goes to prove that for the recovery of Catullus'. The above. has been effected since the Renaissance was best which was the first.' This philological fact, which I regard as indisputable, will be palpable on any examination of the critical editions of the poems and, if I mistake not, many will agree with me in rejecting (at least as in any sense conclusive) several emendations which the authority of Lachmann, or Haupt, might seem to stamp with finality. The foremost of these is Heinsius' Qtiaene etiatii for Quae tietet id of MSS (LXVIII. 91). This has been accepted by Santen, G. Hermann, Haupt, L. Miiller, Bahrens, Schwabe and B. Schmidt Lachmann, however, does not notice it in his edition Its incongruity with of 1829, and it never commended itself to Munro. the general style of the poem, an elaborately wrought series of tableaux, which never pass into familiar or conversational language, has always condemned it to my judgment, though the right reading is difficult to recover. Another conjecture of a very questionable kind is Haupt's Nereine LXIV. 28. It is adopted by almost all German critics: yet it is open to many For the word Nereine, whilst in Greek it is confined to late objections. writers like Oppian and Quintus Smyrnaeus, cannot be shown even to exist in Latin, in which the only form known is Nerine (Verg. Eel. vii. 37), and to which the hiating vowels e z are comparatively strange. IMoreover the MS reading nee tine or 7ieptine points to a word not beginning with ner, whilst the occurrence of Nepitinine in a Latin lyric of the poet Pontano is very probably owing to its being written as a marginal Another guess of Haupt's variant in some of the lost codices of Catullus. horribile aeqiior ultimosqtie Britannos (XI. 11) has found very general acceptance, and I have been severely censured by Dr. IMagnus for not giving in my adhesion to so 'convincing' a conjecture. To me its easiness not only is its has always appeared in inverse ratio to its probability tiera mantis,. and. disappointingly. that in this sense,. '. little. that age. ;. ;. ;.

(21) PREFACE.. XV. occurrence in 1 1 improbable after acguora in 8, but tbe word is hardly strong enough for horrihilc with which it is combined ; while the MSS do not all agree in horrihilesque, some giving Jiorribiles. I shall only add. one more instance.. (LXXVI.. It is. Lachmann's Hei. inihi stirrepcns for. Sen mihi. venture to assert that Catullus could not have tlius written and I will go a step beyond and declare my conviction that neither Poliziano nor Constantius Fanensis nor Avancius nor Marullus could ever have believed it possible that he should thus have written. These remarks are offered not from any wish to detract from the greatness of critics so justly eminent as Haupt, Lachmann, or Heinsius, liut to remind readers of Catullus of a fact they are too apt to forget, I mean, that philology is a progressive science, and that the gratitude which in these last years of the nineteenth century we naturally feel to the scholars whose labours have in successive ages purified the text of this great poet, should be extended to every period alike ; that we must not in our admiration for our own century, with its enormously improved facilities for research, its easy access to early MSS, its schools of Epigraphy, be oblivious of the equally great, and in actual result even greater, epoch of the Italian Revival. It is indeed not often that the wild growths which during the Middle Age gathered round the fairest monuments of an earlier world have been removed so soon and with such success as in the case of Catullus. For my own part I do not doubt that there was some careful, if still groping, study of his poems even in the fourteenth century and from 1400 onwards this must have been steadily on the increase. From one of the Elegies of Beccadelli's HennaphrodHus, written it would seem early in the fifteenth century (Forberg thought circ. 1410-1415), we learn that even women were beginning at that time to be interested in Catullus, and were eager to procure copies of his poems. About 1430 Xicco Polentonus describes the liber Calnlli and quotes its very words. Three generations of Guarini concerned themselves with the preservation, correction, or explanation of Catullus. Guarinus of Verona (1370-1460) repeatedly cites him in his Epistles, though the latest editor of these, Sabbadini, makes it doubtful whether he emended any passage (Schwabe, Testimonia p. xix, ed. 1886). His son Baptista (14 25-1 513) is said to have presented an emended Catullus to the poet's mother-city Verona, and Schwabe makes it probable that he was occupied with this task between 1450 and 1470 (Testimon. p. xx). Baptista's son Alexander published in 1521 at Venice an edition of Catullus with a commentary containing some of his father's criticisms a work which I have several times had occasion to refer to. Cynthius Cenetensis cites XXXIX, 12,11. 13 in his commentary on the Aeneid. Poliziano collated all the MSS of Catullus he could procure and found them all equally corrupt (Schwabe, Testimon. p. xxiii). By his knowledge of Greek he was able to restore the right reading in LXVI. 48, XCVIII. 4, and to defend the tradition in LXVI. 94 to his collation of the unique fragment of Festus (see De Nolhac, 13ibliotheque de Fulvio Orsini pp. surrcpcns. 21).. I. ;. ;. ;. MS. :. MSS. 213-216) we owe the rare word siippernata in XVII. 19 where the wrong]}- gives stipcrata or seperata. In one of his Miscellanea (xix) he describes how, whilst still a youth (probably before 1470), he corrected the. MS. lonios ;. reading of. and. LXXXIV.. 2,. 12 by adding the letter h to visidias, learned men in Florence, the Italian. this before a grouj:) of.

