Where and how did we get hold of Catullus? There are clues in this photo of the opening page of the Oxford text.
On the right, the footnotes above the line give details of ancient writers who quoted from the two poems above. There are a lot, which is useful for textual scholars and shows how well-known Catullus was in antiquity. The notes below the line are about places where the various manuscripts that we depend on for our text of Catullus have wording which differs from that chosen by the editor for the Oxford text. There are a lot of these too, considering that they deal with only thirteen lines of poetry, and this implies that the strength of the manuscript evidence is not particularly great. That is borne out by the left-hand page, which describes the manuscript evidence itself. This amounts to four manuscript copies of Catullus made as late as the fourteenth century. They all lead back to one manuscript, known as V – for Verona, because it existed there around the end of the first millennium. That manuscript was lost centuries ago, but it is the one and only known line of transmission through which Catullus, copied and re-copied many times with varying degrees of accuracy, survived from antiquity. If the Verona manuscript had been lost before, rather than after, being copied, we would have found ourselves with no complete Catullus poems except one (no. 62, a wedding-hymn, which survived separately in an anthology), in other words, without Lesbia and her sparrow and her kisses. It is a chilling thought.
