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Horatian Notes IV: despised readings in the manuscripts of Satires Book 1
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2013
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In three earlier instalments of these ‘Horatian Notes’ (1969, 1971, 1982) I have tried to weigh the claims to truth of manuscript variants in the transmitted text of Odes and Epodes. In the Satires there is so much of that sort of thing that I have had to restrict myself to Book 1. Now, as well as earlier, disagreements with the decisions of all or most contemporary editors arise. I note, however, that this paper was written before D. R. Shackleton Bailey's edition appeared in 1985. Readers of the present notes will find that we have come, independently if perhaps unsurprisingly, to similar conclusions on a number of passages.
There is then much to say, and because of a plethora of evidence I do not propose to comment on the numerous cases where editors of the last half-century or so make what I regard as the right choice, yet, in one way or another, give rise to the suspicion that they do so for the wrong reasons. Thus at 1.1.38 very few editors now follow Keller and Vollmer, not to mention many of their early predecessors, in printing patiens to describe ‘the tiny ant’ in the animal fable designed to illustrate human failings. With Lambinus and Bentley, they do now print sapiens; yet a perusal of commentaries shows how right was A. Palmer, not usually a herald of Bentley's virtues, to refer to Bentley's note both in his app. crit. and his commentary. It is possible to print sapiens and yet to misunderstand it as ‘prudent, thrifty’; so e.g. L. Mueller. A reference to Bentley (and here also to Lambinus), which can be provided briefly in an app. crit. as much as in a commentary, is here and often elsewhere a reminder of good sense. Nevertheless, in order to save space I pass by such cases in this paper. Nor, as a rule, do I discuss cases where the quality of variants, whether preserved directly or indirectly, happens to be more or less balanced.
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NOTES
1. I have in mind such instances as 1.1.81 (cf. now Shackleton Bailey), 88; 2.28, 46; 3.74, 85-6; 6.15 (where the punctuation still needs settling), 68 (cf. now Shackleton Bailey), 122-3 (again for punctuation, now usually right, cf. Bentley's and Peerlkamp's notes, also Meineke2, p. XXVI).
2. E.g. 1.1.55, 2.28, 38, 48, 51, 113, 120; 3.57-8, 91; 4.39; 5.52 and 65; 60; 6.4, 29, 31, 69, 113, 130 (uicturus, -um); 7.2; 8.34, 48; 9.16.
3. Ov. Fast. 5.683-4 siue ego te feci testem, falsoue citaui/non audituri numina magna Iouis, etc.
4. Sen. Ag.330-1 resonetque manu pulsa citata/uocale chelys. Here citata (with manu) is ‘moved’.
5. Bentley thought iteraret would have been spelt itaret with a stroke through or above the first t, to denote t(er), cf. Lindsay, , Notae Latinae, 333–4Google Scholar; the shortening would thus account for the corruption to citaret. This is entirely possible.
6. Keller's siglum ‘y’ denotes one or more unnamed ‘deteriores’.
7. Marx, F., ‘Molossische und bakcheische Wortformen in der Verskunst d. Griechen und Römer’, Abhandl. Sächs. Akad. d. Wiss., Philol-hist. Kl. XXXVII (1922), pp. IV, 237Google Scholar.
8. See above.
9. Thus L. F. Heindorf, edd. 1815, 1843, F. G. Doering, ed. nov. 1838, C. Kirchner, Vol. II, 1855, Keller, , Epil. 453Google Scholar, frequently repeated by others.
10. Pasquali, in SIFC, n.s. 10 (1932) 255–7Google Scholar ( = Scritti fil., 1986, II, 641–3Google Scholar), and in his useful discussion of Blandinian readings set in the chapter on ‘Varianti antiche e antiche edizioni’ of his well known Storia della tradizione e critica del testo, ed. 2 (1952) 382–5Google Scholar. He, however, as already noted, fails to mention Bentley's basic discussion. His remark cited above in the text occurs at SIFC, loc. cit. 256. Pasquali's notions are discussed from different points of view by Rostagni, A., Riv.fil. n.s. 12 (1934) 7 ff.Google Scholar, Lenchantin, M., Ath. 15 (1937) 151–3Google Scholar, Ronconi, A., Ann. Scu. norm. sup. di Pisa 14 (1946) 67–8Google Scholar, Mariotti, S., Parola del Pass. 10 (1955) 119–20Google Scholar.
11. I owe the useful term ‘unconscious emendation’ to Dr D. S. McKie's unpublished work on Catullus.
12. Thus the handbooks, e.g. RE 3, 331 ff. (‘Bestattung’), 13, 114 (‘Libitinarii’), 21, 1412 (‘Pollinctor’), Blümner, H., Die röm. Privat-Altertümer, 1911, 501Google Scholar, with references to Cat. 59.5, Cic., Mil. 90Google Scholar, etc.