(22) PREFACE.. xvi. Athens of Lorenzo de Medici. Doubtless the disputed passages of Catullus would often relieve the sublimer and more abstruse discussions for the very on Plato which were part of the fashion of that time immoralities which marked the whole of the fifteenth century and were preparing the way for the iron hand of the Catholic reaction would con;. tribute to. make poems. like those of Catullus. more read. ;. just as. when. had fully set in, it was attended at least in Italy by a marked and notable change in the direction of learned studies generally, as well as by an almost complete abandonment of this particular portion of the It is true that both Muretus (1554) and Statins (1566) classical field'. but though each lived at Rome and under the eye of the Papal court What is more, the edited Catullus, they were foreigners, not Italians.. that reaction. ;. severer tone of Catholicism. is. perfectly perceptible in their commentaries,. from which the broad allusions to contemporary hcentiousness which mark Alex. Guarinus are as a rule quite absent. Though I do not, with my friend Mr. Symonds, deplore this eff'ect of the revival of clerical strictness in Italy, it is noticeable that most of what will remain as permanently valuable in Italian criticism on Catullus' text is before this date. With Statius commences a period in which the explanatmi of the poet's meaning and the illustration of it by a far wider range of reading than had been possible in the first age of printing, became the main object to which an editor aspired. Scaliger did but supplement Statius, and so for his far as he dealt with MSB added htde or nothing of importance codex Cujacianus, as I have stated before, is now known to be deeply Isaac Voss, removed by half a century from Scaliger, interpolated. possessed a rare collection of MSS, and might have been expected to give something like a detailed account of the codices of Catullus from the knowledge which his own library furnished. He has done nothing of the kind, though some of his emendations are so admirable as to Even Heinsius, to whom suggest that he got them from a good IMS. Ladn poetry owes so vast a debt, the friend and correspondent of princes, the indefatigable explorer of IMSS in every library of Europe, rarely Bentley, whose Manilius shows what he throws much light on Catullus could do for restoring Latin poetry where a thoroughly good MS served him as a guide, cannot be said to have cleared up any of the deep-seated corruptions of the one Catullian poem which he had studied minutely, the Cojiia Berenices ^; it was only in the last quarter of the eighteenth century that the first step towards the formation of a really critical basis was How large was the scale on which Santen had protaken by Santen. jected his edition, we learn from the preface to his specimen, the Elegy to Manlius (LXVIII). No fewer than twelve scholars are named who had :. ;. '^. Fnlvio Orsini seems to have designed a Catullus illustratus on the model of his M. de Nolhac is right in drawing this inference from the Orsini m_ whose edition annotated by Orsini now in the Angelica library at Rome. inscripstudies Epigraphy formed a great part has there illustrated Cat. X. 16 by an The intimate connexion of tion which he had seen in S. Cecilia in the Trastevere. Orsini with a long series of Popes during the very strictest period of the Catholic reaction would be quite enough to divert him from any such design of an illustrated Catullus. (De Nolhac, La Bibliotheque de F. Orsini, p. 271 note.) 2 The codex Gemblacensis, recently collated again by M. Thomas, Gand 18S8. ^ Neither Thiae for phitie, nor Locridos for docridicos, nor Vnguiiiis for Sangwms is more than probable. 1. Vir<rilius illustratus, if.

(23) :. PREFACi:.. xvii. MS. readings, and one of these had excerpted no less than He complains, however, that many seven MSS with his own hand. codices still remained of whose readings he could procure no information; and by an accident which has preserved tlie sheets of i)aper on which the variants had been written out for Santen but not sent, we know that among these was the celebrated Canonici codex (6*) now in the Bodleian, at Santen's apparatus criticiis, therefore, though large, that time in Venice. was not complete. It comprised, however, the Datanus. When Santen's library was sold in 1800, it was purchased by Diez, by whom it was subOn this collection, sequently transferred to the Royal Library of Berlin. partly of actual I\ISS, partly of the collations supplied to Santen by his friends, Lachmann, who examined the whole, based his epoch-making edition of 1829, laconically informing his readers that he had selected two MSS, the Datanus (Z?) and another which he called Z, as representing all et L, cum quorum alicrulro ceieri tion inlcrpola/i ubique 'Codices the rest, conscntiunt hac editione totos exhibemus. quas eincndalioiies nulla auctore. contributed. D. indicato reccpimus, eae Italis saeculi. xv. debentur.'. D. and L are at have revived this now almost forgotten sentence (for the present day admitted to be wholly inferior to G and 0, the former first thoroughly collated in Schwabe's edition of 1866, the latter in my edition of 1867, and both together, to the rejection of all other MSS, by Bahrens in 1875), to show how perfectly the opinion of Lachmann, the greatest Latin critic of this century, not excepting Ritschl, accords with the prominence which in this edition I have assigned to the early Italians. Lachmann, indeed, only faintly indicates the magnitude of our debt. Let any one who wishes to estimate it adequately, take up one of the fourteenth century MSS of Catullus, and compare it with the text of the Nothing at all comparable with the amount of indisputably Aldine. right corrections produced in this interval will be found at any subNay, there are not wanting sequent period in the history of the poems. instances in which the nineteenth century has retrograded from the sixteenth. More than one German critic of eminence can still believe that the poem Quis hoc potest uidere, quis potest pati was not written in pure iambi Could any English scholar say the same ? I believe not throughout. and the emendations of that poem proposed by Avancius in the Trincavelli edition proved that he had quite settled the question on the same side. I have to thank two of my friends for the Index now added to this volume, IMr. Charles Simmons of University College School, London, who drew up the first portion (I-LX), and ]\Ir. R. G. Routh, of Trinity College, who completed the remainder, and reduced the whole to alphaI. I must also acknowledge my obligations to M. Omont, of the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, to Dr. Anziani of the Laurenlian Library at Florence, to Father Bollig, S. J., Sub-Librarian of the \\atican, and Mr. Edward Scott, Keeper of the MSS in the British Museum, for valuable information on points connected with MSS. Amongst the latest contributions to the literature of Catullus I would record the names of two Scandinavian critics, A. B. Drachmann, Catuls Digtning, Copenhagen 1887, and L. F. Stenersen, Catuls Digtning, These two treatises only reached the Bodleian after Christiania 1887. all my Commentary had been printed off.. betical order.. Oxford,. May. 11, 1889..

(24)

