Note 2 — Chapter XV

The ultimate preservation of his poems depended on a single copy, which, after being lost to the world for four centuries, was re-discovered in Verona, the poet's birthplace, during the fourteenth century. As that copy was again lost, the text has to be determined from the conflicting testimony of later copies, only two of which are considered by the latest critics to be of independent value. There is thus much more uncertainty, and much greater latitude for conjecture, as to the actual words of Catullus, than in the case of almost any other Roman poet. As lines not found in this volume are attributed to him by ancient authors, and as he appears to allude to the composition of love poems in his first youth2 which must have been written before the earliest of the Lesbia-poems, it may be inferred that we do not possess all that he wrote. It has been generally assumed that the dedicatory lines to Cornelius Nepos, with which the volume opens, were prefixed by the poet to the collected edition of his poems which we now possess; but Mr. Ellis, following Bruner, has shown that that poem may more probably have been prefixed to a smaller and earlier collection. The lines—