Every work of classical literature extant today has survived through its own unique textual tradition, usually involving copies on parchment or paper of various dates from late Antiquity to the Renaissance, sometimes even papyrus copies from Antiquity itself. The poetry of Catullus is one text of all too many whose survival into the modern world depended upon a single copy - a fact with significant and often unfortunate consequences for our understanding of this author and his work.
Tom Stoppard’s play The Invention of Love deals in part with A. E. Housman’s work on the textual tradition and textual criticism of another Roman poet, Propertius. To clarify the scholarly basis of that work for his audience, and classical textual criticism in general, Stoppard used Benjamin Jowett, the famous translator of Plato, as an unlikely mouthpiece for a speech dealing with the transmission of Catullus:
This morning I had cause to have typewritten an autograph letter I wrote to the father of a certain undergraduate. The copy as I received it asserted that the Master of Balliol had a solemn duty to stamp out unnatural mice. In other words, anyone with a secretary knows that what Catullus really wrote was already corrupt by the time it was copied twice, which was about the time of the first Roman invasion of Britain: and the earliest copy that has come down to us was written about 1,500 years after that. Think of all those secretaries! - corruption breeding corruption from papyrus to papyrus, and from the last disintegrating scrolls to the first new-fangled parchment books, with a thousand years of copying-out still to come, running the gauntlet of changing forms of script and spelling, and absence of punctuation - not to mention mildew and rats and fire and flood and Christian disapproval to the brink of extinction as what Catullus really wrote passed from scribe to scribe, this one drunk, that one sleepy, another without scruple, and of those sober, wide-awake and scrupulous, some ignorant of Latin and some, even worse, fancying themselves better Latinists than Catullus - until! - finally and at long last - mangled and tattered like a dog that has found its way home, there falls across the threshold of the
Italian Renaissance the sole surviving witness to thirty generations of carelessness and stupidity: the Verona Codex of Catullus; which was almost immediately lost again, but not before being copied with one last opportunity for error. And there you have the foundation of the poems of Catullus as they went to the printer for the first time, in Venice 400 years ago. (Stoppard 1997: 24-5)
‘‘Jowett’’ can be criticized on some minor points: he neglects causes of corruption other than scribal error, ignores the ‘‘secondary’’ tradition, elides the considerable scholarly activity that intervened between rediscovery and first publication, and in general downplays the element of sheer uncertainty that surrounds the whole enterprise of recovering an ancient text: not to mention that, if ‘‘Christian disapproval’’ was ever a factor, it seems to have left some of Antiquity’s most flagrantly obscene poetry unmolested. On the whole, however, though the last century and a quarter of scholarship allows us to refine this picture to a considerable extent, it is accurate in its essence: about the transition in Antiquity from papyrus roll to codex, about certain causes of scribal corruption such as unfamiliar scripts, about interpolation, about the alteration of archaic forms, about that single manuscript at Verona, now lost, known as the ‘‘Verona codex’’ or Veronensis (V), from which all the complete copies of our Catullan corpus derive, and about the vast temporal gulf between Catullus himself and the earliest extant complete text - though 1,400 years would be more accurate than 1,500.
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