Valuable minuscule manuscript of Plautus
And the text of Plautus offers peculiarly useful material to the student of textual criticism from the following reason. It is for the larger part, like the text of most Latin authors, dependent on minuscule1 MSS. of the tenth and eleventh centuries. Now one of these minuscule MSS. of Plautus has for a great portion of the text extraordinary value. It has preserved with rare fidelity the actual text of the archetype, leaving corruptions as they stood, with scarcely any attempt to remove them. It thus throws a wonderful amount of light on the course taken by corruptions in minuscule MSS., as an example or two will show. In the Pseudolus v. 1041 for te nunc the other minuscule MSS. of Plautus read lenonem. Ballio, a “leno,” is one of the characters in the Pseudolus, and the word leno is of frequent occurrence throughout the play; but it is plain that the sense of this line requires te nunc, and that lenonem must be a corruption of these two words. The change seems a violent one, and it does not at first sight appear how we could justify such an emendation as te nunc where MSS. read lenonem. A glance at the good codex shows us the intermediate step between the two readings. It has lenunc, having faithfully preserved the miswriting of the archetype—a miswriting not uncommon in MSS. (ch. vi. § 1）—of l for t. Correct this single letter, and the line reads smoothly and metrically: “Macédoniensem quí te nunc flentém facit.”The writer of the copy from which the other MSS. are derived, trying to emend the obvious corruption lenunc, succeeded only in effacing all trace of the true reading. Again, in Pseud. 267 the other MSS. offer an impossible ending of a trochaic tetrameter, dextram: sí lucri quid détur, potius rém divinam “dextram.” The true reading is deseram, as we learn from the good codex, which has destram, t having been substituted for e in the archetype—a substitution which probably dates from a time when the text was written in capitals. Other instances from the Stichus are: v. 573 possit for opus sit, where the good codex has opos sit, this being probably a trace of the old spelling2 of Plautus' time; v. 192 nive repleverit for ni vere perierit, where the good codex has ni vere perlerit. Other examples with the same wrong division of words may be seen in the Persa: v. 587 aequo mihi curat for aequom hic orat, where the intermediate stage is aequo mihi corat; v. 546 qui aspexi equidem for quia specie quidem through qui aspeci equidem. These examples, which might be multiplied indefinitely, may suffice to illustrate the part played by this codex, which so faithfully interprets for us the puzzling varieties of reading that are found in its fellow MSS. The text of most Latin authors depends on minuscule MSS. precisely similar to the ordinary minuscule MSS. of Plautus, but an “interpreter” codex is usually lacking; and that is why a study of the Plautine text is so valuable a training for the emendation of other Latin writers. The MSS. of these will offer us hundreds of readings like lenonem for te nunc, dextram for deseram, aequo mihi curat for aequom hic orat, leaving us without the slightest clue to the origin and course of the corruption. And yet it is a palmary rule of textual criticism that until we can indicate how and why a proposed reading was altered to the reading of the MSS., our emendation cannot be satisfactory or convincing.
