Catullus could easily have suffered the fate of his friends Calvus and Cinna: his work, like theirs, could have survived only fractionally in a few wretched fragments quoted by grammarians. But the Gods decreed otherwise—or, quite simply, we were lucky. One manuscript of his poems, complete save for some dozen gaps of a line or more, was brought to his home town of Verona ‘from a far frontier’, as an epigram attached to it recorded, at the very beginning of the fourteenth century. This MS is known as V, short for codex Veronensis. A little later a copy of V was made, perhaps by Petrarch; this copy is known as X. V and X have both disappeared, but about 1375 another copy of V was made; this is now in the Bodleian Library at Oxford and is therefore known as O (codex Oxoniensis).

[From Lee's Introduction]

Cui dono lepidum nouum libellum
arida modo pumice expolitum?

[From Catullus' original Latin]

Whom do I give a neat new booklet
Polished up lately with dry pumice?

[From Lee's translation]