Catullus. Edited with a Textual and Interpretative Commentary PDF
Preview Catullus. Edited with a Textual and Interpretative Commentary
CATULLUS 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:
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