Quot editores, tot Propertii, ‘as many Propertiuses as editors’: Phillimore’s quip aptly describes the current situation in the textual criticism of Propertius, where a conservative editor such as Fedeli and a radical one such as Heyworth present strongly different texts, and arguably different authors with distinct styles. The principal manuscripts of Catullus are far more corrupt, and yet his modern editors have not produced a similar variety of reconstructions. Apart from a few outliers, editions of Catullus from the same period tend to differ only in the treatment of individual textual problems, but the style of the text they present tends to be the same. The editorial vulgate of his poems has evolved markedly during the five centuries since they were first printed, but its development has been linear, although it can be broken down into several fairly distinct phases.