Ope ingenii: Experiences of Textual Criticism 9783110312850, 9783110312720

Table of contents :
Preamble
Chapter I: Punctuation
Chapter II: Interpolation and Athetesis
Chapter III: Corruption and Conjecture
Epilogue
Index nominum et rerum
Index locorum

Citation preview

Gian Biagio Conte Ope ingenii

Gian Biagio Conte

Ope ingenii

Experiences of Textual Criticism

ISBN 978-3-11-031272-0 e-ISBN 978-3-11-031285-0 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2013 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Printing: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

To Adriano Prosperi and Michael D. Reeve friends, even if colleagues

Preface I have imagined a museum. Not an enormous one like the Vatican Museums, the Louvre, the British Museum or other similar thesauri of art and human history, but just a private collection, created on the basis partly of taste, partly of whim, and partly also by chance. Something comparable, more or less, to the collections of the Galleria Borghese in Rome, the Poldi Pezzoli Museum in Milan, the Frick Collection in New York, or the enchanting Pommersfelden Gallery in the castle of the Count of Schönborn-Wiesentheid, near Bamberg. These, and many others like them, possess a special kind of fascination, because they reflect and celebrate the soul of a person who has put together, one by one, only works selected with great care. That is what I have done in this short book: I have collected certain experiences of textual criticism, those that I remember best, those that struck me most, or that I admired most. In choosing them, I was conscious that they were going to serve as demonstrations of the nature and variety of our work as philologists: in a word, I wanted them to provide some practical teaching. La leçon par l’exemple, as the French might say. The route is empirical, learning to do it by watching it being done. An inductive kind of instruction, if you prefer: from the single case to the general rule. Examples, though, need to be exemplary, in other words they need to be exportable, so that they will serve for similar cases and their validity will not be limited to the single occurrence. The work of the textual critic is no different from that of a craftsman, and likewise unites the ideas of a profession and talent with those of rules and a method. Although the solution to every textual problem is bound to be individual, the same route that leads to the solution of one case may be profitably followed in others. From one example, or rather, from a series of instructive examples, a method can be derived. After all, ‘method’ is simply the route after you have traversed it. Several manuals of textual criticism exist, some very good: we all know them because we used them ourselves for our studies, and we have recommended them to students as a means of instruction. Most of them are normative, and it could not be otherwise. They present a well-arranged list of all the necessary notions of the technique of textual criticism, and record a wide range of case studies of the most commonly found corruptions. These manuals clearly possess the virtues of patience and a gradual approach: the patience with which the author dispenses his instruction, but also the gradual approach by which readers are introduced to a profession that is not at all easy. These two great merits are absent in my book, which throws all patience to the winds, and immediately sets before the reader a repast of critical masterpieces that have elicited my admiration.

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 Preface

Readers may ask: but can you teach something by starting from a reaction of admiration? I believe you can, as long as you succeed in communicating the reasons for that admiration, and in helping others to share it. For this reason, I have chosen to dissect every example, whether isolated or part of a series, analysing and explaining it so that the specific problem will emerge and the intellectual procedure that led to the happy solution will be appreciated. In reality, la leçon par l’exemple provides that the single case should not be merely an end in itself, but should offer instruction aiming to go beyond pure pleasure, becoming a method to be imitated. That is why my little book, which is not a manual of textual criticism, aspires, in a certain sense, to that definition: its purpose is to act as a training ground, a laboratory of experiments conducted in corpore nobili. This book took only a short time to write, but the thinking behind it was lengthy: accumulated readings, conversations with colleagues and students, occasional card indexes, suggestions solicited or spontaneously offered supplied the building material. I share with many others the idea that although our texts have drawn great profit from criticism ope ingenii, they are still in need of restoration far more commonly than is believed. Several cruces that are still unsolved, but also numerous well-camouflaged crypto-corruptions await their challengers; the hope is that this book may help, as far as possible, to sound the alert. The lengthy period of preparation has caused me to incur debts with many people who have generously shared their time and competence to discuss with me problems that are dealt with here: first and foremost James Diggle, Luigi Battezzato, Enrico Medda, Franco Montanari, but also Lucio Ceccarelli, Rolando Ferri, Luigi Galasso, Stefano Grazzini, Laura Micozzi, Filippomaria Pontani, Giulio Vannini: most of these latter are pupils of mine, those who have been, and still are, closest to me in my everyday work. Giulia Ammannati deserves special thanks for all the critical intelligence with which she has constantly succeeded in helping me. I also wish to acknowledge my debt for the sober elegance of the English version not only to the ability and competence of Ronald Packham, but also to the providential supervision of Anna Chahoud, Giovanbattista D’Alessio, Stephen Harrison and Luca Ruggeri. The dedication to two very dear friends, and excellent colleagues, is also intended as recognition of a debt that has grown through the years: I believe that if others were lucky enough to have companions like them in their work, the academic world would be a far pleasanter place. G. B. C.

Contents Preamble 

 1

Chapter I: Punctuation 

 7

Chapter II: Interpolation and Athetesis 

 29

Chapter III: Corruption and Conjecture 

 67

Epilogue 

 99

Index nominum et rerum  Index locorum 

 109

 107

Preamble

One day, years ago, while I was in Rome to visit some libraries and staying at a hotel not far from the Pantheon, it occurred to me that my old teacher, Augusto Campana, had once told me about the nearby Basilica of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, the only Gothic church in Rome. Here – he assured me – were hidden away some real art treasures, together with some important tombs, including that of the great humanist, Pietro Bembo. Why not go and have a look at the church? I hunted around, among the tombstones set in the floor, till I found the one that marked the burial of Cardinal Bembo. During my search, as I idly glanced around like any other irreverent tourist, I ended up in a chapel, where I came across the funeral inscription of the rich merchant Lello Maddaleni, a worthy Roman gentleman of the late XIV century who distributed corn and bread to his fellowcitizens during a terrible famine. The Latin text that recorded this praiseworthy act of Christian charity was fairly articulate, apart from an occasional slip of the stonemason’s chisel: ten reasonably well-composed hexameters, written in Gothic capital letters, where the capitals were mingled with uncial forms. There was only one hitch, towards the end: ATQVE SVIS OPIBVS PATRIE SVBVENIT ET VRBI / CVM EOBET EGRA FAMES. Given that there was a perfect tense in the main clause, I expected an imperfect subjunctive in the subordinate clause. But there was no possibility of fitting ESSET into the metrical sequence. And then, how could ESSET be mistakenly distorted into EOBET? When FORET came to my mind, everything fitted perfectly. And I also understood how the inexperienced stonecutter had come to misinterpret it: he had confused F and E and also R and B, thus committing two typical capital letter mistakes. Typical mistakes made with capital letters: this is one of the first pieces of advice in some old manuals of textual criticism: “Many mistakes in manuscripts written in minuscule can be explained as misunderstandings of more ancient documents written in capitals”. As a result, the first operation attempted by the aspiring philologist will be that of copying out the controversial text in capital letters, trying to substitute C for G, I for L, T for P, O for Q, and vice versa. Rarely, however, do these various combinations produce results proportionate to the neophyte’s enthusiasm. And yet, even if the results obtained by this kind of operation often prove to be disappointing, and even if fundamentally the rule may seem to be mechanical and naive, I am certain that Housman himself, the most sophisticated and talented critic of the last century, must have followed this palaeographical approach when he devised one of his most brilliant textual restorations.1 One of Martial’s epigrams, composed of eight couplets (lib. spect. XXI), recalls a spectacle at the

1 CR 15 (1901), p. 154 (= The Classical papers of A. E. Housman, collected and edited by J. Diggle

4 

 Preamble

amphitheatre, where the myth of Orpheus had been enacted. Everything, the poet says, had gone in accordance with tradition: the singing and the music had swept away forests and rocks, the wild beasts had approached him enchanted except that at the end Orpheus had been unexpectedly torn to pieces, not by the Maenads, but by a musically ignorant bear. The aprosdóketon that occupies the final pentameter is transmitted by H (the best and oldest manuscript) as follows: haec tamen res est facta ita pictoria. Once transformed into Latin capital letters, ITAPICTORIA, the sequence appeared to Housman to be interpretable as a succession of Greek capitals: it sufficed to write ΠΑΡ᾽ ἹCΤΟΡΙΑΝ. He also realised that the adversative tamen in this context is unmetrical, and that the need was rather for a restrictive adverb after haec: his palaeographical competence helped him to remember that the abbreviation tm̃ could mean either tamen or tantum, and that manuscripts in the minuscule frequently exchanged these two little words (or rather: tm̃ for tñ ?). Thus the happily restored line recovers all its original verve: haec tantum res est facta παρ᾽ ἱστορίαν. This one detail of the spectacle was different from the traditional mythical version. Thus, although Housman never missed the chance in his writings to criticise those who made palaeography their chosen approach for dealing with every textual fault, it seems that here, almost à contre coeur, he benefits from his own palaeographical knowledge. That is because palaeography, for philologists, is like marriage for some people: many refuse it, many warn against it, but inevitably many end up by getting married, and some even do so several times. To tell the truth, Housman knew that palaeography offers its best services if it is invoked, not as a universal panacea for first aid treatment, but rather as the ally of an alert critical sense, as a factor that may help to formulate a conjectural hypothesis. It must be admitted that at the preliminary level all diagnoses of errors are nothing other than what empirical doctors would call attempts ex adiuuantibus. When we read a text, it may be the grammar, or the metre, or more often a violation of the logical sense that warns us that there is something wrong with it; once warned, we allow the text itself to suggest a remedy, almost by its internal force; when the remedy is conjectured, we verify it on the basis of palaeographi-

and F. R. D. Goodyear, vol. II, Cambridge 1972, pp. 536‒537). The way had already been opened up by Bücheler, who had tried transcribing the clausula in capital letters.

Preamble 

 5

cal criteria (if the error was caused by script). This breakdown into three successive moments is only a convenient way of representing a mental process which in practice, on the contrary, is almost always simultaneous. The various stages, and even the logical sequence connecting them, are often merged into a single brainwave: an intuition of the critic, who exploits past experiences, implicit rules, almost unreflected processes of reasoning, which often take shape in a single act of thought. Palaeographical considerations, if necessary, usually come together with the idea of the correction itself: they reveal how the error developed, corroborate the hypothesis, and provide the evidence for it. It is my belief, however, that in order to be clear and convincing, corrections do not always need to be substantiated by palaeographical verisimilitude. They are often suggested by the drift of the context, rather than by the graphic presentation of the text. After all, it is by adaption to the context that the outline of the discourse, previously disfigured, is restored and recovers its lost features. What did the wise judge say in the fable narrated by Confucius? “Show me the truth, and I’ll recognize it”. A happy conjecture is like a flash of recognition: you feel that you recognize the text for what it undoubtedly must have been.

Chapter I: Punctuation

There is nothing smaller than a full stop or a comma. And yet we don’t need to be mathematicians to know that if you change the position of a comma or a full stop in a series of numbers, you will change the numerical value – perhaps considerably. And the insertion of full stops or commas into the formulation of a written thought is no less decisive. The mishap that befell Abbot Martin, according to a burlesque French tradition of the XV century, is well known: this devout figure had thought of embellishing the entry to his monastery with a sign saying: Porta patens esto. Nulli claudatur honesto Let the door remain wide open. Let it not be closed to any honest man. But the stonemason who was given the task of engraving this inscription got the punctuation wrong: Porta patens esto nulli. Claudatur honesto Let not the door be opened to anybody. Let it be closed to the honest man. What should have been a warm welcome, inspired by Christian charity, was turned into a curt message of rejection. The end of the story relates that, as a punishment for this, Martin was deprived of his ecclesiastical rank. Philologists have long appreciated how important punctuation is in the editing of texts, making a distinctio between the parts of a discourse. The interventions are minimal, but they have important consequences for the meaning. The most striking case that I know of is the achievement of Alfred Housman (that man again!). In Catullus 64, the epyllion of Peleus and Thetis, when the Parcae address the fortunate bridegroom, prophesying a glorious future for him, ll. 323‒324 run as follows: O decus eximium magnis uirtutibus augens, Emathiae tutamen opis, carissime nato. You who increase your outstanding glory with great virtues, protector of the power of Thessaly, most dear to your son. Thus many of the ancient editors, who exercised their ingenuity on l. 324 for centuries: the least implausible attempts were clarissime nato (‘most glorious on account of your son’) and carissime fato (‘most dear to fate’). But Housman arrived, and realised that the first half of the line, thus structured and separate from the vocative carissime nato, also presents a serious difficulty: the singular opis, with the meaning of ‘the power of Thessaly’, is lexically extremely unusual. He recognized Opis as the genitive of the name of the goddess Ops, the Italic equivalent of Rhea, the wife of Cronos and mother of Zeus (Plaut. Persa 252 Ioui

10 

 Chapter I

opulento incluto Ope nato; mil. 1082 Iuppiter ex Ope natust). The son of Ops is thus none other than Jupiter, indicated by a learned periphrasis in the Alexandrian style. And then Peleus is Homerically Διῒ φίλος, “dear to Zeus”, like the kings and heroes of myth. Housman separated the words differently in the line, and wrote: Emathiae tutamen, Opis carissime nato. protector of Thessaly, most dear to the son of Ops (= Jupiter) and then concluded, with regal superiority: “The reading of the manuscripts offers no difficulty … and stands in need of no help from anyone except the printer.”2 Incidentally, I remember once seeing a similar case in early Latin epic poetry, where philology recovered a proper name which had not been recognized: an intervention of pure graphic cosmetics. Among the fragments of the Bellum Poe­ nicum by Naevius, there is one (51 Morel) transmitted by Priscian, G.L. 2, 235, 20 Hertz: magnam domum decoremque ditem uexerant. In his very scholarly edition and commentary,3 Marino Barchiesi proposes that the line should be written as follows (fr. 51): magnam domum decoremque Ditem uexerant. Dis is Pluto, the god of Hades, who goes up to Mount Olympus for a concilium deorum with the gods of the world above in their place. This hypothesis, elegant and plausible, solves the grammatical difficulties that arise from the use of three adjectives, the first two of which are linked by -que, without any syntactic possibility of adding a third.4 But let us return to those changes in punctuation which, as I was saying, solve the difficulties of a transmitted text, without any invasive intervention. See Verg. Aen. 9, 464 as presented in Mynors: Turnus in arma uiros armis circumdatus ipse suscitat: aeratasque acies in proelia cogunt, quisque suos, uariisque acuunt rumoribus iras. 463 cogunt Cunningham, Wagner: cogit codd., Serv. 464 suos PRω, Seru.: suas Mdr

2 CQ 9 (1915), p. 230 (= Classical Papers, III, p. 914). 3 M. Barchiesi, Nevio epico. Storia, interpretazione, edizione critica dei frammenti del primo epos latino, Padova 1962, pp. 426, 506, 538. 4 ditem〈que〉 Zander.

Punctuation 

 11

Clearly, Mynors interprets: “Turnus exhorts his men to arm themselves: they gather the armour-clad ranks for battle  – each one his own men  – and with various cries rouse their fury”. Quisque suos thus becomes an insertion katà parénthesin or dià mésou, whichever you prefer. But the codices are unanimous in reading cogit, and Servius agrees with them: cogunt is an emendation proposed first by Cunningham and then by Wagner, who were trying, in this way, to adjust cogit to acuunt in the following line. Sabbadini (followed by Castiglioni and Geymonat) makes quisque the subject of cogit (in other words, all three Italian editors maintain the reading of the manuscripts), but consequently the verb cogit comes to govern the two accusatives aeratas acies and suos, which only apparently take their place side by side: in reality, the sentence does not make sense. Perhaps aeratas acies is considered to be an attributive apposition of suos, almost an explanatory addition: “each one gathers his men, armour-clad troops”. But to tell the truth, I confess that I do not understand it. To overcome the problem, more sensibly, Ribbeck, who also read cogit, did not accept suos (although it is much better attested) and chose instead the suas of M, which agrees well with aeratas acies, but which clearly appears to be a correction devised by an ancient reader, to restore syntactical agreement. No corrections are needed: every difficulty disappears if we shift the punctuation from before to after aeratasque acies.5 Thus aeratasque acies is no longer governed by cogit, but depends on suscitat and is closely coordinated with the accusative uiros of the previous line: uiros … suscitat aeratasque acies. A new asyndetic period then follows: in proelia cogit quisque suos (‘everyone gathers his men in battle order’). We may note that in this case too as many other times in Virgil, the asyndeton serves to indicate the immediate consequentiality of the actions: Turnus calls his warriors to battle, and immediately each of his officers (as if they were ‘tribuni militum’ of the Roman army) arranges (cogit quisque) his troops in battle formation.6

5 P. Vergilius Maro, Aeneis, recensuit atque apparatu critico instruxit G. B. Conte, “Bibliotheca Teubneriana”, Berlin / New York 2009. 6 Perhaps the interpretation of Servius was already correct: he not only reads suos, but also notes “nam plenum est aeratasque acies”. His note is even clearer if we read it not in the text of Thilo-Hagen, but rather in the recent edition of Servius by Ramires, “nam pleonasmos est aeratasque acies”. Servius seems to have realised that aeratasque acies is a coordinated addition to the previous proposition.

12 

 Chapter I

Talking about problems of punctuation in the Aeneid, there is another which already tormented ancient exegetes. In 11, 18, Aeneas delivers a homily commemorating the dead Pallas; standing in front of the trophy erected with the arms of Mezentius, and inciting his men to battle against the enemy, he says: arma parate, animis et spe praesumite bellum. prepare arms, with courage and hope look forward to the fight. This is the reading of Hirtzel and Mynors (and Heyne before them). I do not agree. Arma parate animis forms an enallage, that typical device of expressive inversion thanks to which, by changing the normal construction, Virgil achieves great stylistic effect.7 The whole line is constructed in the form of a ‘dicolon abundans’ (another stylistic feature dear to Virgil); the first part is coordinated with the second half, and they join forces to underline the same idea: “supply arms for your courage and with hope look forward to the fight”: arma ~ bellum, animis ~ spe, parate ~ praesumite. Among other things, the two complementary cola are arranged in such a way as to form a perfect chiasmus: arma parate animis, et spe praesumite bellum. As confirmation, compare Aen. 11, 491 exultatque animis et spe iam praecipit hostem. Similarly, if we adapt the punctuation appropriately, we can restore all the fluency to a passage of Lucan (bell. ciu. 4, 581‒587): non segnior illo Marte fuit, qui tum Libycis exarsit in aruis. Namque rates audax Lilybaeo litore soluit Curio, nec forti uelis Aquilone recepto inter semirutas magnae Carthaginis arces et Clipeam tenuit stationis litora notae, primaque castra locat cano procul aequore…

585

No less fiercely the fire of war blazed up then in the land of Libya. For bold Curio weighed anchor on the shore of Lilybaeum, and a gentle North wind filled the sails, till he reached the shore of famous anchorage

7 Cf. G. B. Conte, “Anatomia di uno stile: l’enallage e il nuovo sublime”, in: Virgilio: L’epica del sentimento, Turin 2005, p. 36 n. 45 (= The Poetry of Pathos: Studies in Virgilian Epic, ed. by S. J. Harrison, Oxford 2007, p. 93 n. 45).

Punctuation 

 13

between Clipea and the half-ruined citadels of great Carthage. He pitched his first camp at some distance from the foaming sea … With a swift move, Caesar’s bold general Curio decides to transfer his army from Sicily to Africa, to face the troops of Varus. Lucan’s aim is to underline the impetuous nature of the action: Curio sets sail, lands in Africa and rushes to fight the enemy. This idea clashes with the current interpretation that the ships proceed slowly, due to a slack wind (a very strange thing, if we consider that the fleet is driven on by the Aquilo, a strong northerly wind). The current punctuation connects nec and forti, whereas there should be a break after nec, leaving the ablative absolute, forti uelis Aquilone recepto (‘a strong North wind having filled the sails’), isolated between commas.8 Thus Curio’s action regains all its swiftness: rates soluit… nec… tenuit stationis litora notae (‘and he did not occupy the shore’). The case of Cic. Pro Rab. Post. 14 is more complex: here, Clark (Oxford 1909), Klotz (Leipzig 1918) and Boulanger (Paris 1949) agree in reading: Glaucia solebat homo impurus sed tamen acutus populum monere ut, cum lex aliqua recitaretur, primum uersum attenderet. Si esset ‘DICTATOR, CONSUL, PRAETOR, MAGISTER EQUITUM’, ne laboraret: sciret nihil ad se pertinere; sin esset ‘QUICUMQUE POST HANC LEGEM’, uideret ne qua noua quaestione alli­ garetur. On the other hand, Olechowska (Leipzig 1981) follows the reading of Poggio’s copy (Vatic. Lat. 11458) and prints ne laboraret: scire nihil ad se pertinere. Whether we take one reading or the other, the general meaning of the passage is clear. Glaucia, a character of the Sullan period, famous for his wit, invited the people with the cutting irony of a tribune, to pay attention only to the first few words of a law: if these were ‘the Dictator’, ‘the Consul’, ‘the Praetor’ or ‘the Commander of the Cavalry’, they needn’t bother to listen; if, instead, they were ‘Anybody who on the basis of this law’, they must listen carefully, for fear that the decree might conceal some measure that would touch them personally. However, the absolute use of laboraret is problematic; furthermore, sciret would need to be considered as equivalent to intelligeret, which, though not impossible, appears to me somewhat forced. The point is that laboraret and scire are not to be separated: the expression laborare scire is almost an idiomatic unit, meaning ‘to take trouble to find out, to make an effort to find out’: cf. Catull. 67, 17 nemo quaerit nec scire laborat; Hor. ep. 1, 3, 2 scire laboro; Ov. Met. 10, 413 scelus est quod scire laboras; Pers. 2, 17 minimum est quod scire laboro; cf. also Hor. serm. 2, 8, 19 nosse laboro.

8 Cf. M. Martina, MD 34 (1995), pp. 195‒197.

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 Chapter I

The editors wrongly believed that ne laboraret was the end of the exhortatory clause, whereas the punctuation should be changed, to give the reading ne labo­ raret scire: nihil ad se pertinere “they needn’t take any trouble to find out: it wasn’t in any way connected with them”. It is impossible to overemphasise the importance of punctuation for the textual critic. Editors do not always devote the necessary attention to this aspect of their work; often, indeed, in their effort to choose the authentic reading among those transmitted, and to correct verbal corruptions or crypto-corruptions, they end up by accepting texts which require a more careful distinctio. This kind of intervention, too, can produce quite remarkable results for the restoration of a corrupt text. The rule will always be one, and one alone: try to translate the text you are reading literally; it is only in this way that, as you try to find a precise equivalent for the single words, you discover all the obstacles that a reading of the text as a whole overcomes and simplifies. For example, facing a sequence like that of Soph. O.C. 980‒981, I confess that I can understand it fairly well at a first cursory glance, but I can’t manage to translate it literally if I force myself to consider every linguistic element of it: οὐ γὰρ οὖν σιγήσομαι, σοῦ γ᾽ εἰς τόδ᾽ ἐξελθόντος ἀνόσιον στόμα. Oedipus is replying indignantly to Creon’s accusations: “then I will not keep silent, seeing that you have gone so far as to utter this insolent discourse”. This is the text as Jebb reads it, and his interpretation is as follows: “ἀνόσιον στόμα agrees with τόδ᾽, depending on εἰς. Since στόμα was familiar to poetry in the sense of λόγος (cp. O. T. 426), this version is clearly preferable to taking εἰς τόδ᾽ separately and ἀνόσιον στόμα as accus. of respect”. Not only is this a forced semantic interpretation, but, it seems to me, the rejected alternative (accusative of respect) is no less difficult to translate in any form that is not merely approximate. The solution was perceived by Maehly, but it was also independently defended by Housman in an intelligent note: σοῦ γ᾽ εἰς τόδ᾽ ἐξελθόντος, ἀνόσιον στόμα. seeing that you have gone this far, you foul mouth The vocative restores a fully acceptable meaning to the sentence, and corresponds, as a linguistic gesture, to the exclamation with which, a few lines above, Oedipus had started his indignant reply to Creon: v. 960 Ὦ λῆμ᾽ ἀναιδές “O shameless arrogance”.

Punctuation 

 15

Another instructive case of appropriate distinctio: Ov. Met. 8, 629‒632, the wellknown entry of Jupiter and Mercury into the humble house of Philemon and Baucis: mille domos clausere serae; tamen una recepit, parua quidem stipulis et canna tecta palustri, sed pia Baucis anus parilique aetate Philemon illa sunt annis iuncti iuuenalibus… a thousand homes were locked against them; still, one house received them, humble indeed, thatched with straw and reed from the marsh; but pious old Baucis and Philemon of equal age were in that cottage wedded in their youth… This is the text that the two most recent editors present (Anderson, BT 1977, and Tarrant, OCT 2004). But if we want sed to have a meaning, it is necessary to add some kind of punctuation after pia, as Ehwald did (BT 1915).9 What logic is there, after all, in a sentence like “the house was poor, but the pious Baucis lived in it”? Parua and pia are parallel; the addition sed pia completes and corrects parua quidem, since quidem and sed are correlatives (μέν … δέ). Thus we need to adopt a different punctuation: parua quidem stipulis et canna tecta palustri, / sed pia: Baucis anus parilique aetate Philemon etc. In this case, as in the following one, the effects of a change in the punctuation might not seem to be decisive for the meaning of the sentence, but this is not true at all: the wrong punctuation weakens the style of writing, destroys the emphasis that characterises it, and sometimes may also violate the very substance of the thought. See Ov. am. 3, 9, 37 ff., in the elegy that mourns the untimely death of Tibullus. Kenney’s excellent OCT edition (1961) gives the following text, which is the same as that of the most recent Teubner editor (Ramírez de Verger, 2003): uiue pius: moriere pius; cole sacra: colentem    mors grauis a templis in caua busta trahet. But I do not believe that one can ‘die piously’ (only those Christian believers do so who rely on the sacraments and trust that their souls may be saved, even in limine mortis). The balance of the two sentences, and rhetoric itself, require the punctuation of J. C. Jahn:

9 More assertive than convincing the note of E. Kenney ad loc. in the commentary of the Fondazione Lorenzo Valla, Milan 2011, p. 367.

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 Chapter I

uiue pius: moriere; pius cole sacra: colentem    mors grauis a templis in caua busta trahet. “live a pious life: you will die; venerate the sacred rites piously, and already while you are venerating them, destructive death will drag you out of the temples into the hollow grave”. Thus instead of acting as a rather superfluous appendix to the verb moriere, the second pius emphatically picks up the first. And above all, the verb moriere, isolated and bare, expresses all the peremptory emphasis that the poet intended: a dramatic, traumatic stab in the back. It is often in the emphasis given to a sentence that the real meaning of a passage is hidden. In spoken language, the voice takes steps to inform the listener by marking the words with different intonation: at times affirmative, at other times imperative, or interrogative. On the contrary, in written discourse, the intonation is often supplied by means of linguistic signs: particles or pronouns or adverbs indicate, where necessary, if the sentence is to be interpreted as interrogative. As we have seen above, the punctuation signs are all important for the comprehension, but without doubt the question mark is the one which, by substantially modifying the form of the discourse, intimately conditions the meaning. It is above all the texts of drama that are exposed to this kind of damage (in particular comic texts, because they are more apt to include exchanges of witticisms, the lively deuerbia between one character who asks a question and another who answers). Let us consider a passage from Trimalchio’s Banquet, Satyricon 43, 7: we are right in the middle of the conversation between the freedmen. Seleucus has just returned from the funeral of Chrysanthus: “he was a good man”, he says. But Phileros irritatedly responds: “He may have been a good man, but he had a terrible character: out of questions of financial interest, he had quarrelled with his brother, who was a charming person, and for that reason he had disinherited him, leaving his patrimony to one who wasn’t a member of the family”: 43,  5 et ille stips, dum fratri suo irascitur, nescio cui terrae filio patrimonium elegauit. Longe fugit quisquis suos fugit. Then, after adding a few sententious considerations, he concludes disconsolately: tamen uerum quod frunitus est, quamdiu uixit. †cui datum est, non cui destinatum. The obelos of K. Müller (maintained in each of his four editions) still represents the same textual situation left by Bücheler, who marked a lacuna between uixit and cui and noted in the apparatus “detruncata haec mihi uidentur et fere sic redintegranda: tamen uerum est, quod sua (uel quod uitam) frunitus est quam diu uixit. Etiam deinceps conturbauit librarius neque perscripsit nisi partem sententiae huiusmodi: nec improbo, habet enim cui datum est, non cui destinatum”. In his apparatus, Bücheler mentioned the supplement

Punctuation 

 17

of Muncker, who hypothesised a ‘saut du même au même’: cui datum est, 〈datum est〉, almost as if he meant “what’s been given has been given; there’s no more to be said about it”. On the contrary, I believe that there is nothing missing from the text.10 We only need to give an interrogative form to the first part of the utterance: tamen uerum, quod frunitus est quamdiu uixit, cui datum est? non cui destinatum. To give greater emphasis to his conclusion, Phileros asks himself a question and then answers: “To tell the truth, though, all that he enjoyed as long as he lived, who has it been given to? Not to the person it was [properly] destined for”.11 Preceded by his own question, the answer becomes more vivid, and underlines the scandal: on the basis of his platitudinous morality in defence of the patrimony, Phileros cannot accept that the inheritance should end up, against all legitimate expectations, in the hands of an outsider. In the mimetic rendering by which Petronius reproduces the lively speech of the freedmen, this interrogative gambit is like an expressive habit which colours the whole of the brief speech of Phileros: at the beginning, the freedman had already said quid habet quod queratur? (43,1); and immediately afterwards, to underline that Chrysanthus had not died young, et quot putas illum annos secum tulisse? septuaginta et supra (43, 7). Let us look at another case (more complex, but also more instructive than the others) in which the restoration of the text is again based on a simple change in the punctuation. This is the closing couplet of poem 107 by Catullus, which already led Muretus to write, more than four centuries ago, “postremi uersus … ita uarie leguntur ut appareat eam uarietatem non aliunde quam ex corrigere uolentium temeritate extitisse”. Since then, conjectures have been plentiful: from …magis hac res / optandas uita of Lachmann, to …magis hac re / optandam uitam of Riese, to …magis hace / optandam uita of Ribbeck, to …magis hac re / optandam 〈in〉 uita of Kroll; down to the latest editor of Catullus, D. F. S. Thomson (Toronto 1997), who accepts, faute de mieux, the old conjecture of A. Guarinus …magis hac quid / optandum uita. Mynors had resigned himself to marking the text with cruces:

10 Cf. MD 55 (2005), pp. 205‒207. 11 It is hardly necessary to point out that in this case, too, the restoration of the text involves a simple change in the punctuation: this confirms, on the one hand, the reliability of the evidence of H, but on the other, the frequent unreliability of its punctuation, a defect that may be due to the scarcity of punctuation signs in its model: cf. S. Gaselee, A collotype reproduction of that por­ tion of cod. Paris. 7989, […] which contains the Cena Trimalchionis of Petronius, Cambridge 1915, p. 11 n. 3.

