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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 February 2009
‘It is not deceptae tabellae which reveal your conduct to me nor secretly given presents which incriminate you.’ So does Ovid, according to the vast majority of our MSS, complain of the openness of his mistress's infidelity (the point of this couplet does not emerge fully until line 13, ipse miser uidi…). Tabellae causes no difficulty - wax tablets traditionally carried elegiac love-letters1 - but deceptae, which obviously cannot bear its most usual meaning here, has often been declared corrupt. Burman favoured the variant decepto given by the ‘Sarravianus’ of Heinsius;2 it certainly qualifies mihi aptly enough but leaves tabellae without a much-needed epithet.3 Other editors have resorted to conjectures of widely varying distinction,4 of which easily the most seductive is Heinsius’ male deletae for mihi deceptae. It was prompted by the mihi deletae which appears in one fifteenth-century MS5 and would seem to derive considerable support from Ars Am. 3. 495–6 nec nisi deletis tutum rescribere ceris, | ne teneat geminas una tabella manus (cf. also Ars Am. 2. 395–6 et, quotiens scribes, lotas prius ipse tabellas | inspice: plus multae, quam sibi missa, Legunt).
1 See especially Ov. Am. 1. 11. 7 ff., 1. 12, Prop. 3. 23.
2 Par. Lat. 7997, saec. xv.
3 Goold, G. P., HSCPh 69 (1965), 33.Google Scholar
4 All are recorded in Munari's apparatus.
5 Vat. Pal. Lat. 910. The reading may be traditional, but it could equally well be the result of a copyist's error, since mihi delatae appears in the thirteenth-century B. L. Add. 49368, to which the renaissance MS in question is obviously directly or indirectly related; see Munari's 1970 edition, pp. xxxiv–xxxv.
6 Thus Marius apud Burmannum, Ernout, A., RPh 26 (1952), 125, ‘une lettre surprise (ou saisie) par moi’.Google Scholar
7 CR 14 (1900), 259 = Classical Papers, ed. Diggle, J. andGoogle Scholar Goodyear, F. R. D. (Cambridge, 1972), pp. 521–2.Google Scholar
8 Ad Man. 1. 240.
9 cf. Lenz's translation, ‘eingeschmuggelte Täfelchen’.
10 Goold's, difficulties in comprehending this interpretation in its context (HSCPh 69 [1965], 33) are largely of his own making.Google Scholar
11 S (Sangallensis 864, saec. xi) omits minibus and K (Vat. Lat. 1602, saec. xiv) has amaris for auaris.
12 CQ n.s. 9 (1959), 240–1.
13 Philologus 11 (1856), 71.Google Scholar
14 Ad Catul. 3. 14.
15 For examples from Greek and Latin inscriptions see R. Lattimore, Themes in Greek and Latin Epitaphs (Urbana, 1962)(= Illinois Studies in language and Literature 28 [1942]), pp. 146–7, 153–4.Google Scholar
16 loc. cit.
17 See further Oxf. Lat. Dict. s.v. numerus, 5.