A Sixth-Century Fragment of the Letters of Pliny the Younger Part 11

The scribe could easily catch at the second ATQ after writing the first. It will be at once objected that the repeated ATQ might have occasioned the mistake, whatever the length of the line. Thus in 82, 2 (aegrotabat Caecina Paetus, maritus eius, aegrotabat] Caecina-- aegrotabat _om. BF_), the omitted portion comprises 34 letters--a bit too long, perhaps, for a line of _P_. The following instances, however, can not be thus disposed of.

94, 10 alia quamquam dignitate propemodum paria] quamquam--paria (32 letters) _om. BF_. _Cetera_ and _paria_, to be sure, offer a mild case of _h.o.m.oioteleuta_, but not powerful enough to occasion an omission unless the words happened to stand at the ends of lines, as they might well have done in _P_. As the line occurs near the beginning of a letter, we may verify our conjecture by plotting the opening lines.

The address, as in _?_, would occupy a line. Then, allowing for contractions in _rebus_ (18) and _quoque_ (19) and reading _c.u.m_ (Cla.s.s I) for _quod_ (18), _cetera_ (Cla.s.s I) for _alia_ (20), we can arrange the 236 letters in 8 lines, with an average of 29.5 letters in a line.

123, 10 sentiebant. interrogati a Nepote praetore quem docuissent, responderunt quem prius: interrogati an tunc gratis adfuisset, responderunt s.e.x milibus] interrogati a Nepote--docuissent responderunt _om. BF_. Here are two good chances for omissions due to similar endings, as _interrogati_ and _responderunt_ are both repeated, but neither chance is taken by _BF_. Instead, a far less striking case (_sentiebant--responderunt_) leads to the omission. The arrangement in _P_ might be

SENTIEBANT INTERROGATIANEPOTEPRAETORE (26) QUEMDOCUISSENTRESPONDERUNT (26) QUEMPRIUSINTERROGATIANTUNCGRA (29) TISADFUISSETRESPONDERUNTs.e.xMI (29)

Here the dangerous words INTERROGATI and RESPONDERUNT are in safe places. SENTIEBANT and RESPONDERUNT, ordinarily a safe enough pair, become dangerous by their position at the end of lines; indeed, in the _scriptura continua_ the danger of confusing _h.o.m.oioteleuta_, unless these stand at the end of lines, is distinctly less than in a script in which the words are divided. Here again, as in 94, 10, we may reckon the lengths of the opening lines of the letter. After the line occupied with the addresses, we have 296 letters, or ten lines with an average of 29.6 letters apiece.

We may add two omissions of _F_ in pa.s.sages now missing altogether in _B_. 69, 28 quod minorem ex liberis duobus amisit sed maiorem]

minorem--sed _om._ _F_. Here again an omission is imminent from the similar endings _minorem--maiorem_; that made by _F_ (29 letters and one dot) seems to be that of a line of _P_ where the arrangement would be:

QUOD MINOREMEXLIBERISDUOBAMISITSED MAIOREM

There may have been a copy (_P_) intervening between _P_ and _F_, but doubtless neither that nor _P_ itself had lines so short as those in _P_; the error of _F_, therefore, may be most naturally ascribed to _P_, who omitted a line of _P_.

130, 16 percolui. in summa (cur enim non aperiam tibi vel iudicium meum vel errorem?) primum ego] in summa--primum (59 letters) _om. F_. As there are no _h.o.m.oioteleuta_ here at all, we surely are concerned with the omission of a line or lines. Perhaps 59 letters would make up a line in _P_ or _P_. Perhaps two lines of _P_ were dropped.

Similarly we may note two omissions in _B_, though not in _F_, which may be due originally to the error of _P_ in copying _P_.

68, 5 electorumque commentarios centum s.e.xaginta mihi reliquit, opisthographos] -torumque--opisthographos _om. B_. Allowing the abbreviation of QUE, we have 59 letters and one dot here. The omitted words are written by the first hand of _B_ at the foot of the page. Of course the omission may correspond to a line of _P_ dropped by _B_ in copying, but it is equally possible that _P_ committed the error and corrected it by the marginal supplement, _F_ noting the correction in time to include the omitted words in his text, _B_ copying them in the margin as he found them in _P_.

87, 12 tacitus suffragiis impudentia inrepat. nam quoto cuique eadem honestatis] suffragiis--honestatis _om. m. 1, add. in mg. m. 2_ _B_ (54 letters, with QUE abbreviated). This may be like the preceding, except that the correction was done not by the original scribe of _B_, but by a scribe in the same monastery. The presence of _h.o.m.oioteleuta_, we must admit, adds an element of uncertainty.

