Kissing Clodius: a note on Catullus 79

Extract

Lesbius est pulcer. quid ni? quern Lesbia malit

quam te cum tota gente, Catulle, tua.

sed tamen hic pulcer uendat cum gente Catullum,

si tria notorum sauia reppererit.

notorum is the reading of O; GR have natorum, which is now generally rejected; among other things Catullus himself had no children and could hardly use childlessness as an insult, even if Clodius' children had not been born at the time of the poem. On the other hand notorum has caused some degree of unease; Skinner (1982) 203–4 takes it as meaning not only ‘acquaintances’ but also ‘well-known, distinguished men’, though there seems no evidence for such a meaning for substantival noti; it could also theoretically be the genitive plural of notor; likewise Birt (1904) 470 suggested that it is a partitive genitive with sauiorum understood; to leave even the possibility of such ambiguities is untypical of Catullus. Calphurnius and Heinsius, who were of course unaware of O's notorum, suggested amatorum; this accounts for natorum with the loss of a by haplography and consequent alteration of m to n to produce a Latin word, but it does not account for notorum; furthermore it is a word not used elsewhere by Catullus, and there would be an awkward ambiguity between ‘lovers’ and ‘well-wishers’; cf. OLD s.v. It will be suggested here that amatorum is almost right, and that we should read amicorum.