During the anti-clerical fury of the French Revolution the custodian of the library at the Abbey of St-Germain-des-Prés took to its ruined and roofless tower such treasured manuscripts as he thought most worthy of preservation; preservation from the rain which beat night and day upon the now dangerously broken stairs where he strove unsheltered to sleep and to guard his books, and from the rage of the mob who would have sought his life had they not supposed the place to be deserted because uninhabitable. In the end, at no small cost to his health, he saved for us inter alia the Codex Sangermanensis (G) of Catullus. Yet this tale of peril, almost of disaster, is for all its drama not unique in the history of these poems; for if to some the story faintly recalls the return to Verona of the sole surviving Catullus, long hidden ‘beneath a bushel’, there may be others who will reflect on the discovery, by the sort of accident that happens only to the prepared, of a third cardinal manuscript to be set beside O and G, the Codex Romanus (R) in the year 1896, together with certain Homeric battles over its importance which ensued.

It has always been the fate of Catullus, not only to live dangerously so to speak, but to attract to himself the attention of minds fertile in humanistic accomplishment.