Letture scolastiche e circolazione del testo di Catullo in epoca antica

The transmission of the text of Catullus is very puzzling, both in Antiquity and in late Middle Ages, after the appearance of a codex of Catullus in Verona in XIV century. The first problem is the circulation of Catullus’ text in the Antiquity, since we have a number of different titles for parts of his work, and we do not know when and how his poems were put together in the Liber we received from the mediaeval tradition. Catullus was not used in a large dimension by latin scholars and grammarians and the only quotations are devoted to rare words, such as archaisms, neologisms, barbarisms, and to particular linguistic usages. For these reasons it is possible that Catullus’ text circulated during the Antiquity in a rather ‘fluid’ way, and that an edition with the poems we now have was assembled only in a late date.