The interdependent processes of correction and study began hand in hand as soon as Catullus became available to the so-called ‘‘proto-humanists’’ of the fourteenth century. Giuseppe Billanovich (1988) has done the most speculating about the role that these scholars might have played in the ‘‘resurrection’’ of Catullus (his views are conveniently summarized in Thomson 1997: 24-33 along with Thomson’s own and McKie’s); Billanovich’s most plausible suggestion is that Albertino Mussato may be responsible for early annotations like the metrical notes found in G and even for some early conjectures, even if he did not commission the copying of the MS that Thomson designates A. Petrarch is sure to have had a role somewhere; the most likely places are either as an annotator of A or as the owner of X (Thomson 1997: 27-8). Those who were responsible for the restoration of poem-divisions that took place in the near descendants of V (and it was surely a cumulative, collaborative effort) were the first modern textual critics of Catullus, just as the authors of the numerous annotations in O and G were the first interpreters and rudimentary commentators.
Neither this annotation nor the impulse to improve the transmitted text was in any way unusual; in fact, both were entirely natural parts of ‘‘manuscript culture’’ as practiced from Antiquity through to the Renaissance, necessitated by the unreliability of handwritten copies. The correction of scribal errors (such as corruptions and misdivisions) normally involved two processes. A scholar could correct his own copy by searching for better readings in other copies, or he could correct by conjecture, in effect ‘‘guessing’’ the author’s original intention (or sometimes by reasoning from the content of some other ancient text: for example, Quintilian’s paraphrase of 93.2 at Inst. 11.1.38 obviously facilitated the restoration of the line as Catullus wrote it). Naturally conjecture was the more fruitful activity in the earliest days of Catullan scholarship; as we have seen, there were numerous errors, many of them superficial, awaiting correction, and fifteenth-century scholars corrected hundreds of these, representing the vast majority of the corrections now accepted into the text. The first scholar whose corrections to the text of Catullus we can identify with any certainty is Colluccio Salutati (1331-1406), chancellor of Florence, who commissioned the copying of R and was its first owner; his conjectures can be found among the readings that editors designate with the symbol r (see, for example, 3.16, where o [factum male] is Salutati’s correction of the transmitted bonum). Collating other copies was more difficult; there were very few MSS at all in existence (a note in G complains of this very fact, and apologizes to the reader for not offering a better text), and none not descended from V, so that consultation inevitably involved closely related MSS: for example, the MS that editors designate m (Venice, Bibl. Naz. Marciana XII.80 [4167]) was copied from R, then subsequently collated against R at a later stage (enabling editors to distinguish between earlier and later stages of annotation by Salutati), and at some point supplied a set of variant readings recorded in G.
In the fifteenth century, as corrections proliferated, inspection of other copies was increasingly profitable, though of course readers of this period lacked the knowledge of the tradition that we possess today and could not distinguish authoritative readings from conjectures. The corrections of (mostly) anonymous fifteenth-century humanists remind us of the notable service that they performed for classical texts, in contrast to the image perpetuated in modern scholarship. Though Mynors’s apparatus criticus bears testament to their achievement (in addition to those identified by name, every reading there designated by a Greek letter is the conjecture of some anonymous humanist), he nonetheless followed the standard view in his preface and denounced the supposed ‘‘befouling’’ of texts by the men known scornfully as the Itali. It ought to be clear, however, that no one can evaluate how a scholar practiced the art of textual criticism without knowing the texts on which he worked; yet such knowledge was non-existent in the nineteenth century, and no one who denounced the Itali really had any idea of what they had done. In fact the accusations of excessive and irresponsible emendation that nineteenth - and twentieth-century scholars have repeated from Karl Lachmann are simply part of a rhetorical tradition that can be traced as far back as the fifteenth century, in which someone (often a scholar who emends heavily) criticizes another group of scholars for emending either too carelessly or too heavily. With the increasingly improved texts and advancing knowledge of Latin language and literature and Roman history came the opportunity for the writing of commentaries (catalogued and described in Gaisser 1992; see also Gaisser 1993: 24-108 for discussion of some of the early printed commentaries), and for Catullan influence in literature as well. It would be fair to say that the single most important figure in the reception of Catullus is Giovanni Gioviano Pontano, a virtually unique combination of scholar, poet, and emender who practiced every one of his arts at the highest level. It is unfortunate that his own MS of Catullus does not survive (though his copies of Tibullus and Propertius, for example, do) and that we are therefore poorly informed about his no doubt extensive conjectural activity (the six occasions on which his name appears in the apparatus criticus of Mynors’s OCT are surely the proverbial ‘‘tip of the iceberg’’). As an emender of the text, Pontano earned the scorn of nineteenth-century scholars, who saw him as the worst (or perhaps the best) of the Itali. But he was widely recognized in his own day and for centuries after as a scholar of importance and as an authority on the Latin language; and, while many of the humanists who emended Catullus were poets at least to the extent of being able to spin out hexameters or elegiac couplets with varying degrees of fluidity, Pontano was not only prolific - he was good as well, and his reputation as a poet remained as strong as his reputation as a scholar until the nineteenth century, and no doubt contributed, like his scholarship, to his abilities as an emender. It was through such early works of Pontano as the Liber Parthenopaeus that Catullus was restored not only to the world of scholarship but to the world of literature as well (cf. Gaisser 1993 and this volume).
Catullus first appeared in print in 1472, in an edition published in Venice by Vindelino de Spira (Hain *4758; BMC V 161-2); for the subsequent publication history see Thomson (1997: 43-60). Of course attempts at correcting the text did not cease, and perhaps reached a peak in the nineteenth century with the efforts of such indefatigable emenders as Baehrens and Ellis; nevertheless, many problems still remain, though their impact on interpretation is minimal. Modern textual criticism continues to follow the same lines as in the Renaissance. Scholars continue to propose new conjectures or resurrect old ones, or they defend passages against conjecture, and of course questions of poem-division are still debated: whether 2.11-13 are a fragment or follow on from 2.10, whether 14.24-6 are a fragment or the conclusion of 14, whether 51.13-16 are the conclusion of 51.1-12 or a fragment of another poem in Sapphics, whether ‘‘58b’’ should be separated from 58, whether 68 is one poem or two, whether a new epigram should begin at 76.13. The text of Catullus remains a work in progress, 700 years after its resurrection and repatriation.
World History