So, of the pa.s.sages here brought forward, 94, 20; 123, 10 and 69, 28 are best explained by supposing that _B_ and _F_ descend from a ma.n.u.script that like _?_ had from 24 to 32 letters in a line, while 32, 19 and 130, 16 fit this supposition as well as they do any other.

One orthographic peculiarity is perhaps worth noting: we saw that _B_ did not agree with _?_ in the spellings _karet_ and _karitas_.[49] We do, however, find _karitate_ elsewhere in _B_ (109, 8), and the curious reading _Kl_ [.'.] _facere_, mg. _calfacere_, for _calfacere_ (56, 12).

This is an additional bit of evidence for supposing that a copy (_P_) intervened between _P_ and _B_; _P_ had the spelling _Karitas_ consistently, _P_ altered it to the usual form, and _B_ reproduced the corrections in _P_, failing to take them all, unless, as may well be, _P_ had failed to correct all the cases.

[Footnote 49: See above, pp. 42, n. 1, and 50, n. 1.]

Thus the evidence contained in the portion of _BF_ outside the text of _?_ corroborates our working hypothesis deduced from the fragment itself. We have found nothing yet to overthrow our surmise that a bit of the ancient Parisinus is veritably in the city of New York.

EDITORIAL METHODS OF ALDUS.

[Sidenote: _Aldus's methods; his basic text_]

We may now return to Aldus and imagine, if we can, his method of critical procedure. Finding his agreement with _?_ so close, even in what editors before and after him have regarded as errors, I am disposed to think that he studied his Parisinus with care and followed its authority respectfully. Finding that his seemingly extravagant statements about the antiquity of his book are essentially true, I am disposed to put more confidence in Aldus than editors have granted him thus far. I should suppose that, working in the most convenient way, he turned over to his compositor, not a fresh copy of _P_, but the pages of some edition corrected from _P_--which Aldus surely tells us that he used--and from whatever other sources he consulted. It may be beyond our powers to discover the precise edition that he thus employed. It does not at first thought seem likely that he would select the Princeps, which does not include the eighth book at all, and contains errors that later were weeded out. In the portion of text included in _?_, _P_ has thirty-two readings which Aldus avoids. In most of these cases _p_ commits an error, sometimes a ridiculous error, like _offam_ for _officia_ (62, 25); the ma.n.u.script on which _p_ was based apparently made free use of abbreviations. Keil's d.a.m.ning estimate of _r_[50] is amply borne out in this section of the text; Aldus differs from _r_ in sixty-five cases, most of these being errors in _r_. He agrees with _?_ in all but twenty-six readings.[51] Aldus would have had fewest changes to make, then, if his basic text was ?. This is apparently the view of Keil,[52] who would agree at any rate that Aldus made special use of the ? editions and who also declares that _p_ is the _fundamentum_ of _r_ as _r_ is of the edition of Pomponius Laetus.[53]

[Footnote 50: See the introduction to his edition, p. xviii.]

[Footnote 51: See below, pp. 60 ff.]

[Footnote 52: _Op. cit._, p. xxv: illis potissimum Aldum usum esse vidi.]

[Footnote 53: _Op. cit._, pp. xviii, xx.]

It would certainly be natural for Aldus to start with his immediate predecessors, as they had started with theirs. The matter ought to be cleared up, if possible, for in order to determine what Aldus found in _P_ we must know whether he took some text as a point of departure and, if so, what that text was. But the task should be undertaken by some one to whom the early editions are accessible. Keil's report of them, intentionally incomplete,[54] is sufficient, he declares,[55] "_ad fidem Aldinae editionis const.i.tuendam_," but, as I have found by comparing our photographs of the edition of Beroaldus in the present section, Keil has not collated minutely or accurately enough to encourage us to undertake, on the basis of his apparatus, an elaborate study of Aldus's relation to the editions preceding his own.

[Footnote 54: _Op. cit._, p. 2: Ex ? pauca adscripta sunt.]

[Footnote 55: _Op. cit._, p. x.x.xii.]