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 Chapter I

Quis me uno uiuit felicior aut magis † hac est    † optandus uita dicere quis poterit? hac O, me GR

Est is an excellent reading, I believe; it is only necessary to adjust optandus to optandum12 and change the discourse into direct speech: Quis me uno uiuit felicior aut ‘Magis hac est    optandum uita’ dicere quis poterit? Direct speech is highly appropriate, vital and vivacious as it is, for the joyful enthusiasm of the poet when he is at last reunited with his beloved: indeed, this is the bold gesture by which he seals his burst of happiness. Besides the torments of a love branded by inconstancy and betrayal, Catullus also undoubtedly encountered the sharp criticism of those who disapproved of a life totally dedicated to passion, the rumores … senum seueriorum. Against these people, against each of these self-righteous critics, the poet launches his impertinent provocation: will they have the courage to affirm: “there are things more desirable than this life”? A life that they would define as nequitia, whereas instead it is the peak of happiness. Quintilian observed (inst. 9, 2, 36) that the construction dicat aliquis or dixerit aliquis followed by direct speech is the way to introduce an objection which the speaker imagines may be made against him: cf. Ter. Andr. 640 Atque aliquis dicat ‘Nihil promoueris’; Ov. ars 3, 7 Dixerit e multis aliquis ‘quid uirus in anguis / adicis et rabidae tradis ouile lupae?’; Phaedr. 3 Prol. 8 Fortasse dices:‘Aliquae uenient feriae’. It is the implicitly adversative emphasis, presupposed in the moralising interlocutor, that generates the division in the sentence: Magis hac est  / optandum uita: the demonstrative hac is brought forward in the line and displaces est, which stands out at the end, with affirmative force and a strong enjambement. Plautus puts the same syntactic structure – identical also in the emphatic word order – into the mouth of one of his characters at the height of his emotion (Rud. 675): Par moriri est. Neque est melius morte in malis rebus miseris. Having recovered the exuberance of the closing direct speech, with its provocative, self-satisfied aggressiveness, the poem regains its epigrammatic edge, which, as often happens with the couplets of Catullus, and even more so with his imitator Martial, turns into a mischievous smile.

12 This is one of the most common scribal errors, quite frequent in the tradition of Catullus, as shown by G. Wiman’s series of examples in Eranos 61 (1963), p. 37.

Punctuation 

 19

I mentioned above that as the texts of drama are constructed in dialogue form, they may suffer more than others if the punctuation does not orientate the reader correctly: a character’s remark acquires a radically different meaning (even the opposite) if it is given an affirmative rather than an interrogative tone. Let me provide another example which, I believe, will clarify the question.13 In the Andromache of Euripides, the protagonist accuses Menelaus of cowardice and unworthiness for kidnapping the child she has had with Neoptolemus, and for threatening to kill him if Andromache did not leave her position as a suppliant at the altar (ll. 319‒360); she then ends her bitter invective with the insinuation that the conquest of Troy had also been organised by Menelaus for a squalid reason to do with women: truly a shameful kind of behaviour (ll. 361‒363). In his reply, Menelaus (according to the text commonly printed: thus also Diggle in his excellent Oxford edition of 1984) appears to accept the accusation of Andromache (ll. 366‒369): γύναι, τάδ᾽ ἐστὶ σμικρὰ καὶ μοναρχίας οὐκ ἄξι᾽, ὡς φήις, τῆς ἐμῆς οὐδ᾽ Ἑλλάδος. εὖ δ᾽ ἴσθ᾽, ὅτου τις τυγχάνει χρείαν ἔχων, τοῦτ᾽ ἔσθ᾽ ἑκάστωι μεῖζον ἢ Τροίαν ἑλεῖν. Woman, these things are, as you say, trifles and not worthy of my kingly power or of Greece. But make no mistake, whatever an individual happens to desire, that becomes for him greater than the conquest of Troy. The idea that Menelaus accepts the accusation is surprising. It is true that the whole scene reveals his calculating cynicism, but the ethics that he professes are not an admission of unworthiness, but simply a straightforward recognition of Realpolitik: one’s own interests are to be pursued in every way possible. G. Hermann14 realised that the two lines should be changed into a rhetorical question: γύναι, τάδ᾽ ἐστὶ σμικρὰ καὶ μοναρχίας οὐκ ἄξι᾽, ὡς φήις, τῆς ἐμῆς οὐδ᾽ Ἑλλάδος; εὖ δ᾽ ἴσθ᾽, ὅτου τις τυγχάνει χρείαν ἔχων, τοῦτ᾽ ἔσθ᾽ ἑκάστωι μεῖζον ἢ Τροίαν ἑλεῖν.

13 Illuminating considerations in L. Battezzato, “Pragmatica e retorica delle frasi interrogative in Euripide”, MD 44 (2000), pp. 141‒173. 14 Euripidis Andromacha, recensuit G. Hermannus, Lipsiae 1838, ad loc.

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 Chapter I

Woman, are these trifles and not worthy of my kingly power or of Greece, as you say? Make no mistake, … The rhetorical question used by Menelaus is a way of denying the affirmation contained in it: and this restores full consistency to the dialogue. In spite of its elegant economy, Hermann’s proposal has been ignored by subsequent editors. I cannot understand why. But I would like to present a few parallels that show how frequent (indeed, usual) this form of expression is among the rhetorical strategies of dramatic argument. I remember that when Eduard Fraenkel held his seminars at the Scuola Normale in Pisa, he used to say to us, every now and then, with a smile: “A philologist is always happy when he finds a parallel”.15 He spoke Italian very well, but, in an error caused by the German eine Parallele, he got the gender of the word wrong in Italian (… “when he finds a parallel bar”); and we, too, smiled in amusement at his mistake. So here are some parallels that will satisfy us. The sentence introduced by εὖ δ᾽ ἴσθι in Andr. 368 is in clear contrast with the preceding rhetorical question, which implies a negative answer, as we have seen; the same happens in Hipp. 654‒656: Πῶς ἂν οὖν εἴην κακός, ὃς οὐδ᾽ ἀκούσας τοιάδ᾽ ἁγνεύειν δοκῶ; εὖ δ᾽ ἴσθι, τοὐμόν σ᾽ εὐσεβὲς σώιζει, γύναι. How could I ever be an evil man, when the very sound of your words makes me feel unclean? But make no mistake, my piety protects you, woman. The structure is similar in Soph. Ajax 1304‒1309: ἆρ᾽ ὧδ᾽ ἄριστος ἐξ ἀριστέοιν δυοῖν βλαστὼν ἂν αἰσχύνοιμι τοὺς πρὸς αἵματος, οὓς νῦν σὺ τοιοῖσδ᾽ ἐν πόνοισι κειμένους ὠθεῖς ἀθάπτους, οὐδ᾽ ἐπαισχύνηι λέγων; εὖ νυν τόδ᾽ ἴσθι, τοῦτον εἰ βαλεῖτέ που, βαλεῖτε χἠμᾶς τρεῖς ὁμοῦ συγκειμένους. Thus nobly born as I am from two noble parents, should I disgrace my own flesh and blood,

15 See the recordings of two seminars (on Ajax and Philoctetes) interspersed with exuberant exclamations and witty, learned obiter dicta in Due seminari romani di Eduard Fraenkel, with an introduction by L. E. Rossi, Sussidi Eruditi 28, Edizioni di Storia e Letter., Rome 1977.

Punctuation 

 21

whom, now that such troubles have laid him low, you would thrust forth without burial, and are you not ashamed to say it? Now be sure of this: wherever you cast this man away, with him you will also cast our three corpses. Compare also Soph. El. 295‒298: … οὐ σύ μοι τῶνδ’ αἰτία; οὐ σὸν τόδ᾽ ἐστὶ τοὔργον, ἥτις ἐκ χερῶν κλέψασ᾽ Ὀρέστην τῶν ἐμῶν ὑπεξέθου; ἀλλ᾽ ἴσθι τοι τείσουσά γ᾽ ἀξίαν δίκην. Have you not brought this upon me? Is this not your doing, you who snatched Orestes from my hands and carried him to safety? Yet be sure that you will have your due reward. Sometimes the correct punctuation even makes it possible to choose between two conflicting readings. This is the case with Georg. 1, 181. See the whole sequence (176‒183): Possum multa tibi ueterum praecepta referre, ni refugis tenuisque piget cognoscere curas. area cum primis ingenti aequanda cylindro et uertenda manu et creta solidanda tenaci, ne subeant herbae neu puluere uicta fatiscat, tum uariae inludant pestes: saepe exiguus mus sub terris posuitque domos atque horrea fecit, aut oculis capti fodere cubilia talpae…

180

181 inludant MPRωγ, edd. plerique, schol. Bern: inludunt M2P2c, Seru. (ludunt A)

I can repeat for you many maxims of the men of old, unless you shrink back and are reluctant to learn such trivial cares. First of all the threshing floor must be levelled with a heavy roller, kneaded by hand, and made solid with binding clay, lest weeds spring up, or, crumbling into dust, it gape open, and then diverse plagues make mock of you. Often a tiny mouse sets up his home and builds his storehouses underground, or sightless moles dig out their chambers; … Starting from l. 176, Virgil gives instructions for the preparation of the threshing-floor and the ground. In l. 181, the editors (Ribbeck, Sabbadini, Mynors,

22 

 Chapter I

Geymonat) read inludant, following the first hand of the oldest codices, and the consensus of almost all the Carolingian MSS; on the other hand, the correctors of M and P, the Bernensis 184 (c) and Servius have the indicative inludunt, which is indirectly supported also by the reading of the Augusteus, ludunt. Those who choose the subjunctive consider it to be dependent on the ne in the previous line, coordinated with subeant and fatiscat. However, the lack of any negative particle introducing tum…inludant (in the same way as ne subeant and neu fatiscat) makes the connection of the first hemistich of 181 with what goes before it rather difficult. If, on the other hand, we punctuate with a strong pause after fatiscat and choose the reading inludunt, then v. 181 inaugurates a new development, listing the various pestes that may damage the ground if the husbandman has not prepared the threshing-floor: mice, moles, toads, weevils and ants, represented with gentle humour as monstra produced by the earth. First of all, the poet says, roll the threshing-floor flat, and make it compact, so that there are no cracks, and no tufts of weeds start growing there: otherwise, you will be struck by various pests, including all those tiny animals that dig into the ground and make their nests in its recesses. It is worth while at this point recalling a special case of distinctio, the kind that concerns the distribution of lines between the various characters in dramatic texts. It is not unusual for manuscripts to assign actors’ lines in a dialogue wrongly.16 If the indication of the change of speaker is accidentally omitted, the speech appears to be pronounced by a single character. This is the most frequent error; but it may happen that the mistaken insertion of a marginal stage direction, or a paragraphos, interrupts a single speech pronounced by one actor, thus bringing about the intervention of another character. See a clear example from the Agamemnon by Aeschylus. After the herald has reported to the chorus of Elders at Argos the news of the great victory over the Trojans, mentioning the terrible sufferings endured during the war, Clytemnestra comes on the scene and pronounces a long speech before the chorus and the herald. The queen recalls her ten years of anxious waiting, and pronounces proud words that the herald is to repeat to her husband: “Let him come speedily,

16 The recent discovery of a papyrus (which can be dated between the 1st century B.C. and the first half of the 1st century A.D.) has presented us with what seems to be an ‘actor’s text’, a fragment of the text of a tragedy in which the parts that the actor did not have to pronounce (because they were assigned to other actors) were omitted: this is probably a play script with which the actor ‘rehearsed’ his part: see C. W. Marshall, “Alcestis and the Ancient Rehearsal Process (P. Oxy. 4546)”, Arion, Third Series, vol. 11, n° 3 (2004), pp. 27‒45.

Punctuation 

 23

and coming may he find his wife at home as faithful as when he left her, a watchdog to his house, a foe to his enemies, unchanged in all the rest, never having broken any seal in all this length of time. I know no pleasure from another man or ill-repute”. The manuscripts assign the following lines to the herald (613‒614): Τοιόσδ᾽ ὁ κόμπος, τῆς ἀληθείας γέμων, οὐκ αἰσχρὸς ὡς γυναικὶ γενναίαι λακεῖν. Such a boast, rich in truth, brings no disrepute on the noble woman who utters it. But Gottfried Hermann, the philologist who, in my opinion, has been most successful in restoring the text of Aeschylus with his special awareness of the conventions of dramatic technique, realised that these lines were really the conclusion of Clytemnestra’s speech. His firm judgement is worth quoting: “nec decet praeconem respondere, nec potuit ille τοιόσδ᾽ ὁ κόμπος dicere, sed dicere debuit τοιόσδε κόμπος, nec iustus finis factus erat orationi Clytaemnestrae”. It is Clytemnestra herself who, by adding these words, expresses all her pride of a faithful wife: “such is my boast” (the article in ὁ κόμπος has a fully deictic value). After all, it would be in contrast with all tragic decorum if the herald criticised his queen’s speech as boastful.17 Another instructive case if that of Eur. El. 982‒987: Ηλ. Ορ.

Οὐ μὴ κακισθεὶς εἰς ἀνανδρίαν πεσῆι, ἀλλ᾽ εἶ τὸν αὐτὸν τῆιδ᾽ὑποστήσων δόλον ὧι καὶ πόσιν καθεῖλεϲ †Αἴγισθον κτανών†; ἔσειμι, δεινοῦ δ᾽ἄρχομαι προβήματος καὶ δεινὰ δράσω γε …

El. Or.

Don’t become a coward and fall into unmanliness, but set for her the same trap you used to kill her husband, †when you destroyed Aegisthus†. I am going in; I am undertaking a dreadful step and I will do dreadful things …

This sequence is preceded by a rapid exchange of comments between Electra and Orestes (962‒981), but at the end of the stichomythia, the manuscript mechani-

17 See the translation of Headlam (CR 17, 1903, pp. 242‒243): “Such is the boasting; though brimfull of truth, unseemly, surely, for a noble dame to trumpet?”. By contrast, cf. the illuminating comment of Eduard Fraenkel, Aeschylus. Agamemnon, vol. II, Oxford 1950, ad loc.

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 Chapter I

cally continues to insert a series of paragraphoi, thus indicating continuous changes of speaker also for ll. 982 ff. In other words, the copyist did not realise that the stichomythia finishes at line 981: there follows a perfect correspondence between three lines to be assigned all to Electra (982‒984), and three lines all pronounced by Orestes (985‒987).18 Henri Weil definitively restored the correct distribution of lines.19 The tradition of Aristophanes too contains several attributions of lines which editors have corrected in various ways. One famous case, studied by Eduard Fraenkel, occurs in the Birds: the two protagonists are on stage and speak to each other until vv. 644‒645 without ever calling each other by name. The attribution of the lines – with the respective names of the two interlocutors, Peisetairos and Euelpides – is in fact somewhat debated: considerable variations exist between one manuscript and another, and obviously different roles have been proposed. Displaying great subtlety of analysis, Fraenkel believed that the dominant role could be assigned to Peisetairos, while Euelpides is his stooge; but in reality we don’t know how rigorous the characterisation was.20 A similar problem, though smaller in scale, is presented by the prologue of the Peace. The stage is occupied by two servants, busy feeding cakes of dung to a giant dung-beetle, on the back of which the good countryman Trygaeus – like Bellerophon riding the winged Pegasus – intends to fly to heaven and set free Peace, who has been taken prisoner. The two servants talk together, in turn cursing their disgusting task: one takes the cakes to the beetle, which is shut inside the stable, while the other mixes the dung to prepare them. From ll. 38 to 49 the manuscript tradition is rather uncertain in dividing up the lines between servants I and II, and editors vary in their attributions. However, it seems possible to detect a different ethos in the two servants: one is more inclined to moaning than to invective, whereas the other reveals quite an aggressive, caustic spirit. This differentiation makes it possible to obtain striking comic effects: the resigned persecution complex of the former is contrasted with the imaginative bad language of the latter, who, at the height of his disgust, succeeds in coining a coarse but exhilarating obscenity when he defines the dung

18 Manuscript L attributes both ll. 981 and 982 to Orestes, who would thus be encouraging himself to commit matricide in v. 982. Murray was clearly struggling when he made l. 983 a question. 19 Paris 1868. 20 Eduard Fraenkel, Beobachtungen zu Aristophanes, Rome 1962, spec. pp. 61‒65. One of Fraenkel’s pupils, J. C. B. Lowe, wrote a dissertation on the subject of attributions, “The Manuscript evidence for changes of speaker in Aristophanes”, BICS 9 (1962), pp. 27‒42.

Punctuation 

 25

beetle as a gift of Διὸς καταιβάτου: in the pronunciation of the two successive words, Zeus “who swoops down with his thunderbolt” sounds like Zeus “who swoops down with his dung” (and one scholion trivialises the pun by writing explicitly σκαταιβάτου). Bearing in mind the characterisation of each of the two servants, I believe ll. 38‒42 should be divided as follows: ΟΙΚΕΤΗΣ Α μιαρὸν τὸ χρῆμα καὶ κάκοσμον καὶ βορόν, χὤτου ποτ᾽ ἐστὶ δαιμόνων ἡ προσβολὴ οὐκ οἶδ᾽. Ἀφροδίτης μὲν γὰρ οὔ μοι φαίνεται. ΟΙΚΕΤΗΣ Β οὐ μὴν Χαρίτων γε. ΟΙ. A τοῦ γάρ ἐστ᾽; OI. B οὐκ ἔσθ᾽ ὅπως οὐκ ἔστι τὸ τέρας τοῦ Διὸς καταιβάτου. SERVANT I Foul, greedy, nasty piece of work – I don’t know what god unleashed this curse on us. It doesn’t look like Aphrodite to me. SERVANT II Nor the Graces, certainly. S. I Who was it then? S. II No doubt Zeus, god of the thundercrap. The second servant would thus seem to have a dominant, more marked role in this prologue: among other things, when the other servant has left the stage (l. 49), he has the job of telling the public about the subject of the play (ll. 50‒61). As was to be expected, Seneca’s plays also offer some examples of mistaken attribution of lines. In Herc. Oet. 892, the Etruscus, the famous Laurentian manuscript indicated by the letter E, transmits this text: NVT. Vitam relinques miseram? DEI. Vt Alciden sequar. On the other hand, the codices of the A family write: NVT. Vitam relinques misera? DEI. At Alciden sequar. This last text appears to be an attempt to correct the reading of the archetype: the nurse cannot define Deianeira’s life as miseram at the same time as she is trying to discourage her from her decision to die; vice versa misera, as an expression of sympathy, is more acceptable. Although the text of A thus seems reasonable, modern critics, who undoubtedly have a more complete knowledge of Seneca’s metrical and stylistic procedures than a copyist or an ancient editor could have, do not feel satisfied: the tragedian Seneca, an author who rather likes antilabē in dialogue, introduces a change of speaker only in certain positions in the trimeter,

26 

 Chapter I

and never in the sixth position (here the two short syllables of mise-; ‑ra is in synaloepha with at/ut) or after the two short syllables of a dactyl (­‑ques mise-).21 J. F.  Gronovius, an expert Dutch philologist of the mid XVII century, who may perhaps have been unaware of this metrical obstacle, but was undoubtedly sensitive to the stylistic effectiveness that the riposte could offer, corrected the text of E, whose content was inappropriate, and that of A, which was metrically defective – by means of one simple intervention: he brought the change of speaker forward to the previous word: NVT. Vitam relinques? DEI. Miseram, ut Alciden sequar. Besides restoring a good sense to the line, this correction satisfies all metrical requirements, as it makes the rhetorical pause coincide with the break after two and a half feet, the caesura preferred by Seneca. Even more praiseworthy is Friedrich Heinrich Bothe’s correction in the 1919 Teub­ ner edition of the text of the Octavia, the praetexta wrongly attributed to Seneca. The manuscripts transmit ll. 193‒200 as follows: NVT. Violare prima quae toros ausa est tuos animumque domini famula possedit diu, iam metuit eadem nempe praelatam sibi. Subiecta et humilis, atque monumenta exstruit quibus timorem fassa testatur suum. et hanc leuis fallaxque destituet deus uolucer Cupido: sit licet forma eminens, opibus superba, gaudium capiet breue. she [sc. the freedwoman Acte] who first dared to violate the sanctity of your marriage-bed, and, although a servant, has possessed the affections of your husband for a long time, this same woman now evidently fears the other who has been preferred to her. She is submissive and subdued, and builds monuments by which she openly reveals her fears. And she too [sc. Poppea] will be abandoned by the fickle, deceptive winged god, Cupid; however magnificent she may be in her beauty or proud of her power, her joy will be brief.

21 L. Strzelecki, De Senecae trimetro iambico quaestiones selectae, Krakow 1938, p. 7.

Punctuation 

 27

Here, too, a nurse tries to console her betrayed mistress, the princess Octavia, using the argument that the love of a young man is inconstant: little is needed to kindle passions for women of easy virtue, but in the end these passions fade away, and the husband returns to his legitimate wife. The charming freedwoman Acte, who first violated Octavia’s marriage-bed, also now fears another woman who is preferred to her. As in the previous case, the nurse’s argument has such a counter-productive consolatory force as to sound almost comical (“you see, now he’s found another one”); what’s more, it contrasts with the calm certainty with which she had just confirmed that marital love remains invincible: cf. v. 192 amor perennis coniugis castae manet. For this reason, Bothe suggested introducing a change of speaker and interpreting nempe as an ironic interruption, a caustic comment from Octavia: “undoubtedly (nempe) she fears the woman who has been preferred to her”. This jibe at Nero’s new passion not only restores full meaning to the text, but also brings out the Leitmotiv of Poppea, the future conqueror, in the play. This kind of interruption parà prosdokían is actually very common in Greek and Latin tragedy and comedy. Octavia’s sarcastic comment may have been partly obscured by the fact that in the following line the nurse continues her speech as if there had not been any interruption, in accordance with an ethos appropriate to her role as a person of inferior rank, who cannot react to the provocations or sarcastic comments of those who are of a higher status.22 Furthermore, the medieval copyist probably did not know that the rare particle nempe generally serves to introduce an ironic comment (and therefore comes at the beginning of the sentence); as he was aware of this, Bothe recognized the caustic remark with which Octavia breaks into the nurse’s speech. The opposite case can be found in a passage of the Alcestis by Euripides (792‒795), in which, after expressing a series of resigned considerations about the human condition to the servant of Admetus, Heracles invites him to take advantage of brief moments of joy, and to drink without worrying about the misfortunes of life: τὰ δ᾽ ἄλλ᾽ ἔασον ταῦτα καὶ πιθοῦ λόγοις ἐμοῖσιν, εἴπερ ὀρθά σοι δοκῶ λέγειν. οἶμαι μέν. οὔκουν τὴν ἄγαν λύπην ἀφεὶς πίηι μεθ᾽ ἡμῶν …;

22 It is common for the first interlocutor to continue his speech, showing indifference to the second one’s interruptions: cf. in the same play, Octauia vv. 458‒459: NE. metuant necesse est. SE. Quidquid exprimitur graue est. / NE. iussisque nostris pareant. See the excellent note of R. Ferri in his commentary on Octauia, Cambridge 2003, pp. 180‒181.

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Let all these questions be and believe these words of mine, if you think I am right in what I say. I believe I am. Give up this excessive grieving and drink with me, will you …? Someone thought that οἶμαι μέν “I think so” must be an answer in agreement with the preceding speech, especially because it was then followed by a question introduced by οὔκουν, which is usually found (like the Latin nonne) at the beginning of a speech.23 For this reason, manuscripts B and O attribute οἶμαι μὲν to the servant, making him pronounce an interlocutory remark. It is a pity that when the servant finally has the chance to speak, he states that he does not agree at all (803‒804 “we are in conditions that do not require merry-making and laughter”) and indeed reveals that his master’s wife has died (821).

23 cf. J. D. Denniston, Greek Particles, Oxford 1951, 2nd ed., rev. K. Dover, p. 431.

Chapter II: Interpolation and Athetesis

Dealing with interpolations can be dangerous. We only need to think of what happened in the case of the so-called “comma Joanneum” (I John 5, 7‒8). The great humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam, more animated by philological rigour than afraid of the foreseeable theological consequences, established that this short passage, the only one in the Bible which speaks of the Trinity, was a late interpolation (which had probably been made in Spain during the fourth century). The antitrinitarian Miguel Servet took his cue from this, and, on the basis of Erasmus’ athetesis of the passage, wrote De Trinitatis erroribus in 1531. Servet was burnt at the stake at Geneva in 1553, in accordance with the wishes of Calvin, thus courageously paying with his life for his anti-dogmatic stance. History shows, then, that purging texts of interpolations is a task that needs to be carried out with great caution. However, it is true that interpolations in the New Testament are a special case in the panorama of ancient literature: additions and rearrangements had, so to speak, an ideological origin in those texts, that is to say, they corresponded to apologetic or polemical interests that arose in the context of doctrinal disputes, and were also favoured by the still ‘open’ nature of the corpus of Scripture. For example, in the Gospel of Mark, the episode that narrates the appearance of the risen Jesus to the disciples is undoubtedly an interpolation: the final part of the passage (16, 9‒20), as we can read it in ancient versions, is not only missing in some of the most important manuscripts of the Greek text, but also suffers from striking stylistic and grammatical anomalies and factual discrepancies.24 The episode of the woman taken in adultery in the Gospel of John is also to be considered spurious: the words “let him that is without sin among you throw the first stone” will continue to exercise the most extraordinary fascination for us, but it should be known that Christ never pronounced them.25 Every philologist-editor is frequently called to carry out the delicate task of purging interpolations from texts, much more frequently than might be imag-

24 See B. M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, London 1994, pp. 122‒126; L. Battezzato, “Textual Criticism”, in: The Oxford Handbook of Hellenic Studies, ed. by G. Boys-Stones, B. Graziosi, P. Vasunia, Oxford 2009, pp. 783‒787 (with updated bibliography). 25 Cf. B. D. Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why, San Francisco, 2005. This book, which looks back over one thousand five hundred years of mistakes, manipulations, interpolations and rearrangements that have afflicted the text of the New Testament, also illuminates the efforts of those great critics who collaborated, between the 16th and the 19th centuries, in defining the physiognomy of the most disputed text of Western tradition: the Dutchman Erasmus from Rotterdam, the Frenchmen Robert Estienne and Richard Simon, John Mill from Oxford, Richard Bentley from Cambridge, Johann Wettstein from Basel, and then the two Germans Karl Lachmann and Lobegott Friedrich Constantin von Tischendorf, and lastly the ‘Dioscuri’ from Cambridge, Brooke Westcott and Fenton Hort.

