Interpretations of Catullus

Cultivate (colunt) is obviously nonsensical, and must be emended. Both the emendations of colunt which have been proposed go back to Heinsius;2 one of them, olent, has captured half the editors in spite of its palaeographic implausibility; the other, tegunt, has dropped out of sight since Baehrens' edition.3 Deferrari and Eagan, in their Concordance to Statius, so far assume the correctness of olent that they describe the colunt of the manuscript tradition as a varia lectio. D'Arcy Thompson in the 1930's made the line as amended by Heinsius, with olent, into the title of an article;4 and never mentioned that he was arguing from an emended text. Indeed the whole prevailing notion, that the Romans used bad poems as wrapping-paper for fish in the market, has to be taken for granted before Heinsius' emendation olent can be ventured: accordingly, because editors in general had agreed to accept olent, the underlying notion was assumed which made it palatable. Of course the next step was to use the word olent as proof of the custom. But three centuries are

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