13. I made a case for a spondaic verse ending occidenti at A.P. 461, the only instance in Horace on which all MSS agree, but I am not so sure now. In any case I would not regard A.P. 467 as sufficient to shield the present anomaly. Lenchantin, loc. cit., found Pasquali's text of Sat. 1.3.131-2 unacceptable on metrical grounds. Mariotti, loc. cit. 120, cites two Lucilian instances of spondiaci with elision in the fifth foot, and contends that this fact, on the one hand, proves a take-off of Lucilius by Horace, and, on the other hand, proves the genuineness of Horace's text. Pace Mariotti, I do not believe that it proves either.
14. Ronconi (above p. 34 n. 10) is at least consistent in replacing tonsor by ustor. But ustor, as argued above, has its own difficulties.
15. Much identifying of unidentifiable persons was done by the writers on personae Horatianae and picked up by Porphyrion. Thus he maintained here that this Alfenus uafer had been a cobbler before he became famous as a lawyer and consul. Well, we are not obliged to believe him, as the learned E. Klebs unfortunately did in RE 1, 1472, ‘Alfenus’ (8). A lawyer's epithet uafer may occasionally be, as e.g. K.-H. remark. But that, as they rightly say, is quite inconclusive in any specific case. It certainly does not oblige us to make everyone called uafer a lawyer.
16. See below on this passage.
17. Pasquali, cited above p. 34 n. 10. This strikes me as a more reasonable assessment than Rostagni's startling inference, loc. cit. 7 and 20-5. He suggests that in the two passages discussed above the competing readings of V and, on the other hand, of all the extant MSS go back to Horace himself, or, to put it differently, that they are what is known as ‘author's variants’ in successive editions of his poems. Thus one caprice of the imagination – the unitary nature of Horace's text – makes room for another – author's variants in Horace. And, moreover, we are told, we know who the editor must have been to whom we owe the preservation of the two competing but genuine readings: why, of course, it must be Probus. For Probus' edition of Horace, see Horace on Poetry II, 36–8Google Scholar, Jocelyn, H. D., ‘The annotations of M. Valerius Probus’, CQ 34 (1984) 464–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar, especially 468, 35 (1985) 149-61, 466-74.
18. In fact, this is traditional lore; at the end of the 15th century (first in 1482) Christophorus Landinus said, ‘excutiat, a circumstantibus; sibi ad suam voluptatem’.
19. Thus Rutgersius' Notae in the R. Stephanus edition 1613, and more fully his Lectiones Venusinae, posthumously, in the elder Burman's edition of 1699 (p. 338), and again Lectiones Venusinae, ed. 2, 1713Google Scholar. Rutgersius paraphrases: ‘qui dum aliis modo dicax uideatur, risumque exprimat, nulli amico parceret’ and compares 83 solutos/qui captat risus hominum, famamque dicacis. L. F. Heindorf (1st ed. 1815) approved; many more disapproved.
20. So e.g. L. Mueller implies in rejecting Rutgersius' emendation in his commentary (1900).
21. Büchner, K., Philol. 93 (1938) 491–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar, observations said by Castiglioni, L., Ath., n.s. 18 (1940) 216Google Scholar, to be ‘molto accurate, ma poco persuasive’, though it is not said why he is not persuaded.
22. Papers, 771-2.
23. The reason, as noted earlier in this paper, is to shield sibi … cuiquam … amico by Aristotle's 
, and parallel dummodo risum/excutiat by 
. Nor was Vollmer the first to bring Aristotle into that argument. What might be said however is that 
fits Aristotle's context better than sibi non fits Horace's.
24. non quisquam Sat. 1.3.5-6, 3.33, 2.2.116-7, Epist. 1.14.37; haud quisquam Sat. 1.9.27, 2.1.39-40. The usages will have been influenced also by the archaic and archaizing character of haud, and its very selective employment in verse; see Wackernagel, , Vorl. üb. Syn. II 256Google Scholar, Hofmann, Syn. 642Google Scholar, Hofmann-Szantyr 453, Axelson, , Unpoet. Wörter 91–2Google Scholar.
25. Landgraf, G. on Cic. Rosc. Am. (ed. 2) 52Google Scholar discusses the idiom, and refers to Anton, H. S., Stud, zur Lat. Gram. u. Stil. III (1888) 275Google Scholar, Schmalz, J. H., Üb. den Sprachgebr. des Asin. Pollio ed. 2. 1890, 38Google Scholar: see also Kühner-Stegmann I 822.
26. Thus Heinze, as noted above, Vollmer ed. 1 (1907) p. VII, though non hic still in the text, Vollmer2, 1912, Lenchantin-Bo, and the two new Teubner texts, ed. Borszák 1984 and Shackleton Bailey 1985.
27. Thus numquid at Sat.1.2.69, 4.136, 9.6, 2.6.53. At 1.4.136 cod. λ has non quid, an exception to the use of num, but not of quid as against qui.
28. The adverbial usage was noted e.g. by Hand, F., Tursellinus IV (1846) 324–5Google Scholar, Kühner-Stegmann II 299 n. 9.