(25) :. PROLEGOMENA. Catullus as Poet. It. is. not often that so great a poet as Catullus has risked extinction,. and been preserved almost by miracle. a single imperfect copy discovered,. MSS. All our. we do. are derived from. know where,. not. at the. begin-. ing of the xivth century: no complete poem, with the exception of. which. and. the quatrain to Priapus cited. Lachm., has come down I. '. Thuanean Anthology of. included in the. is. loss of Alcaeus. to us in. and Sappho. in. the. Paris. LXII. Library,. by Terentianus IMaurus 2755-2758 any other collection. Yet only the. Greek. literature could. compare with. the. and we may estimate the barbarism which decline of the Roman empire by nothmg more signally. loss of the lyrics of Catullus;. followed the. than the absence of even one copy of the two Greek poets, and the almost casual preservation of the Veronese in a single mutilated. MS,. the. MSS.. During the long period which elapsed between Isidorus of Hispalis and lulianus of Toletum^ in the seventh. parent of. all. our extant. century and the re-discovery of the teenth, only. one writer. is. poems. at the. beginning of the four-. knozvn to have read Catullus, Rather, bishop of. circ. 930-970 though LXII may have been copied Thuanean Anthology from a complete MS of the poems, and. Verona. :. into the. traces of. possible imitation, as well as glossarial extracts, are not wanting, as I have. shown. in. my. former volume, Prolegomena pp. viii, ix. Cf. Schwabe ed. These may be and, in the existing ardour for. 1886, pp. xiii-xiv.. mediaeval *. et. study, are perhaps likely to be supplemented by. luliani Art. ed. Lorenzana,. quia dicit soles. Romae. ire et redire possunt,. Hageni Anecdot. Heluetica. 1797, p. 63. Da. pro diebus hoc. Quomodo. new. dis-. propriae qualitatis nomen. Sol dicit.. Excerpta cod. Bern. 207. solem propriae qualitatis esse cum dicatur Soles ire et redire possunt. Pro diebus hoc dictum est. * G. Amsel Rhcin. Mus. for 1888, p. 309, quotes from Notker, a monk of St. Gallen (died 1022), the following passage from Nolker's translation of Boetius de Consol. iii. 4. Unde Catullus nonium licet sedentem in curuli tamen struraam appellat. Fone diu uuard taz Catullus nonium gutter hiez. doh er an demo herstuole saze. Catullus uuas ueronensis poeta. nobilis pe diu uuas imo nonius unuuerd. ter fone gallia ze Roma chomener. mit gothorum suffragio ze consulatu gesteig. Thus translated by Prof. ap.. p.. ccxx. dicis. :. Napier.. '. From. that. (. = thence). it. was that Catullus called. b. 2. lîonm?, gutter. Q giiltiir =^.

(26) :. PROLEGOMENA.. XX coveries. :. remains true that Catullus was. still it. unknown book:. a singular fate. him almost from. the. first. if. we. amongst. long time an almost. for a. think of the popularity which greeted. He. countrymen.. his. himself. us. tells. had been countenanced by Cornelius Nepos Cicero, who nowhere mentions him by name, seems to have borrowed that his early attempts. two of. ;. his expressions (ad. molUorem,. ocellos Italiae). Q. Fr.. 15. 4, Att. xvi. 6. 2 auricula infima. ii.. the parallelisms between. ;. him and Lucretius latter, and. cannot be shown to spring from our poet's imitation of the. may with equal probability be ascribed he. is. classed with Lucretius. epoch which preceded the his attack. upon himself (probably XXIX). time (Suet.. lul.. 73); and. as representing the literary. of Vergil (Att.. rise. xii). to. his general popularity. undisguised imitations of the greatest poets. Horace, Propertius\. knowledge of Catullus. to Lucretius'. by Corn. Nepos. above. Statius. Juvenal,. J.. ;. Caesar considered. have branded him for is. who all. all. by the. attested not only. followed him, Vergil,. Martial, or the various. parodies of him found in the Catalepta^ Priapea^, or elsewhere, but even. more. in the sneer of. Horace. that he. and. Calvus were sung to. his friend. the exclusion of every other poet by the fashionable singer of the day (S.. i.. Horace's sneer no doubt expresses the position of the. 10. 19).. Augustan poets as. it. to Catullus. ;. they belonged to an epoch which, greatly. was influenced by the era which preceded. agonistic to. its. chief representatives,. On. political reasons.. the one. hand. and. was. it,. in the. this for literary. the son. and successor of. could not forget that Catullus had aimed his bitterest shafts cessor and adoptive father. ;. on. the other the. struma) although he sat on the honour therefore Nonius was disliked by him.. main ant-. no. Augustan. less. than. Caesar. J.. prede-. at his. poets, aiming as. Catullus was Veronensis poeta nobilis having come from Gallia to Rome rose. seat.. :. He. to the consulship by the suffragio Gothorum.'. It is. noticeable that the three words. Veronensis foeta nohilis are also found in a twelfth century. MS. Commentary on. this. MSS. 174, p. 85) Catulus poeta nobilis ueronensis nonium dignitatem consularem deturpantem in presentia popnli strumam despectiue appellauit. passage of Boetius (Digby sine. quod gibosus. dignitatem. esset sine. turpiter. accompany the. text. uiuendo. quod. sicut gibbus. deturparet.. dorsum totumque hominem. The same MS,. the. in. glosses. of the de Consolatione, gives the following, p. 33.. indignatus est de nonio,. et. quia indignatus est non appellauit. enm. consulari. ita ille. which. Catullus. nomine. .s.. nonium sed strumam.. Possibly there was an early collection of short glosses on the de Consolatione, which was worked up and amplified in the course of the Middle Age.. TibuUus are mainly in Book III which since Lachmann is usually Haupt cites Lygd. 6. 27, 28 39-42 50 add 4. 85-96 which is a diiect imitation of Cat. LXIV. 153-156, LXVIII. 159, XXX. 10. ^ Cat. iii. 5,6 Vt ille uersus usqueqtiaqiie pertinet, Gener socerque, perdidistis omnia, viii Sabinus ille, qucm uidetis, hospites, a parody of the Phasellus ille. xiii. II Quare illiid satis est si te perviittis amari, cf. Catull. LXVIII. 147. '. The. parallels in. ascribed to Lygdamus.. ^. Priap. 52. 12, 61. 13, 64.. direct imitations of Catullus.. ;. I, 69. 4,. The author. ;. :. of the epyllion Ciris. is. full. of.