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ined, given that unauthorised insertions are a widespread evil. The reasons that may have caused them are many, and various: first of all, the ingenuous emulation of readers who felt that they were authorised to leave a sign of their pres­ ence in the texts. These figures were not afraid of being considered as violators of sacred works, indeed they were convinced that they were diligent collaborators: while they lacked respect for the authors that they were reading, they acted under the illusion that they were improving them, or at least integrating them. It is a well-known fact that many Greek tragedies were subjected to additions or alterations from the fourth century on, largely due to readers who did not hesitate to perfect the compositions of the great playwrights, or who simply wanted to make more explicit what seemed to them only to be hinted at. The guilty parties will probably have been, above all, theatrical actors or directors, ready to modify or embellish the texts that were staged on the various occasions.26 The comedies of Plautus, and, to a lesser extent, the tragedies of Seneca, did not fare any better, either. The texts of Euripides were the most exposed to these intrusions, because his plays enjoyed an extraordinary popularity in the fourth century. To tell the truth, the texts of Sophocles also suffered various interpolations, though not so widespread: we only need to think, for example, of the atheteses suggested by L. Dindorf for OT 73‒75 and 812, by Wilamowitz for El. 593‒594, by Schneidewin for Ajax 1105‒1106, by J. C. Campe and C. Macleod for Ajax 854‒858 (with the wholehearted approval of E. Fraenkel), by H. J. Rose for OT 531 (the line is not found in a papyrus which has the whole sequence), by Elmsley for Ajax 571, by Barrett and Fraenkel for Phil. 385‒388. Exemplary cases of interpolations in theatrical texts can be found in the incipits of two famous tragedies, the Phoenician Women by Euripides and the Electra by Sophocles. Let us start with the testimony of a scholion on the Phoenician Women.27 “Ὦ τὴν ἐν ἄστροις: an ancient opinion is transmitted, according to which Sophocles is supposed to have rebuked Euripides for not placing these two lines in initial position [ὅτι μὴ προέταξε], and Euripides is supposed to have rebuked Sophocles for not placing initially in the Electra the line Ὦ τοῦ στρατηγήσαντος ἐν Τροίαι ποτέ”. The scholion remained incomprehensible for centuries.

26 The classic work to read is undoubtedly D. L. Page, Actors’ Interpolations in Greek Tragedy, Oxford 1934; see also G. Jachmann, “Binneninterpolation”, Gött. Nachr. 1 (1936), pp. 123‒133. A fine example of critical intelligence is offered by the trilogy of M. D. Reeve, “Interpolation in Greek Tragedy, I-II”, GRBS 13 (1972), pp. 247‒265, 451‒474; “III”, ibid. 14 (1973), pp. 145‒171. 27 Scholia in Euripidem, collegit recensuit edidit E. Schwartz, vol. I, Berolini 1887.



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 33

This is how manuscripts present the beginning of the Phoenician Women by Euripides: Ὦ τὴν ἐν ἄστροις οὐρανοῦ τέμνων ὁδὸν καὶ χρυσοκολλήτοισιν ἐμβεβὼς δίφροις Ἥλιε, θοαῖς ἵπποισιν εἱλίσσων φλόγα You who cut out your course among the stars of heaven and climbing on to your chariot inlaid with gold, O Sun, make your flame rotate, thanks to your swift horses The first line of the Electra by Sophocles runs as follows: Ὦ τοῦ στρατηγήσαντος ἐν Τροίαι ποτὲ Ἀγαμέμνονος παῖ O you who once commanded the army at Troy, son of Agamemnon How could the poets rebuke each other for not writing verses which were actually at the beginning of their respective tragedies? There must have been a mistake. The scholion was reasonably adjusted by Valckenaer, who suspected a corruption, or rather an interpolation. Valckenaer (who, not surprisingly, was one of the first to deal with the problem of interpolations in tragedy, in his epochmaking edition of the Phoenician Women) took out the two negatives, excising the two occurrences of μή: “Sophocles rebuked Euripides for putting these two verses first, and Euripides rebuked Sophocles for putting first the verse…” This expunction was widely accepted (cf. Schwartz 1887). The scholion thus regains meaning, and no longer contradicts the transmitted text of the two poets: Sophocles was believed to have criticised Euripides for two verses which in reality were too declamatory, and Euripides to have criticised Sophocles for a line which was also rather emphatic and superfluous. Clearly, with this conclusion, the scholiast would have been demonstrating that he possessed greater poetical sense than Sophocles and Euripides: but then, everybody knows that now and then, even Homer dozes off. This was the situation up to 1975. In that year, Haslam published a brilliant article28 in which he pointed out that in two papyri of this text of Euripides, as

28 M. W. Haslam, “The Authenticity of Euripides, Phoenissae 1‒2 and Sophocles, Electra 1”, GRBS 16 (1975), pp. 149‒174. See the balanced and clear note ad loc. in Euripides, Phoenissae, edited with an introduction and commentary by D. J. Mastronarde, Cambridge 1994. Of course, James Diggle expunges the two interpolated verses in his OCT edition of Euripides (Oxford 1994).

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 Chapter II

well as in another papyrus which included the hypothesis and the first line of the play, the Phoenician Women begins with l. 3. Furthermore, the Phoenissae by Accius – an imitation which is actually a literal translation, made in accordance with the usual technique of uertere barbare 29 – begins by reproducing line 3 (and not l. 1) of the play by Euripides: Sol qui micantem candido curru atque equis flammam citatis feruido ardore explicas30 Evidently, the opening line of the Phoenician Women by Euripides was l. 3: the two lines that precede it are nothing more than a pompous addition. For once, then, the scholion has been transmitted perfectly. Manipulation has taken place, it is true, but in the text of the tragedian, and what’s more, in a position which should have been particularly well protected. The scholiast devised an amusing anecdote to explain why the lines in question were missing in some editions: these lines are said to be two additions by the author, or better, two additions that Sophocles and Euripides polemically exchanged. In reality, the scholiasts are never happy to admit that they don’t know the answer to the problems that texts raise: as a result, they quite often save their skin by inventing incredible stories which are meant to provide explanations, but which often offer little more than implausible fantasies. In conclusion, the interpolation is likely to be the work of actors or directors of the fourth century or the beginning of the third. But how did it come about that the lines remained submerged, only to surface in medieval manuscripts? They were undoubtedly athetised in the recensio edited by the Alexandrian philologists (Aristophanes of Byzantium), but although censured with the obelos, they were nevertheless not suppressed, and ended up by surviving in a large part of the tradition. It is likely that during the Alexandrian and imperial ages, copies continued to circulate which included the two interpolated lines, together with copies which did not. It makes sense, however, to believe that the two lines were missing from the Alexandrian edition: if they had been included, it would be difficult to explain why, during the imperial age, four or five centuries later, copies without the interpolated lines still existed. As often happens, copyists tend not to eliminate the extra lines: to avoid making a mistake, they also copy what may not be authentic. This explains the progressive spread of the interpolation, even in a highly protected position like the beginning of a text. To sum up, the three papyrus documents offer us a text of Euripides which correctly omits the two

29 On which see A. Traina, Vortit barbare, Rome 19742. 30 TRF 581-84 Ribb.



Interpolation and Athetesis 

 35

interpolated lines; unfortunately, the medieval paradosis recovered them instead of expelling them. The inepta historiola of the reciprocal criticism exchanged by Euripides and Sophocles was invented by the scholiast, to explain why the spurious lines were missing in certain ancient editions: modern philologists failed to understand the clear implications of the anecdote until some of these ancient editions were re-discovered. One last consideration. According to the scholiast’s invention, Sophocles was thought to have written the first two lines of the Phoenician Women and Euripides the first line of Electra. But while the first two lines of the Phoenician Women are undoubtedly interpolations, I believe that Haslam goes rather too far when he also judges the first line of Electra to be inauthentic. This verse is very probably to be attributed to Sophocles. The fact that this verse, too, contains a declamatory apostrophe introduced by Ὦ may have induced the scholiast to imagine, with an evident appreciation for parallelism, that Euripides had responded tit for tat to Sophocles’ attack, and therefore also the first line of Electra must be an addition, tailor-made by the author of the Phoenician Women as a polemical retaliation. In conclusion, though the scholiast’s story only serves to make us smile, the truth that it conceals – that is to say, the fact that the first two lines of the Phoenician Women are undoubtedly spurious – does not imply that we should also consider the first line of Electra to be an interpolation. In Homer’s poems, too, apocryphal lines have insinuated themselves, lines which occasional rhapsodists had put together, imitating genuine hexameters by Homer, or inventing them from scratch. In actual fact, this question assumes a totally different aspect if it is judged by the criteria that we use for other classical texts: the usual notions of authentic and spurious are only partly valid in this case, and only if significant qualifications are introduced. A modern edition of Homer consists of a numerus uersuum which was fixed a long time after the composition of the poems. There were two decisive stages in this process: the first goes back to Alexandrian philology (the great period of criticism begins with Zenodotus in the first half of the III century, and ends with Aristarchus in the first half of the II); the second stage is represented by the Homeric philology inaugurated by F. A. Wolf (the most brilliant pupil of C. G. Heyne, even if the latter stood in his way) in the years spanning the late 18th and early 19th centuries. However, we have the certainty that at least up to the II century B.C., Homer’s text included many more lines (those which today are called ‘additional verses’, or ‘plus-verses’), but also lacked some verses printed in modern texts (‘minus-verses’). These terms are clearly relative, and are only valid if we make reference to a text which we conventionally define as authentic. In reality this authentic text is a historical creation, not ‘the original text’. Our text is nothing other than an orderly sequence of verses

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that was fixed in a period very distant from the composition of the poems. On the other hand, the precise form of the original is destined to remain inaccessible to us. The numerus uersuum that we use as canonical includes, for example, Il. 9, 458‒461, in the speech of Phoenix to Achilles: τὸν μὲν ἐγὼ βούλευσα κατακτάμεν ὀξέϊ χαλκῶι· ἀλλά τις ἀθανάτων παῦσεν χόλον, ὅς ῥ᾽ ἐνὶ θυμῶι δήμου θῆκε φάτιν καὶ ὀνείδεα πόλλ᾽ ἀνθρώπων, ὡς μὴ πατροφόνος μετ᾽ Ἀχαιοῖσιν καλεοίμην. Then I thought of killing him with sharp bronze; but a god restrained my wrath: he brought to my mind the judgement of the people and the unending contempt of men, so that I would not be called a patricide among the Achaeans. These are lines that are not found in any manuscript (codex or papyrus), and our evidence for them comes only from Plutarch,31 not exactly one of the most ancient authors, who informs us that they were expunged by Aristarchus, who was appalled at the idea that mention was made of patricide; they were therefore present in the copies known to Aristarchus, but they have disappeared from all our witnesses. Furthermore, the Alexandrian numbering system devised by Aristarchus ignores several “plus-verses” which find much better testimony in papyri, scholia and manuscripts. In brief, we find cases of verses weakly attested which are nevertheless present in the canonical editions of Homer, and vice versa, verses based on much better evidence which are excluded. We should expect to find, indicated as lemmata in the hypomnemata, and regularly annotated, lines which Aristarchus had athetised; which is not at all strange, seeing that the lines that were athetised, though stigmatised with the obelos, remained in the text. However, there is reason to believe that lines were in circulation which Aristarchus’ approved numerus did not recognise at all – lines which had not found a place in the text of Homer, and had not been marked with the sign of athetesis either. We have to admit that the picture is uncertain and bewildering. While Alexandrian philology played an important normalising role as regards the determination of the numerus uersuum, it does not seem to have been equally effective in reducing the formidable variation in single readings.32 This is

31 De audiendis poetis 26e; cf. De adulatore et amico 72b and Vita Coriolani 32. 32 G. Pasquali, Storia della tradizione e critica del testo, Firenze 1952, pp. 216‒217: “While the



Interpolation and Athetesis 

 37

a strange case of schizophrenia, reprised by the antithetical positions of Bolling and Allen: the former maintained that our uulgata substantially reproduces the edition of Aristarchus, whereas the latter affirmed that the ancient philologists had very little influence on the manuscript tradition of Homeric readings. Thus for Homer we have a highly peculiar history of the text and history of the tradition: this entails a form of textual criticism that is substantially different from that of other works. As is well known, Pasquali observed that in Homer the differences between witnesses often consist in an exchange of expressions not alike in appearance or sound but of equivalent meaning and function: for this reason, it is often difficult to establish which of the variants is the more ancient, let alone the genuine one (but then: “genuine” in what sense?). We also resort to the history of the language in order to obtain criteria that can establish what is more ancient and what more recent (and dialectology can also be useful for justifying or excluding a form). But what can ‘authentic’ mean if it is true that diction evolved within a text for centuries, undergoing stratification and adaptation, and evolution also continued after the moment of fixing, whether oral or written? How can we establish that a reading or a verse is authentic or spurious if there is no ‘original’ that is guaranteed, at least in theory? For some time, now, one of the basic questions has been this: did the variants of the Alexandrian philologists come from collation of copies and the consequent choice among witnesses, or were they the fruit of their arbitrary conjectures, which aimed, without too many scruples, to adapt the text to their taste and orientation? Simplifying, we may say that variation in the text, which is documented up to the late Hellenistic age, is a phenomenon that can be evaluated in very different, even opposite, ways. On the one hand, the most radical oralists maintain, albeit with different nuances, that this is the tangible sign of the fluidity of a text

comparison with the Alexandrian editions removed many superfluous verses from their place, why weren’t a similar number of ‘Alexandrian’ readings introduced into the text? The answer, in my opinion, is quite simple: for people not used to criticism, like editor-wholesalers and readers, one line more or fewer is something much more tangible than a different reading in some line. Many of them will have been satisfied to eliminate the spurious lines, without taking care to correct the reading everywhere. Furthermore, the spurious lines often practically bore the seal of their superfluousness impressed upon them. The superiority of a reading, on the other hand, is often truly debatable if the variant consists in an exchange of different epic formulas; this must have seemed to be the case every time the divergences were of a morphological or syntactical nature. And in the latter case, it is not necessarily true that the Alexandrian grammarians always made the best choice: here, sometimes, the papyri present readings superior to those of the medieval tradition.”

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which was created and transmitted orally, and subsequently fixed in a written form only in the 6th century, and did not remain unchanged even after that (G. Nagy speaks of a ‘multitext’). These scholars do not hesitate to endorse the readings and all the textual variants recorded and discussed by the Alexandrian philologists, who are believed to have made a true collation of copies, thus offering objective documentary data of paramount importance. On the other hand, those who think that Homer’s text was fixed, and even written, at the time of its composition (arguably in the 8th or 7th century), believe that the variants discussed by the Alexandrians are no more nor less than alterations to an original: almost all of them, therefore, conjectures or errors to be rejected. With what degree of certainty, I wonder, can it be stated that a reading present in a copy known to Zenodotus was a conjecture made by some previous critic? Doesn’t a reading that cannot be shown with certainty to be conjectural count as a variant in the history of the tradition? And what difference exists between a rhapsodic variant and a pre-Alexandrian conjecture inserted into a copy of the text? Let us take for example Il. 3, 421‒427: Αἱ δ᾽ ὅτ᾽ Ἀλεξάνδροιο δόμον περικαλλέ᾽ ἵκοντο, ἀμφίπολοι μὲν ἔπειτα θοῶς ἐπὶ ἔργα τράποντο, ἡ δ᾽ εἰς ὑψόροφον θάλαμον κίε δῖα γυναικῶν. Τῆι δ᾽ ἄρα δίφρον ἑλοῦσα φιλομμειδὴς Ἀφροδίτη ἀντί᾽ Ἀλεξάνδροιο θεὰ κατέθηκε φέρουσα· ἔνθα κάθιζ᾽ Ἑλένη, κούρη Διὸς αἰγιόχοιο, ὄσσε πάλιν κλίνασα, πόσιν δ᾽ ἠνίπατε μύθωι· And when they came to Alexander’s lovely house, the attendants then quickly set about their work, but Helen, goddess among women, went to her high-ceiled room. Aphrodite, the laughter-loving goddess, picked up a chair and set it for her opposite Alexander. On this Helen, child of aegis-bearing Zeus, sat down, and with eyes averted, began to criticize her husband: According to one scholion, Zenodotus is believed to have replaced verses 423‒​ 426 with this single line: αὐτὴ δ᾽ἀντίον ἷζεν Ἀλεξάνδροιο ἄνακτος “she sat down opposite prince Alexander”: the grammarian considered it undignified for the goddess Aphrodite to carry out such a servile gesture as putting a chair in place for Helen. Was the intervention of Zenodotus the fruit of a conjecture of his own, or was it the choice of a shorter, ‘censured’ variant transmitted? Aristarchus raised the objection that in this scene Aphrodite was disguised as an elderly servant



Interpolation and Athetesis 

 39

(cf. v.  386) and that consequently the gesture could not be scandalously inappropriate: this was the element of the context that Zenodotus had overlooked. In a word, Aristarchus underlined the internal coherence of the whole narrative sequence, whereas Zenodotus preferred (as usual) a shorter and also ‘moralised’ text. Modern editors for their part quote the intervention of Zenodotus in the apparatus but do not see any reason for expunction: they follow the text of Aristarchus, and also accept the numerus uersuum. The case of Il. 12, 450 is also instructive: τόν οἱ ἐλαφρὸν ἔθηκε Κρόνου πάϊς ἀγκυλομήτεω. The son of crooked-minded Cronos made it light for him. Hector is the first to jump over the Greek wall, and then he lifts up a large boulder, which not even two of the strongest men of today could have lifted together, and passes it from hand to hand without any difficulty: Zeus, who is helping the Trojans, makes it light for him (v. 450). This line, according to one scholion, nullifies the strength of Hector in hoisting up the rock: in short, it undermines the hero’s exploit. Zenodotus cancelled the line from the text (οὐδὲ ἔγραφεν); Aristophanes of Byzantium and Aristarchus expunged it (that is to say, they left it in the text, but with the doubtful obelos): the former was more drastic, the other two more prudent. But the question to be asked is: was Zenodotus, who wanted a shorter text, making a conjecture, or did he have before him a copy where the line was missing? And then, at what stage of the evolution of Homer’s text did this line come into the passage? Had it been inserted by someone who wanted to make it explicit that Zeus was on the side of the Trojans and Hector? Modern editors, however, record the fact in the apparatus, but do not dispute the verse. It is my fear that radical criticism, although admirable in its directness, suffers from a sort of petitio principii. It presumes that all variants are later, taking it for granted that there was an authentic, integrally fixed text, and even indicates when that text was fixed; thus it believes that the original text can be established with certainty. Clearly, it takes great rationalistic faith to argue like this: and that in itself inspires respect. Indeed, if we wish to admire a monument erected to rationalistic faith (the oxymoron is deliberate), it is sufficient to look at the edition of the Iliad recently prepared by M. L. West. This scholar from Oxford is quite certain that the poem was written by a real author in the first half of the VII century B.C., and that it subsequently underwent a series of alterations: it is the philologist’s job to recognize these alterations, so as to clean up the original text. West introduces brackets, curly ones, to be precise, in order to indicate the exclusions (to tell the truth, brackets are a customary critical sign in all philology, but

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not in Homericis); and the whole of Book X, the Dolonia, falls under the knife of athetesis, because it was interpolated with respect to the original text.33 To conclude, I am ready to believe that the text of the Alexandrian philologists depended partly on their tastes, and that in their interventions they followed criteria such as repetition, tautology, incoherence, the idea of prepon, the Hesiodic or cyclic character of style and content, the linguistic form and metrical and prosodic elements. Zenodotus preferred a more concise text, Aristarchus one less succinct than that of Zenodotus, although the one containing the ‘plus-verses’ was excessive for him too. It is obvious that the ancient philologists followed their tastes, but the decisive point is whether they intervened by choosing among witnesses or by making conjectures ope ingenii. Did they athetise lines because their attestation was weak, or was their initiative completely arbitrary? The orientation of Van der Valk – represented today, with some important distinctions, above all by West and Janko  – according to which the Alexandrian philologists were unrestrained conjecturers who did not bother at all to consult other copies or to compare them, but only followed their own critical whim,34 does not appear to have stood up to the most stringent objections. There are reasons to believe that they consulted copies, and made well-substantiated choices (obviously, on the basis of criteria that modern studies of Homer may not consider to be completely satisfactory); and it is likely that they sometimes intervened ope ingenii. But why should we think that they did only the one thing or the other? The question whether the textual uncertainty that they had to deal with was an indication of its ancient orality, and the symptom of a special kind of ‘authorship’, or whether, on the contrary, it was the result of serious alterations to an original well-defined (and written?) text that was the work of a true author, is precisely the heart of the

33 West’s edition treats a series of verses of ‘Wolf’s vulgata’ as interpolations on the basis of the contents, the language, the textual coherence, or also external evidence (when they are missing in a part of the tradition without any obvious mechanical reason): see pp. 11 ff. of the important volume companion to the edition, Studies in the Text and Transmission of the Iliad, München / Leipzig 2001. Apart from the Dolonia, West eliminates 166 verses of ‘Wolf’s vulgata’, which, among other things, was undoubtedly arbitrary (like all the others, actually, including that of Aristarchus), since it included verses with very few attestations and excluded others that were better attested. 34 West, in particular, believes that in his edition Zenodotus followed a rhapsodic text of the Ionian area, the area that he came from himself (Ephesus); this Alexandrian philologist was believed to have made very few conjectures, and to have preserved on some occasions the original text which had been obscured in the other sources: in other words, a separate ancient branch of the tradition, containing mistakes but also correct readings. On the other hand, Janko is convinced that the readings of Zenodotus were largely conjectural.



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matter: the point where the question of the history of the text and the working method of the Alexandrians are at the centre of the Homeric question.35 Totally different from the fluctuating tradition of Homer’s text is the solidly-based tradition of the Aeneid. This work has been transmitted in good condition, above all thanks to a group of extremely precious late-antique codices (V‒VI centuries A.D.), by virtue of which we possess a text which, though in need of philological treatment, is fairly reliable: in a word, quite an exceptional case in the panorama of classical authors, almost a tribute of admiration which the manuscript tradition, too, has chosen to pay to the greatness of the poet. Even the immediate reception of the work, which was read early on in schools, explained and annotated by grammarians and commentators, memorised and imitated by poets, exposed it to the risk of interpolation here and there, at the hands of admirers who wished to make Virgil’s text more attractive and more complete. The following are three interpolations which seem to me to be among the most instructive. Let us look at the sequence 1, 378‒380; Mynors’ text does not differ substantially from that of Ribbeck, Sabbadini, Castiglioni and Geymonat: sum pius Aeneas, raptos qui ex hoste penatis classe ueho mecum, fama super aethera notus; Italiam quaero patriam, et genus ab Ioue summo.

380

380 summo (A. vi 123)] magno R

I am the loyal Aeneas, who carry with me in my fleet my household gods, snatched from the foe; my fame is known above the heavens. It is Italy I seek, my father’s land, and my stock is from Jupiter most high.

35 On the whole question, see M. Haslam, “Homeric Papyri and Transmission of the Text”, in: A New Companion to Homer, ed. by I. Morris and B. Powell, Leiden / New York / Köln 1997, pp. 5‒100; F. Montanari, “Zenodotus, Aristarchus and the Ekdosis of Homer”, in: Editing Texts / Texte edieren, ed. by G. W. Most, Aporemata B. 2, Göttingen, 1998, pp. 1‒21. See also F. Montanari, “Alexandrian Homeric Philology. The form of the ekdosis and the variae lectiones”, in: Epea Pteroenta. Beiträge zur Homerforschung, Festschrift für Wolfgang Kullmann zum 75. Geburtstag, hrsg. von M. Reichel und A. Rengakos, Stuttgart 2002, pp. 119‒140; cf., again by Montanari, “La filologia omerica antica e la storia del testo omerico”, in: Antike Literatur in neuer Deutung, Festschr. für J. Latacz, hrsg. von A. Bierl, A. Schmitt, A. Willi, München 2004, pp. 127‒143; “Correcting a Copy, Editing a Text. Alexandrian Ekdosis and the Papyri”, in: From Scholars to Scholia. Chapters in the History of Ancient Greek Scholarship, ed. by F. Montanari and L. Pagani, TCSV 9, Berlin / New York 2011, pp. 1‒15.

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The ancient manuscripts agree in transmitting the text of v. 380 in the form Italiam quaero patriam, et genus ab Ioue summo: only R, though handing down the verse in its entirety, presents a small divergence: magno instead of summo: Ribbeck and Mynors read summo, Sabbadini-Castiglioni-Geymonat prefer the magno of R, evidently thinking that Virgil is making a slight variation on 6, 123 et mi genus ab Ioue summo. But things are rather more complicated. Let us take a look immediately at 6, 119‒123, in which the same words end a speech, slightly modified: si potuit manis accersere coniugis Orpheus Threicia fretus cithara fidibusque canoris, si fratrem Pollux alterna morte redemit itque reditque uiam totiens. quid Thesea magnum, quid memorem Alciden? et mi genus ab Ioue summo. Here, the hemistich et mi genus ab Ioue summo concludes an argument structured almost like a syllogism: Aeneas presents himself to the Sibyl and reminds her of the names of those heroes of divine origin who have visited, before him, the impenetrable kingdom of the dead. Aeneas now invokes for himself the same privilege that was previously granted to Orpheus, Pollux, Theseus and Hercules, as descendants of the gods, given that he too is of divine origin: et mi genus ab Ioue summo: ‘my race too descends from Jupiter most high’. Thus Aeneas presents his credentials, by virtue of which the Sibyl cannot deny him entry into the kingdom of the dead. However, the almost literal repetition of the same hemistich in 1, 380, the line that we are considering, appears to be totally inappropriate. Aeneas is introducing himself to a beautiful huntress that he doesn’t know, and, full of admiration, he supposes that he has come across Diana, or a nymph of the woods; but she answers in the negative: “I am simply a Tyrian hunter-girl, like lots of other girls in this area” (335). At this point, Aeneas reveals his name (sum pius Aeneas), describes his Trojan origins and the ordeals that he has gone through (raptos qui ex hoste penatis / classe ueho mecum), and lastly indicates the destination of his voyage: Italiam quaero patriam. These are three precise answers to the three questions that the beautiful hunter-girl had asked him in the immediately preceding lines (369‒370) sed uos qui tandem? quibus aut uenistis ab oris? / quoue tenetis iter? After Italiam quaero patriam, when the hero has given all the information requested, the final hemistich makes Aeneas add “and my stock is from Jupiter most high”. This little addition sounds rather silly, and thoroughly inappropriate



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here: almost a note of foolish boasting.36 “I am searching for Italy and I descend from Jupiter”: it is to be noted that the conjunction et joins together two clauses that have no relation whatsoever to each other. It is hardly necessary to point out that on the contrary, the conjunction et has a very different force and is perfectly appropriate in the passage in Book VI (from which it was taken) because there it is equivalent to “etiam”: et mi genus ab Ioue summo: “for me too”, as for the other descendants of gods. A clumsy interpolator, I believe, completed the halfline Italiam quaero patriam by adding a hemistich taken from another passage by the same author. The copies of Virgil’s works that circulated in antiquity, especially those of the Aeneid, very soon presented additions of various kinds. Some readers tried to supplement the tibicines (as those half-lines left unfinished by Virgil are improperly called). In 2, 640 uos agitate fugam was supplemented with the hemistich et rebus seruate secundis, taken from 1, 207 Durate et uosmet rebus seruate secundis. And again: in 10, 284 the ‘tibicen’ audentis Fortuna iuuat is quoted by Seneca (ep. 94, 28) with the completion piger ipse sibi obstat. But the list of examples could easily be lengthened: perhaps the most curious one is the verses 3, 660‒661, referring to poor blinded Polyphemus: Virgil shows us the enormous Cyclops pasturing his flock, the only source of joy that is left for him: the lines end at sola­ menque mali, but the interpolator adds another detail: de collo fistula pendet, as if the sorrowful Polyphemus went away crestfallen. In other cases, the inventiveness of readers was applied in an attempt to improve Virgil’s text by interpolating whole lines, mostly taken from the works of Virgil himself. Let us look at two cases like this, starting with Aen. 4, 124‒127, which Mynors (and with him all preceding and subsequent editors) reads as follows: speluncam Dido dux et Troianus eandem deuenient. adero et, tua si mihi certa uoluntas, conubio iungam stabili propriamque dicabo. hic hymenaeus erit.

125

to the same cave shall come Dido and the Trojan leader. I will be present and, if I can be sure of your consent,

36 Servius struggles to explain this unfitting addition, and thus makes genus ab Ioue summo depend on quaero, meaning that Aeneas was to head for Italy because that was the original homeland of his ancestor Dardanus, son of Jupiter. Quite absurd! As if Aeneas were not already a descendant of Jupiter through his mother, Venus!