[Sidenote: _The variants of Budaeus in the Bodleian volume_]

We may now test Aldus by the evidence of the Bodleian volume with its variants in the hand of Budaeus. For the section included in _?_, their number is disappointingly small. The only additions by Budaeus (= _i_) to the text of Beroaldus are: 61, 14 sera] _MVDoa_, (_m. 1_) _?_ serua _Bf.u.xi_, (_m. 2_) _?_; 62, 4 ambulat] _i c.u.m plerisque_ ambulabat _r Ber._ (ab _del._) _M_; 62, 25 quoque] _i c.u.m ceteris_ p?ouq (ue) _Ber._; 64, 23 Quamvis] q Vmuis _Ber._ _corr. i._

This is all. Budaeus, who, according to Merrill, had the Parisinus at his disposal, has corrected two obvious misprints, made an inevitable change in the tense of a verb--with or without the help of the ancient book--and introduced from that book one unfortunate reading which we find in the second hand of _?_.

There is one feature of Budaeus's marginal jottings that at once arouses the curiosity of the textual critic, namely, the frequent appearance of the _obelus_ and the _obelus c.u.m puncto_. These signs as used by Probus[56] would denote respectively a surely spurious and a possibly spurious line or portion of text. But such was not the usage of Budaeus; he employed the obelus merely to call attention to something that interested him. Thus at the end of the first letter of Book III we find a doubly pointed obelus opposite an interesting pa.s.sage, the text of which shows no variants or editorial questionings. Budaeus appears to have expressed his grades of interest rather elaborately--at least I can discover no other purpose for the different signs employed. The simple obelus apparently denotes interest, the pointed obelus great interest, the doubly pointed obelus intense interest, and the pointing finger of a carefully drawn hand burning interest. He also adds catchwords. Thus on the first letter he calls attention successively[57] to _Ambulatio_, _Gestatio_, _Hora balnei_, _pilae ludus_, _Coena_, and _Comoedi_. The purpose of the doubly pointed obelus is plainly indicated here, as it accompanies two of these catchwords. Just so in the margin opposite 65, 17, a pointing finger is accompanied by the remark, "_Beneficia beneficiis aliis c.u.mulanda_," while 227, 5 is decorated with the moral e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n, "_o hominem in diuitiis miserum_." Incidentally, it is obvious that the Morgan fragment was once perused by some thoughtful reader, who marked with lines or brackets pa.s.sages of special interest to him. For example, the account of how Spurinna spent his day[58] is so marked. This pa.s.sage likewise called forth various marginal notes from Budaeus,[59] and other coincidences exist between the markings in _?_ and the marginalia in the Bodleian volume. But there is not enough evidence of this sort to warrant the suggestion that Budaeus himself added the marks in _?_.

[Footnote 56: See Ribbeck's Virgil, _Prolegomena_, p. 152.]

[Footnote 57: See plate XVIII.]

[Footnote 58: _Epist._ III, i (plate IV).]

[Footnote 59: See plate XVIII.]

[Sidenote: _Aldus and Budaeus compared_]

It is of some importance to consider what Budaeus might have done to the text of Beroaldus had he treated it to a systematic collation with the Parisinus. Our fragment allows us to test Budaeus; for even if it be not the Parisinus itself, its readings with the help of _B_, _F_, and Aldus show what was in that ancient book. I have enumerated above[60] eleven readings of _?BF_ which are called errors by Keil, but of which nine were accepted by Aldus and five by the latest editor, Professor Merrill.

In two of these (62, 33 and 64, 3), Budaeus, like Aldus, wisely does not harbor an obvious error of _P_. In two more (62, 16 and 65, 12), Beroaldus already has the reading of _P_. Of the remaining seven, however, all of which Aldus adopted, there is no trace in Budaeus. There are also nineteen cases of obvious error in the ? editions, which Aldus corrected but Budaeus did not touch. I give the complete apparatus[61] for these twenty-six places, as they will ill.u.s.trate the radical difference between Aldus and Budaeus in their use of the Parisinus.

[Footnote 60: See above, p. 47.]

[Footnote 61: The readings of ma.n.u.scripts are taken from Merrill, those of the editions from Keil; in the latter case, I use parentheses if the reading is only implied, not stated.]

60, 15 duplicia] _MVDr?_ duplicata _?BFGpa_

61, 12 confusa adhuc] _MV?_ adhuc confusa _?BFGpra_

18 milia pa.s.suum tria nec] _?BFMV_(_p_?)_a_ milia pa.s.sum tria et nec _D_ mille pastria nec _r_ mille pas. nec _?_

62, 6 doctissime] _MV?_ et doctissime _r_ doctissima _?BFDa_ et doctissima _p_

26 igitur eundem mihi cursum, eundem] _?BFD_(_p_?)_a_ igitur et eundem mihi cursum et eundem _r?_

fuit (25)--potes (64, 12) _om. MV_

63, 2 MAXIMO] _?BFDG_(_pr?_)_a_ Valerio Max. _?_ Gauio Maximo _Catanaeus_