(27) PROLEGOMENA.. xxi. they did at the suppression of the older and ruder literature of. era, as in the. well-known assertion of Horace. had shown the iambi of Paros having their. I. own. aim, but not attaining. drove Lucilius out of the. satires. and epodes. Catullus by his odes. it. that. he was the. who. first. silently. disparaged them as. adequately.. But Horace whose. Latium, or. to. Rome,. immediately preceding. either consciously ignored the great poets of the. did not supplant the lyrics of. field,. the allusions scattered through the. ;. writings of the post-Augustan and subsequent periods, though they cannot. be called numerous, are enough. show. to. remained a. Catullus. that. familiar book to the Romans, that he was read and read through \ Thus references to the poems on the Sparrow are found in Seneca, Juvenal, and the elder Pliny quotes some words from the dedicatory hendeMartial ;. casyllables to Cornelius. and takes pride. in the first sentence of his Natural History,. Nepos. poet his countr}'man {conterraneiim). in calling the. ;. the. elder Seneca corrects our INISS of LIII. 5, which he cites as in hendecasyllabis,. Controu.. vii.. 7. only once cites TibuUus, once. who. Quintilian,. ;. younger Pliny was a. Propertius, has seven references to Catullus. ^. diligent student (iv. 14. 5, 27. 4), as well as. an accurate. the. hendecasyllables. 16.. (i.. A.. 5);. the. ;. critic, at least. discusses. Gellius. length. at. passages of Catullus (VII. 16, VI. 20) and indirectly proves. of. two. how much. he was read by the variety of readings which he found in the MSS then Hyginus P. A. ii. 24 explains, perhaps wrongly, the word in circulation ;. magnajiimam. in the. Coma. Berenices; and extracts from Catullus are. found in Apuleius*, Porphyrion. ^. Nonius Marcellus ^ Ausonius ^ IMacrobius. '",. Sidonius. Apollinaris. Horatian scholiast, Censorinus. the. Servius. commentator on. the. ". Capella. ", INIartianus. '^ the. ''j. Vergil,. Christian. Hieronymus and Augustine, and the Grammarians ". Whether commentaries were written upon him, as upon Cinna's Zmyrna, we do. writers. not. know; Haupt argued from. a passage of Charisius. Asinius Pollio wrote on the diction of Catullus. i.. p.. 97 Keil that. but the interpretation. ;. is. doubtful. '. 'Sic scribit Catullus,. Mart. Praef.,. legitur.' "^. Sen. Apocoloc.. ii,. Marsus,. sic. lib.. sic. Pedo,. sic. Gaetulicus, sic. quicunque per-. i.. luuen.. vi. 8,. Mart.. i.. 109.. 7. 3,. i, iv.. 14. 13, vii. 14. 3, xi. 6. 16,. xiv. 772. i.. and 20. 5. 8,. ;. vi. 3.. 18 5. :. ix. 3. 16, ix. 4.. Apol.. «. 94 lahn,. *. Praef. Gryphi, Praef. ad Pacat. i, 2.. *. Serv. ad G.. 6, 10, II.. ''. S.. ". Epist.. ii.. '. 27, 97.. ii.. 95, Aen.. I. 8, vi. I.. 141. Porphyr. on Hor.. *. iv.. 41 and 42. 409, :. v.. i.. 96. 10. 19,. ;. xi. ii.. 3.. i.. 38.. 299.. C.. i.. 16. 22.. 108. 13, 134, 21, 198. II, 517. 3, 546. 26.. 591, 610,. perhaps. x. i.. ;. S.. ii.. vii.. 37S.. 7. 6.. *- iii. 229. ii. 10. 6 (p. 35 Luetiohann). See Schwabe's Testiraonia pp. xi, xii. It is possible that the words atractis pedibus of a Pompeian Inscription, C. I. L. iv. 1261, are from Cat. XV. 18.. ".

(28) PROLEGOMENA.. xxii. Roman. born within a few miles of each other. Cahillo, says. Ovid Am.. Verona owed and. ;. antiquity as at this time. iii.. Majitua Vcrgilio gaudet, Veroiia. 7; IMartial xiv. 195 declares that great. 15.. as deep a debt to her Catullus as. it is. little. Mantua. contrast or parallel must have been as. this. modern. with every. one of the chief. grapher Corn. Nepos. to her. common. in. Cisalpine Gaul was in fact. traveller.. literary centres of Italy. Catullus, the epigrammatist Furius Bibaculus,. lacchus. respectively represent. imagination in the Ciceronian and Augustan. and Vergil, were both natives of Cisalpine Gaul, and both. ages, Catullus. Vergil. who. rather remarkable that the two poets. It is. the highest point of. ;. produced besides. it. and the annahst or bio-. Suetonius mentions Octavius Teucer, Sescennius. :. Laccus) and Oppius Chares as teaching grammar there with. (.?. (Gramm.. distinction. 3).. The. profession of a grammarian implied, ac-. cording to the definition of Nepos (Suet. invariably, the interpretation of poetry,. who began. Gramm.. 4),. primarily,. to write early, was, as a boy, trained to read. great works of. Greek. if. not. nor can we doubt that Catullus,. The. as well as Latin literature.. and study the. increased. demand. Greek teachers was in fact one of the signs of the time Lutatius Daphnis, Theophanes of Lesbos, Alexander Polyhistor, the elder and younger Tyrannic, Lenaeus, Asclepiades of Myrlea, Parthenius, Hyginus, Theopompus, most of them attached to the household of some great for. ;. Rome, and. noble, settled in authors, soon. partly as librarians or teachers, partly as. exercised a strong influence. (Merkel ad Ibin. p.. 357.). Dionysius Thrax, the author of the. pendium;. as well as of Valerius. Gramm.. (Sueton.. poets of his time. The. rules. earliest extant. 11) the poet-grammarian, the. Greek models. niceties of. The. Greek. as. preceded. the. it. Roman. literature,. was. not so. much by. the. by the minute care with which the. grammar and metre were studied and much slower than we are comedies of Terence and the poems of. Between the. all. probability. and Catullus nothing which. vived except the Aratea of Cicero.. Gramm.. optivii poetae. diction,. process was in. apt to suppose.. Lucretius. grammatical com-. -.. imitation of. and. generation.. maker and reader of. century 654-754 v.c, the golden age of. applied.. new. Calo^ summi grammaiici,. distinguished from the period which. mere. over the. This was the era of Scytobrachion and. We. is. not. fragmentary has sur-. pass at one bound from this. Cato Grammaticns, Latina Siren, Qui solus facit et legit poetas.' and Aiovi'aios MiTvXrjvaios In a similar manner Antiochus of Ascalon was attached as a sort of literary companion to Lucvillus, Philodemus to L. Calpurnius Piso, Staseas to M. Piso, Philagrus to Metellus Nepos, ^. Suet.. Suidas. s.. v.. 11. '. iîoviaios 'A\fâvSp(vs. .. Diodotns, Lyson, and Apollonius to Cicero, Strato, Posidonius, and Empylus to M. Brutus (Teuffel Rom. Lit. i. p. 227, Eng. Transl.)..

