Marulus, Catullus and the Codex Traguriensis (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, Lat. 7989)

0. Introductory remarks At the beginning of 2005, I discovered that the transcript of the Claudian poem De phoenice at the end of the Codex Traguriensis was in the hand of Marko Marulić. At that time I had at my disposal just reproductions of a few pages from this celebrated manuscript, and had to base the conclusion that there were more Marulić writings in the manuscript on information from the secondary literature. I put this forward in the paper “Marulić’s Hand on the Codex Traguriensis”, Colloquia Maruliana XIIII (2005), pp. 315-322. In the meantime I have acquired photographs of the whole of the codex, and can now put forward data based on my own inspection; they confirm the hypotheses developed in the previous text, and expand them with new understandings. According to A. C. de la Mare (1976) the codex was written in three hands: a – that of the scribe of the main text of the codex; b – a later hand that entered just a few marginal notes (which, as she hypothesises, might have been Zadar’s Juraj Benja / Georgius Begna); c – “an early sixteenth-cent. (?) italic hand”; it was to this hand that the Claudian poem De phoenice at the end of the MS was ascribed. She adds: “the scribe of the Claudian poem (early sixteenth century?) wrote some notes and variants in all the texts except the Cena, and made many additions to Catullus”. None of the three hands has in the literature been identified with even ap-proximate certainty. In the paper published in CM XIIII I showed without any doubt that the transcription of the Claudian poem had been done by Marko Marulić: this meant that for the first time one of the scribes of the Trogir Codex had been identified by name and surname. I devoted a separate study to the transcription of Claudian, “Marulić’s Claudian”, Croatica et Slavica Iadertina, 2 (2006), pp. 217-236 (also publishing here the editio princeps of the transcription). On the basis of an inspection of the entire codex, there is no doubt at all that hand c belongs to Marko Marulić. 1. Marulić’s marginalia in the non-Catullan part of the Trogir Codex I was unable to obtain from the Bibliothèque Nationale any colour photo-graphs, but only black and white reproductions of the whole codex. From black and white pictures it is not possible to acquire some very important information such as what colour the ink is, and in some places the text cannot be read at all or with only limited certainty. For this reason I restricted my research to notes writ-ten in the margins (not considering at all, then, those that were entered interlinearly, nor those written over the text of hand a). For the same reasons I decided not to get into the attribution of the very interesting curlicue marks that appear in many places on the margins of the codex. In form they are very similar to those that Marulić tended to write on the margins of his books. Table 1 shows Marulić’s marginalia in the Trogir Codex (except those to the Catullus poems, which I treat separately). They are to be found in several places alongside the verses of Tibullus, Propertius and Ovid, perhaps alongside Virgil’s Moretum; at the edge of the Petronius’s Satyricon (actually, alongside the excerpta vulgaria, for alongside the Cena Trimalchionis there are no traces of Marulić’s hand) the Split Humanist entered two marginal titles. With respect to content and function, the marginalia can be classified into three groups: Marginal titles: Table 1, nos. 3, 4, 7, 8, 17, 18. All in all they recall the marginal markings that Marulić put into his own works (in Judith and the Davidiad, Susannah and Carnival and Lent. Lexical glosses: Table 1, nos. 1, 5, 10 These consist of the writing out of uncommon words from the main text in the margin. Textual variants and emendations: Table 1, no. 9 (to some extent 10 as well), 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 (the last three are however, with respect to attribution, un-reliable). 2. Marulić’s marginalia to the Catullus poems 2.1. In the continuation below, traces of the reading of Catullus in Marulić’sworks already established are given; they are not very numerous (a single reminiscence in the Evangelistarum and several echoes from Catullus in the Latin verses of Marulić). 2.2. After this a review of previous research into the Catullus text in the TrogirCodex is given (M. Zicàri, A. C. de la Mare, J. Haig Gaisser, D. F. S. Thomson). The interventions of hand c in the text and on the margins of the Catullus poems were not at all interesting to previous investigators. But since we now know the author, they have come into Marulology as something completely new, as well as a contribution to the knowledge of the reception of Catullus in the Renaissance. There are many interventions by Marulić in the Catullus part of the Trogir Codex, and they are very diverse in kind (the typology of them is given in Table 2). Alongside almost every poem, Marulić wrote some short accompanying note in the margin, some kind of summary, and he entered many emendations into the text of the Catullus poems, writing them between the lines, or over the original entry, or in the margin. At a rough guess, there must be at least three hundred such variants or emendations. 2.3. In the Catullus part of the codex, too, I have discussed only the notes written in the margins. I have classified them into three major groups: marginal titles and other emphases; textual variants; summaries of the poems. 2.3.1. Table 3 shows Marulić’s marginal titles and other emphases connected with the Catullus poems. Most of the marginal titles are written in a hand much larger than the other marginalia (this is particularly obvious with the personal names in the margins alongside poem 64). Should this be ascribed to some later origin for the writing (when the writer was making up for his senile myopia by writing bigger letters) or perhaps only to their different function? 