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I will unite them in a lasting marriage and consecrate her as his; the marriage will take place here. This scene shows us the pact between Venus and Juno: the two goddesses make an agreement to keep Aeneas at a distance from Latium. On the one hand, Juno is afraid of the future power of Rome, and on the other, Venus is worried about the wars that Aeneas will have to face when he gets to Italy. Juno explains her plan: “Aeneas and Dido will go hunting together. I will unleash a violent thunderstorm and in this way I’ll arrange things so that they remain alone in a cave where they go to take shelter from the violence of the heavens” (117‒123). The problem can be detected in v. 126 conubio iungam stabili propriamque dicabo. This line is identical to 1, 73. Let us see what the context is in the passage from Book I. Here too, it is Juno who is speaking. She has sighted the hated Trojan fleet sailing along on calm seas. Seized with rage, she flies to the island of Aeolus and asks him to unleash a storm with his winds, so as to scatter the ships. To convince Aeolus, the great goddess promises him the most beautiful of her nymphs (1, 71‒75): sunt mihi bis septem praestanti corpore Nymphae, quarum quae forma pulcherrima Deiopea, conubio iungam stabili propriamque dicabo, omnis ut tecum meritis pro talibus annos exigat et pulchra faciat te prole parentem Everything is clear and appropriate here: conubio iungam stabili propriamque dicabo: “I will unite her to you in a lasting marriage, and I will consecrate her as yours”. Juno is speaking to Aeolus, and she can use the expression propriamque dicabo, as if it were “propriamque tibi dicabo”. The context is Book IV is completely different. ‘Propriam for whom?’ we are forced to ask ourselves. Naturally for Aeneas, and not for Venus, whom Juno is addressing, and to whom, for incontrovertible reasons of grammar, the adjective propriam should necessarily refer. The syntactical referent in Book I is the second person, to whom Juno is speaking (“your own, that is to say, yours, Aeolus” the goddess says); but it is only apparently possible to refer propriam to Aeneas in this case: in reality, it is an absurd straining of the syntax. The interpolator did not realise this, just as he did not realise that it is even more difficult to understand Dido as the direct object of iungam, since in the previous sentence both Dido and dux Troianus are subject. Perhaps in this case the interpolator simply wanted to note down in the margin a line taken from a similar context, in which the same Juno had already organised a marriage in the past (she who is known as the dea pronuba, or match-making goddess).



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The sequence restored by elimination of the extraneous line appears to be effective, and above all, soberly euphemistic: adero et, tua si mihi certa uoluntas, / hic hymenaeus erit: “I will be present, and if I can be sure of your consent, the marriage will take place here” – only a fleeting hint at marriage, only a discreet suggestion, in line with Virgil’s style. There is another case of sloppy interpolation in Aen. 9, 151. The sequence containing the verse to be athetised is as follows: non armis mihi Volcani, non mille carinis est opus in Teucros. addant se protinus omnes Etrusci socios. tenebras et inertia furta Palladii caesis late custodibus arcis ne timeant, nec equi caeca condemur in aluo: luce palam certum est igni circumdare muros.

150

151 late FRbr, Tib.: summae (A. ii 166) MPω

Turnus is quickening the courage of his men, who are shocked after the miracle of the ships turned into sea nymphs. He intrepidly encourages them: “We shall take possession of the Trojans’ camp with the force of our arms, fighting hand to hand, without any subterfuges. To win against them, we don’t need weapons forged by Vulcan, or a fleet of a thousand ships, or a wooden horse (all expedients that the Greeks used to defeat them in the Trojan War). The Trojans needn’t be afraid that they may be attacked in secret for a second time, or that they may be attacked under the cover of darkness. We shall surround their walls with fire openly, in the light of day”. All the bravery – and at the same time the heroic loyalty – of Turnus are condensed in these proud words. Furta – that is to say, “ruses”, and “stratagems of war” – are repudiated because they are inertia, ‘contemptible, unworthy of a true warrior’. But the interpolator did not understand that furta means ‘ruses’ here, and instead interpreted it as ‘thefts, robberies’. Thus, among the memories of the capture of Troy (one thousand Greek ships, Vulcan’s magic shield, the wooden horse), he adds the theft of the Palladium, the sacred statue of Athene the protectress, which Diomedes and Ulysses had irreverently stolen from the temple, after killing the guards of the citadel. This is what Virgil had related in Book II of the Aeneid, and it is from there that the interpolator took his line; see 2, 164‒167: Tydides …scelerumque inuentor Vlixes, fatale adgressi sacrato auellere templo Palladium, caesis summae custodibus arcis corripuere sacram effigiem…

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One last observation. If we carefully re-read the interpolated line and compare it with the model, we realise that the syntax of the line inserted is only apparently acceptable: the ablative absolute caesis… custodibus arcis, which, as is linguistically correct, is subordinate to a verbal form (corripuere) in the verse of Book II, here absurdly becomes subordinate to a noun (inertia furta): an unacceptable linguistic blunder. More than two hundred and fifty! I am not quoting a snatch of Leporello’s catalogue, but rather that is the amazing number of interpolations that Rudolf Merkel detected in the text of Ovid’s Metamorphoses half-way through the 19th century.37 To tell the truth, Nicolaus Heinsius had already proposed or carried out a large number of atheteses two centuries earlier, but Merkel’s excesses are testimony to an unparalleled methodical mistrustfulness: it was in that period – the heroic age of philological studies – that the virtue of critical suspicion sometimes overshot the mark, turning into the vice of reckless scepticism. Subsequently, as often happens in reaction, Ovidian philology became more timid, or even perhaps excessively cautious, and editors ended up by tamely accepting into the text many of those lines which had been added by engaged readers in the margin of their codices and then included in the text by some copyist, as if they were authentic verses that had been accidentally omitted. With optimistic ingenuousness, or rather with downright superficiality, those editors decided not to consider spurious any verse that was present in any of the manuscripts. It is important to realise, however, that still in antiquity, and subsequently above all from the Carolingian age on, when Ovid’s fascinating collection of myths enjoyed enormous fortune, some admiring readers did not resist the temptation to put together a few lines in Ovid’s style. I do not know if, to a certain extent, they felt that they too were ‘authors’, to quote the well-chosen expression of Richard Tarrant.38 Neither do I believe that they were all motivated by the malice of the forger. I am reminded of what a colleague told me some years ago: he was preparing a critical edition of the Enchiridion by Epictetus and had gone out to Mount Athos to read some manuscripts of the Christian paraphrases of that author; he was collating one of them when he realised that, at a point in the text which read “God is in heaven and on earth”, the good monk who was responsible for the transcription had not refrained from adding “and also on Mount Athos”. Oh to be innocent! With his little interpolation, the monk-scribe expressed the

37 In particular in the second edition (1875); the first one had appeared in 1855. 38 “The Reader as Author: Collaborative Interpolation in Latin Poetry”, in: Editing Greek and Latin Texts, ed. by J. N. Grant, New York 1989, pp. 121‒162.



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hope that God at least had not forgotten that place neglected by mankind. There was no malice in him, he was not the slightest bit interested in passing off a spurious insertion as authentic, he didn’t even dream for a moment of being the coauthor of the text: he simply felt the need for spelling out the implication, and went ahead and added it. Nowadays, after the enormous quantity of interpolations proposed by Merkel has been reduced to less than one sixth, Richard Tarrant, the most recent editor of the Metamorphoses,39 still identifies several of them: some with certainty, others dubitanter; some already pointed out in the past, others revealed by him for the first time.40 He shows courage, but is never impetuous; he succeeds in maintaining his self-control, although at times he gives way to the demon of diffidence. Even when his suspicions seem to be less well-grounded, they have a beneficial effect: those who wish to defend the transmitted text are forced to refine their counter-arguments. In his search for interpolations Nicolaus Heinsius remains his tutelary deity, nor could it be otherwise: some of the most convincing exclusions bear his signature. Among these, some remain truly exemplary: lessons of critical intelligence that can hardly be bettered. Let us read 3, 400‒401: Inde latet siluis nulloque in monte uidetur, omnibus auditur, sonus est qui uiuit in illa. Given that the myth of Echo is an aetiological one, the reader may have felt the need for a conclusion that openly connected the acoustic phenomenon with its origins. In reality this need does not exist, because at the beginning of his story (vv. 359‒361) Ovid has already anticipated the outcome of it. In a word, the couplet is completely superfluous, and simply rehashes preceding verses: inde is a variation on ex illo (394), latet siluis repeats 393 spreta latet siluis, and lastly, nulloque in monte uidetur is a pedantic duplicate of 394 solis … uiuit in antris (as she hides in the caves, it is obvious that Echo cannot be seen on the mountainside, apart from the fact that she does not possess a body). Furthermore, omnibus is too generic, and the antithesis uidetur/auditur is banal and mechanical. These are the features by which an interpolation can be recognized: rather than moti-

39 Oxford 2004. See the excellent discussion of L. Galasso in MD 66 (2006), pp. 105‒136. 40 Most (almost thirty) of the expunctions which do not appear in the Teubner edition of Anderson derive from Tarrant, who often implements the doubts and suspicions of N. Heinsius; a dozen or more atheteses derive directly from Heinsius, and the same number from Merkel; various others derive from Naugerius, Bentley, Riese, and Korn; single proposals are to be attributed to D. Heinsius, P. Burman, G. E. Gierig, F. Polle, P. Lejay, J. J. Hartman, and S. Mendner.

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vated, the addition appears to be hyper-motivated, since it aims to make explicit what is already present in an implicit form: at first sight it may seem to be acceptable, but on looking again, it proves to be futile, generating no new meaning. No less evident, in my opinion, is the case of Met. 7, 580‒581, a couple of lines in the body of the long description of the plague at Aegina, where Ovid competes with the scenes in which Lucretius and Virgil had described two renowned episodes of pestilence: Membraque pendentis tendunt ad sidera caeli, hic illic, ubi mors deprenderat exhalantes Lexical and stylistic elements betray the spurious nature of the addition, which is a clumsy re-elaboration of 6, 245‒247, where Ovid described the death of two of the sons of Niobe: membra solo posuere, simul suprema iacentes / lumina uer­ sarunt, animam simul exhalarunt. The interpolator has reproduced the spondaic ending of line 6, 247 exhalarunt, but here he has used exhalantes absolutely (without any direct object, animam or uitam), thus straining the proper meaning of the verb. Likewise, the use of membra tendere with the meaning of manus or bracchia tendere is without any attestation; furthermore, the finite verb tendunt breaks the sequence of present participles just set up (578 flentes and 579 uer­ santes, which depend on the imperfect subjunctive aspiceres)41. There is another problem in the combination pendentis…caeli: pendere is attested in Ovid (1, 268 late pendentia nubila) and in Virgil (Georg. 1, 214 dum nubila pendent), but always together with nubila (a highly appropriate iunctura: it is the clouds, after all, that are suspended in the sky). In the same passage, in the very first verses that recall the plague at Aegina, I am afraid another interpolation has slipped in. Tarrant has no doubts and expunges vv.  7, 525‒527, which seem inappropriate to him at this point in the story, with respect to the order of the narration:42 Dira lues ira populis Iunonis iniquae incidit exosae dictas a paelice terras. [Dum uisum mortale malum tantaeque latebat causa nocens cladis, pugnatum est arte medendi;

41 cf. the fine note in the commentary of E. J. Kenney, Ovidio, Metamorfosi, VII‒IX, vol. IV, Fondazione Lorenzo Valla, Milano 2011, p. 283 ad loc. 42 For this reason, Kenney cit. (p. 278 ad loc.) prefers to think that these are verses put in the wrong place, rather than interpolated, even though it is not clear to him where they should be placed.



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exitium superabat opem, quae uicta iacebat.] Principio caelum … The uselessness of medicine is a fixed element, which each of the famous plague descriptions regularly records, but none of them propose it as a preliminary fact: it is usually mentioned, understandably, only after the epidemic has manifested its wide variety of effects: cf. Thuc. 2, 47, 4; Lucr. 6, 1179; 1226; Verg. Georg. 3, 549‒550. Ovid differs from his predecessors by attributing a divine origin to the plague, and with the words dira lues (v. 523) immediately alludes to Verg. Georg. 3, 469. The same combination returns in 15, 626 Dira lues quondam Latias uitiauerat auras: it is from this passage of the Metamorphoses that the interpolation probably takes its origin.43 The immediate introduction of the motif that all medicine is ineffective against the plague strangely precedes the adverb principio (528), which should, obviously, be the opening of the whole narration. Besides this evident difficulty, the combination mortale malum does not appear to be easy to understand: it should mean a “disease of human origin or nature” (and thus liable to be cured by medicine), but this interpretation is not at all immediate: the most obvious meaning would seem to be, rather, a “disease which leads to death”. Also causa nocens cladis seems strange: causa nocens would be sufficient, just as causa cladis would be acceptable, but the group of three words has something badly ­amalgamated, and unpleasantly superfluous about it. Furthermore, dum uisum evokes a concomitance, or perhaps even a duration, which does not find any adequate correspondence in the main clause. In a word, there are many linguistic and stylistic uncertainties which induce us to be suspicious of these lines. Too many, in fact. Exclusion is the best remedy, though this, in turn, raises a significant problem: as a result, we then get the repetition of terras at the end of v. 524 and terras at the end of v. 528, which is somewhat awkward.44 Qui melius consulit consul fuat. The case of Metam. 1, 477 is particularly interesting, seeing that the problem of the interpolation is solved if we reconstruct the real network of allusions that Ovid created above all in the first three books of the poem:

43 R. Tarrant, “Editing Ovid’s Metamorphoses: Problems and Possibilities”, Class. Phil. 77 (1982), pp. 357‒358. 44 Tarrant tentatively suggests solem at the end of l. 528, but he himself realises the intrinsic weakness of his proposal.

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… captiuarumque ferarum exuuiis gaudens innuptaeque aemula Phoebes. [uitta coercebat positos sine lege capillos.] multi illam petiere … Athetesis45 might at first sight seem to be a painful solution: renouncing this verse would also obscure the clear parallelism that exists between the episode of Daphne related here and that of Callisto, described in v. 2, 413 uitta coercuerat neglectos alba capillos: as can be seen, the two lines are clearly similar, indeed, one seems to be an imitation of the other. However, the line that we are considering presents considerable problems. First of all, it is missing in HMacNac: which is no insignificant indication. A certain difficulty is also created by the union of positos and sine lege: the combination might almost be an oxymoron (Daphne’s hair would be ‘styled without any system’), and this agudeza might be appealing if it were not for the fact that her hair is undoubtedly dishevelled (cf. below 1, 497). In the largely similar passage her. 4, 77‒78 Te tuus iste rigor positique sine arte capilli / et leuis egregio puluis in ore decet (this is a description of Hippolytus, the unruly adolescent who is against the artifices of cultus), the combination is significantly positi … sine arte, not sine lege. And then (an important fact) the mention of Daphne’s unkempt looks finds a more appropriate narrative position a few lines further on, when Apollo himself significantly notices them: 497 spectat inornatos collo pendere capillos, / et ‘quid si comantur?’ ait. Indeed, if we compare the line in question with the episode of the other follower of Diana, Callisto, where important analogies and similarities are clearly visible (see in particular 1, 476 aemula Phoebes ~ 2, 415 miles erat Phoebes), we can see that this detail is used appropriately here. As a result, the suspicion arises that the interpolator focused his attention on this particular of Callisto’s dishevelled hair, and crossed it with ars 3, 133 non sint sine lege capilli. Even if none of these arguments would be sufficient by itself to recommend athetesis, their sum total proves to be decisive.46

45 Tarrant argues for this in “Editing Ovid’s Metamorphoses” cit., p. 355. 46 Arguments in favour of exclusion are put forward also by A. Barchiesi, Ovidio, Metamorfosi (libri I-II), Fondazione Lorenzo Valla, Milano 2005, p. 208 ad loc. The defence of the transmitted text by Ch. E. Murgia (“Imitation and Authenticity in Ovid”, AJPh 106 [1985], in particular pp.  456‒464) is not convincing, although the contribution as a whole offers some interesting ideas for reflection.



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At other times the interpolations are more difficult to detect: they merge into the text as additional thoughts, which may not bother an absent-minded reader, but on closer inspection have the effect of slackening the connection between the parts of the discourse, or obstructing the stylistic flow. On examination with a critical eye, they prove to be what they are: excrescences which disfigure the smooth surface of the text. To confirm their spurious nature, it is often sufficient to carry out a test: eliminate these extraneous bodies from the text, and, as if by a sudden illumination, you obtain the delightful impression of purity regained. The interpolation of Met. 8, 124 appears to be of the same kind: Nec Ioue tu natus nec mater imagine tauri ducta tua est; generis falsa est ea fabula: uerus [et ferus et captus nullius amore iuuencae] qui te progenuit taurus fuit. After cutting off the purple lock of hair from the head of her father, Nisus, out of love for the young Minos, king of Crete, son of Europa and Jupiter, who had assumed the aspect of a white bull in order to carry Europa away, Scylla is incensed by Minos’ rejection, and disparagingly shouts after him: “Neither were you born from Jupiter, nor was your mother abducted by Jupiter transformed into a bull; the story of your birth is false: it was a real bull that generated you”. In this offensive tirade (which shows the influence of the passionate reproche that Dido hurls at Aeneas) it is totally improper to add that the animal had never been in love with any heifer: this does not add anything to the insult; if anything, it weakens it. And above all, the insertion causes serious damage to the expression, by separating taurus from uerus, which is in a strongly emphatic position at the very end of the line. Evidently, the interpolator was not satisfied with the simple abuse of Scylla, and preferred to embroider the episode. Perhaps, in making his addition, the interpolator (if it is the same one) also thought of Pasiphae, the bride of Minos, who chose to mate with a bull: a short circuit between two animal passions, both of which were undoubtedly among his items of mythological knowledge. The story of Pasiphae’s mating with a bull comes into his mind again a few lines later, in the same tirade of Scylla against Minos (8, 134‒139): … an inania uenti uerba ferunt idemque tuas, ingrate, carinas? [iam iam Pasiphaen non est mirabile taurum praeposuisse tibi: tu plus feritatis habebas.] me miseram! properare iubet diuulsaque remis unda sonat …

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These two lines again appear to me to be interpolated. Let us see why. Scylla is watching the ships leave in alarm, and she despairs when she realises that instead of being moved by her tearful rebukes, Minos is speeding up his flight. The contextual link between Scylla as she watches the ships leaving and Minos as he impassively orders his oarsmen to keep rowing away must be close and immediate, without any break: the grief-stricken outburst of the abandoned heroine cannot be interrupted. There must not be any break between v. 135 uenti … ferunt …tuas… carinas and v. 138 properare iubet, which is the natural continuation; nor between ingrate in v. 135 and me miseram! in v. 138. The interpolator is evidently not satisfied with all the accusations of inhumanity launched against Minos in the preceding verses, and has thus thought of aggravating Scylla’s outburst with the addition of another offensive consideration: ‘At this point it’s no surprise that Pasiphae preferred a bull to you: you were more of a beast than he was’. The addition, which is actually rather frigid, obstructs the flow of Scylla’s lament. Equally objectionable, moreover, is the strange nature of the temporal adverb iam iam, which usually means ‘at every moment’ in Ovid and is used improperly here for iam nunc or iam tandem: this incidental inaccuracy escaped the attention of the interpolator, all taken up as he was by enriching his beloved poet. Two opposite fables reçues are in circulation: according to the first one, conservative critics have the great merit of defending texts against the aggression of those who would like to mutilate them, or adulterate them with excessive corrections; according to the other, the true critics are only those who keep watch over the purity of texts, purging them of errors, crypto-corruptions and interpolations, all of which are traps to which conservative critics remain ingenuously insensitive. In reality, these two pictures are caricatures, and it would make no sense to take sides in advance with one group or the other. As the famous manual about war by von Clausewitz teaches, defensive tactics are as valid, when necessary, as tactics for attacking: what is needed is just rational judgement and a healthy empiricism. What is more, every text has a different tradition behind it, which requires appropriate care, depending on the individual case. Some authors depend on a limited number of manuscripts, or even a codex unicus, whereas others have a rich tradition; some depend on authoritative ancient codices, others have been preserved for us in copies that are rather contaminated and uncertain. Perhaps, however, it may be helpful to be a little mischievous, and remind conservative critics that it would make more sense to mistrust a debatable text than those who reasonably have doubts about it. But everybody knows: it is easier to harbour suspicions about a colleague who is in disagreement than about defective witnesses. Nor should we forget that even when the atheteses proposed are not fully convincing, they should not arouse panic, as if they were inevitable



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death sentences. The athetised wording survives, thank God, it can still be read, and it may always return from its momentary exile, and impose itself victoriously after a new judgement that restores it to honour in the text. After all, a critical edition is only a working hypothesis. Thus a suspicion, even if unjustified, is not in any way a fault but rather an invitation to reflect more carefully. That is what I did with Tarrant’s proposed exclusion of Ov. Met. 2, 226; in the end, after weighing the pros and cons, I came to the conclusion that the verse should be considered authentic: … Caucasos ardet Ossaque cum Pindo maiorque ambobus Olympus, [aeriaeque Alpes et nubifer Appenninus.]

225

At the end of the list of mountains set on fire by Phaethon’s chariot, Tarrant47 observes that the mention of Olympus has a strongly conclusive sense, and thus the addition of the Alps and the Apennines would give rise to an anticlimax. In reality, the long list (217‒226) is organised in accordance with the principle of a haphazard list (as normally happens in ancient poetic listings, which avoid being similar to prosaic lists); it offers a complete panorama of the known world: in its uncontrolled course, the fiery chariot of the Sun crosses the whole sky helterskelter, setting fire to every mountain top. Ending up with the Italian peaks may be seen, so to speak, as a nationalistic touch, analogous to the one that places the Po and the Tiber in the final position (258‒259) in the equally long list of rivers dried up by Phaethon’s chariot in its unbridled flight. The analogy with Verg. Aen. 12, 701‒703 also seems important, where a mini-list of mountains ends with the mention of the Italian Apennines: quantus Athos aut quantus Eryx aut ipse coruscis / cum fremit ilicibus quantus gaudetque niuali / uertice se attollens pater Appenninus ad auras. The final position of nubifer Appenninus also obtains a metrical effect that is functional to the context, as it makes it possible to finish the list with the sophisticated solemnity of a spondaic hexameter, which reinforces the sense of completion of the sequence:48 cf. Hor. Epod. 26, 29 in mare seu celsus procurrerit Appenninus. In conclusion, this line is not to be expunged, but nobody will want to criticise Tarrant for his suspicion: he exerted his watchful ingenium,

47 R. Tarrant, “The Soldier in the Garden and other intruders in Ovid’s Metamorphoses”, Harv. Stud. Class. Phil. 100 (2000), p. 428. 48 See the excellent note of A. Barchiesi in his commentary (quoted n. 26 above) pp. 253‒255, where, among other things, he observes, with a great sense of style: “It was normal in the neoteric tradition that these spondaic verses coincided with the use of sophisticated Greek names, but here Ovid renews the convention, showing that the Hellenising form may fit in with Italian geography”.

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he was afraid that he had come across a fake, but by so doing he forced us (we gratefully acknowledge) to scrutinise not only his own reasons but also Ovid’s. While the Metamorphoses had many readers, who were all too ready to become zealous collaborators in Ovid’s text, the tradition of De rerum natura almost seems to have followed the Epicurean ideal of láthe biōsas. This may be one of the reasons why the text of Lucretius does not seem to have undergone as many interpolations by ancient readers or ‘editors’ (in spite of the convictions to the contrary of K. Müller and M. Deufert, the scholar who is preparing the new Teubner edition: both of them stigmatise a considerable number of lines). In itself, the work was accessible only to the few readers who were capable of enjoying it: though admirable in its poetic enthusiasm, it was tough in its subject, and not very inviting in its attitudes, and it appeared to be somewhat complicated in its expression, besides presenting a thoroughly deplorable doctrine. I believe that it was very rarely read. Rather than interpolations, other kinds of damage marked the tradition of De rerum natura: lacunas, transposed lines and frequent corruptions, even without adding that as a result of the disruption of the archetype, whole sheets ended up in the wrong order. However, this does not exclude the possibility that in the late antique period, especially in anti-Christian circles, some more curious reader may have taken up Lucretius’ poem and occasionally felt the need to gloss the difficult text or supplement it with his own words. One of the first interpolations discovered (the exclusion goes back to Naugerius, and was confirmed by Lambin, two exceptionally gifted humanists) regards lines 3, 474‒475, which are nowadays excluded by agreement from all modern editions: et quoniam mentem sanari, corpus ut aegrum, et pariter mentem sanari corpus inani. More than from the insidious aims of a forger, these two hexameters stem, perhaps, from a sincere intention to make Lucretius’ discussion more explicit: we have an anticipation here of a consideration which the poet himself presents shortly afterwards, in v. 510: et quoniam mentem sanari, corpus ut aegrum, / cerni­ mus et flecti medicina posse uidemus. Lucretius had just said (in vv. 459‒473) that as the body, by its nature, falls ill and suffers pain, the soul too follows the same destiny. But the interpolator felt the need to add that as the body can be cured, so also the soul can be freed from its sickness: for this reason, he copied l. 510 from the poet himself, and followed this up with a highly uncertain verse of his own, constructed using fragments of Lucretian language; and in so doing, he betrayed all the incompetence of a clumsy poetaster. Was he a reader who wanted to clarify Lucretius by means of Lucretius himself? Or a dilettante reader who annotated,



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almost for his own personal benefit, a text which was not always simple in its argumentation? Whoever he was, there is no doubt that this collaborator was more imprudent than deceitful. A less blatantly spurious case would seem to be that of 3, 743, even if I am practically certain that this is an interpolation: indeed, I am amazed at the obstinate defence that some discerning scholars persist in putting up against athetesis. The text of the editio Veneta, which we may take as the basis for discussion as the one adopted by the most recent editors, runs as follows in vv. 741‒747: Denique cur acris uiolentia triste leonum seminium sequitur, uulpes dolus, et fuga ceruis a patribus datur et patrius pauor incitat artus, et iam cetera de genere hoc cur omnia membris ex ineunte aeuo generascunt ingenioque, si non certa suo quia semine seminioque uis animi pariter crescit cum corpore quoque? Why is it, then, that impetuous rage goes with the lion’s grim breed, cunning with foxes, and a tendency to flee is passed down to deer from fathers, and their fathers’ fear urges their limbs on, and why, in short, are other traits of this kind all created in limbs and in character from the very start of life, if not because a power of mind set by its own seed and breed grows along with each body? The Oblongus and the Quadratus manuscripts agree in reading ceruos in v. 742; the reading ceruis seems to have developed in order to achieve a syntactical continuity between the two lines, after the interpolation of v. 743. Faced with the question cur? (a rhetorical question: the poet gives the answer himself in ll. 746‒747, si non … quia), the interpolator feels that he is called upon in some way to answer, and puts together the verse in which he explains that lions, foxes and deer have inherited their characteristics from their parents. But by so doing, he interrupts the urgency of the second rhetorical question, which underlines that the nature of the various animals is innate in them from their birth (744 et iam … cur); ll. 746‒747 answer both the rhetorical questions, which, after all, are closely connected. Lambin already made mention of a “doctus quidam” who had scented the intrusion; in his wake, Lachmann, Bernays, Munro and others resolutely proposed athetesis. The reasons given by conservative critics (Giussani, Heinze, Merrill, Bailey, Ernout) do not take into sufficient account the unanimous reading

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of the manuscripts (ceruos) or the completeness of the elegant triplet that shapes the first interrogatio: uiolentia… leonum seminium / uulpes dolus / et fuga ceruos. An excellent discussion in favour of expunction is now offered by M. Deufert.49 The case of 2, 40‒45 is decidedly problematic; here, we find a verse which has been transmitted to us indirectly, and has been placed by editors in this context: si non forte tuas legiones per loca campi feruere cum uideas belli simulacra cientis, subsidiis magnis et equom ui constabilitas, ornatas armis pariter pariterque animatas, feruere cum uideas classem lateque uagari, his tibi tum rebus timefactae religiones effugiunt animo pauidae … Unless you happen to see your legions swarming round the Field of Mars, rousing a mimic warfare, strengthened with large auxiliaries and force of horse, alike equipped with arms, alike spirited; or when you see the fleet swarming and spreading over the sea: then, frightened by these spectacles, superstition pales and flees your mind …

43b

43b

As mentioned above, v. 43b is missing in the direct tradition, and is handed down by Nonius in a passage where he is discussing the quantity of feruere (503, 24 M, p. 808 L.: “Lucretius lib. II: feruere cum uideas classem lateque uagari”).50 Lambin was the first scholar to introduce it into the text, substituting it for 42 and 43; Lachmann printed it as an addition between 43 and 44, Munro after 46. To tell the truth, the fact that the line was omitted in the direct tradition may be attributable to the disastrous state of the archetype, which must have suffered damage (as it seems) at this point: lines 42 and 43 appear to be internally corrupt, and are transmitted only in O and G (but added in uncial script by the rubricator); they are completely missing in Q, and sufficient space is left for three lines. Hence the editors’ idea of placing 43b at some point between 41 and 44. But I believe that this is an interpolation by modern editors, so to speak: I find it unacceptable to place Nonius’ verse in this context. The lively image of legions in motion, amid flashes of metal and manoeuvres of the cavalry, seems

49 M. Deufert, Pseudo-Lukrezisches im Lukrez. Die unechten Verse in Lukrezens ‘De rerum natu­ ra’, UaLG Bd. 48, Berlin / New York 1996, pp. 249‒251. 50 There is a clear discussion of the problem in the commentary of D. Fowler (Oxford 2002) pp. 114‒118.