(29) ;. PROLKGOMKNA.. xxiii. prosiest translation of a prosaic original to the delightful grace of the. Catullian hendecasyllable and the sublime exaltation of the Lucretian. Yet much had been written and many experiments. hexameter.. tried.. Laevius, perhaps a contemporary of the later years of Lucilius, adopted. Eroiopacgnia the lyrical metres of the Greeks with more precision. in his. Cn. INIatius, besides had yet been attempted mimiambus, seemingly scazons, translated the Iliad in hexameters of some skill; and the same metre underwent new modifications in the Annales of L. Accius, the Bellum Histricum of. and greater. variety than. introducing. the. ;. Hostius, and the Annales of A. Furius of Antium.. seem to belong to the age immediately preceding the birth M. Varro and ]\I. Furius Bibaculus of Cremona were born of Catullus him and survived his death into the Augustan age. before some time All these. :. The. developments of the time are exhibited. literary. writers,. though. INI.. Varro alone has. powers and influence.. enough. left. to. in. each of these. form an idea of his. In his Menippean satires Varro introduced every. kind of Greek rhythm, with no great success and very imperfect manipulation INI.. ;. still. with a sense of metre. Furius Bibaculus born 651. much. in. advance of the older generation.. 103. is. mentioned by Quinlilian as a. |. by Tacitus as attacking the Caesars, by in each capacity he must Suetonius as a composer of hendecasyllables have been the rival, perhaps the model, of his compatriot Catullus. But writer of defamatory iambi,. :. no one shows the change of styles, the decline of the old school and the rise of the new, more signally than the Transalpine poet, P. Varro Atacinus. Jerome on 01. 174. 3 tells us he began studying Greek assiduously. when. inference that. up. thirty-five years old in. to that time. 707. |. he had followed. 47. ;. and. Roman. it. seems a natural. models exclusively,. probably in his Bellum Sequafii'aim, as opposed to his paraphrase of Apollonius'. Argonautica,. his. Chorographia,. (INIerkel ad Ibin p. 360 sqq., Teuffel. Miserable as. is. Rom.. Ephemeris,. and. elegies. Lit. § 208).. the accident of literature which has preserved to us. next to nothing of these poets, and more than 600 lines of Cicero's Aratea,. we cannot. fail. to trace in the. few fragments. still. surviving of. works the growing perception of the predominant importance of form in art. The anapaests and hexameters of Accius are an advance upon those of Ennius, the rhythms of the Erotopaegnia and the hexameters. their. The few of Matius are even more distinctly an advance upon Accius. specimens of Furius quoted by Macrobius would not discredit Vergil those of Varro Atacinus, whatever their date, imply a mastery of the hexameter which must have been the growth of long and careful study To what so far are they beyond Lucretius in finish, Catullus in variety. extent this. common. feeling of art. was produced by recognized colleges.

(30) PROLEGOMENA.. xxiv or associations of poets. coUeghnn poetanan as. we cannot. tell. Valerius INIaximus speaks of a. ;. back as the time of Accius (ii. 7. 11); the last century of the republic was emphatically a century of sodalida ; and the. poems of. far. Catullus are quite sufficient to prove the close connexion of. an era. is. independent of anything. course between. and. its. contact or personal inter-. like actual. chief exponents. the wide diffusion of. :. Greek books. Rome. communication between. teachers, the increased facilities of. all. But the general tendency of. the leading representatives of his school.. and every part of Italy, as well as every part of the empire, the rapidity with which new works were transcribed and circulated, all contributed to. same. the. known. development of a feeling for. result, the. before.. we may trust or more ready. Cicero, Italy. If. Greek influences. to greet. literary perfection. was never more. them than. un-. alive to. in the years. which. immediately preceded the social war, the period of the Greek poet Archias' arrival, in the consulship of Marius and Q. Lutatius Catulus. 102 (Arch.. 652. iii.. 5).. I. Catullus was born. by. when. and was' himself. it,. ments. this. tendency had already. the highest exemplar of. perhaps. in its pre-Augustan,. highest. its. has rightly called attention to the finish of. we may. improving himself. included in. the. notice of Cornelius Nepos,. is. lungclaussen. poems and and was constantly. his. best. Whether any part of our extant. juvenile niigae which. ;. collection. already attracted. uncertain. was moulded. aims and achieve-. period.. all. sure that he never wrote hurriedly,. feel. set in,. its. the. was. favorable. but the finest of the hendeca-. ;. syllables,. such as those on Lesbia's sparrow, Viuaynus vica Leshia atque. avicmus,. Quaen's quoi viihi basiationes, Acmeii. lam. must have been the grow'th of time as. it. him. seems. to. earliest.. and we may. :. How. own or. first. sionally negligent in his caesura.. the. There. is. conclude that. this,. effect. foot. ;. is. Yet who. produced by the. we can. specimens either of. more severe hendecasyllables. Unlike these Catullus allows himself a. any hendecasyllabic poem by. freer in his elisions will. Statius or Martial. finest. and occa-. venture to say that the total is.. comparable. hendecasyllables of Catullus.!*. an abandon in these, a sense of freedom working by rule but. not dominated by only rarely, attains. artificial. less finished. of his contemporaries, but with the. trochee or iambus in the. effect of. fairly. perfect the hendecasyllables of Catullus are. of Petronius, Statius, and Martial.. with. amorcs,. have been his favorite rhythm, was also that which occupied. judge by comparing them not only with his. suos. Septiviios. uer egelidos refert tepores, exhibit the metre in a perfection which. period of. it,. to. which Martial and. The younger. Roman. charm of Catullus when he. Statius. never, Petronius. Pliny hving in the later and. literature. seems to have. says, speaking of his. felt. more. the superior. contemporary Pompeius.

