Chapter 8 - Catulli Carmina

Summary

Modern editions of Catullus probably derive, at one or two removes, from a single (now lost) manuscript called the codex Veronensis (V), which returned to or resurfaced in Verona around ad 1300. This text, which marks poem divisions somewhat haphazardly and often wrongly (especially in the elegiacs), was subsequently divided (as conventionally numbered) into c.116 poems. As extant it is a collection of unparalleled diversity: poems range from 2 to 408 lines in length written in a wide variety of metres – lyric, iambic (including choliambics or scazons), phalaecian hendecasyllables, hexameters, galliambics, and elegiacs – and dealing with subjects that include the intensely personal, the quotidian and the exotically mythical, tender expressions of love, jocular amicability and viciously obscene invective in language that reflects as appropriate the gutter, the elevated dignity of epic or the refinement of the self-consciously learned urban elite.