29. Donatus ad 1. Ter. aut ‘num’ aut ‘qui’ abundat.
30. The Suetonian parallel was cited first by Heinze 1906, in the 3rd (his 1st) edition of Kiessling's commentary.
31. In Plautus the former notion, ut = quo tempore, is found e.g. at As. 343 in tonstrina ut sedebam, me infit percontarier, the latter, ut = ex quo, e.g. at St. 29-30 uiri nostri domo ut abierunt,/hic tertius annus.
32. Of recent editors Bo 1959 and Borszak 1984 omit ut. So did Klingner in his discussion, Hermes 70 (1935) 397 n.2Google Scholar, but the support drawn from his classification of the MSS, though approved by Fraenkel, , Horace 109 n.1Google Scholar, strikes me as fanciful. Bentley attached the ut clause to the following sentence, and this order was repeated by many editors, even if they omitted ut, as did e.g. Bo and Borzsák. On the other hand, attachment to the previous sentence (2), commended above, does not seem to occur in 18th or 19th century editing before J. H. J. Düntzer 1841, E. F. Wüstemann in Heindorf's second edition 1843 (who acknowledges K. Reisig's lectures), Thomas Keightley 1848. It occasionally appears thereafter, though not as often as it might have done; most recently it is in Shackleton Bailey 1985.
33. Suet. Aug. 98.4. ex dilectis unum … quasi conditorem insulae κτίϲτην uocare consueuerat.
34. ‘Wer ditior … locus verbindet, zerstört den Parallelismus der Glieder in v. 91.’
35. R. J. Getty was one of the few who recently did. His painstaking article on this passage needs to be pondered: Class. mediaev. and Renaiss. studies in honor of B. L. Ullman (Storia e lett. 93, 1964) I 119–31Google Scholar. Getty's argument rests on the notion, unexceptionable in itself, that 125 sol acrior can well go with 126 rabiosi tempora signi, the dog-days. There is no difficulty, he suggests, in the concurrence of the two in the same sentence. ‘It was at once the season and the hour when the sun is acrior’, he suggests at p. 125, and on the previous page refers to Virg. Georg. 4.425-30 and other passages, where there is concurrence of season and hour. But how does this make Horace's expression, fugio rabiosi tempora signi, any easier? Getty does not deny that tempora here means season; hence tempus at C. 3.6.44 (cited in apparent support at p. 124) is not in point, nor is Colum. 11.2.55, where temporibus is defined by adjectives (Getty, p. 123). It seems to me that Horace could not ‘escape the season of the maddening constellation’, even if he tried. The phrasing therefore remains as odd as Bentley said it was, no matter that either Tyndaris ‘avoids’ (uitabis, C. 1.17.18) the heat of the dog-star in her sheltered valley, or the fountain of Bandusia is ‘untouched’ (nescit tangere, C. 3.13.10) by the grim ‘season’ (hora) of the burning dog-star. Nor does the imitation at Pers. 3.5-6 further the argument, as was noted by Bentley. The reading therefore remains suspect of interpolation, and certainly not less so, as Getty seems to suggest (p. 125), because the dog-days were a Horatian commonplace. There is no question of Horace sunning himself here (p. 128), and no need to deprive me fessum of its appropriate sense of weariness caused by exercise, or to link it with ‘the languid flock’ of C. 3.29.21 (Getty, pp. 129-30). Finally I note that a probable fault in part of the Blandinian reading, viz. lusum, must not be made into an indictment of the whole of the reading. Altogether, then, Getty's argument, though elaborate, is confused. It would have profited from the clarity of Bentley – clear even when wrong –, of whom Getty writes condescendingly.
36. Priscian cites the line at Inst. X.6 (GL II, 508, 20 Keil)Google Scholar but does so only in order to illustrate summosses, not uiuimus itself.
37. If Villeneuve is justified in dating the Montpellier codex H425 which he calls M and Keller called μ to the 12th century, this would show that at that time there were the two variants in the tradition. The scribe of the codex put uiuitur in the text, and then he, or the corrector, replaced it by the main reading, uiuimus.
38. If there is anything, apart always from the testimony of the MSS, in favour of uiuimus, I have still to hear it. uiuimus is said by Keller, , Epil. 501Google Scholar to be more appropriate as an answer to the preceding question, 43 Maecenas quomodo tecum?; but that question is answered properly neither by uiuimus nor by uiuitur. Nor is Fritzsche ad 1. (1875) any more convincing: the reticence shown by uiuitur would fail to show that Horace was proud to be on familiar terms with Maecenas; hence uiuimus; Kiessling and Heinze agree. And, finally. Palmer's point in favour of uiuimus is precisely what makes against it: ‘There is more good fellowship in uiuimus than uiuitur’.
39. In fact dilatus used to be the accepted reading just as delapsus is now. Thus dilatus in Lambinus, Dacier, Wieland, Orelli, Heindorf, Kirchner, Keightley, Meineke2 (delatus in 1st ed.), Peerlkamp (with an extensive note), Palmer, Wickham, Kiessling-Heinze, and some others.
40. I am indebted to the Referee for useful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.