(31) PROLEGOMENA. He. Saturninus,. and. sciously is. :. What a fund of wit,. writes verses like Catullus or Calvus.. True he introduces. swee/fhss, bitterness, love !. tender. xxv. light character some. of a harsher. here again folhnving Calvus. with verses of a. side by side. quality, but he does so con-. and Catullus. (Kpist.. 1. i.. 6. 5).. It. the insertion of these duriusculi that distinguishes the hendecasyllables. of Catullus and his contemporaries from those of the empire. from. this point of. (Plin. Epist.. iv.. mean. tion, I. Of. 27. 4).. seem. three alone. his. and. ;. is. it. view that Sentius Augurinus calls them both uetercs. to. the other lyrical metres used by Catullus. have been elaborated by him to the same perfec-. pure. iambics, scazons, and. .cannot so well compare. him with. his. glyconics. successors. for. ;. but here. :. we. Horace never. uses the pure iambic except in combination with the hexameter (Epod, 16): the glyconics of Seneca are not divided by the regular recurrence of. a pherecratean into strophes. by. later writers, in. and Martial. under rules. ;. more recondite. the scazon alone. :. used frequently. is. and Priapea, by Persius, Petronius somewhat stricter, and of course with a much. the Catalepta. more. diction, yet hardly with. demonstrably based on the. and throughout. felicity,. and more. earlier, greater, less artificial. artistic. Two. other. metres used by Catullus, the Sapphic and the Choriambic metre of. XXX. poet in whose hands the metre had. first. become a. success.. Alfene immemor atque tinaniniis false sodalibus, were afterwards perfected. by Horace. :. in Catullus they. ment; but the experiment. can hardly be thought more than an experiis. throughout closely modelled on Greek. precedents, e.g. in the admission of a trochee into the second foot of the sapphic. omnium. and the frequent hypermeter. ulti-inosque Britannos, idcntidem. Ilia rumpens, uelut prati Vltimi ;. admitted in either metre,. Ille. mi par. esse,. as. well as the lax caesuras. Gallicum. Rhenum. horribilem,. Vltimi flos praeter in the Sapphics, tute iubebas a7ii?nam, di meminerunt,. meminit Fides in the. Choriambics.. Whether. followed any famous writer of Galliambics. the. in. we do. Catullus. Attis. know. not. ;. we. retain. only a few fragmentary lines by Varro and IMaecenas in this measure the splendour of Catullus' it. poem produced no. imitators, or. no. remains unique as a wonderful expression of abnormal feeling. quasi-abnormal metre.. Quasi-abnormal however only. :. for. ;. rivals; in. a. no poem of. Catullus follows stricter laws, or succeeds in conveying the idea of a. wild freedom under a. more. carefully veiled regularity.. In his Epyllion, the Nuptials of Peleus and Thetis, Catullus has not reached the same metrical perfection. currence, line after line, of one. Short. as the. poem. monotonous cadence,. sameness which might almost be called. is,. Prognatae. inartistic.. the re-. gives an air of uertice. pinus, Neptuni nasse per undas, Argiuae robora pubis, abiegnis aequora. palmis,. — such. is. the. predominant type from. first. to. last,. only occa-.

(32) PROLEGOMENA.. xxvi. by the spondaic endings which he and other poets. sionally relieved. made. of his school for a time. more. popular, sometimes by verses of a freer. luxuriant rhythm, like Itidottntos in corde gerens Ariadna furores,. Erycina serens. Spi7iosas. Hue hue. error,. Tedi friistrareiur. in pectore curas,. like Lucretius, studied Cicero's. Aratea. is. inobseruabilis. Whether Catullus had,. aduentate ?neas audite querellas.. uncertain. :. but the coincidence. poems of the same recurring rhythm is at least remarkable, though we may feel sure that Catullus would have held Cicero a very sorry versifier. It seems more probable that both Cicero and Catullus in both. in their determination to avoid the irregularities of the older poets, with. whom. accent and ictus had been allowed to agree or conflict in the. last three. feet;. of the hexameter indifferently, had recourse to the ex-. feet. making. pedient of. and. the accent as a rule agree with the ictus in those. that they succeeded in thus giving their verses. monotonous. formity, but did not avoid the. consequence.. has followed the. Catullus. iambic poems Phasellus. il/e,. owe much of. has shown. and Qufs hoe. effect. same. to be his. enough compare Catullus with. in this respect. ;. natural. two. the. which as IMunro. monotonous.. :. It. would be. contemporaries Calvus. Zmyrna have. but their epics lo and. except a few short fragments freer in. its. in. their effectiveness to this coincidence of ictus. interesting. Cinna. principle. potest tddere,. with accent, and are not long to. greater uni-. which was. these however, so far as they go,. rhythm than the hexameters of the Peleus and Thetis. ;. and. perished,. seem. and even. Cicero in the twenty-nine verses translated from the Iliad in the. Dimnatione off. much. of his former sameness and attains to something hke variety.. Lucretius stands by himself and school.. I. am. is. in. no respect an adherent of the new. inclined to believe that Catullus wrote his Epyllion before. his only other extant. hexameter poem. Vesper. Vesper Olympo, in which the rhythm. approach made. The. to Theocritus. is. adest, iuuenes,. more broken. and the Alexandrian. and almost rudeness of most of. simplicity. strong contrast with the perfection of his. merely translating, as. in the. Coma. writers.. Catullus' elegiacs. lyrics.. Berenices,. When. of Greek elegy. ;. in his ingenuity,. We. shall. have been.. we cannot expect him. is. to. extant elegy the original. art,. but charming. delicate, if not tender, vein of sentiment.. look in vain for this perfection in Catullus, except perhaps in. the lines to Hortalus. and. in. Callimachus was indeed the consummation. elaborate and even symmetrical in his. and with a. is. indeed he. :. Coma must. conmrgite:. up, and a nearer. move with complete grace and we can see from Callimachus' the Aovrpa UaWdôs how far removed from the Latin version of the. De. 30) written ten years after the death of Catullus throws. (ii.. (LXV), those. the fine self-apostrophe in. written at his brother's. which he determines. to. tomb. (CI),. renounce Lesbia.