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to be deeply rooted in the poet’s imagination, as he makes use of it twice in Book II (vv. 5‒6 and 323‒332), as well as the well-developed description of four lines here (vv. 40‒43). On the other hand, the image of the fleet wandering around the sea is superficial and schematic here: it looks like an artificial addition. Above all, I find particularly unacceptable the repetition of the first hemistich (feruere cum uideas), which, far from being an emphatic anaphora, is rather a pedestrian duplicate, used only for attaching a superfluous addition. Among other things, if Nonius had wanted to quote a verse by Lucretius attesting the use of a dactylic feruere, he should have quoted l. 41: as a result, I am afraid that this was simply an oversight, and he contaminated the first hemistich of this verse with an extraneous sequence.51 I agree with K. Müller:52 the line is to be rejected. The kind of interpolator at work in the Satyricon is different, not least because of the very different transmission of this text. Only more or less extensive fragments of the work attributed to Petronius Arbiter have come down to us, attested by different currents of tradition which go back to an archetype that was undoubtedly incomplete. What we possess seems to derive from a codex containing only the second part of the novel, i.e. books 13‒24: it has been suggested, on the basis of many good reasons, that probably the whole work originally consisted of twentyone or even twenty-four books like the Iliad, the Odyssey and the novel by Antonius Diogenes.53 While, in all likelihood, the loss of the first half of the text may be attributed to material factors, it is not easy to explain how or why the second half (which was probably still complete in the early Middle Ages) was subsequently reduced to fragments. All that remains of the Satyricon is transmitted by four different classes of witnesses, whose reciprocal relationships have only partly been clarified. The first current is represented by the so-called excerpta breuia (indicated as O in critical editions); these are preserved in manuscripts that go back to a period between the IX and the XII centuries, and are ‘extracts’, though at first sight this does not seem to be the case. Whoever chose the passages did not take the trouble to indicate the cuts that he made, but on the contrary put together a continuous text, trying to

51 This suspicion is backed up by the fact that the following quotation in Nonius’ text begins with the word late. 52 T. Lucreti Cari De rerum natura libri sex, recens. et adnot. K. Müller, Zürich 1975, pp. 328‒329. 53 This is the convincing hypothesis of G. Vannini, Petronii Arbitri Satyricon 100‒115. Edizione critica e commento, BzA Bd 281, Berlin / New York 2010, pp. 7 and 40. This is the best introduction to the history of the tradition of the Satyricon (pp. 39‒61), to which readers are referred for further details. The hypothesis that the original text included twenty-four books had already been formulated by P. G. Walsh, The Roman Novel, Cambridge 1970, p. 76.

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hide the seams as far as possible, often choosing thematically similar passages. The excerptor must have been a learned person who collected passages for use at school: he has rigorously omitted all the most smutty passages which speak about homosexual love, and has opted instead for poems, scenes with dialogue, passages in a high style and disquisitions on literary criticism. A more limited current is represented by the florilegium Gallicum (φ), an anthology of exemplary expressions and passages, compiled in central-northern France (Orléans?) about half-way through the 12th century, which includes sen­ tentiae, short poems and the highly refined story about the matron of Ephesus. Whoever selected the passages of Petronius did not have access to the archetype, but rather to a witness of the excerpta breuia and to another anthology which derived from the archetype. A third important current of the tradition is that of the excerpta longa (L in the critical editions); besides transmitting more extensive portions of text, these also include everything that can be found in the breuia and the florilegium. The text of the longa is preserved only in printed editions and in manuscripts of the second half of the 16th century, which in turn derive from older codices. This makes it particularly difficult to reconstruct the tradition of the longa and their origin. The L collection is particularly precious, not only because it provides us with chunks of more extensive text, but also because it is the only one that provides indications of the cuts made by the excerptor, lacunas generally indicated by asterisks. Lastly, a fourth current derived from the archetype; this is attested by a codex unicus, the famous “Traguriensis”, which transmits the entire Cena Trimalchionis (26, 7‒78). The condition of the text, which survived thanks to a series of lucky events, with serious losses, condensed and sometimes misunderstood as a result of the vicissitudes of the tradition, has always required special philological care. After the first, imposing, modern critical edition, published by Franz Bücheler in 1862, and at least five minor editions which this great philologist en­riched, during the course of a lifetime of hard work, with new interventions and reconsiderations,54 an overall revision of the text and its tradition was undertaken at the end of the 1950s by Konrad Müller: his assiduous advisor, or rather, his diligent mentor in this task was Eduard Fraenkel. Müller’s edition came out in 196155 and immediately caught the attention of scholars, who were struck both by his exceptional critical work and by his methodological approach to the constitutio textus.

54 Petronii Arbitri Satyricon reliquiae ex recensione F. Buecheleri, Berolini 1862; the minor editions were published at Berlin, between 1862 and 1912. 55 Petronii Arbitri Satyricon, cum apparatu critico edidit K. Müller, München 1961.



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Fraenkel believed (and Müller with him) that during the Carolingian period someone had reduced the text of the Satyricon to a collection of fragments, and had glossed them, inserting his own additional explanations, bridging passages, links with the parts that had been suppressed and personal observations: in a word, a hyper-active excerptor, who did not show much respect. The theory was based on the presupposition, already formulated by Bücheler, that at the origin of the medieval history of the text there was a collection of excerpta, from which all the branches of the tradition derived.56 It seemed perfectly logical that from a text which was already condensed, essentially mirrored by the longa, other more selective collections had been extracted, like those of the excerpta breuia and the florilegium. This reinforced Fraenkel’s idea that the excerptor himself had systematically interpolated the text: the resolute scrutiny to which Fraenkel and Müller subjected the Satyricon, to purge it of these unwanted excrescences, was thus thoroughly justified. A careful reading of the text had in fact brought to light at least one hundred presumed interpolations, which were attributed to a ‘stupid Carolingian’, as he was baptised by Fraenkel himself in seminars on Petronius that he held in Italy in the mid-60s. I remember that in our seminar at Pisa, the guilty interpolator almost became a negative hero: we knew all about his elementary psychology, and followed his traces enthusiastically, and perhaps also with a measure of attraction. It is certain that some of those exclusions restored the authentic structure of the text, and they are still accepted today in the best critical editions. Here are a few examples: in the orgiastic episode organised by Quartilla, a young girl is introduced who is at the centre of the smutty scene in chapters 25‒26. The girl’s arrival is accompanied by an interpolation (probably taken from 18, 7), which surprisingly had not been suppressed by anyone before Fraenkel: continuoque producta est puella satis bella et quae non plus quam septem annos habere uide­ batur [et ea ipsa quae primum cum Quartilla in cellam uenerat nostram] (25, 2). The name of Habinnas’s wife is superfluous, and is rightly athetised by Fraenkel, in chapter 67, 5: applicat se illi toro in quo [Scintilla] Habinnae discumbebat uxor; in my opinion, Müller wrongly restored this in the subsequent editions. Some doubt may remain about the inclusion of suas in the interpolation identified by Müller in chapter 73, 5: in aliud triclinium deducti sumus, ubi Fortunata disposuerat lau­ titias [suas ita ut supra], though it is beyond discussion that ita ut supra is the

56 cf. Bücheler, ed. mai., p. XI f.:“unus fuit … excerptorum liber, e quo quasi riui ac fossae ex iusto fluminis alueo exiere codices et apographa quotquot supersunt.”

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‘additamentum’ of a reader; probably suas too should be athetised, considering that lautitias stands very nicely at the end of the sentence as a good closure.57 In the amusing story about the boy of Pergamon, Eumolpus, the guest of a respectable family, does his utmost to win the favour of his host’s handsome son: 85, 7 ubi cum libenter habitarem non solum propter cultum aedicularum, sed etiam propter hospitis formosissimum filium, excogitaui rationem qua non essem patri familiae suspectus [amator]; it is all too clear that that amator is an explanatory gloss which had ended up in the text: it was added by someone who wanted to make explicit the lustful intentions of Eumolpus, which Petronius instead with his customary elegance, limits himself to suggesting in propter hospitis formosis­ simum filium. It is my belief that only an acute reader like Fraenkel could have noticed the interpolation at 115, 10: this is included in the speech of Encolpius pronounced over a still unknown corpse, which later proves to be that of the tyrannical merchant who is the owner of the ship, Lichas: haec sunt consilia mortalium, haec uota [magnarum cogitationum]; en homo quemadmodum natat. The reference to the magnae cogitationes looks incongruous in the context (for the moment, they are only bewailing some poor stranger who has drowned) and is clearly interpolated from the following section. in which, after recognizing the body of his arrogant enemy, Encolpius abandons himself to Seneca-like considerations on the vanity of human conceit (115, 14 ite nunc, mortales, et magnis cogitationibus pectora implete). But on the other hand, the invasive restoration operation attempted by Fraenkel and Müller sometimes ended up by stripping the text of its lustre. This is the case, for example, with a passage in the episode of the matron from Ephesus. The soldier tries to persuade the young widow not to let herself die on her husband’s tomb, and offers her something to eat and drink, in order to convince her: the interruption of her ritual fast would in itself have meant the abandonment of her mourning. The acceptance of the chaste matron, who ends up by surrendering completely to the soldier’s siege, is anticipated by a sententious expression which only apparently acts as an extenuating circumstance for the woman’s weakness: nemo inuitus audit, cum cogitur aut cibum sumere aut uiuere (111, 13). Fraenkel expunged the disjunctive aut cibum sumere aut, thinking that it had been taken from the previous paragraph, and introduced as a superfluous duplicate of uiuere. Not by chance, this athetesis was only accepted by Müller in his first two editions. The disjunction is essential, as it heralds, with gentle humour,

57 suas had already been excluded by Bücheler, who left ita ut supra, though.



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the triumphal march of her vital appetites: cibum sumere is the first step towards the inevitable total surrender (ne hanc quidem partem corporis mulier abstinuit). Many of the excesses of the 1961 edition were immediately pointed out in the exemplary reviews by Josef Delz and Robin Nisbet: both scholars were perplexed by some of the more daring cuts.58 But the most formidable attack on Fraenkel’s theory of the systematic interpolator came indirectly from a re-examination of the upper branches of the stemma conducted by Helmut van Thiel.59 Developing a suggestion of Reinhold Merkelbach, this German scholar succeeded in demonstrating that the L collection was not the fruit of a reduction proceeding from a longer text to shorter fragments, but rather the work of a collector who had assembled all the production of Petronius that he had found, after the mid-XII century: this Sammler had incorporated into his collection the fragments contained in the breuia, in the florilegium and in a selection (Λ) made up of longer fragments deriving from the archetype. It thus became clear that behind the Petronian tradition we should not presuppose a single selection made by only one excerptor, but more than one: probably, these selections were to be attributed to different people, who had been at work in different periods, with different aims. All this critical hustle and bustle led Müller to something of a recantation: in the appendix to a reprint which has not been widely circulated (1978), our Swiss scholar ended up by restoring to the text about half the exclusions adopted in 1961, thus laying the foundations for a new, more balanced edition of the Satyri­ con, which appeared in 1983 and was largely confirmed in the Teubner edition of 1995.60 In spite of everything, the debate that followed Fraenkel’s provocative idea was not at all futile. His imaginative hypothesis was groundless, but all the same, it proved to be one of the most fruitful of the last fifty years. The scrupulous examination to which the text was – and still is – subjected has prompted a fuller appreciation of the quality of Petronius’ prose style, which increasingly

58 Respectively in Gnomon 34 (1962), pp. 676‒684, and in JRS 52 (1962), pp. 227‒232. Resistance to Fraenkel’s theory reached peaks of true blindness, however: the monography by M. Coccia, Le interpolazioni in Petronio, Rome 1973 is paradigmatic, in its dedication to an uncritical rejection of each and every one of Müller’s expunctions. 59 cf. H. van Thiel, Petron. Überlieferung und Rekonstruktion, Leiden 1971, pp. 2 ff., whose conclusions were subsequently accepted by Müller. 60 Petronii Arbitri Satyricon reliquiae, quartum edidit K. Müller, Stutgardiae / Lipsiae 19954, reprinted with corrections in 2003. For Müller’s various editions, and more generally for the most recent editions of Petronius, readers are referred to the extremely useful commented bibliography by G. Vannini, Petronius 1975‒2005: Bilancio critico e nuove proposte, Lustrum 49, Göttingen 2007, pp. 41 ff.; see also pp. 95 ff. for studies on the history of the textual tradition.

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appears to be one of the most elegant in all Latin culture. While our awareness of a different origin for the fragmentation of the work, and also the dismissal of the Non-existent Interpolator (as Italo Calvino would call him), lead us to believe that the text was not subjected to systematic interpolation, they do not stop us from recognizing occasional intrusions, which are well-known mishaps that afflict practically all traditions, in particular fragmentary ones. And again, now that we have a better knowledge of Petronius’ prose style, we can remove some deposits which have passed unnoticed, or which, though detected, still resist their just condemnation. Thus at 27, 5 I believe we should athetise a reader’s note which has entered the text: cum has ergo miraremur lau­ titias, accurrit Menelaus et ‘hic est’ inquit ‘apud quem cubitum ponitis, et quidem iam principium cenae uidetis’. [5] etiamnum loquebatur Menelaus, cum Trimalchio digitos concrepuit, ad quod signum matellam spado ludenti subiecit. As Nietzsche said, Petronius is the master of the Prestoform: his narration, inspired by the purest Atticism, always proceeds in a swift, essential manner. For this reason, I believe that it is inappropriate to repeat the subject Menelaus a second time: this is probably an interpolation by someone who glossed the text for the sake of clarity. Petronius’ usus scribendi favours the economy of similar ellipses: compare the structurally and syntactically identical case of 99, 5, in which Eumolpus is still speaking when the nauta suddenly knocks on the door: ‘ut scias’ inquit Eumolpus ‘uerum esse quod dicis, ecce etiam osculo iram finio…’ adhuc loqueba­ tur, cum crepuit ostium impulsum: here, too, the subject is not repeated.61 Among other things, the exclusion restores an excellent clausula. Another incorporated gloss which is clearly unsuitable may be found in 111, 2, in the episode of the widow of Ephesus: …positumque in hypogaeo Graeco more corpus custodire ac flere totis noctibus diebusque coepit. The interpolator was not satisfied that Petronius had written positumque in hypogaeo… corpus, and felt the need to clarify the fact that this way of burying the dead was a Greek custom, not a Roman one. It did not escape the attention of Fraenkel that Graeco more is only the pedantic comment of a reader, perhaps a medieval reader who had found the analogous combination uulgari more in the sentence immediately before. But conservative critics decided to save the gloss from exclusion. Isn’t it true, they argued, that Graeco more contrasts the Greek custom of burial with the Roman habit of cremation, and that this detail is functional to the requirement that the dead body be maintained intact, so that it can be hoisted up on the cross at the end of the anecdote? I do not think so: it seems clear to me that burial in hypogaeo

61 See the fine note of G. Vannini in MD 59 (2008), pp. 216‒217



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(as the word indicates) already means, without any further specification, that the dead body is interred.62 One last consideration. Conservative critics are accustomed to recognizing as interpolations only those parts of a text that violate the coherence of the discourse, or that display some serious linguistic inaccuracy. Only in these cases do they resign themselves to athetesis. And yet the interpolation is often not at odds with the context where it is inserted: indeed, it is like an act of collaboration with the author on the part of the reader, a willing reader who assumes his responsibility, explaining to himself – and also to posterity – what the text, according to him, has omitted to say. This is why interpolations may originate perfectly naturally from the text, camouflaging themselves so well that some compassionate critics suffer if they are forced to get rid of them. Like parasites, they feed on the logic of the discourse of which they become a part; but on closer inspection, rather than motivated, they appear to be, once again, hyper-motivated. A popular saying says that when you enjoy good health, you’ve got the most important thing. Some ancient reader of Juvenal’s tenth satire must have shared this idea. Amazed that this fundamental good was not mentioned among the gifts to be requested from the gods, he interpolated v. 356, to make up for the oversight: “people should pray that they may have a sound mind in a sound body”. Perhaps Juvenal himself would have adhered to this obvious truth, but then he should have written another satire: his tenth satire does not leave room for any other theme than that of the moral perversion of men who succumb to mistaken desires and are hostile to virtue, which is the only thing that could make them happy. Naturally, the conventional wish that couples health of body with peace of mind recurs in many paraphilosophical texts, and Juvenal’s comments have a large number of parallels: suffice it to quote Mart. 10, 47, 5‒7 uitam quae faciant beatiorem / … mens quieta / … salubre corpus.

62 Among other things, the addition appears to be the work of a semi-educated person, since the Greeks very often practised cremation and indeed considered it a characteristic of their people as opposed to others: cf. Herodotus 3, 38, where Darius asks the Greeks “at what price they would agree to eat their fathers, when they died, and they replied that they would not do so at any price. After this, Darius called the Indian population known as the Callatians, who ate their parents, and asked them, in the presence of the Greeks, who were informed by an interpreter about what was being said, at what price they would agree to burn their fathers in flames when they died; they started shouting at the top of their voices, begging him not to speak of such enormities”. See also Lucian, De luctu 21 “the Greek cremates, the Persian inters, the Indian covers with rock crystal, the Scythian eats, the Egyptian embalms” (ὁ μὲν Ἕλλην ἔκαυσεν, ὁ δὲ Πέρσης ἔθαψεν, ὁ δὲ Ἰνδὸς ὑάλωι περιχρίει, ὁ δὲ Σκύθης κατεσθίει, ταριχεύει δὲ ὁ Αἰγύπτιος).

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Let us take a look at the context in Juvenal: ut tamen et poscas aliquid uoueasque sacellis exta et candiduli diuina tomacula porci, orandum est ut sit mens sana in corpore sano. fortem posce animum mortis terrore carentem, qui spatium uitae extremum inter munera ponat naturae, qui ferre queat quoscumque dolores, nesciat irasci, cupiat nihil …

355 356

If however you want a reason for prayer and for offering a pretty white piglet’s innards and sacred sausages at the shrines, then you should pray for a sound mind in a sound body. Ask for a courageous heart that has no fear of death, that regards long life as among the least important of nature’s gifts, that can endure any kind of hardship, that knows neither anger nor desire … After a long, stern harangue against foolish men who follow wrong ways, the poet concludes with an exhortation to virtue: “instead of praying to the gods in the hope of obtaining false benefits, if you really want to ask for something, ask for a courageous heart…”. A pedigree sleuth like Michael Reeve63 scented the traces of the clumsy interpolator: the insertion of v. 356 interrupts the continuity of the syntactical structure ut poscas aliquid …, / posce, a structure that on the contrary requires a close, immediate link between the two parts. It is true that the insertion of the spurious verse is to all appearances well camouflaged, as it produces a sequence which in itself is plausible; but the damage that it produces is considerable, because it destroys the elegant verbal repetition which makes the poet’s exhortation peremptory: the sequence poscas … posce actually reproduces a trait of spoken language, as we can see from Juvenal himself 11, 148 cum poscis, posce Latine; texts which variously reproduce traits of colloquial language offer many an example, e.g. Pl. Poen. 511 quin si ituri hodie estis, ite; Ov. Am. 3, 14, 15 quae facis, haec facito; A.A. 1, 596 et, quacumque potes dote placere, place; Sen. Ben. 2, 5, 2 fac si quid facis. Furthermore, it must be taken into consideration that orandum est betrays the late usage of the language of Christians, who were accustomed to employing the verb orare for all the meanings present in rogare and precari; indeed, they made it a characteristic item of their religious vocabulary. A quotation of this verse that can be found in Dracontius, laud. 3, 745: sint reduces sensus, mens sana in corpore

63 CR 20 (1970), pp. 135‒136.



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 65

sano, leads us to believe that the interpolation took place before the fifth century. It only remains to be observed that according to Stoic orthodoxy, to which the satire seems to conform,64 good health is a contingent possession, undoubtedly inferior to the sovereign good towards which all human efforts should tend: virtue.65 In short, once the verse is found to be spurious, the only choice left is athetesis. Juvenal will be happy; less so, the numerous managers of sports gymnasiums, who, after raising the banner mens sana in corpore sano many times as a promising advertising sign, now see it downgraded to an anonymous fake. I consider this to be without any doubt an interpolation, which only the indulgence of an extreme conservatism might save from exclusion. But if we want to be sympathetic, conservative critics have some justification on their side: they have had to put up with so many unrestrained attacks on several other passages of Juvenal that it is impossible for them not to feel that they are in a state of siege. The siege began almost one hundred and fifty years ago (but a few interpolations had already been diagnosed before that), when Otto Ribbeck published an imposing study, the title of which already indicated how much space he intended to dedicate to athetesis: Der echte und der unechte Iuvenal.66 He judged many of the last few satires to be spurious, only because they presented a different style and attitude compared with the tone of indignatio characteristic of the first part of the collection. Suffice it to recall that among the most recent editors, a middleof-the-road critic like Wendell Clausen (Oxford 1959; 19922) condemns about forty interpolations either certain or suspected; James Willis, who follows decidedly extremist criteria, goes much farther (BT Stuttgart / Berlin, 199767). Of course, not all cases are the same: some verses betray their inauthentic nature by the fact that they are missing in a part of the manuscript tradition (e.g. 6, 614a-b-c; 9, 134a; 14, 1a); others express considerations that are out of place, or at least inappropriate, like 9, 5; then, the case of vv. 6, 346‒348 is special, since they appear to be almost identical to ll. 29‒34 of the Oxford fragment. In general, from a typological point of view, it may be noted that while it is mostly single lines or series of whole lines that are interpolated, we also find, not infrequently, interpolations ‘straddling the lines’, that is to say, those that consist of two hemistichs belonging to two successive lines (7, 50‒51; 8, 202‒203; 11, 168‒169; 15, 107‒108),

64 Cf. Cic. nat. deor. 3, 88; Epict. Enchir. 1,1; SVF III 149‒150; Sen. Epist. 94, 8. 65 Cf. Cic. fin. 3, 44 …ualetudinem … neque … in bonis ponimus, … censemus nullam esse tantam aestimationem ut ea uirtuti anteponatur (this refers to the position of the Stoics in opposition to that of Aristotle). See D. Iunii Iuuenalis Satura X, ed. P. Campana, Firenze 2004, pp. 360‒364. 66 Berlin 1865. 67 To get an idea of the criteria used by Willis, it is sufficient to read pp. VIII‒XLI of the praefatio. Cf. by the same author “Juvenalis male auctus”, Mnemos. 4 ser. 42 (1989), pp. 441‒468.

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or which may even cover one hemistich plus one verse plus another hemistich (like 13, 187‒189 accusatori nollet dare.[ plurima felix / paulatim uitia atque errores exuit, omnes / prima docens rectum, sapientia.] Quippe minuti…). Interpolations in Juvenal’s works are usually of a sententious, or moralising character, but often they also echo a well-known passage, on which they are constructed. This is the case with 6, 188: Nam quid rancidius quam quod se non putat ulla formosam nisi quae de Tusca Graecula facta est, de Sulmonensi mera Cecropis? Omnia Graece: [cum sit turpe magis nostris nescire Latine.] hoc sermone pauent, hoc iram, gaudia, curas, hoc cuncta effundunt animi secreta.

185

190

What’s more disgusting than this, that no woman considers herself a beauty, unless she turned herself from Tuscan to Greek, from a native of Sulmo to an authentic Athenian? Everything they say is Greek: [although it’s more disgraceful for our own (Roman) women to show ignorance in Latin.] In this language they tell their fears, voice their anger, joys, cares, in this language they pour out all the secrets of their hearts. Here, the interpolation is all too clear, because it interrupts the logical and syntactical connection between Graece and hoc sermone. Some reader thought it desirable to add a further comment of censure which has nothing at all to do with the fanatical passion of Roman women for Greek. The insertion is at the same time a note of comment and a quasi-citation d’auteur:68 it contains a verbal echo (even if the sense of the original is different) of a famous saying of Cicero contained in Brutus 140: non enim tam praeclarum est scire Latine quam turpe nescire. It seems clear that the annotation must have been initially placed in the margin of the passage, in a place where it did not constitute an obstacle to the correct succession of verses: after being subsequently absorbed into the text, it became an impediment to the flow of the discourse, and as such it should be removed without any hesitation.

68 R. Tarrant, “Toward a Typology of Interpolation in Latin Poetry”, TAPA 117 (1987), pp. 281‒298, tries to classify interpolations, by distinguishing between ‘glosses’, ‘comments’, ‘citations’, ‘imitations/collaborations’: obviously the various cases may overlap or be combined together.

Chapter III: Corruption and Conjecture

Ab Ioue principium. Let us start with Poliziano, because there is no doubt that he must be recognized as the Jupiter of humanistic conjectural criticism: it is with him that the history of the new philology begins. Not only did he possess outstanding perspicacity, but also methodological rigour, and though extremely proud of his philological talent, and contemptuous towards almost all of his humanist colleagues, he was also capable of bridling his explosive ingenuity. As a poet, he was appreciated and respected in the Florence of Lorenzo il Magnifico, as was Alfred Housman in Victorian England; he too did not shrink from bitter disputes, and made every one of his critical interventions an opportunity for a proud lesson of philological skill. The example of De rer. nat. 1, 122 may suffice. Among the mistaken opinions which induce men to be afraid of death, Lucretius also considers the Pythagorean doctrine of metempsychosis, which is the reason why the name of Ennius is mentioned: etsi praeterea tamen esse Acherusia templa Ennius aeternis exponit uersibus edens, quo neque permaneant animae neque corpora nostra sed quaedam simulacra modis pallentia miris

120

yet Ennius too narrates, disclosing it in his immortal verses, that the regions of Acheron exist, where neither our souls nor our bodies remain, but only certain images of an extraordinary pallor All the manuscripts agree in attesting the reading permaneant: this verb, the occurrence of which is not very frequent in poetry, is not to be found anywhere else in all the work of Lucretius, The main problem, however, is not so much the totally extraneous nature of the verb in the vocabulary of Lucretius, but rather the adverb of motion to a place quo, which is improperly compelled by many critics (Lachmann, Munro, Bailey) to assume a locative meaning, almost as if it were equivalent to quo loco. To circumvent the difficulty, Marullo had emended it to perueniant, a correction that Pio accepted into the text of his annotated edition of 1511; in the following year, Candido too recorded it among possible improvements in the appendix to his editio Iuntina. In the margin of the codex Laurentianus 35. 29, clearly a copy of L (Med. Laur. 35. 30, the codex that Niccoli had transcribed from the copy by Poggio),69 some hand corrected the transmitted reading, perma­

69 Cf. M. D. Reeve, “The Italian Tradition of Lucretius”, It. Med. Um. 23 (1980), p. 39.

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neant, to permanent. This hand has been identified as that of Poliziano, who in that period was a much admired professor at the University of Florence.70 The verb permanare, which frequently recurs in De rerum natura, is a highly appropriate term: cf. e.  g. 3, 699 permanare animam; 3, 586 anima emanante. In his Adversaria, furthermore, Turnebus71 indicated a passage of Festus from which a paretymological relationship emerges between Manes and manare: Paul. Fest. p. 115, 6‒12 Lindsay “Manalem lapidem” putabant esse ostium Orci, per quod animae inferorum ad superos manarent, qui dicuntur manes; ibid. p.  147, 7; cf. Seru. Dan. ad Aen. 4, 490 manes quod ad inferos manent; ibid. 3, 63.72 It is thus highly likely that Lucretius felt that the close relationship between “the souls of the dead” (the Manes) and their “passage from one world to another” (per­ manare) was motivated and deeply rooted in the patrimony of Roman beliefs: this is the concept of metempsychosis that Ennius adopts in those lines. This etymological recovery not only reinforces my conviction that Poliziano’s emendation hits the nail right on the head, but it also gives me the opportunity to express a few thoughts about his conjectural method: it is typical of Poliziano to propose corrections that are based on some kind of auctoritas, generally ignored or underestimated. More than his palaeographical expertise or his intuitive awareness of the probable graphic confusion between the forms of permanere and permanare, I am convinced that what led him towards the correct emendation was his knowledge of the etymology that survived in Paulus-Festus and in Servius. Promoter of a type of correction that was decidedly new for his period, he had several times criticised the current practice of emendation, in which, to put it in his own words, what triumphed was the conjecture “ex commodo conficta”: “Nihil pernitiosius studiis nostris quam quod multi iam pridem facere audent, ut nulla veteris auctoritate codicis, nullo scriptoris idonei testimonio nisi, quodcumque suspicio trahat, deleta priore lectione, superscribant et quod adhuc intellegi non potest in alia quaedam verba detorqueant, unde aliquis modo sensus, licet undecunque decerptus, eliciatur.”73 In a word, not just a more or less plausible correction, suggested by whim or imagination, but a restoration induced by some external testimony.

