Catullus textual criticism class, Wadham College, Oxford

By accident, I find a class on textual criticism of Catullus. Top poet, could do The Lot. Anguish, filth, everything in between.

I email Professor Stephen Harrison. May I come to the class, as a long-ago graduate of this establishment?

‘It’s rather austere,’ he warns.

A stream of scholars from the Middle Ages to today (ooh look, there’s A. E. Housman) have been wrestling with a variety of transcribers and opinionated editors on the quest for a true text.

One.

The works of Catullus survived through one incomplete manuscript, shot with mistakes (not his), now lost.

This class is wonderful. Two top geezers conduct it in stereo: Stephen Harrison - I haven’t captured his exquisite gestures here but he subtly hand-jives fragments of the poems - and Stephen Heyworth.

I don’t believe in translation. I don’t even believe in synonym. That’s tough.

Today, Tristan Franklinos contributes a scholarly canter through the variants in 69.

Something cataclysmic has happened since I was last in these parts: Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

Would Catullus have used this word? Word search. Click. It’s there. Hang on a second - Plautus used it twice. 

It feels like cheating. 

When I arrived at university as an ineducable teenager my motto was from Richard II: ‘I wasted time and now doth time waste me.’ In my adult years it’s ‘Otium Catulle’ from a section of poem 51 which he may or may not have written. And what is otium? Time on your hands, freedom, leisure, idling, slacking, messing around, not having to fight a war (and was that considered a good or a bad thing?), Catullus… It’s bad for you… Destructive…



I got Argos to make the necklace.