(33) PR0LEG0:MENA. The. (LXXVI).. first. xxvH. of the two longer elegies. subject and obscure in. allusions. its. (LXVII). revolting in. is. the long epistle to Allius, though. ;. constructed on technical rules of the greatest intricacy, and obviously written with unusual care, fails to please S either before. of. mechanism or. its. after the forty lines. after. has been detected. it. we. are conscious. the studious art with which. ;. which form the Prooemium, Catullus has worked out of Allius, in a series of tableaux which beginning. his subject, the laudation. with Allius pass on to Catullus' love for Lesbia, to Laodamia, to Troy, to the death of his brother, the central panel of the picture, then in reverse. order from. Troy. an European workmanship. Laodamia,. the device. ;. view. in. ends a. this elegy,. constructed by the clumsy hands of. failure.. with. It. its. when he wrote. de fratrc doknlis Insolahililer. well-known Nil praeier Caluum the. word. el. me. :. the. words. just as in the. docius cantare Catullutn, the choice of. was perhaps determined by. docius. has always seemed to. twice repeated lament for the. death of Catullus' brother (20-24, 92-96),. Fratrem viaermiis, rapto. back again to. to Lesbia, to Catullus, so ball,. Greek, and might have been beautiful, the. is. Roman and. is. Horace had. that. to. reminds us of a Chinese. Allius,. constant application to. its. Catullus. If. we examine. their defects to. Greek. elegy,. the metrical peculiarities of these elegies,. lie. mainly. in the too exclusive imitation of. we. shall find. Greek models.. whether written by Tyrtaeus, Theognis, IMimnermus, Her-. mesianax, or Callimachus allowed the thought to run on uninterruptedly. and with every. variety of pause. it. ;. did not break off the sentence at the. end of the pentameter, and often began a new sentence in the middle or end of a line. Again it admitted words of any length, from a monosyllable to a heptasyllable, at the. perhaps. end of the pentameter, with a preference. for trisyllabic or quadrisyllable. lian elegy is completely. Greek. meter ends four times with a. words.. In these respects the Catul-. in the short elegy to. ;. Hortalus the penta-. disyllable, four times with a trisyllable, three. times with a quadrisyllable, once with a pentesyllable {amahiiior).. Coma. much. but are I. In the. quadrisyllables are the rule, disyllables are preferred after these,. ends. less frequent. in a heptasyllable, 2. in a trisyllable,. 38. in the epistle to Allius,. :. in a pentesyllable,. in a dis}-llable.. The poem. of 80 pentameters,. 13 in a quadrisyllable, 26 St qua recordanti shows. a similar preference for the disyllable; of 13 pentameters 8 terminate thus, pium tibi miser poie opem mihi uelit men ; 3 end in a quadrisyllable,. verses. I. in. disyllables. '. F.. a trisyllable,. Surripui. Hermes. tibi. Catullus rightly. dum has. in. i. ludis. not. condemns as. a. monosyllable. (XCIX), have allowed. tasteless the. {sunt). 5. :. the finished. quadrisyllables,. himself equal. licence. in. 3 his. comparison of I.aodamia's yearning. love with the barathrum of Pheneos (LXVIII. 109 sqq.)..

(34) PROLEGOMENA.. xxviii. management of pause: though he on through. often introduces long sentences running. instances of a clause continued. coincides with the end of a clause;. from the pentameter. hexameter though not unex-. following. to the. ampled are rare: thus LXVIII has only the following 28, 29 quisquis de meliore noia Frigida deserto tepefacsit membra ctibili, 34, 35 tlla domus^ Ilia ?niht sedes, 64, 65 atira secimda tienit lam prece Pollucis, iam. Ad. Castoris imploraia, 68, 69 isque dcdit do?}unam,. ceremm amoves,. 74, 75. qiiam co??imunes exer-. Laodamia domum Inceptam /rustra,. 106, 107. tiita. 127 quae mullo dicitur vnprohius Oscula viordenti semper decerpere rostro ; and of these all except three have a quasi-pause at the end of the pentameter. In the epigrams. dulci'm atque ani/na Coniugiiim,. Catullus. is stricter. 126,. each distich generally contains a single thought, and. :. the sentence closes with the pentameter. ends with words of any length they. differ. from those of. yet here also the pentameter. :. indifferently.. Martial, will. These epigrams, widely as. not be denied to be in their. way. as. they will bear comparison with the best epigrams of the Greek effective Anthology, and seem to me to prove that the subsequent development of :. the Elegiac. measure. hands of TibuUus, Propertius, Ovid, and Martial much from any inherent. in the. triumphed over the more Greek type not so superiority,. nor even from the tendency of. in trammels, but rather. Roman. genius to work better. from the accidental circumstance that no poet of. transcendent genius rose after Catullus to mould the elegiac in Catullus'. way.. Roman. elegy,. it. is. true,. became. in. the. Amores. Ovid. of. an almost new and certainly most exquisite vehicle of poetry; but it seems rash to pronounce that this was its necessary development; had Vergil for instance chosen this. of the hexameter,. field instead. Roman. elegy might have assumed a form as purely Vergilian as the epos yet as far. more Greek. Ovid made. in type than. completely an imitative. might have become. artist. in skilful. it. as Vergil. What the hands we may perhaps than Ovid.. is. ;. and. more. Catullian elegy''. conjecture from. such poems as the Copa or the lines Si mihi susceptum fiierit deciirrere viuniis, Catal. vi.. The. latter especially,. as Niebuhr seems to have thought. Greek. in. it,. even. is. if. not the work of Vergil,. very graceful and completely. form\. Si tibi talis erit qualem dilecta Catullo Leshia plombdt, hie habitare seems to have considered it a peculiarity of the Catullian pentameter This occurs once in a doubtful to allow the third half-foot to be a short syllable. passage, C. 6 Perfeda exigitiir tma amicitia, where, as in Martial's plorabat, the syllable is lengthened, no doubt on Greek analogies in the same foot m is unelided 1. From. xiv. 77. potest, Martial. ;. three times right.. Chalybwn omne, linguam. esse,. euliim olfaeere/n,. if. the. MS. reading. is. Propertius, like Catullus, allows the third half-foot of the pentameter to be a. short syllable in. ii.. i. or ten verses, the close of each distich as a rule. six, eight. 8. 8, iv, 5.. 64, both. however suspected passages.. •.

