Excerpt from Clarendon Press Series: A Commentary on Catullus

As far back as 1859 I designed a commentary on Catullus, and only interrupted it to reconstitute the text as a preliminary. But the earlier plan, for which from the first I had accumulated a considerable store of materials, had never been abandoned, and after the publication of my edition of the text in 1867 became the principal object to which my studies were directed.

As compared with Vergil and Horace, or even with Tibullus and Propertius, Catullus may almost be said to have been during the past century a neglected book. While each of those poets has found an interpreter of first-rate ability, Doering's edition of 1788 remained without a rival for ninety years. How imperfect that edition is is known to every one. Doering's chief merit was his brevity. He carefully avoided all discussion where discussion was more than usually interesting, and when the student was asking for information on the numerous points where the poems touch on the personal or public history of the time, was contented to illustrate his author by quotations from the elegiacs of the ill-fated and interesting, but now forgotten Lotichius.

This neglect was certainly not justified by the history of the poems in the preceding centuries. From Parthenius and Palladius at the end of the fifteenth century, to Vulpius and Conradinus de Allio in the former half of the eighteenth, Catullus was edited and reedited by a series of scholars including some of the greatest names in philology. The sixteenth century alone produced no less than four commentaries of primary importance, those of Alexander Guarinus in 1521, of Muretus in 1554, of Achilles Statius in 1566, of Scaliger in 1577. Of these the three former were published at Venice, with which city Catullus may in modern times claim an almost special connexion. Guarinus' edition is now known to few, but it is for all that a most valuable book. No doubt modern taste is offended by the plainness, not to say grossness, of his explanations, which indeed perpetually suggest that he was illustrating the corruptions of Catullus' time by observations drawn from his own.

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