70 Cf. M. Rinaldi, “Per la storia di un verso lucreziano”, MD 46 (2001), pp. 174‒175. 71 Adriani Turnebi, Adversariorum Tomi III, Basileae 1581, l. X, c. XV, col. 319. 72 See R. Maltby, A Lexikon of Ancient Latin Etymologies, ARCA 25, 1991, s. u. Manes, p. 364. 73 Angelo Poliziano, Miscellaneorum Centuria secunda, edited by V. Branca and M. Pastore Stocchi, ed. minor, Firenze 1978, p. 11.



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Similarly, in Catullus 66, 48 (Miscellanea 1, 68) the recovery of Chalybon, as opposed to the unmetrical celitum of the paradosis,74 more than a conjecture, is an admirable correction deriving from comparison with a complex fragment of the Lock of Berenice by Callimachus – a fragment which Poliziano was the first to discover in a scholion on Apollonius Rhodius, creating an interaction with the line of Catullus’ version (ut Chalybon omne genus pereat ~ Χαλύβων ὡς ἀπόλοιτο γένος).75 The same thing happens in De officiis 1, 18, 61. Here, Cicero says that commonly, the actions performed by a courageous, stalwart soul are widely praised; as a result, orators have free rein to extol Marathon, Salamis, Platea, Thermopylae, and Leuctra: Hinc rhetorum campus de Marathone, Salamine, Plataeis, Thermopylis, Leuctris, Stratocles, hinc Decii, hinc Cn. et P. Scipiones, hinc Marcellus… This is the text as it was transmitted. Poliziano realised that the name Stratocles concealed a corruption – what did the demagogic adversary of Demosthenes have to do with this list of names of glorious Greek battles? – and emended it to 〈hinc no〉ster Cocles (before the publication of the Centuria Seconda76, this correction was attributed to Pier Vettori). Poliziano had understood that at this point in the text, after the series of places of renown for the Greeks, a parallel series of Roman national glories (cf. noster) must begin: first, the legendary Cocles, then the Decii, the Scipios, and Marcellus. This is an example of a conjecture that takes into consideration not only the reality of antiquity, but above all, the data of the manuscript tradition: in actual fact, two codices, neglected by other critics, transmit something rather more promising than Stratocles (to be precise, Stercocles and Stercodes)77, even if neither of them preserves the reading proposed by Poliziano. This is another characteristic of his philological method which should be properly stressed: the collation of codices has been raised to the level of a fundamental criterion of criticism.78 Not that this was unknown to other humanists, but it is

74 Other codices read celerum or celorum. Calfurnio (1481) and Partenio (1485) had printed telorum. 75 Cf. Callimachus, ed. R. Pfeiffer, vol. I, Oxonii, 1949, pp. 114‒115. 76 Chapter 14 of the Branca-Pastore Stocchi editio maior, Firenze 1972. 77 “Cum domesticum codicem cum duobus quibusdam conferrem, quorum scilicet alter mediae fere antiquitatis Andreae Magnanimi bononiensis opera … fuerit mihi commodatus, alterum vero longe antiquiorem ex Medica bibliotheca deprompseram, reperiebam in antiquiore pro ‘Stratocle’ ‘Stercocles’; at in bononiensi ‘Stercodes’, videlicet .c. et .l. litteris in .d. coagmentatis parato lapsu”. 78 Cf. S. Timpanaro, La genesi del metodo del Lachmann, Padova 19852, cap. I, “L’emendatio ope codicum dagli umanisti al Bentley”, pp. 3‒16 (= The Genesis of Lachmann’s Method, ed. and transl. by Glenn W. Most, Chicago / London, 2005, pp. 45‒57); cf. S. Rizzo, Il lessico filologico degli

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only in the Miscellanea that we find a systematic use of this approach. Emendatio ope codicum becomes a necessary presupposition of emendatio ope ingenii. Undoubtedly, Poliziano was all too well aware of the fact that he possessed broader learning and a more mature method than other humanists, above all those of the preceding generation: all of them were ardently attached to the texts rediscovered of Greek and Latin antiquity, but none of them had developed a method like his in the practice of philology (perhaps with the exception of Lorenzo Valla). And so it was that several of the interventions of the highly precocious Poliziano (he died at the age of only forty) were dictated by a proud antagonism. One of his most brilliant restorations, at Ov. Ibis 569, can be seen to stem precisely from the intention to make a fool of the humanist Domizio Calderini. The passage of Ovid speaks of the episode narrated by Menelaus in Book IV of the Odyssey: Helen, imitating the voices of their sweethearts, calls each of the strongest of the Greek stalwarts hidden inside the wooden horse, one by one, in order to induce them to betray their presence, but Ulysses immediately stifles the impulsive Anticlus, who is on the point of responding to the call: utque loquax in equo est elisus guttur Agenor,    sic tibi claudatur pollice uocis iter. and as the loquacious Agenor was strangled inside the horse,    so may the passage of your voice be closed with a thumb. Poor, hapless Calderini expressed his acceptance of this text. Pitilessly, Poliziano, whose modesty did not match his intelligence, first threw in his teeth the fact that the Greek character mentioned by Homer is Anticlus and not Agenor (who, among other things, is a warrior on the Trojan side), and then, reeling off an interminable string of insults and derision, triumphantly nailed him: not in equo … Agenor, but in equo … acerno, “inside the horse made of maple-wood”. I have no fear of committing a sin of bias if I follow the motto à tout seigneur tout honneur: in a museum of conjectural art, Poliziano should be given a room of his own, not so much in view of the single results obtained, as for the methodology that he adopted. Scaliger has no need of promoters or apostles to invoke his miracles. Even though his boast of descending from a princely family (the Scaligeri of Verona) must

Umanisti, Roma 1973, pp. 260‒263; A. Grafton, “On the Scholarship of Politian and its Context”, Journ. of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 40 (1977), pp. 150‒188; see also E. J. Kenney, The Classical Text, Berkeley/Los Angeles/London 1974, pp. 5‒12.



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have been practically groundless, he really was a prince, a prince of philologists. Although his period saw scholars of the level of Estienne and Casaubon, Turneby and Muret, Justus Lipsius and Denis Lambin, nobody did so much for classical literature, or enjoyed such great renown in Europe, above all in the field of textual criticism. Called to the University of Leiden, by gracious concession of the academic authorities he was exonerated from the obligations of teaching, so that he could dedicate all his time to the reading and emendation of ancient authors. Several of his innumerable critical interventions deserve to be recalled, if for no other reason, to demonstrate the wide range of his talent and his interests; but there is one which, though very well known,79 I cannot pass over without reproducing it here: I have always admired it as an act of pure conjectural bravura. In poem 61, 189 ff. by Catullus, the manuscript tradition presented a somewhat corrupt text, which had been subjected to various attempts by preceding editors:80 ad maritum tamen iuuenem caelites nihilominus pulcre res From the previous strophe (l. 184 marite) Scaliger inferred that here the poet is addressing the bridegroom directly, singing his praises; thus he emended the phrase ad maritum to at, marite, and this was the first step along the road to the solution. He then sensed intuitively that the unlikely sequence tamen iuuenem concealed the optative formula of the oath ita me iuuent / Caelites, a formula that Catullus uses again, with variations, in 66, 18 (ita me diui… iuuerint) and in 97, 1 (ita me di ament). Thus he wrote at, marite, ita me iuuent Caelites, nihilo minus pulcher es but you, o husband, so may the gods help me, are no less handsome But the most radical readjustment in this poem involved the transposition of an entire strophe. The group of lines from 184 to 198 consists of three five-line

79 An instructive analysis of the corruptions contained in these lines is offered by M. L. West, Textual Criticism and Editorial Technique, Stuttgart 1973, pp. 132‒133. 80 J. J. Scaliger, Castigationes in Valerii Catulli librum, Paris 1577, p. 52: “Locus inquinatissimus, quem ita, uti hodie legitur, reconcinnavit Parthenius. Mallem veterem lectionem depravatam reliquisset, quam suum somnium nobis interpretaretur”.

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strophes, all three of which are addressed directly to the future husband: in the first, the poet reminds him of the beauty of the bride who is waiting for him in their marriage bed, in the second he praises him because he is as handsome and attractive as she is, and in the third one, he assures him that he will enjoy the favour of Venus. But in the course of their transmission, the order of the second and third strophes was changed, and the understanding of the lines was seriously compromised.81 With sovereign aplomb, Scaliger restored the correct sequence: “Monstrum lectionis, ut vides, sed in quo solo istius loci depravandi et emendandi cardo versetur. Transposita enim haec strophe locum cum superiore commutare debet, itaque sic omnia suo ordini reponimus, et tunc facile menda ipsa tollemus82”. A stroke of genius, and a gesture of pride: Scaliger was like that. Another transposition, perhaps less striking, but equally successful, is to be put down to his credit in the ordening of Verg. Aen. 10, 707‒716: Ac uelut ille canum morsu de montibus altis Actus aper… ......................................................................... substitit infremuitque ferox et inhorruit armos, nec cuiquam irasci propriusue accedere uirtus, sed iaculis tutisque procul clamoribus instant; haud aliter, iustae quibus est Mezentius irae, non ulli est animus stricto concurrere ferro, missilibus longe et uasto clamore lacessunt; ille autem impauidus partis cunctatur in omnis dentibus infrendens et tergo decutit hastas.

707

711

714 715 716 717 718

And as a boar, driven down from the high hills by snapping hounds … halts and snorts fiercely, hackles bristling, and no one is brave enough to rage at it, or approach it, but, brandishing their spears, they shout from a safe distance; in the same way, none of those who are rightly angry with Mezentius has the courage to attack him, sword drawn, but they provoke him from afar with arrows and loud shouts; and he fearlessly turns, undecided, in all directions, gnashing his teeth, and shakes the spears off his back.

81 Cf. J. Haig Gaisser, Catullus and his Renaissance Readers, Oxford 1993, p. 187. 82 Castigationes … cit., ibid.



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This is the order of lines transmitted by the ancient manuscripts in capital script. The authority of tradition has led many scholars to accept this sequence, which makes ll. 717‒718 refer to Mezentius. But in this way, the simile with the wild boar becomes an identification rather than a comparison (thus, among others, Conington, who finds it “very plausible” that the Etruscan king should assume an animal-like appearance). It is true that in Virgil, more than in Homer, compara­ tum and comparandum usually appear to blend their elements; but if we accepted this succession of lines, the attribution to Mezentius of certain features which properly refer to the wild boar would violate the laws of the prepon, from which Virgil’s descriptions never stray very far. I believe that some error occurred before the creation of our tradition. After the simile had been started by means of the usual formula ac uelut ille…aper, it probably seemed that the phrase that comes a few lines later (ille autem impauidus, which still refers to the wild boar) was introducing a contrast, and therefore referred to Mezentius. Whatever happened, Scaliger restored the logical order of the sequence by transposing ll. 717‒718 after l. 713 and making the part dedicated to Mezentius begin with l. 714 (Prolegomena in M. Manilium, 8, in the second edition of his Manilius, Leiden 1600): “hoc ita esse nemo dubitabit, nisi qui Latine nescit, aut communi sensu caret”. The words ille autem impauidus closely follow the simile with the wild boar in the Homeric model in Il. 11, 415: ὡς δ᾽ ὅτε κάπριον ἀμφὶ κύνες θαλεροί τ᾽ αἰζηοὶ σεύωνται, ὁ δέ τ᾽ εἶσι βαθείης ἐκ ξυλόχοιο θήγων λευκὸν ὀδόντα μετὰ γναμπτῆισι γένυσσιν, ἀμφὶ δέ τ᾽ ἀΐσσονται, ὑπαὶ δέ τε κόμπος ὀδόντων γίγνεται, οἱ δὲ μένουσιν ἄφαρ δεινόν περ ἐόντα, ὥς ῥα τότ᾽ ἀμφ᾽ Ὀδυσῆα Διῒ φίλον ἐσσεύοντο Τρῶες.

415

420

As when energetic young men and hunting dogs harass a boar, the beast charges from dense foliage on every side, baring white fangs over its curving jaws, and they dodge all round it, to the sound of champing tusks, hunters and dogs standing firm, for all their fear – that’s how Trojans then kept going at Odysseus, loved by Zeus. The whole of line 718 dentibus infrendens et tergo decutit hastas can only refer to the wild boar: the enraged animal, ready to attack, bares its fangs and at the same time shakes off its back the spears that have hit it. Those who maintain the transmitted order of the lines are forced to belittle the clear Homeric model, and

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to believe that Mezentius fends off the enemy spears from his ‘shield’, thus giving a highly improbable metonymic value to tergum: only one fragment of Sallust (Hist. 4, 75 Maur., quoted by Servius ad Aen. 11, 619) would seem to allow such an eccentric exegesis. The obstinate custodians of the manuscript tradition, if they truly wish to defend Virgil’s text, will have to give up their doubts, and, with Scaliger, accept transposition. May I recall a personal experience? Everyone knows what an extraordinary critical talent Richard Bentley received as a gift from Providence (his contemporaries were already well aware of it), but I would like to provide direct evidence: experto credite. A few years ago, I was preparing a critical edition of the Aeneid for the Bibliotheca Teubneriana, and I had arrived at the point of fixing the text of Book X. Believe it or not, within the space of only seven lines, I found myself forced to accept not one, but three conjectures proposed by Bentley. He had brought to light three insidious faults, and had also solved them magnificently. I could hardly believe that in such a well-transmitted text as that of Virgil, the possibility existed of the need for such frequent interventions, which at the same time were so effective. It only remains to have a look at the passage, following the text that I accepted (ll. 702‒711): Nec non Euanthen Phrygium Paridisque Mimanta aequalem comitemque, una quem nocte Theano in lucem genitore Amyco dedit et face praegnans Cisseis regina Parim: Paris urbe paterna occubat, ignarum Laurens habet ora Mimanta. Ac uelut ille canum morsu de montibus altis actus aper, multos Vesulus quem pinifer annos defendit multosque palus Laurentia silua pascit harundinea, postquam inter retia uentum est, substitit. …

705

710

He killed Evanthes too, the Phrygian, and Mimas, Paris’s friend and peer, who was born to Theano and his father, Amycus, on the same night when Cisseus’s royal daughter, pregnant with a firebrand, gave birth to Paris: Paris lies buried in the city of his fathers, the Laurentine shore holds the unknown Mimas. And as a boar that pine-covered Vesulus has sheltered for many years and Laurentine marshes have nourished with forests of reeds is driven from the high hills by snapping hounds, and halts when it reaches the nets …



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Three conjectures in seven lines, we said: let us look at the first one. In l. 704 the manuscripts read genitori Amyco, and many editors have followed them. Bentley, with his infallible sense of the language, realised that it was an illusion that dedit could be taken at the same time with the dative genitori and the complement in lucem: “to give birth to, for his father”. The construction dare in lucem is already a ‘complete’ construction, which cannot be extended with a dative. The ablative absolute genitore Amyco, which is idiomatic in expressions of paternity, is the conjecture by means of which Bentley eliminated the obstacle. With perfect economy. The following line offers another admirable demonstration of bravura: here, the diagnostic skill and the perspicacity of the therapy draw force from each other. The manuscripts agree in transmitting regina Parim creat: urbe paterna / occubat etc. The context reveals a certain degree of strain: not only is the verb occubat without any subject, which has to be inferred necessarily from the object Parim of the preceding line, but also the perfect dedit is not in very good agreement with the coordinated present creat, though the two verbs refer to actions that are perfectly concomitant.83 In a note on Hor. Epod. 5, 28 Bentley found the solution to the problem: he corrected the text to regina Parim: Paris urbe paterna / occubat. His reasoning may be reconstructed as follows, even though the idea probably occurred to him as a flash of intuition: at an early stage of the manuscript tradition, Paris was omitted as a result of haplography, and then creat was conjectured in its place, in order to have a verb governing the accusative Parim. Among the various kinds of damage to written texts, haplography is one of the most common, and a large number of examples can be given: also at Ecl. 7, 70 Corydon Corydon P writes Corydon only once; in Aen. 2, 663 P transmits patrem instead of patris patrem and in 10, 753 has Salium instead of Salius Salium. The fault once shrewdly diagnosed, the remedy came almost by itself. The contiguous repetition of the same word (or of the same proper noun) in different cases subsequently became a ‘mannerism’ in Ovid: cf. fast. 3, 199 festa parat Conso; Consus tibi cetera dicet; ars 1, 545 dum sequitur Bacchas, Bacchae fugiuntque petuntque; her. 7, 41 quo fugis? obstat hiemps: hiemis mihi gratia prosit. Again in Book X, in l. 751, Virgil takes pleasure in the elegant expression … hunc peditem. pedes et Lycius processerat Agis. The last correction to the passage remains to be seen. In reality, the wild boar of the comparison is split into two different boars, which are equally aggressive: one that the hunters flush out on Mount Vesulus, and the other one that lives in the Laurentine marsh. The two animals are described in two different syn-

83 See the fine note in the commentary of S. J. Harrison, Vergil, Aeneid 10, Oxford 1991, p. 239.

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tactical formulations, which a banal error of the manuscript tradition accidentally unified: the nominative actus aper (708) produced by analogy silua pastus harundinea (710). But in no way can the participle pastus be taken outside the relative clause in which it is contained, and linked with the object quem; and it is equally plain that the coordination multosque must imply that the indicative defendit shall be connected with another verb in the indicative. We must correct pastus to pascit. This providential adjustment repairs the disrupted syntax and restores full balance to the two parts of the simile. I have already referred to my amazement as an editor: as many as three conjectures to be accepted in only seven lines. To tell the truth, though, I have to add that I had already been tempted to accept another of his corrections in Book IX, 485. This line belongs to the harrowing lament of the mother of Euryalus: … nec te, sub tanta pericula missum, adfari extremum miserae data copia matri? heu, terra ignota canibus data praeda Latinis alitibusque iaces…

485

… Didn’t you give your poor mother the chance for a final goodbye when you were being sent into such great danger? Ah, you lie here in a strange land, given as prey to the carrion birds and dogs of Latium! … In contrast with the oldest manuscripts, Bentley proposed the masculine vocative date, trusting in his sense of style (but also following the reading of some recentiores): he suspected that data praeda was due to a mechanical assimilation to data copia in the previous line. Among other things, the vocative date adds pathos to the apostrophe, as happens in 2, 283 exspectate uenis? and in 12, 947 tune…spoliis indute meorum / eripiare? I was thus convinced, and accepted the intervention. But some time later, when I was forced to accept the three conjectures described above while editing Book X, I gave way to second thoughts, and restored the data of the manuscripts. My reason for doing so was not that I was religiously following the transmitted text: I did it almost out of irritation. I had the impression that Bentley had already received too much admiring homage from me, and I was reluctant to bow once again to his overwhelming intelligence. Alas, admiration often hides a shade of envy. In any case, the critical apparatus of my edition still bears the traces of my all-too-human weakness: next to the reading date I wrote “aegre reicio”. I had refused it, but reluctantly: the better part of me could not help appreciating this umpteenth display of intelligence by the inimitable Richard Bentley.



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And yet, it should be taken into consideration that Virgil was not his ‘author’. On the contrary, it was Horace and Terence that benefited from his most assiduous editing, as well as the difficult Manilius: over these three, he exercised a real critical monopoly. In the edition of Horace, he gave free rein to his talent as an implacable conjecturer (his changes to the text amount to more than 70084); thanks to his pioneering knowledge of the prosody of Latin dramaturgy, he was capable of subjecting Terence to radical editing (more than one thousand corrections)85; and also the text of Manilius was transformed in his hands: he athetised no fewer than 170 lines which seemed to him to be the fruit of interpolation. He dedicated his old age to the most formidable task, the edition of the New Testament: in this case, he had to deal with an extremely turbulent, contaminated tradition, which required a cold, rational approach, more than a passionate conjectural talent; but after twenty years of untiring effort, death put an end to his work. Another hundred years were to pass before Karl Lachmann executed the formidable task. What Bentley considered to be the main quality of a true philologist – conjectural ability – was granted in abundance by the generous gods to Richard Porson, the brilliant Regius Professor of Cambridge who exerted for some decades an unchallenged domination over Greek literature studies; in exchange, they unfortunately denied him balance of mind and sobriety of life. In the last room of this ideal museum of ours (an Epilogue on metre as an instrument to diagnose corruption, see infra p. 102‒103), we will find an example that serves to demonstrate how useful Porson’s exceptional knowledge of metre was in the art of emending texts. Here, on the contrary, I would like to recall one of his conjectures which seems admirable to me for ingenuity and linguistic perspicacity: a real case of an ability to identify the error and the appropriate cure. At the end of Euripides’ Ion, the protagonist, who is not yet ready to believe that Creusa is his mother, asks her, as confirmation, what objects she left with her son at his birth so that he could be recognized – objects which the Pythian priestess has just handed over to Ion himself. The young man is not satisfied with a single answer, which, he says, might by chance be correct. Creusa provides further convincing proof. In the text of manuscript L we read (ll. 1427‒1428):

84 D. R. Shackleton Bailey, “Bentley and Horace”, in: Profile of Horace, London 1982, pp. 104‒120; cf. also R. Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship from 1300 to 1850, Oxford 1976, p. 154. 85 It is extremely instructive to read what Gottfried Hermann wrote in De Richardo Bentleio ei­ usque editione Terenti dissertatio, Lipsiae 1819 (= Godofredi Hermanni Opuscula II, Lipsiae 1827, pp. 263‒287).

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δράκοντες ἀρχαῖόν τι παγχρύσωι γένει δώρημ᾽ Ἀθάνας… snakes, quite an ancient gift of Athene to the race all of gold … All in all, the answer is comprehensible, though the “race all of gold” seems a strangely emphatic expression to indicate the house of Erechtheus, king of Athens. And then, why “quite (τι) ancient”? Athene had sent two snakes to keep watch over the baby Erichthonius, the ancestor of Creusa, as Hermes recalls in the prologue of the play (l. 23): but undoubtedly, these snakes could not still be alive in the cot after so many years. Furthermore, Hermes himself also recalls that since that time it had been a tradition to give children two jewels in the shape of serpents. Wilamowitz carried out a rough and ready repair job on the text of L, writing: δράκοντες, ἀρχαίωι τι πάγχρυσον γένει δώρημ᾽ Ἀθάνας… snakes, a certain gift all of gold from Athene to the ancient race… Kovacs86 takes up the proposal of Wilamowitz, without feeling any embarrassment at that clumsy τι. The strange thing is that some time before, Porson had already repaired all the damage done to the line: δράκοντε μαρμαίροντε πάγχρυσον γένυν, δώρημ᾽ Ἀθάνας two snakes whose fangs gleam with golden flashes, the gift of Athene In this way, the irritating τι disappears, and we discover the dual to be expected from l. 23 (δισσὼ δράκοντε): the corruption of the whole line starts from here. Furthermore, a verb is recovered, μαρμαίρω, which recalls the preceding description of Apollo in ll. 887‒888 χρυσῶι χαίταν μαρμαίρων ‘who makes his locks shine with golden gleams’. We could not desire anything more. But Wilamo­witz ignored Porson’s brilliant conjecture. Perhaps he was still irritated because of the bitter dispute which had opposed Porson, from Cambridge, to Hermann, from Leipzig, a century earlier? I do not wish to overestimate the importance of nationalistic motivation, but the indifference of Wilamowitz to a masterpiece of emendatio ope ingenii like this really does appear to be incomprehensible. Maybe it’s because

86 Euripides, Trojan Women, Iphigenia among the Taurians, Ion, ed. and translated by D. Kovacs, Cambridge (Mass.) / London 1999.



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I firmly believe the words of the wise judge in Confucius who, as I said above, affirmed with conviction: “Show me the truth, and I’ll recognize it”. James Diggle recently put things right in his Oxford edition of Euripides (1981, reprinted 1986): here, Porson’s emendation finally appears in the text. Let us stay with Diggle: not only a skilful editor, but also a gifted conjecturer, who can boast of several happy corrections to his credit, regarding both Greek texts (above all) and Latin authors. I will mention one correction in Euripides: it seems particularly instructive to me, as it enables us to appreciate, step by step, all the mental activity that is behind every good emendation. In the Supplices, in ll. 508‒509, we find the following affirmation (transmitted in this form by manuscript L): σφαλερὸν ἡγεμὼν θρασύς· νεώς τε ναύτης ἥσυχος, καιρῶι σοφός. An arrogant commander is the cause of failure; but the ship’s sailor who remains steady is sensible at a critical moment. It is difficult to understand, however, why only a sailor, and not a leader, can remain steady; among other things, the herald who pronounces these words cannot be suspected of sympathising with the proletarians who usually formed the crews of ships. This punctuation, accepted by Wilamowitz and Murray, has to be discarded. Collard87, who adopts at the same time the punctuation of Markland after ναύτης and the conjecture νέος τε advanced independently by Orelli and Camper, prints: σφαλερὸν ἡγεμὼν θρασὺς νέος τε ναύτης· ἥσυχος, καιρῶι σοφός. An arrogant commander is the cause of failure and so is a young sailor: he who is steady is sensible at a critical moment This is already a step forward. But in 198188 Diggle objected that ἥσυχος cannot mean ‘steady’, as Collard interprets it. Furthermore, he observes that the reflection of ll. 506‒509 is about sophia (χρὴ τοὺς σοφούς…) and must therefore terminate with a definition of the man who is σοφός, not of the man who is ἥσυχος. The correct punctuation (as Markland saw) will thus be:

87 Euripides, Supplices, ed. C. Collard, Groningen 1975. 88 Studies on the Text of Euripides, Oxford, pp. 13‒14.

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σφαλερὸν ἡγεμὼν θρασὺς νεώς τε ναύτης· ἥσυχος καιρῶι, σοφός. An arrogant commander is the cause of failure and so is the ship’s sailor: he who remains calm at the right moment is sensible. This is evidently much better, though we have still not finished. Diggle himself observed that the “young sailor” did not fit in with the herald’s discourse. The previous sentence underlines “that wise men should love first of all their children, and then their parents and their country” (506‒507): speaking about “young sailors” is off the point. Diggle defended the pleonasm νεώς τε ναύτης “the sailor of the ship”, even though he was forced to do so using parallels that were only partly convincing: Iph. A. 266‒267 ναυβάτας ναῶν, Soph. Phil. 540 ὁ μὲν νεὼς σῆς ναυβάτης. But he soon realised89 that it was sufficient to change one letter to obtain the required sense: λεώς τε ναύτης “the seafaring people”, “the troop of sailors”. The expression corresponds perfectly to other passages of tragedy: Eur. Hec. 921 ναῦταν…ὅμιλον, Iph. A. 294‒295, Soph. Ai. 565, Aesch. Pers. 383 ναυτικὸν λεών. The corruption is present in an identical form in Iph. A. 1480 ναόν LP2: λαόν P. At last we can read the herald’s proclamation: “An arrogant leader is the cause of errors, and so is the crew of sailors; he who remains calm at the right moment is sensible”. Emendatio ope codicum and emendatio ope ingenii: two parts of a single task, although the first part reached its critical maturity only in the course of the nineteenth century, when the stemmatic method established itself. We have seen that during the humanistic age the most convinced advocate of emendatio ope codicum was undoubtedly Poliziano; in advance of the times, he also showed a genuine interest in the historical investigation of the manuscript tradition, but a long time was still to pass before Lachmann’s recensio could become the foundation of a mature science. Properly speaking, what I am about to present is an example of emendatio ope codicum: it should not, therefore, be mentioned in my book. But the exception has a justification. In this case, a parasitical reading is dethroned which ages ago planted its roots in the accepted text of Lucretius; thus the new reading, proposed by Sebastiano Timpanaro,90 almost assumes the appearance (if I may be

89 J. Diggle, Prometheus 7 (1981), p. 122 (= Euripidea, Oxford 1994, p. 219). 90 Philologus 104 (1960), pp. 147‒149 (= Contributi di filologia e di storia della lingua latina, Roma 1978, pp. 135‒139).



