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Catullus, 55. 9–121

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Jonathan Foster
Jonathan Foster
Affiliation:
University of Liverpool
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Extract

Catullus has been looking everywhere for his friend Camerius. In Pompey's arcade he has accosted all the girls who were hanging about there, but they have calmly disavowed knowledge of his friend's whereabouts. At line 9 Catullus breaks into flagitatio, the beginning of which is desperately corrupt: attempts to emend avelte have been made, but it seems more realistic to assume that avelte is the result of some corruption of quas vultu at the beginning of line 8 (with which it has four letters, a v lt, in common, and e - - e corresponding to u - -u), and that it has ousted the original beginning of line 9. In terms of a flagitatio—the girls are pessimae inasmuch as they are allegedly withholding what is Catullus' own, his friend, from him—the sort of word one expects is redde or cedo. Hence reddatis here, merely exempli gratia, would be one conceivable way of introducing the demand. (The ellipse of the imperatives da and cedo which Fordyce alludes to is a well-known feature of colloquial Latin, but it would be most unnatural in a flagitatio to omit the most significant and forceful word, the imperative claiming the return of Catullus' friend.)

Type
Research Article
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 21 , Issue 1 , May 1971 , pp. 186 - 187
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1971

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References

page 186 note 2 See Usener, H., ‘Italische Volksjustiz’,Rh. Mus. lvi (1901), i ff.Google Scholar and, on this poem in particular, 21 ═ Kl. Schriften iv. 356–82, esp. 375.

page 186 note 3 e.g. ‘avelli sinite’ ipse flagitabam (Avan-tius), ‘avertistis’ saepe fl. (Riese).

page 186 note 4 Cf. 42. 11, 12, Plaut. Most. 603.

page 186 note 5 Equivalent to reddite, cf. 8. i, 32. 7, 61. 95, etc.

page 186 note 6 See Hofmann, , Lat. Umgangsspr., p. 170.Google Scholar

page 186 note 7 See T.L.L. vii. 2. 334.69 ff.Google Scholar for examples, and compare Iliad, 5. 880, etc., for the use of αὐτός in the same sense.

page 186 note 8 Cf. 42, where the poet's hendecasyllabi are summoned to perform this office for him.

page 187 note 1 2. 2. 28 ‘candida non tecto pectore si qua sedet’, quoted but not utilized in this way by Kroll ad loc.