The Renaissance history of Catullus begins with a riddle, the mysterious epigram written in the first years of the fourteenth century by Benvenuto Campesani commemorating the discovery of a manuscript of the poet after his works had been lost for a thousand years (for a text and translation, see Butrica, this volume, p. 27). The manuscript celebrated by Benvenuto (called Vfor Verona) was soon lost, but not before it was copied at least once. All of our extant manuscripts of the complete text - four from the fourteenth century (O, G, R, and m [Venice, Biblioteca Marciana lat. 12.80 (4167)]) and roughly 125 from the fifteenth - are descended from this single lost manuscript. A ninth-century florilegium or anthology preserves one poem, 62, whose text is descended from the same archetype as V (Thomson 1997:24-38,72-93).
The fact that Catullus survived the Middle Ages only in a single manuscript may surprise the modern reader, for Catullus (perhaps after Vergil) is the most popular Roman poet of our time, and in Antiquity he exercised a profound influence on both the Augustan poets and those of the Silver Age. Catullus is not the only ancient author to come to us in a single manuscript - Apuleius’ Golden Ass and the surviving parts of Tacitus’ Histories and Annals had the same narrow escape (Reynolds 1983: 15-16, 406-7) - but his history is still a little disquieting. How could it happen that such a poet was reduced to such a slender lifeline?
The answer - at least part of it - seems to be Martial, for it is one of the ironies of literary history that the admiration and imitation of Martial, along with that of Pliny and other lesser poets of the Silver Age, probably contributed to Catullus’ virtual eclipse from the second century on (Gaisser 1993: 7-15). Martial and his contemporaries had no interest in the qualities that our time admires in Catullus - his elegant urbanity, his learned Alexandrianism, his passionate emotion. Instead, they promoted him as a poet of light verse and epigram (see Lorenz, this volume). As a consequence he was soon supplanted by his chief imitator. Why read an old-fashioned and sometimes difficult poet like Catullus, when one could so easily enjoy Martial’s smooth and racy epigrams? In the second century Aulus Gellius and Apuleius knew some of
Catullus’ poems; the poet of the Ciris and the author of an epicedion on a pet dog knew others (Goold 1969; Walters 1976). But even then texts were no doubt already becoming scarce, and we can be sure that fewer still were preserved when scribes transferred the works of ancient authors from roll to codex around the fourth century AD. There are echoes of tags and single verses in authors from the fourth to the seventh century (Schwabe 1886: xi-xiii; Wiseman 1985: 246-61; Ullman 1960); but after that Catullus goes underground. The only people we can identify with certainty as readers of his poetry in the Middle Ages are the anonymous scribes of Vor its archetype and the florilegium containing poem 62.
World History