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allowed to say so) of a correction realised ope ingenii. The textus receptus of De rerum natura makes Book III begin with these words: E tenebris tantis tam clarum extollere lumen qui primus potuisti inlustrans commoda uitae, te sequor, o Graiae gentis decus, inque tuis nunc ficta pedum pono pressis uestigia signis, non ita certandi cupidus …

5

You who first were able to lift up such a clear light out of such great darkness, revealing the true comforts of life, you, glory of the Greek race, I follow, and set my footsteps firmly planted now in the impressions and marks of your own – not so much desirous of vying with you … The reading E tenebris is found in only a few humanistic manuscripts (such as the Monacensis 816, known as the ‘Victorianus’), but it soon undeservedly gained ground. The first word of the line in the Oblongus and the Schedae Vindobonenses, on the contrary, is the invocatory particle O. The other great Lucretian codex, the Quadratus, is without any initial letter: evidently the copyist left the task of illuminating the first letter to the rubricator, who, however, failed to do the work. It is clear that, given that the Quadratus and the Schedae derive from the archetype through a sub-archetype, the agreement of one of these two manuscripts with the Oblongus undoubtedly reflects the reading of the archetype. It seems paradoxical, then, that Lachmann notes “O ineptum est”: this goes against the criteria of the stemmatic method, the method which bears his name, and which finds its practical basis in the 1850 edition of Lucretius. The right reading is therefore O. Only G. Wakefield (1796), before Timpanaro, refused the conjecture E of the Victorianus and put in the text O tenebris tantis… / qui primus potuisti. He understood that the opening passage that inaugurates the proem of Book III takes the form of a hymn in honour of Epicurus. Both the invocatory particle O and the relative qui, which, like Hellenistic aretologies, recalls the superhuman task of the Lucretian hero, are elements that are typical of hymnic fervour. And then, on closer inspection, how is it possible to extollere, ‘lift up on high’, a clear light out of darkness, e tenebris? David West has rightly wondered: “If you lift up a light from the darkness, what was it doing there? How would the darkness have been dark if it were there?”91 Only the simple ablative (an ablative of ‘diffused space’) is appropriate in this context: “amid such great

91 The Imagery and Poetry of Lucretius, Edinburgh 1969, p. 80.

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darkness”. The preposition E is only an inappropriate intrusion: to be excluded without hesitation. In taking leave of his epic poem, Statius closes the Thebaid with a reference to the Aeneid, the perfect model that he has devotedly followed and delightedly imitated: …nec tu diuinam Aeneida tempta,  / sed longe sequere et uestigia semper adora: ‘ …do not vie with the divine Aeneid, but follow it from afar, and always venerate its tracks’ (12, 816‒817). A frank, conscious confession, not at all conventional, almost an address for readers. Statius knew, in fact, that every one of his readers was capable not only of recognising immediately the signs of the close relationship of intertextuality that linked his poem with that of Virgil, but also of appreciating the creativeness of his own artistic imitatio. This is precisely what modern interpreters have learnt to do, making every effort to identify the similarities between the two epic texts, and at the same time to appreciate their differences and Statius’ innovations.92 But textual critics can also gain some benefit from a judicious use of intertextuality: the text that is imitated finds confirmation in the imitating text, and vice versa, the imitating text receives its authorisation from the imitated one. I will give two examples which are, so to speak, complementary: a Virgilian crux repaired by recovering an imitation by Statius, and vice versa, a passage of Statius corrected on the basis of a linguistic usage and a stylistic structure in the Aeneid. Let us start with Virgil. In Aen. 3, 358‒362 Mynors reads: His uatem adgredior dictis ac talia quaeso: ‘Troiugena interpres diuum, qui numina Phoebi, qui tripodas Clarii et laurus, qui sidera sentis et uolucrum linguas et praepetis omina pennae, fare age …’

360

I go to the seer with these words and make this request: “Trojan-born intermediary of the gods, you who know Apollo’s will, the tripods and bays of the Clarian, the stars and the language of birds, and the omens of their auspicious flight, speak, come on …’

92 There is a wide-ranging review of comparisons in R. Helm, De P. Papinii Statii Thebaide, Berolini 1892, pp. 69 ff.; B. Deipser, De P. Papinio Statio Vergilii et Ouidii imitatore, Argentorati 1881, spec. pp. 119‒123; R. T. Ganiban, Statius and Virgil: The Thebaid and the Reinterpretation of the Aeneid, Cambridge 2007, p. 113.



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Thus Aeneas addresses Helenus, the Trojan priest who had become the sovereign of Epirus, asking him to reveal to him the future that awaits him. Helenus possesses all the traditional virtues of divination and prophecy; Aeneas recalls them, one by one, and indeed particularly underlines the ability to interpret the oracles of Clarian Apollo: qui tripodas Clarii et laurus …sentis. The most authoritative manuscripts transmit this line in an unmetrical form: Clari laurus (Clari is an iambus). The lame line was usually corrected by introducing an asyndetic sequence: qui tripodas, Clarii laurus, qui sidera sentis. Thus, not the “bays of Claros” (the island where the famous sanctuary sacred to Apollo was situated), but the “bays of the Clarian” (that is to say, of Clarian Apollo). This was the text commonly in circulation, which Ribbeck still accepted. Madvig93 rebelled against the asyndeton: he did not want tripodas to be detached from Clarii laurus, and thus he adopted a reading of the recentiores and proposed: tripodas Clarii et laurus “the tripods and the bays of the Clarian”, a solution that was approved by many editors and commentators (Heyne, Mynors, Geymonat, Horsfall) in view of its economy; however, the suspicion hangs over this reading that it may have been born as a makeshift solution, that is to say, that it may be a cure conjectured in order to overcome the metrical fault. Another possibility of avoiding the asyndeton was spotted by Mackail94, who started from a line of Lucretius which Virgil undoubtedly had in his mind, Pythia quae tripodi a Phoebi lauroque profatur (1, 739 = 5, 112); in line with this model, he conjectured qui tripoda ac Clarii lauros: after the loss of the copulative ac, the singular tripoda might have been changed to the plural tripodas to adjust the prosody. Although the hypothesis is in itself attractive (I too was initially prepared to accept it for my Teubner edition), it is hard to give up the plural tripodas, which is not only a sophisticated feature of Virgil’s poetic language, but also finds confirmation in a line of Nicander where the oracle of Apollo at Claros is mentioned: Alex. 11 ἑζόμενος τριπόδεσσι πάρα Κλαρίοις Ἑκάτοιο. I have become convinced that Silvia Ottaviano95 has found the right solution, and in fact I enthusiastically accepted her conjecture into my text: it appears to me not only economical, but also methodologically perfect. It runs as follows. In Theb. 7, 706 ff. another priest equally endowed with prophetic gifts, Amphiaraus, soon to be slain in battle, is presented by Statius with words that are very close to those with which Virgil had characterised the priest Helenus in our passage:

93 I. N. Madvigii, Adversaria critica, II, Hauniae 1873, p. 35. 94 The Aeneid, ed. with introd. and comm. by J. W. Mackail, Oxford 1930, ad loc. 95 “Nota a Aen. 3, 360”, MD 62 (2009), pp. 231‒237.

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… quantum subito diversus ab illo qui tripodas laurusque sequi, qui doctus in omni nube salutato uolucrem cognoscere Phoebo! … How quickly changed from him who was skilled to follow the guidance of tripods and of bays, to salute Phoebus and recognize the significance of birds in every cloud! The imitation here is composed of faithful borrowings: qui tripodas laurusque…, qui… But the allusion to the model implies that together with the correspondences, it is possible to appreciate also some emulative modifications. Statius must have read Virgil’s line as follows: qui tripodas laurusque Clari, qui sidera sentis Statius took possession of a Virgilian rhythmic and syntactic sequence and varied one of its constitutive elements. He put sequi in the place of Clari, an isometric, isoprosodic, isotonic substitution: a tour de force of bravura, which comes into competition with the model and echoes it. Thus the imitation by Statius acquires, for the restoration of Virgil’s text, all the weight of evidence from an indirect tradition: a reading that is extremely precious and authoritative. And now, the inverse procedure, the one more familiar to the philologist: the imitator Statius who can be amended by starting from the imitated Virgil. The passage of the Thebaid that interests us is the one in which the old seer Teiresias, at the request of Eteocles, prepares an infernal rite, designed to evoke the souls of the dead; see in particular ll. 4, 449‒454: Tum fera caeruleis intexit cornua sertis ipse manu tractans, notaeque in limite siluae principio largos nouiens tellure cauata inclinat Bacchi latices et munera uerni lactis et Actaeos imbres suadumque cruorem manibus; adgeritur, quantum bibit arida tellus.

450

Then he entwined their fierce horns with dark wreaths, handling them himself, and at the edge of the well-known wood first, nine hollow trenches cut through the earth, he pours lavish draughts of Bacchus and offerings of springtime milk and Attic rain and blood propitiatory to the shades below; so much is poured out as the dry earth will drink. As we know from the Homeric Nekyia (Od. 10, 519 f. and 11, 27 f.), the gifts offered to the dead are wine, milk, honey and blood. Statius seems to introduce a novelty



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into the ceremonial: munera uerni / lactis “offerings of springtime milk”. Why on earth “springtime”? It is impossible to believe that Statius is varying the lacte nouo (“fresh milk”) that Aeneas pours out as a libation, together with “pure wine” and “consecrated blood”, at the point (Aen. 5, 77 f.) where he celebrates the infer­ iae for Anchises. Suspecting a corruption, Damsté corrected the text to et, munera Auerni, lactis: apparently an ingenious intervention, but in reality pernicious, because it separates the combination munera lactis, which cannot be given up, because it is clearly parallel to Bacchi latices, Actaeos imbres, suadum cruorem. But his suspicions about uerni were justified. However, it was necessary to wait for the arrival of Josef Delz to see the corruption at last repaired – and also the truth restored with great elegance.96 Delz sensed intuitively that the eccentric adjective uerni concealed behind it the verb uergit, a technical term of the sacrificial rite which means ‘to incline the bowl to pour out a liquid that is contained inside it’. This is the explanation that Servius gives ad Aen. 6, 244: uergere autem est, conuersa in sinistram partem manu, ita fundere ut patera conuertatur, quod in infernis sacris fit. The two verbs of the line, inclinat and uergit, are practically synonymous; used one next to the other, they form a feature that is highly typical of Virgil’s style: the ‘dicolon abundans’, that two-membered structure in which two coordinated and varied clauses express, almost by tautology, the same meaning. Thus, in the line of Statius, hidden behind the corruption, Delz perceived the traces of a stylistic construction which is thoroughly Virgilian; he restored the structure of the illustrious model, and thus succeeded in emending the corruption. While the ‘dicolon abundans’ is typical of Virgil, the positioning of the two verbs ‘as a frame’ is equally Virgilian: inclinat at the beginning of the line, uergit at the end. I could quote many analogous examples from the Aeneid: two will be sufficient, which present both the widely used ‘dicolon abundans’ and the ‘frame’ positioning of the verbs: 2, 537 f. persoluant grates dignas et praemia reddant  / debita… and 4, 505 f. intenditque locum sertis et fronde coronat / funerea… But Virgil himself had used the rare sacred verb, or better, the compound inuergere, in a similar situation, where, in the book about the dead, the Sibyl celebrates the rite of purification before the katabasis: quattuor hic primum nigrantis terga iuuencos / constituit frontique inuergit uina sacerdos (Aen. 6, 243 f.). Ovid, too, had made use of the same verb to indicate the infernal rites described in Met. 7, 245 ff. …patulas perfundit sanguine fossas. / tum super inuergens liquidi carche­ sia uini / alteraque inuergens tepidi carchesia lactis / uerba simul fundit (Medea sacrifices to the chthonian deities). And Statius himself again uses the ritual

96 ‘Textkritisches zu Valerius Flaccus, Statius, Silius Italicus’, Mus. Helv. 32 (1975), pp. 167‒168.

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verb uergere (once again for a funeral ceremony) when he describes the libations offered to the dead body of little Opheltes in Theb. 6, 211 f.: spumantesque mero paterae uerguntur et atri / sanguinis. One more example of artistic imitation at the service of textual criticism. It is well known that Virgil’s poetic intention was that the Aeneid should appear to be almost the third poem by Homer: a new work which aspired to take the place of both the Iliad and the Odyssey together. Virgilian modernity thus had to compete with the ancient Greek model, continually creating comparisons with it. The revisitation of the two great heroic poems involved acts of appropriation and acts of transformation: Virgil’s homage must be clear, but his own freedom must be equally clear; the exemplary role of Homer must be unquestionable, but Virgil’s distance from him must be equally unquestionable. For Virgil, imitating Homer meant placing himself at the same level, proposing himself as a literary monu­ mentum, a new classic. Homer must appear as the guarantor of the new epos. And Virgil does not skimp on his acts of homage: he scatters here and there expressions which recall the great model, every now and then he displays the features that are most typical of Homer, and sometimes he imitates a linguistic or metrical peculiarity. The case that I would like to examine belongs to this latter category. In Aen. 3, 464, the manuscript tradition, together with several editors, reads: dona dehinc auro grauia sectoque elephanto then gifts heavy with gold and carved ivory Servius, who also accepts this reading, underlines the lengthening in arsis of the last syllable of gravia, justifying it “finalitatis ratione”: he is upset (“sed satis aspere”), but accepts the text. Following him, several editors quote as support Georg. 1, 279, Aen. 3, 91 and 12, 363 (in all three passages, the phenomenon of the lengthening in arsis concerns the enclitic -que). Lachmann97, with an infelicitous sense of the language, had proposed the correction to grauia a, imagining a case of haplography. But the corruption had a more complex origin. Schaper understood this when he realised that secto elephanto was an imitation of πριστοῦ ἐλέφαντος (Hom. Od. 18, 196 and 19, 564), a particularly noticeable closure, in view of the hiatus that distinguishes it. Virgil had decided to mark his line-end with the same metrical stylistic preciosity as Homer, not only echoing the two words of the Greek model, but also reproducing the same rare stylistic device.

97 In T. Lucreti Cari d. r. n. libros commentarius, Berolini 1855, p. 76.



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The unusual hiatus must soon have created embarrassment among ancient readers, with the result that the line was soon adjusted to the form in which it has been transmitted; by writing sectoque, the ‘scandal’ was eliminated, but also the marks of Homer were rubbed out. Once the mystery of the imitation had been unravelled, Schaper had no difficulty in restoring the line to its original form: dona dehinc auro grauia ac secto elephanto Two examples are clearly not enough if we think of the vast range of uses that imitation may have in textual criticism. Anyone who is interested can find some more ideas in an interesting article on certain corruptions in the Aegritudo Perdicae published by Scevola Mariotti a few years ago: “Imitazione e critica del testo”.98 I was talking about these perspicacious corrections to my friend Michael Reeve, who immediately reminded me of another happy conjecture of Mariotti for the Priapea: he had much appreciated it, and I have to admit it is outstanding for the methodological lesson that it offers. Let’s take a look at it. Priapea 68 is no more or less than a light-hearted parody of Homer: the Iliad and the Odyssey are reinterpreted in a carnivalesque spirit, as a continuous series of events all of which are alike conditioned by low sexual motivation. From the rape of Helen to the wrath of Achilles, from the slyness of Ulysses to the faithfulness of Penelope, it is always Priapus who celebrates his obscene triumph. Lines 11‒12 read as follows in the manuscripts and in many editions: Mentula Tantalidae bene si non nota fuisset,    nil, senior Chryses quod quereretur, erat. If the tool of the descendant of Tantalus (= Agamemnon) had not been so widely known, old Chryses would not have had anything to complain about. Poor Agamemnon, this is slander! His fame was undoubtedly due to his great power and his boundless arrogance, and not to his mentula. With respect to the mythological tradition in which he is involved, it is somewhat incomprehensible, or at least strange, that the poet should say “if the mentula of Agamemnon had not been known”. For this reason Broukhusius had already thought that the text was corrupt, and had conjectured nata (followed by Bücheler); for his part, ­Baeh­rens had attempted correction to mota. Two highly unsatisfactory solutions: one is a banal attempt, the other one is almost impossible to translate, if not

98 Riv. Filol. Istr. Class. 97 (1969), pp. 385‒392 (= Scritti di Filologia Classica, Roma 200, pp. 523‒530).

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totally ungrammatical (mota contains a verbal meaning, and does not fit in very well with fuisset). But on closer inspection, the order of the words raises doubts, too. It is not clear why the author wrote bene si non nota (or nata or whatever else), rather than following a normal, straightforward formulation like si non bene nota. Starting from this point, Mariotti perceptively realised that the corruption also involved non, and thus he searched for a single word hidden behind the phrase non nota. The word morata occurred to him, which is a correction that is both appropriate and elegant: “if Agamemnon’s mentula had been well-behaved”, that is to say, “if he had shown respect for the young Chryseis, the daughter of the old priest of Apollo”. In other words, by giving way to an incontinent mentula, Agamemnon had shown a lack of moral sense. This brilliant conjecture of Mariotti’s appears to me to satisfy all the requirements. Both in Ovid and in Seneca, the adjective moratus indicates, as in our case, tendencies shown by parts of the body: Met. 15, 94 uoracis et male morati… uentris; epist. 123, 3 bene moratus uenter. Among other things, the conjecture bene morata restores a standard linguistic combination; as the adjective is, properly speaking, a ‘middle voice’, moratus is often accompanied by the adverbial qualification bene or male: cf. Cic. Brut. 7 bene moratae …ciuitatis; De orat. 2, 184 ut probi, ut bene morati…esse uideamur; Liv. 26, 22, 14 multitudinem melius moratam. Some copyist did not understand the rare word, and thought (or preferred to think) the reading was nõ nota: a corruption which, as often happens, is at the same time palaeographical and psychological. It is disappointing to see that Louis Callebat’s recent critical edition of the Priapea imperturbably accepts the transmitted text, without recording any correction in the apparatus (but see the cursory note on p. 271).99 I was still quite young when I happened to read a short article in which Eduard Fraenkel proposed a conjecture on the text of Petronius (Glotta 37, 1958, pp. 312– 315): I had to translate it as an exercise for an advanced course in German language; it had been assigned to me by a language assistant in the Seminar on Classical Philology at the Scuola Normale. The pedagogical procedure was based on texts that had never been translated into Italian, and (what a great idea!) invited students of antiquity to practise by translating a passage by some German classical philologist, students of philosophy three or four less well-known pages of Heidegger or Husserl, and those in the history course some rare passage of Ranke or Weber, or even an extract from the “Historische Zeitschrift”: in a word, unicuique

99 Priapées, texte établi, traduit et commenté par L. Callebat, Paris 2012.



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Germanicum suum! I didn’t cope too badly with Fraenkel’s article: I had practically learnt it by heart. But it was only with the passing of time that I realised what a gem of textual criticism was contained in that brief note. This happens with the poems that we are forced to learn at school – they come back to our mind later in life, and it is only then that we discover all their beauty. When he wrote this article, Fraenkel must have recently started studying the Satyricon (in 1958 he held his famous seminar on the tradition of Petronius at Pisa). The passage that he magnificently corrected is found in chapter 99, the scene of the reconciliation between Encolpius and Eumolpus (the elderly poet had been reconciled with Giton only shortly before): profusis ego lacrimis rogo quaesoque ut mecum quoque redeat in gratiam: neque enim in amantium esse potestate furiosam aemulationem. daturum tamen operam ne aut dicam aut faciam amplius quo possit offendi. tantum omnem scabietudinem animo tamquam bonarum artium magister deleret sine cicatrice. with floods of tears, I beg and beseech him to make peace with me too: mad rivalry is not in the power of lovers. I promise that I will make every effort not to say or to do anything else that might offend him. I only ask him, as a master of the noble arts, to eliminate all harshness from his spirit without leaving any scar. The last sentence, which starts with tantum, immediately reveals a certain difficulty: Bücheler was not happy with animo, which he did not accept as depending on deleret and consequently emended to animi, linking it with scabietudinem. But the real difficulty lies in the imperfect subjunctive deleret, which cannot be accepted in indirect speech depending on a verb in the present tense: rogo quae­ soque ut…redeat in gratiam. The sequence of tenses requires a present subjunctive. And Fraenkel found it in deleuet (from deleuare, ‘to scrape away, to remove a rough surface, making it smooth’). Columella arb. 6, 4 testifies to the use of the verb in the ‘surgery’ of the arboriculturist: sin autem uetus uinea … radices alte positas habebit, … eam uineam … resecato. quattuor digitos ab radicibus trunci relinquito et … iuxta aliquem nodum serrula desecato et plagam acutissimo ferro deleuato. It belongs to the terminology of surgical procedure, as the word plagam, ‘the wound’, confirms; and it is a semantic imitation of the Greek ἀπολεαίνω, ‘to excise, making smooth’. And thus the correct text is: omnem scabietudinem animo … deleuet sine cicatrice, “take away every asperity from his spirit without leaving any scar”. After this correction, even Bücheler would not have found any problem in making animo go with deleuet. One single imperceptible adjustment was suf-

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ficient to restore the original physiognomy to the disfigured text: the minimum expense with the maximum profit. It sometimes happens, more often in the field of Greek studies, less commonly in the case of Latin, that excavations bring to light some papyrus which offers confirmation of a brilliant conjecture. When this happens, it’s a cause for celebration, because papyri are not always generous in recompensing the efforts of philologists; indeed, they generally take pitiless pleasure in giving the lie to scholars’ patient mental lucubrations. But sometimes they are benevolent, and in these cases they represent the richest prize for human intelligence. Thus, a papyrus that surfaced from the sands of Palestine (PColt 1)100 confirms a shrewd conjecture proposed by Emil Baehrens during the second half of the nineteenth century.101 Baehrens was one of the most diligent philologists of the great German discipline of Altertumswissenschaft: after studying under Bücheler, Lucian Müller and Ritschl, he taught for several years at Groningen.102 As an editor, he published the texts of many Latin authors, including Catullus and Propertius. But his most outstanding feat was the edition of the Poetae Latini Minores, which Teubner published in five volumes from 1879 to 1883. The conjecture that I would like to recall is found in line 423 of Book IV of the Aeneid. Dido is by now desperate: she understands that Aeneas has decided to leave; she makes one last attempt to get her sister Anna to persuade Aeneas at least to put off his departure: … miserae hoc tamen unum exsequere, Anna, mihi: solam nam perfidus ille te colere, arcanos etiam tibi credere sensus; sola uiri mollis aditus et tempora noras. I, soror, atque hostem supplex adfare superbum.

420

… Yet still do one thing for me in my misery, Anna: since the deceiver cared only about you, even trusting you with his private thoughts,

100 Cf. M. C. Scappaticcio, “NORIS e NORAS (Verg. Aen. IV 423): un sondaggio di ‘Filologia dei papiri’”, Vichiana 10 (2008), pp. 170‒175. A challenging study of the whole corpus of Virgilian papyri by the same authoress is now in print. 101 “Emendationes Vergilianae”, Neue Jahrb. f. Philol. und Paedag. 135 (1887), p. 817. 102 See D. R. Shackleton Bailey, “Emil Baehrens (1848‒1888)”, in: Latin Studies in Groningen, 1877‒1977, ed. H. Hofmann, Groningen 1990, pp. 25‒37



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and only you knew the time and the best way to approach the man. Go, sister, and speak humbly to my proud enemy. All the manuscripts, together with the indirect tradition of Servius Danielinus and Nonius Marcellus, agree on noras. Peerlkamp (a Dutch scholar who had subjected the text of the Aeneid to an extremely sceptical examination in the first half of the nineteenth century, pushing the ars dubitandi preached by Bentley to its extreme limits) had already sensed something inappropriate and incongruous in the words that Dido says to her sister. Starting from this reasonable suspicion, Baehrens arrived at the conclusion that the line, as formulated, appears to be a pointless repetition of the preceding sentence (solam…perfidus ille  / te colere etc.), since it all refers to the past (sola…noras); on the contrary, the context requires that Dido should intend to entrust Anna with a task to be carried out in the present or the immediate future. Queen Dido can only say: “you will know (or you can understand) the right kind of flattery and the best moment to talk to Aeneas”. Baehrens thus made the correction to noris. As if by magic, the text recovers its full sense. While Anna is given the task of flattering Aeneas, Dido already intends to flatter Anna: “you possess the gift of tact, my sister, and you will succeed in using it”. The speech of the desperate queen is constructed by parataxis (as a speech broken by anxiety and suffering is bound to be); but the anaphoric correspondence “solam … te, sola” implies causal reasoning: “that traitor only respected you, and let you into his most secret thoughts: therefore you are the only one that can know the best way and the best moment to talk to him”. The uiri mollis aditus et tempora cannot refer to past occasions, but must be a part of the plan that Dido wants to put into practice: they are future moments which Anna, like a skilful tactician, will choose for her meeting with Aeneas. Aeneas himself, a few lines earlier (293‒294), after the devastating appearance of Mercury, ordering him to leave Carthage, had planned similarly cautious tactics to communicate his imminent departure to Dido: temptaturum aditus et quae mol­ lissima fandi  / tempora, quis rebus dexter modus. The terminology is the same, and so is the strategy: first Aeneas, and then Anna, have to decide what the best moment is for their future moves. It is conceivable that the reading noras is due to the intervention of someone who, in the early stages of the transmission of Virgil’s text, preferred to believe the Varronian version of the myth (echoed by Ovid to a certain extent in Fasti 3, 546‒656), according to which Aeneas was in love with Anna, and consequently held some intimate meetings with her; but this tradition seems to be totally foreign to Virgil and to all the tragedy of passion in Book IV of the Aeneid. Peerlkamp suspected that this was so, and Baehrens did full justice to him when he corrected

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the transmitted text with his conjecture. The papyrus attests the reading noris; and it little matters that this papyrus is full of mistakes: according to Phaedrus, pearls can sometimes be found in dung heaps, where only a pullus gallinaceus would rather find a delicious grain of maize. We, instead, pick up the precious pearl, and reverently bow before the extraordinary perspicacity of Emil Baehrens. Before concluding this chapter, two examples from Virgil’s Georgics. In recent years, I have dedicated much of my time to this text, and I have sometimes come across conjectures that deserve to find a place in my ideal museum. The two that I choose are didactically more fascinating than others: it is easy to draw a lesson of critical method from them. In 4, 219‒222 the text transmitted unanimously by all the manuscripts, and accepted by many editors (among them the most recent, Mynors and Geymonat), is as follows: His quidam signis atque haec exempla secuti esse apibus partem divinae mentis et haustus aetherios dixere; deum namque ire per omnes terrasque tractusque maris caelumque profundum. On the basis of these characteristics, and following these models of behaviour, some have said that bees partake of divine intelligence, and drink ethereal draughts; for God moves over all lands and stretches of sea and throughout the deep sky. The last part of these lines is paraphrased in a passage of De officiis by Ambrose (1, 13): per omnia deum ire ipsi adserunt […] uim et maiestatem eius per omnia elementa penetrare, terram, caelum, maria. Starting from here, Peerlkamp discovered a crypto-corruption, and corrected omnes to omnia: the reading omnes (taken together with terras) had clearly derived from the desire to overcome the difficulty of an (apparent) trisyllable in the final foot; but omnia is a disyllable, as a result of synizesis: failure to understand this phenomenon facilitated the alteration to omnes. The same has happened at Aen. 6, 33 quin protinus omnia / perlegerent oculis, where some manuscripts again present a change to omne. If the neuter plural omnia is adopted, the following line becomes an appositional tricolon, with the consequent reconstruction of the poetic formula that appears in a fragment of Empedocles (fr. 38 D.-K.): …εἰ δ᾽ ἄγε τοι λέξω πρῶθ᾽ ἥλικά τ᾽ ἀρχήν,  / ἐξ ὧν δῆλ᾽ ἐγένοντο τὰ νῦν ἐσορῶμεν ἅπαντα,  / γαῖά τε καὶ πόντος πολυκύμων ἠδ᾽ ὑγρὸς ἀήρ  / Τιτὰν ἠδ᾽ αἰθὴρ σφίγγων περὶ κύκλον ἅπαντα. The same cliché had been taken up in Latin poetry by Ennius (ann. 543 Vahl.2 = 556 Sk.) …qui fulmine claro  / omnia per sonitum arcet, terram mare caelum and by Plautus (Amph. 1055) ita mihi uidentur omnia, mare terram caelum, consequi / iam



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ut opprimar. Virgil himself had used line 222 in Buc. 4, 50 f., where the same syntactical progression is repeated: aspice conuexo nutantem sidere mundum, / ter­ rasque tractusque maris caelumque profundum: here, too, the tricolon is in apposition to nutantem…mundum. There is no doubt that Peerlkamp was perfectly right: and the improvement in the text is considerable. I have left myself till the end, in last place – an act of ostensible modesty, by which I hope to be forgiven for my vanity in including one of my own conjectures among those that I like most. I should have refrained from doing so, at least out of delicacy, but I was overcome by that ingenuous ambition which sometimes induces a painter to depict himself in a picture full of characters: in the foreground the protagonists, distinguished and prominent; in the background the artist, a respectful, contented witness, almost one of the many. The justification that I would like to give for my impertinence is sincere: I know exactly how the intervention that I quote came to life – precisely because it is my own; I can explain how it was conceived, I can make a detailed list of the criteria that I applied, and of the various stages of my reasoning. In this way, la leçon par l’exemple becomes didactically effective, as if it were a step-by-step account of a scholastic seminar. Let us read Georg. 3, 157‒165: Post partum cura in uitulos traducitur omnis; continuoque notas et nomina gentis inurunt, et quos aut pecori malint submittere habendo aut aris seruare sacros aut scindere terram et campum horrentem fractis inuertere glaebis. cetera pascuntur uiridis armenta per herbas: tu quos ad studium atque usum formabis agrestem iam uitulos hortare uiamque insiste domandi, dum faciles animi iuuenum, dum mobilis aetas.

