At the very beginning, to see what pure
irrelevancy, what almost incredible foolishness, finds its wayinto print, take this instance. It had been supposed for several
centuries that Plautus' name was
M. Accius
Plautus , when Ritschl in 1845 pointed out that in the
Ambrosian palimpsest discovered by Mai in 1815, written in the[74] fourth or fifth century, and much the oldest of Plautus'MSS., the name appears in the genitive as
T. Macci
Plauti , so that he was really called
Titus
Maccius (or
Maccus )
Plautus . An Italian scholar, one Vallauri,
objected to this innovation on the ground that in all printededitions from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century the name was
M. Accius . He went to Milan to look at the
palimpsest, and there, to be sure, he found
T. Macci quite legibly written. But he
observed that many other pages of the MS. were quite illegible,and that the whole book was very much tattered and battered;
whereupon he said that he could not sufficiently wonder at anyoneattaching any weight to a MS. which was in such a condition. Is
there any other science, anything calling itself a science, intowhich such intellects intrude and conduct such operations in
public? But you may think that Mr. Vallauri is a uniquephenomenon. No: if you engage in textual criticism you may come
upon a second Mr. Vallauri any turn. The MSS. of Catullus, noneof them older than the fourteenth century, present at 64. 23 the
verse:
heroes saluete, deum genus! o bona
mater!
The Veronese scholia on Vergil, a palimpsest of the fifth or sixth
century, at
Aen . v. 80,"salue sancte
parens,"have the note:"Catullus: saluete, deum
gens , o bona matrum | progenies, saluete
iter[um]"—giving
gens for genus,
matrum for
mater , and adding
a half-verse absent from Catullus' MSS.; and scholars havenaturally preferred an authority so much more ancient. But one
editor is found to object:"the weight of the Veronese
scholia, imperfect and full of lacunae as they are, is not to beset against our MSS."There is Mr. Vallauri over again:
because the palimpsest has large holes elsewhere and because muchof it has perished, therefore what remains, though written as
early as the sixth century, has less authority than MSS. writtenin the fourteenth. If however anyone gets hold of these
fourteenth-century MSS., destroys pages of them and tears holes inthe pages he [75] does not destroy, the authority of those partswhich he allows to survive will presumably deteriorate, and may
even sink as low as that of the palimpsest.
Again. There are two MSS. of a certain author,
which we will call A and B. Of these two it is recognised that Ais the more correct but the less sincere, and that B is the more
corrupt but the less interpolated. It is desired to know whichMS., if either, is better than the other, or whether both are
equal. One scholar tries to determine this question by thecollection and comparison of examples. But another thinks that
he knows a shorter way than that; and it consists in saying"the more sincere MS. is and must be for any critic who
understands his business the better MS."