2.3.2. Scholars to date have noted that the person who corrected the Catullus poems knew the edition of Catullus edited by Palladius Fuscus (Venice 1496), as well as that which was published in Venice in 1502 by Aldo Manuzio (prepared by Girolamo Avanzi). I have compared all of Marulić’s textual variants and mar-ginal corrections with these two editions (Table 4). This has shown that some of his notes do not correspond either with the 1496 or the 1502 edition (such places are indicated in Table 4 by bold). Did then Marulić make use of some other edition, apart from those of 1496 and 1502? I have inspected three more Catullus editions available to me (1472, 1487 and 1500) and two editions of Avanzi’s Emendationes in Catullum (1495, 1500). In addition I checked out all the places in the table against the apparatus criticus in Mynors’ (1958) and Thomson’s (2003) editions. As far as I could establish, none of these sources has any confirmation for the versions that are bolded in Table 4. Hence I would not rule out the possibility that Marulić emended his copy of Catullus ope ingenii. From the first edition of Avanzi’s Emendationes we can find out that one codex of Catullus’s poems was owned by Marulić’s friend and fellow townsman Kristofor Papalić (Christophorus Papalis). From this lost manuscript, several readings are extant thanks to Avanzi, but they do not coincide with the marginalia of Marulić. Nevertheless, the very fact that one of the members of the Split Humanist circle possessed a manuscript of Catullus poems is worthy of attention. 2.3.3. The most extensive and obvious kind of Marulić writings in the TrogirCodex are the shorter or longer summaries of the Catullus poems. It has already been noticed (Zicàri, De la Mare, Haig Gaisser) that the compiler (now known to be Marulić) knew the Fuscus edition of 1496. An analysis of the Marulić summa-ries and a comparison of them with the Fuscus commentary shows that the Split Humanist always made use of the initial part of the Fuscus commentary to a given poem, where the Paduan too gives some kind of abstract of it. Marulić never wrote out these parts verbatim, but condensed and altered them, and sometimes added information from other sources: Martial (ad 3); Avanzi, Emendationes (ad 39); Macrobius, Saturnalia (ad 52). Several times he entered an occasional original and independent detail (ad 4; 63; 67). Table 5 gives a comparison of the text of Marulić’s summaries with the corresponding parts of the Fuscus commentaries. This is at the same time the editio princeps of Marulić’s marginalia. Those parts of the Marulić text that have no point of origin in the Fuscus commentary are bolded. 3. Some hypotheses, issues and conclusions Marulić’s notes in the Trogir Codex derive from a considerable span of time. It would seem that the earliest to be written was the transcription of the Claudian poem (in the 1480s or 1490s?). For the summaries of the Catullus poems the ter-minus post quem is 1496, and for the textual variants, 1502. It cannot be ruled out that the marginal titles to 64 are later than all the other marginalia. About the time of origin of the marginalia to the other texts in the codex, it is hard to say any-thing in any detail. It is clear that at the beginning Marulić’s abstracts accompanied almost every poem, and that subsequently they thinned out, and stopped entirely after 67 (with the exception of 97) (see Table 5). The same thing is true, if a little less pronouncedly, with the variant readings (cf. Table 4). What could have induced Marulić to put so much effort into the codex, and, more particularly, into the emendation of Catullus’ poems? Some of the answer might be found in the circumstance that Palladius Fuscus at the end of the 15th and the beginning of the 16th century spent time in Dalmatia as teacher of poetry and rhetoric: in the 1480s he was in Trogir (making friends with Coriolanus and Aloysius Cippicus), while from 1493 to 1516 he was in Zadar. It is known that Marulić was linked by friendship to Coriolanus, and it cannot be ruled out that he became acquainted with Fuscus. The edition of Catullus with commentaries, printed in 1496, must have attracted the attention of the local Humanists. In such a set-ting, in which Aldo’s edition of 1502 must also have been remarked, Marulić might easily have felt spurred to address the editing of the text in the codex. There are no secure answers; still, some conclusions seem to be reliably founded: — In the whole history of Marulić philology there has been not the slightest indication to date that he was engaged in the emendation of any classical text. Hence the discoveries put forward here supplement and alter to a considerable extent our perception of Marulić’s relationship with the ancient heritage. The Split writer now can be seen in the eminently Humanist role of a textologically aware recipient of a text from classical antiquity. That the subject of Marulić’s most studious philological interest was a Roman poet of amorous, satirical and licentious com-positions (the Split writer paraphrasing or writing out in the margins the most obscene expressions in Catullus’ repertoire without any hesitation) is a fact that need not be excessively dramatised, but henceforth will have to be borne seriously in mind as a not-to-be-neglected part of Marulić’s literary profile — Marulić can be considered the first Croatian reader of Petronius, and the first Croatian philologist. — The abstracts alongside the Catullus poems can, although they are not in-dependent and original texts, nevertheless be added to the Marulić corpus, and his literary bequest is thus enlarged by several precious pages of Latin prose. — The abundance and character of the interventions in the Trogir Codex, the temporal extent of their origin (perhaps of several decades) tend to support the claim that I advanced when writing of this topic the firs time (in CM XIIII): Marulić was not just fortuitous and coincidental reader of the codex, but its real and last-ing owner. Marulić thus appears as a key personality in the history of one of the most celebrated and enigmatic manuscripts containing works of the classical writers. The question arises: how did the Trogir manuscript come into Marulić’s hands? And how did it leave them, and why? Some answers to these questions, or at least hypothetical answers founded on the new material, will be advanced in a separate paper