Commentarius

As we saw in Chapter 2, the first generation of Catullan commentators laboured mightily just to make sense of Catullus’ poems—-often with little success. None of the three was a famous or distinguished scholar. Partenio and Palladio were schoolmasters; Alessandro Guarino, though of a famous humanist family, was himself primarily a courtier. Each, to the extent that he is known at all, is known almost exclusively for his work on Catullus. There is nothing to link them with one another, and, except for Partenio, almost nothing to link their work to its time and place. With the second generation it is quite otherwise. Marc-Antoine de Muret, Achilles Statius, and Joseph Scaliger were all renowned and prolific scholars, and the work of each is firmly bound to its intellectual and cultural milieu.

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