CATULLUS AS POET

It is not often that so great a poet as Catullus has risked extinction, and been preserved almost by miracle. All our MSS are derived from a single imperfect copy discovered, we do not know where, at the begining of the xivth century: no complete poem, with the exception of LXII which is included in the Thuanaean Anthology of the Paris Library, and the quatrain to Priapus cited by Terentianus Maurus 2755–2758 Lachm., has come down to us in any other collection. Yet only the loss of Alcaeus and Sappho in Greek literature could compare with the loss of the lyrics of Catullus; and we may estimate the barbarism which followed the decline of the Roman empire by nothing more signally than the absence of even one copy of the two Greek poets, and the almost casual preservation of the Veronese in a single mutilated MS, the parent of all our extant MSS. During the long period which elapsed between Isidorus of Hispalis in the seventh century and the re-discovery of the poems at the beginning of the fourteenth, only one writer is known to have read Catullus, Rather, bishop of Verona circ. 930–970: though LXII may have been copied into the Thuanaean Anthology from a complete MS of the poems, and traces of possible imitation, as well as glossarial extracts, are not absent, as I have shown in my former volume, Prolegomena pp. viii, ix.