(35) 1. PROLEGOMENA. I. pass to the diction of Catullus, a most integral part of his greatness a. as. Niebuhr says truly of. poet.. common mode if. xxix. that. this. of expressing our thoughts. is. as natural. is. it. with us.. ourselves to the lyrics, to be an exact illustration of. we confine. our. as. seems indeed,. It. Words-. worth's paradox, that the language of poetry does not essentially differ. There. from the language of prose.. strained, far-fetched, or artificial in the required. words, and. spontaneously.. Hence. we may. if. of anything. it. passionate, jocose, or homely, as. is. Greece. were. it. not indeed the later school, Pindar. ;. Sappho, Alcaeus,'. his contemporaries, but the founders of lyric art,. Anacreon, and,. in. these lyrics stand alone in Latin poetry as equal-. ling the great lyric poets of. and. an utter absence. is. the thought clothes itself without effort. :. include. him among. In. these, Archilochus.. nothing does Catullus stand in such marked contrast with the succeeding generation as in this inimitable spontaneity. Horace could. Vergil nor. attain to. :. it. was a. Lucretius. ;. measure, but only in his inspired moments, that. is. Though. poem.. part of his. one of the highest. it. He. changing. would be impossible. 3 qiiicquid ^. e. g.. si placet. may be. common. LVL. Dionae. amas Catidhim on. entem on the. pedem. in. it. much. some. in. the smaller. to reduce to rules. what. briefly classified.. fond of taking an expression of every-day. is it,. is,. qualities of genius, there are certain peculiarities in. the language of Catullus which (i). quality which neither. alone has. si. me. 6,. a variation. a??ias,. insidias struentem,. on. and. life. si. slightly. dis placet,. XXI. 7 i?isidias XIV. 22 pedem. LVI.-. viihi instruattulistis. for. tidistis.. poems preserve some expression which might be used Quantum qui pote plurimum, quibus non est Cordi CatuUum laedere, at quibus cordi est which is raised into poetry by the substitution of CatuUum for me, XXXVIII. 4 quod minimum (2). Most of. in prose. — Vt. facillimumque in tuto,. the. co7iuenerat esse delicatos,. est,. XXVIII.. XXXV.. 1 1. si. mihi uera nuntiantur,. II sed qtiatitum uideo. XXXI.. 6 uidere. pari fuistis Casu, XV. 12 ubi. foris paratum, VII. 2 sint satis superque. :. te. erit. similarly ni petitum aliunde eat. LXI. 130, and the recurring boni nialique VI. Sometimes a 15, bo7iis malisque XV. 10, bona cum bona alite LXI. 19. whole line only differs from prose by being metrical, e. g. XLI V. 1 Orationem in Antium petitorem, XXXIX. 8 Neque elegantem, ut arbi/ror, neque urbanmn, XXXII. 6 Neu tibi lubeat foras abire, XXVI. 4 Verum ad LXI. 146,. hodie atque heri. milia quindecim et ducentos,. Qui ? non est homo bellus ?^ inquies. 7 bonam atque magnam Cenam, LV. 15 Die. XXIV.. Est, XIII. 3 Si tecum attuleris. '. nobis ubi sis futurus. (3) Catullus passes rapidly. in another. lines of. One. from speaking. of the best examples of this. which the poet addresses himself. in is. one person VIII, in the. in the vocative. to speaking first. eleven. and speaks of.

(36) PROLEGOMENA.. XXX Lesbia in the third person. and speaks of himself rat : in. in. :. 12-18 he makes a sudden turn. in the third person, Vale pticlla. 9 he returns to his self-address.. 1. to Lesbia,. I'am Catullus. :. XL VI. Similarly in. ohdu-. after. con-. on the return of spring which allows leave Bithynia, he makes a sudden apostrophe to his companions. gratulating himself in the vocative. him. to. So XXVIIl. (9-12).. times. five. in the. Pi'sonis comites. :. amicos~At. uobis. compass of. from Veranius and Fabullus. :. changes the vocative. fifteen lines. — O Memmi—pari fuistis to. Casu. —pete. nobiles. Memmius, then. to. Veranius and Fabullus again, then to an unnamed individual representing the world at large. —. finally, to. Piso and. Memmius. rapid change forms part of the effectiveness of. —Et. uidebis et feres ?. imperator unice. ilk. — Parum expatrauit-— Quid himc malumfoue lively indignation. cidence of accent and ictus conveys metrically.. be. to notice his. fail. egotistical. No. / is so XXXVIII. i,. by tuus Catullus XIII.. XIV.. 7,. 13,. lis. ? expresses. which the coin-. reader of Catullus. tendency to speak of himself; yet. doubtless because the direct. ;. the alternating". potest iiidere. from the point of language the same can. :. — Cinaede Romule, haec — nunc superbus Cinaede Romule—Eone nomine,. and second person, Quis hoc. third. The same. together.. XXIX. this is. not. felt. to. constantly replaced or. Catullus. alone. XLIV. 3, XLIX. 4, LVI. 3, LVIII. 2, LXVIII. 27, 134, LXXIL i, LXXIX. 3, LXXXII. I somedmes by the vocative Catulle VIII. i, 19, XLVI. 4, LI. 13, LII. I, 4, LXXVI. 5, LXXIX. 2. :. Another feature of Catullus'. (4). them. ;. in. style is his. :. bimuli tremula ;. :. if. imula oricilla: 10 Xô, latusculuju mollicellas. tive. fondness for diminutives. we except the shorter epigrams, is without some they abound to excess XXV. 2 has three, juedullula. hardly any of the poems,. tettellulo,. the. last, like. XVII. :. medullula. ^ve, ponticuli acsuleis. a double diminu-. oricilla,. besides these the nouns uillula pupula sacculus flosculus lectulus. pupulus hortulus uersiculus amiculus sarcinulae puellula sauiolum brachioluni solaciolum corolla papillae ocellus gemellus labellum lucellum salillum. scortillum lapillus codicilli homullus with the. Scptumillus. :. proper names. Veraniolus. the adjectives aureolus turgidulus molliculus imulus iietulus. albulus turpiculus lacteolus frigidulus lassulus eruditulus perlucidulus uuidu-. he seems even to. lus pallidulus itttegellus misellus tantillus febriculosus ;. parade the. idea, as in. sound LXXVIII. 4 (5). whole si. LVI.. 3 Cato Catullum, 5 pupulimi puellae, or the. Cum puero. Equally noticeable. is. ut hello bella puella cubet.. the recurrence of the. quid carius. est oculis. LXXVII.. 2, 4,. ambobus carior. again No7i harum modo sed quot aut fuerunt annis so. same phrase or even of XIV. i,. lines; thus plus oculis a mabat 111. 5, plus oculis amarein. XXI.. 7nilia. 2, 3. occurs with a slight variation. est oculis. CIV.. Aid sunt aut aliis erunt in XXIV. 2, 3, XLIX. 2,. multa V. 10, XVI. 12, LXI. 203, milibus trecentis IX.. 2,. 2. :. in 3. :. milia.

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