160

165

After birth, all care passes to the calves; and at once they brand them with the marks and names of the family, and setting apart those that they prefer to rear for breeding or to consecrate for the altars, or to destine for ploughing and turning over the soil, rough with its broken clods of earth. The rest of the cattle graze in green pastures: those that you want to prepare for practice and function in the fields, Train them while they are still young, and set about taming them While the spirits of the young beasts are docile, and their age still submissive.

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Here, Virgil is talking about the branding of domestic animals, in view of the various uses to which they will be assigned by the farmer. Philologists have long expressed their uneasiness as regards line 159: et quos appears to be a real exegetical ‘crux’. All the possible hypotheses of syntactical connection appear to me to be unsatisfactory. Heyne summed up the problem with precision: “Copula et non habet cui bene iungatur. Sunt qui construant: continuoque inurunt notas, et nomina gentis et quos, ut uerba et nomina et quos pro appositione habeantur, genusque et usus distincte designetur. Sed quomodo inurunt nomina et quos iungi possit, non docent. Equidem suppleo: et inurunt notas iis, quos.”103 Modern commentators continue to grapple with the dilemma formulated by Heyne: either they follow his proposal, or they accept the other solution, which he mentioned himself but only to reject it. Thus Conington, Page and Thomas try to extract from the general meaning of notas et nomina gentis inurunt a verb like signant or distinguunt, an implicit verb with the function of governing an unexpressed eos which is the antecedent of quos. Mynors, on the other hand, prefers to adopt the old interpretation, which treats et nomina…et (eos) quos as a double apposition which explains notas (“signa quibus et denotentur nomina et distinguantur ii qui…”).104 None of these explanations seem acceptable to me: they are all exegetical distortions, acrobatics authorised only by the illusion that a relative clause can be construed with a strongly elliptical or even ungrammatical syntactical link. Then, many interpreters appear to be influenced by the note of D. Servius, who interprets cetera in line 162 as quae non inuruntur (“the animals that are not branded”), with reference to the preceding lines and the categories of animals which, on the contrary, are branded (as if Virgil distinguished two groups of animals: those that inuruntur and those that non inuruntur). It seems likely to me that in the transmission, the first combination et nomina gentis inurunt mechanically produced the second combination et quos, so as to obtain two phrases apparently coordinated in polysyndeton. But if we do not insist on believing that quos is a relative pronoun, the idea immediately comes to mind of the emendation si quos. The result is a limpid, fluid sequence: continuoque notas et nomina gentis inurunt, / SI QUOS AUT pecori malint … AUT aris seruare …AUT scindere terram. The text thus corrected means that all the categories of calves are branded, whether they are destined for breeding, for ploughing or for sacrifice. The same syntactical structure, in which si quos

103 Publius Vergilius Maro. Ex recensione C. G. Heyne recentioribus Wenderbruch et Ruhtipfi curis illustrata, II, 1827, p. 25. 104 Virgil, Georgics, ed. with a Commentary by R. A. B. Mynors, Oxford 1990, p. 207.



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is followed by a list of three elements, each introduced by aut, is found (in perfectly identical form) in Ecl. 5, 10‒11 ‘incipe, Mopse, prior, SI QUOS AUT Phyllidis ignes / AUT Alconis habes laudes AUT iurgia Codri’. This is one of the clearest cases of an ‘inner ear’ that we can find in a poet; but there are many other examples that show Virgil’s liking for the combination si quis …aut: suffice it to quote Georg. 2, 49‒50 Tamen haec quoque, si quis / inserat aut scrobibus mandet mutata subactis, or Aen. 1, 575 …Libyae lustrare extrema iubebo, / siquibus eiectus siluis aut urbibus errat, oppure 9, 406 siqua tuis umquam pro me pater Hyrtacus aris / dona tulit, siqua ipse meis uenatibus auxi / suspendiue tholo aut sacra ad fastigia fixi. Closely connected with this is the problem of line 162 cetera pascuntur… armenta; this line was excluded by Ribbeck because it is difficult to reconcile with the preceding list, which should have exhausted all the possible destinations of the calves. But, as Mynors suggests in his commentary (in the wake of Martyn105), cetera “looks forward”, that is to say, it inaugurates a new sentence, linked with what follows, and does not refer to what goes before it. Cetera is the equivalent here of ἄλλα μέν, which finds its correspondence in the imperative tu… hortare… insiste (“while all the rest of the cattle…, you select a few calves…”). In other words, cetera refers to “all the rest of the cattle” with respect to the “few uituli” that farmers should isolate immediately, so that they can be tamed and get used to working in the fields: it is necessary to do this while they are still young, and their spirits can still be trained without difficulty to the exertions of the yoke (quos ad studium atque usum formabis agrestem). The sequence of thought goes like this: ‘you take the calves that you will have to train, and leave the others free’.106 But Virgil’s formulation is practically turned upside down, and becomes: “Leave the other calves free to graze, and apply yourself to taming the ones that will have to work in the fields”. On closer examination, the same feature of opposition, between an antecedent alii (which is likewise the equivalent here of ἄλλοι μέν) and a subsequent imperative referring to

105 P.Virgili Maronis Georgicorum libri quattuor. The Georgicks of Virgil, with an English translation and notes by J. Martyn, London 1755 (third edition), p. 310: “I take a new sentence to begin with ver. 162. Caetera pascuntur, &c. The rest of the herd, that is, those which are designed for breeding, or sacrifice, may feed at large in the meadows, for they need no other care, than to furnish them with sufficient nourishment, till they arrive at their due age. But those which are designed for agriculture, require more care: they must be tamed, whilst they are but calves, and tractable in their tender years”. 106 From this perspective, the reading of the ‘recentiores’, pascantur, instead of the pascuntur of the rest of the tradition might also be enhanced. An exhortative subjunctive would be perfectly consistent with the sequence of the following verbs, all of which are of a preceptive nature (hor­ tare, insiste…, ducantur, signent…, carpes, consument).

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the addressee, can be found in the well-known passage Aen, 6, 846 ff. excudent alii spirantia … aera / … / tu, …, Romane, memento: “others will fashion works of breathing bronze; you, o Roman, remember…”.

Epilogue

One room after another, we have visited most of our ideal philological museum. But before leaving it, let us take a fleeting glance at another special section: conjectural experiences which are based on metrical elements, or better, which diagnose and correct a corruption in response to a metrical fault. The works of Greek lyric poetry and above all those of the great Attic stage, together with the comedies of Plautus and Terence, are probably the texts that benefited most from the progress that skilled scholars made, starting in the eighteenth century, and then all through the nineteenth, in the field of classical metre. This was the period of the discovery of the principles and norms of an increasingly robust science, which is now accepted as fundamental to a solidly grounded textual criticism. First of all Gottfried Hermann, with his De metris poetarum Graecorum et Romanorum libri III (1796) and the Elementa doctrinae metricae (1816), and then August Boeckh, with his edition of Pindar, and then also Ulrich von Wilamowitz, and lastly Paul Maas (unmatched in his rigour and economy), A. M. Dale (her studies on lyric metres and choral versification are definitive): these are the main names in a glorious lignée which succeeded in establishing a new degree of precision in the texts of the great Attic dramatists. In parallel, for the metres of the Latin theatre, the most significant progress is linked with the names of R. Bentley, F. Ritschl, O. Ribbeck, Fr. Leo, W. M. Lindsay, Ed. Fraenkel, J. Soubiran, and C. Questa (whose recent studies represent today the finishing touches of a research project that has lasted for almost two centuries). While the role of pioneer in this field must be attributed to Hermann,107 he must also be awarded the palm for some conjectures based on metre which have by now become canonical. For economy and perspicacity, a conjecture of his that corrects a line of the Agamemnon by Aeschylus stands out. In the parodos of the tragedy, the chorus recalls the words with which Calchas interpreted the prodigy of the two eagles that had torn the pregnant hare to pieces: “In time, this expedition will capture the city of Priam …”; but the wise seer had added some words of caution (ll. 131‒132): οἶον μή τις ἄτα θεόθεν κνεφά   σηι προτυπὲν στόμιον μέγα Τροίας only beware that some blinding (ἄτα) sent by the gods does not obscure    beforehand the mighty curb imposed on the city of Troy.

107 But he himself frankly recognized that Bentley had shown that he possessed a sense of metre like nobody else before him (Handbuch der Metrik, Leipzig 1799, IV).

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This text is perfectly acceptable as regards meaning, and it also recalls a concept that is central in Aeschylus’ Oresteia: blinding, ἄτη (in the conventionally ‘Doric’ form, ἄτα, as is normal in the lyric parts): cf. e.g. Ag. 361, 643, 1192, 1230, 1268, 1433, 1523. However, the text is metrically impossible. Aeschylus repeatedly uses dactylic series to recall the rhythm of Homeric epos: in line 131, precisely because of the word ἄτα, the eight dactyls of the antistrophe do not scan, and do not correspond to line 113 of the strophe: οἰωνῶν βασιλεὺς ~ οἶον μή τις ἄτα: the first syllable of ἄτα is etymologically long.108 What was needed was a word with a short first syllable. Hermann identified the correct reading: the rare word ἄγα, ‘envy’, which we find attested in Herodotus (6, 61, 1: φθόνωι καὶ ἄγηι χρεώμενος)109 and in Aeschylus himself (Hesych. α 286 Latte = fr. 85 Radt). An absent-minded copyist, lengthening the top stroke of the capital gamma, had ‘restored’ a word that was thematically significant in Aeschylus (ἄτα), but metrically impossible. Hermann corrected the inaccuracy as only he could. A fault happily brought to light thanks to metrical criteria? Yes, but not only that: it is rather a fascinating empirical intuition, prompted by a clear understanding of the text (Calchas is afraid that “envy on the part of the gods” may ensue, not a “blinding caused by the gods”), and supported both by palaeographical expertise and by extraordinary lexicographical knowledge. A philologist whose name is often linked with that of Hermann, not only as a result of the important contributions that he made to the texts of Attic tragedies between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but also because of the bitter disputes that saw them opposed, is Richard Porson from Cambridge. His attitude towards the paradosis was undoubtedly more conservative: in his conjectures, he mainly tended to save, as far as possible, the external facies of letters as it appears in the codices, without arriving at radical alterations to the transmitted text (it was partly for this reason that Porson saw the transposition of words as the most economical means of solving various problems, by the simple reorganization of the metrical sequence). He, too, was in many ways a pioneer, in the sense that he started off that metrical and linguistic purification which was to become the main objective of so much of subsequent textual criticism. If there was a demon behind his work, it was the analogical method: nor could it be otherwise, because the scientific idea of metrical correctness must necessarily be based on obser­ vatio and on the extensive application of inductive rules (even if they are some-

108 Since it derives from the contraction of the first two alphas of the root found in the verb ἀάω ‘to mislead’: cf. Il. 19, 129 Ἄτην, ἣ πάντας ἀᾶται “Ate, who misleads everyone, who blinds everyone”. 109 Cf. Etym. M. 9, 1 ἄγη παρ᾽ Ἡροδότωι βασκανία.

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 103

times applied too rigidly). He gave birth to a method, and also, alas, to a fashion: ‘Porsoniasm’.110 But even the analogical procedure, though apparently mechanical, can provide quite brilliant results, if assisted by learning and subtle ingenuity. See Porson’s achievement in Aesch. Ag. 457: βαρεῖα δ᾽ ἀστῶν φάτις σὺν κότωι· δημοκράντου δ᾽ ἀρᾶς τίνει χρέος· the voice of the citizens incited by anger is grave, and pays the debt of a curse ratified by the people. This is the text as corrected by Porson, which is generally accepted by editors. The transmitted δημοκράτου of the antistrophe is unacceptable: as it has a short alpha, it does not correspond to the sequence καὶ ταλαντοῦχος of the strophe. Porson restored the correct correspondence by conjecturing one of those compounds ending in -κραντος which were so dear to Aeschylus (ἄκραντος, πολεμόκραντος, θεόκραντος, μοιρόκραντος): an unbeatably economical and stylistically perfect solution.111 In the philologist’s array of instruments, therefore, metre plays an essential role: that of making the diagnosis. Lines which at first sight might seem to be acceptable prove, on metrical examination, to be faulty and in need of an intervention; and many crypto-corruptions would pass unobserved if the laws of the numerus did not expose them. See Plaut. Rud. 1114: Eo tacent quiá tacitá bonast mulier semper quam loquens. For that reason they keep quiet, because a silent woman is always better than one that speaks. This is a trochaic septenarius which is problematic from the metrical point of view, because in the third and fourth feet it requires word division between the two brevia (-a ta-, -ta bo-) of a resolved longum, in violation of what Questa calls

110 A rather severe critical profile has recently been offered by R. D. Dawe, “Richard Porson”, in: Classical Scholarship. A Biographical Encyclopedia, ed. by W. W. Briggs and W. M. Calder III, New York  / London 1990, pp.  376‒388. Cf. C. Stray, “The Rise and Fall of Porsoniasm”, CJ 53 (2007), pp.  40‒71; E. Medda, “Riflessioni sull’Eschilo di Porson”, Lexis 27 (2009), pp.  111‒130. Worth reading also is D. L. Page, “Richard Porson”, Proceedings of the British Academy 45 (1959), pp. 221‒236. 111 It is worth reading the note ad loc., which motivates the semantic specificity of δημοκράντου, in the commentary of Denniston-Page, Aeschylus, Agamemnon, Oxford 1957, p. 111.

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 Epilogue

Ritschl’s rule. Many philologists have shown indifference to the problem, and have accepted the transmitted text (Sonnenschein, Lindsay, Fr. Marx); others (Leo, Ernout, Thierfelder and Questa112) have accepted the proposal of R. Bentley, who, upset by the metrical irregularity, corrected bonast to melior. But Bentley’s cure, though metrically effective, is unacceptable for other reasons: it normalises the construction of the ‘positivus pro comparativo’, which, as on other occasions in Plautus, appears to be an inalienable linguistic feature. This is a comparative expression that is typical of everyday language, in which the notion ‘more’ is not expressed by magis or potius or by any other form of comparison (verbal, adjectival or adverbial), but derives from the overall meaning of the whole sentence, and above all from the presence of a second term of comparison introduced by quam. In brief, Bentley’s metrical diagnosis was undoubtedly wellgrounded, but the route leading to the correction needs to be different. The most satisfactory solution was identified one hundred and fifty years ago by Ussing113 and has been taken up more recently by S. Timpanaro:114 bona erit. In this way, the linguistic peculiarity of the utterance is fully respected, and the metrical anomaly is eliminated. Among other things, the so-called achronic future (erit…semper) is highly appropriate for a sentence which maintains that “a silent woman will always be good with respect to a talkative one”. In the new edition of his Metrica (2007, p. 210) C. Questa has also accepted Ussing’s correction. The laws dictated by political nomothetai are impositions of a higher authority which sets out to create order where order does not yet exist. Metrical laws are exactly the opposite: they are born from an order which already exists, and only waits to be made explicit. Metricians do not invent laws, but search for them, or rather find them, in the constant practice of poets, in their words regulated by prosody, rhythm and musicality. The restorations excogitated ope ingenii by philologists are based on these rules much more than is commonly believed. Let me provide an example from Virgil’s Georgics. In 4, 348 all the editors read as follows:

112 In Introduzione alla metrica di Plauto, Bologna 1967, p. 127. 113 Plauti Comoediae, rec. et enarr. J. L. Ussing, V, Hauniae 1886, pp. 160, 501. Ussing’s happy conjecture was probably forgotten because, in the same line, he also corrected, absurdly, quam loquens to uir loquens. 114 “Positivus pro comparativo in latino”, in: Studia Florentina Alexandro Ronconi sexagenario oblata, Rome 1970, pp. 455‒481 (= Contributi di filologia e di storia della lingua latina, Rome 1978, esp. 45‒48).

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 105

carmine quo captae dum fusis mollia pensa deuoluunt … fusis dum Mγ1 (fusisis dum γ): dum fusis PRω: dum fusi G.

captivated by this song, while they spin the soft staples of wool from the spindles … In the wake of M and γ I have become convinced that we should read fusis dum. This is the order of words required by Marx’s rule, the most famous example of which is undoubtedly the sequence Troiae qui primus ab oris, which is preferred in the first line of the Aeneid to qui Troiae primus ab oris. In Marx’s formulation, the norm has an absolute validity: “in a hexameter, if a monosyllabic longum is accompanied by a spondaic word after a caesura in the third foot, the spondaic word comes first in the sequence”115; but to tell the truth, a few cases exist in which Virgil fails to comply with this rule, which was mainly observed by the Catullian hexameter. The exceptions regard special cases: if there is a strong pause after the third-foot caesura, with the beginning of a new syntactic construction,116 or if there is special emphasis on the monosyllable (e.g. in the presence of an anaphora or an antithesis involving the monosyllable itself).117 Anyway, even if it is not an inescapable law, it is valid as a tendency generally followed by Virgil. And I believe that we should follow it in this passage, too, and choose without hesitation the reading of M and γ. The most common risk is that metrical anomalies, which are indicators of corruption, are not even noticed, but are pacifically accepted. Indeed, if a critic denounces them, and tries to correct them, he may even be treated with impatience, as if he intended to disfigure the text with unmotivated alterations. It is sufficient to quote the case of Manil. 3, 604: Quaeque super signum nascens a cardine primum tertia forma est et summo iam proxima caelo, haec ter uicenos geminat …

605

115 F. Marx, Molossische und Bakcheische Wortformen in der Verskunst der Griechen und Römer, in ASAW 1922.1, p. 198. 116 E.g. Georg. 2, 159 anne lacus tantos? / te, Lari / maxime, teque; 4, 159 exercentur agris; / pars intra / saepta domorum; 4, 358 duc age duc ad nos: / fas illi / limina divom; Aen. 6, 539 nox ruit, Aenea: / nos flendo ducimus horas. 117 E.g. Ecl. 6, 10 … si quis // captus amore leget, / te nostrae, / Vare, myricae, // te nemus omne canet; Aen. 7, 352 … fit tortile collo // aurum ingens coluber, / fit longae / taenia uittae; cf. ibid. 7, 328.

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 Epilogue

and the ‘form’ which is third after the first sign, starting from the cardinal point, and already close to the peak of the sky, this trebles the groups of twenty … This line presents a diaeresis at the end of a spondaic word in the second foot, which is known to be forbidden in the classical hexameter.118 Lucian Müller119 noticed the problem and proposed forma erit. For his part, Housman120 emended it to sors manet, offering reasons and comparisons in a note. Housman’s excellent conjecture was subsequently accepted by G. Goold (Lipsiae 1985). It is a pity that E. Flores121 still does not understand the problem: deaf to the metrical rhythm of the line, and deaf also to the advice of his sagacious predecessors, he maintains the transmitted text, and makes an irritated mention of the corrections of Housman and Müller in the apparatus adding the judgment inutiliter in the former case, and minime necessarium in the latter. There is nothing useless about these proposals: they (or other possibilities) are necessary if we wish to avoid printing a corrupt text. Our worthy friend Bertil Axelson would repeat once again his despairing accusation: “Korruptelenkult!”.

118 Summarising table with bibliographic references in L. De Neubourg, La base métrique de la localisation des mots dans l’hexamètre latin, Brussel 1986, p. 121. 119 De re metrica poetarum Latinorum praeter Plautum et Terentium libri septem, Leipzig 1894 (= Hildesheim 1967), p. 249. 120 M. Manilii Astronomicon liber tertius, rec. et enarr. A. E. Housman, ed. altera, Cantabrigiae 1937, pp. 60‒61. 121 Manilius, Astronomica, critical text by E. Flores, transl. by R. Scarcia, commentary by S. Feraboli and R. Scarcia, 2 vols., Fondazione Lorenzo. Valla, Milan 1996‒2001.

Index nominum et rerum Alexandrian philology    34‒41 Aristarchus of Samothrace    36, 38‒40 authorship    32, 40‒41, see also “readers as ‘authors’” Baehrens, Emil    92‒94 Bentley, Richard    76‒79, 93, 101 Boeckh, August    101 Bücheler, Franz    58‒59 capital letter mistakes    3‒4 ‘comma Joanneum’    31 conjecture    4‒5, 38‒40, Chapter III passim corruption involving two words    90 Dale, Amy Marjorie    101 ‘dicolon abundans’    12, 87 Diggle, James    81‒82 direct speech    18 distinctio    9, 14‒15, 22 dramatic texts    16, 19‒20, 22‒28, 32, 101 – ‘actor’s text’    2216 – distribution of lines between characters    22‒28 – interruption parà prosdokían    26‒27, 2722 – stichomythia    23‒24 emphasis    15‒18, 51 Erasmus of Rotterdam    31 ethos    24‒25, 27 etymology    70 Fraenkel, Eduard    20, 58‒62, 90‒91 – theory of the systematic interpolator in Petronius‘ Satyricon    59‒61 haplography    77 Heinsius, Nicolaus    46‒47 Hermann, Gottfried    23, 80, 101‒102 Homer – Homeric question    40‒41, 4135 – textual criticism / tradition    35‒41 Housman, Alfred Edward    3‒4, 9‒10, 69 hymn    83 imitatio    84‒90 interpolations    Chapter II passim – copying of    34 – recognition of    47‒52 interrogative sentence    16‒17, 19‒20 – rhetorical question    19‒20, 55

Juvenal – textual criticism    65 – interpolations    65‒66 Leo, Friedrich    101 linguistic aspects    49, 63, 79‒81, 84‒86, 90, 104 – context    5, 38‒39, 44, 52‒53, 56‒57, 60, 63, 77, 93 – discourse    16, 51, 63, 66, 82 – idiomatic units    13 – lexis    48, 102 – style    48‒49, 51, 65, 78, 84‒88 – syntax    44, 46, 55, 64, 66, 78, 96‒97 Lucretius, tradition of De rerum natura    54‒56 Maas, Paul    101 Maddaleni, Lello    3 Abbot Martin    9 Merkel, Rudolf    46‒47 metre     3‒4, 25‒26, 53, 85, 88, 94, 101‒106 – Marx’s rule    105 – metrical laws    104‒105 Müller, Konrad    58‒61 New Testament – interpolations    31, 3125 – edition    79 open nature of handwritten texts    31‒32 Ovid, textual criticism of the Metamorphoses    46‒47 palaeography    3‒5, 102 papyri    92‒94 Petronius, transmission of the Satyricon    57‒62 philology, history of    69‒70, 72‒73, 82, 101‒102 Poliziano, Angelo    69‒71, 82 – conjectural method of Poliziano    70‒72 Porson, Richard    79‒80, 102‒103 – ‘Porsoniasm’    102‒103, 103110 prepon    75 carmina Priapea (and Homer)    89 proper names    9‒10 Questa, Cesare    101 readers as ‘authors’    46‒47, 4638, 63

108 

 Index nominum et rerum

(conflicting) readings    21‒22 Ribbeck, Otto    65, 101 Ritschl, Friedrich    101 Scaliger, Joseph Justus    72‒75 scholiasts    32‒35 Seneca’s (tragic) style    25‒26 Servet, Miguel    31 Soubiran, Jean    101 Statius (and Virgil)    84‒88 Tarrant, Richard    47, 53‒54 textual criticism    VII – conservative criticism ‘vs.’ excessive corrections    46, 52‒53, 55‒56, 60‒61, 6158, 62‒63, 65 – ope ingenii / ope codicum     VIII, 40, 71‒72, 79‒84, 104 – radical c.    39‒40

tradition of texts    52 translation, literal    14 transposition    73‒76 Valckenaer, Lodewijk Caspar    33 Virgil – Aeneid – – half-lines    41‒43 – – tradition of the    41, 43 – asyndeton in V.    11 – enallage in V.    12, 127 – ‘frame’ positioning of verbs    87 – and Homer    88‒89 West, Martin Litchfield    39‒40 von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Ulrich    80‒81, 101 Wolf, Friedrich August    35 Zenodotus of Ephesus    38‒40, 4034

Index locorum Aeschylus Ag. 131‒132    101‒103 Ag. 457    103 Ag. 613‒614    22‒23 Aristophanes Av. 644‒645    24 Pax 38‒42     24‒25 Catullus carm. 61,189‒191 / 184‒198    73‒74 carm. 64,323‒324    9‒10 carm. 66,48    71 carm. 107,7‒8    17‒18

10,356 / 354‒360    63‒65 11,168‒169    65 13,187‒189    66 14,1a    65 15,107‒108    65 Lucan bell. ciu. 4,581‒587    12‒13 Lucretius De rer. nat. 1,122 / 120‒124    69‒70 De rer. nat. 2,40‒45    56‒57 De rer. nat. 3,1‒5    82‒84 De rer. nat. 3,474‒475    54‒55 De rer. nat. 3,743 / 741‒747    55‒56

Cicero De off. 1,18,61    71 Pro Rab. Post. 14    13‒14

Manilius 3,604 / 603‒605    105‒106

Euripides Alc. 792‒795    27‒28 Andr. 366‒369    19‒21 El. 982‒987    23‒24 Hipp. 654‒656    20 Ion 1427‒1428    79‒81 Ph. 1‒3 / Schol. Ph. 1    32‒35 Supp. 508‒509    81‒82

Naevius frg. 51 Morel (Priscian, G.L. 2,235,20)    10

Homer Il. 3,423‒426 / 421‒427    38‒39 Il. 9,458‒461    36 Il. 11,415 / 414‒420    75‒76 Il. 12,450    39 Od. 18,196    88 Od. 19,564    88 Juvenal 6,188 / 185‒190    66 6,346‒348    65 6,614a-b-c    65 7,50‒51    65 8,202‒203    65 9,5    65 9,134a    65

Martial lib. spect. XXI    3‒4

New Testament Eu. Marc. 16,9‒20    31 1 Ep. Jo. 5,7‒8    31 Ovid

am. 3,9,37‒38    15‒16 ars 1,545    77 fast. 3,199    77 her. 7,41    77 Ib. 569    72 met. 1,477 / 475‒478    49‒50 met. 2,226 / 224‒226 / 217‒226    53‒54 met., 2,258‒259    53 met. 2,413    50 met.3,400‒401    47‒48 met. 6,245‒247    48 met. 7,525‒527 / 523‒528    48‒49 met. 7,580‒581    48 met. 8,124 / 122‒125    51 met. 8,134‒139    51‒52 met. 8,629‒632    15

110 

 Index locorum

Petronius 25,2    59 27,5    62 43,7     16‒17 67,5    59 73,5    59‒60 85,7    60 99,2    90‒92 111,2    62‒63 111,13    60‒61 115,10    60 Plautus Rud. 1114    103‒104 carmina Priapea 68,11‒12    89‒90 Seneca Herc. Oet. 892    25‒26 Ps.-Seneca Oct. 193‒200    26‒27 Sophocles Aj. 571    32 Aj. 854‒858    32 Aj. 1105‒1106    32 Aj. 1304‒1309    20‒21 El. 1‒2    32‒35 El. 295‒298     20‒21 El. 593‒594    32 OC 980‒981    14 OT 73‒75    32 OT 531    32 OT 812    32 Phil. 385‒388    32

Statius Theb. 4,449‒454    86‒88 Theb. 7,706‒708    85‒86 Virgil Aen. 1,73 / 1,71‒75    44 Aen. 1,378‒380    41‒43 Aen. 2,164‒167    45‒46 Aen. 2,537‒538    87 Aen. 2,640    43 Aen. 2,663    77 Aen. 3,358‒362    84‒86 Aen. 3,464    88‒89 Aen. 3,660‒661    43 Aen. 4,124‒127    43‒45 Aen. 4,423 / 420‒424    92‒94 Aen. 4,505‒506    87 Aen. 6,119‒123    42 Aen. 9,151    45‒46 Aen. 9,464 / 462‒464    10‒11 Aen. 9,485 / 483‒486    78 Aen. 10,284    43 Aen. 10,704 / 705 / 710 / 702‒711    76‒78 Aen. 10,707‒716    74‒76 Aen. 10,751    77 Aen. 10,753    77 Aen. 11,18    12 Ecl. 7,70    77 Georg. 1,181 / 176‒183    21‒22 Georg. 3,159 / 162 / 157‒165    95‒98 Georg. 4,219‒222    94‒95 Georg. 4,348‒349    104‒105