Abstract

It neither is nor need be doubted that tutamen opis, preserved like many another true lection in the margin of G and R, is what Catullus wrote. The tutū opus which OGR present in their texts is a simple error arising from the abbreviation of tamen as S0009838800022916_inline1. But the verse still fails to satisfy and is universally esteemed corrupt. The description of Peleus as dear exceedingly to his yet unborn and unbegotten son is so absurd a form of address that all editors now adopt from the interpolated MSS the conjecture ‘clarissime nato.’ This description is neither absurd nor untrue, but it is yet untimely, and sorts ill with the bridegroom's other titles. The ‘decus eximium,’ the ‘magnae uirtutes,’ the ‘tutela Emathiae,’ all are already his: the glory reflected from his heroic son belongs to the future and is part of that prophecy to which in the next two verses he is bidden to give ear. clarissime nupta would be appropriate, and would resemble 25 ‘eximie taedis felicibus aucte’ and Ouid. met. XI 217 sq. ‘coniuge Peleus | clarus erat diua’; but ‘most illustrious in thy son’ breaks away from the rest of this prelude and forestalls what is to come in 338 and the following verses. There is therefore an undercurrent of feeling that even now all is not well: ‘de coniectura ilia dubitari potest, cum propriae Pelei ipsius uirtutes hie praedicentur’ says Baehrens, and Schwabe even proposes so wretched an alternative as ‘carissime fato.’