On Catullus 61. 116–19

Extract

quae tuo ueniunt ero,
quanta gaudia, quae uaga
nocte, quae medio die
gaudeat! sed abit dies.

In PCPS n.s.24 (1978), 99 Professor Nisbet emended medio to emerito, and offered a new interpretation of the lines in which the time of day specified will now be, as he admits, roughly the same in each quae clause. Two points may be worth making about this proposal.

First, the fundamental necessity for change has not been demonstrated. As to the sense of the lines as they appear in the MS. tradition, Professor Nisbet says that mention of love-making between husband and wife in the afternoon ‘has no place in an epithalamium, a serious celebration of married love’. How do we know this? We have only one complete epithalamium in republican Latin poetry, and this is it. It is not therefore possible to say with any confidence what the genre does or does not allow at this stage of its development, except in so far as this poem casts light on the matter. And in this poem we read, not many lines after these, of Torquatus's concubinus. We are told that the concubinus attends Torquatus on his visits to his country estates (136f. ‘sordent tibi uilicae’), and furthermore that Torquatus had quite a developed taste in pueri delicati (141–3 ‘diceris male te’).