53. The popularity enjoyed by Catullus among the Augustan elegiasts did not preserve his memory alive through the declining centuries of the Roman empire. The scholars and poets of the latter half of the first millennium after Christ had forgotten even his name. Only Rather, bishop of Verona, in a sermon delivered there in 965 A.D., confesses that he had just become acquainted with his writings; and an anthology of Latin poets written at about the same time (now cod. Thuaneus, Parisinus 8071) contains a single poem of Catullus (c. 62). Then he drops cut of ken once more till the opening of the 14th century when a writer of Vicenza, Benvenuto Campesani (who died before 1330), celebrated in a few enigmatic verses (cf. Critical Appendix ad fin.) the rediscovery of the text of Catullus “'under a bushel”,' apparently at Verona. From this MS., or from copies of it, numerous Italian scholars, among them Petrarch, early learned to know the poet. The original MS. soon disappeared, and has never been found; but two descendants of it, apparently not more than one generation removed, are preserved to us, and form the basis of the present text of Catullus. One of these copies, ordinarily called G (now No. 14,137 in the National Library at Paris) was made in the year 1375, and the other, O (No.30 of the Canonici Latin MSS. in the Bodleian Library) at about the same time. (Cf. also introductory note to Critical Appendix.）
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Catullus. Catullus. E. T. Merrill. Cambridge. Harvard University Press. 1893.
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