15/11/2024
Like many literary works from antiquity, the poems of Catullus survived by the slenderest of threads…We have to imagine also that at one time in the early transmission of the Catullan corpus, some scribe, in an increasingly Christian culture, thought well enough of the poems to copy them from scrolls into a codex, dirty words, out-of-date political invective, antiquarian vocabulary, homosexual verse and all. That broad-minded scribe and undoubtedly many others after him allowed Catullus to “last . . . beyond one lifetime,” as he expressed it in the dedicatory poem to his book, a destiny not shared by any of the other poets in his circle, whose works are entirely lost.
—Bruce Whiteman on Catullus and the new translation by Stephen Mitchell from Yale University Press. Full review free to nonsubscribers. https://tinyurl.com/4kwvy7dt