partial or subsidiary character which are known in general as testimonia. Such are Anthologies or collections of extracts. The oldest authority for an epithalamium of Catullus (62) is an anthology at Paris written in the 9th century.
Translations from one language into another may help to fix the reading of the original, or this again that of the translation.
In Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, ii. 5, 54,—“Child of Light! thy limbs are burning | Through the vest which seems to hide them”—“limbs” is supported against “lips” (ed. 1) by “membre” in the Italian prose version made by Shelley himself; and similarly in l. 52 “looks” (not “locks”) by the rendering “sguardi.” In his translations of Euripides' Cyclops, 381, “a bowl | Three cubits wide and four in depth, as much | As would contain four amphorae” the Greek original clearly points to “ten amphorae” and four may have come from the previous line.
In direct quotations, either of passages or single words, and either with or without the author's name, we must be sure that the writer is quoting exactly.
A couplet of Propertius is written upon the walls of Pompeii in the following form: “Quisquis amator erit, Scythiae licet ambulet oris, | Nemo adeo ut feriat, barbarus esse uolet.” Here the manuscripts have “Scythicis”—“deo ut noceat,” of which deo is rejected by every one in favour of the Pompeian reading, but Scythicis and noceat are retained on the ground that they are in themselves better than the Pompeian readings, which may be simply due to lapse of memory. In Shelley's Julian and Maddalo, 40,—“(talk) such as once, so poets tell, | The devils held within the dales of Hell | Concerning God, freewill and destiny,”—vales has been suggested to make it harmonize with the passage of Milton to which reference is made: but the argument is not conclusive.
Parodies may prove of service in restoring the form of what is parodied or this in restoring the parody. So also obvious imitations, especially in a highly imitative literature such as Latin poetry. The connexion of the passages must in all these cases be unmistakable.
In Homer, Iliad, i. 4 seq., Aristarchus had the common reading αὐτοὺς δὲ ἑλώρια τεῦχε κύνεσσι | οἰωνοῖσί τε πᾶσι, but another Homeric critic of note, Zenodotus, read δαῖτα for πᾶσι, and this is supported by the obvious imitation in Aeschylus, Supplices, 800, who has ὄρνισι δεῖπνον.
The support which a reading gains from the evidence of the directly transmitted text and from the auxiliary testimonia may be called its documental probability. To restore a text from the documental evidence available we must know and weigh the causes which tend to vitiate this evidence in its various kinds. We shall speak first of those which affect the direct transmission of texts. These are either external or internal.
External.—A text may become illegible through damp or constant thumbing; portions of it may be torn away; if it is in book form, leaves or whole quires may be detached and either lost or misplaced. When this has taken place on a considerable scale, the critic is helpless; but minor injuries may sometimes be traced and remedied. The weakest parts of a MS. book were the outer margins; and hence the beginnings and the ends of lines, whether of verse or prose, were specially liable to injury. It obviously makes a difference upon which side of a leaf, whether on the verso or the recto, a line was written. Hence the determination of the paging of the archetype (as was done for the archetype of Lucretius by Lachmann) has more than a merely antiquarian value. In ancient classical MSS. the first letters of poems in verse and of paragraphs in prose usually, and the initial letters of lines in verse occasionally, were written separate and by another person than the scribe (who was called the rubricator), and hence were apt to be omitted. Other external circumstances may prejudicially affect a text. The copy from which Shelley's Julian and Maddalo was printed was written on very narrow paper, and the punctuation marks at the ends of the lines were frequently omitted.
Internal.—These errors arise from the default of the scribe or copyist, and, in the case of printed books, the compositor.[1] They are very numerous. They may be roughly arranged according to the degree in which the volition of the copyist is absent or present, as involuntary or mechanical, semi-voluntary and voluntary; or again as they affect single signs (letters, figures or symbols), words, lines or even larger units such as sentences or paragraphs.
Simple Errors of the Eye.—(a) Confusions of letters. These are very numerous, and different in different scripts or styles of writing (see Palaeography). Thus the Roman letters E and F are liable to be confused in capital script, but not in cursive (e, f), C, G, in capitals, c, e in the cursive writing called Caroline minuscule, c, t, in the angular cursive of the 13th century and later. Texts which have had a long history will often show by the letter-confusions which they exhibit that they have passed through several distinct stages of copying. It is to be observed that two different styles of writing are often found in the same manuscript, the difference being utilized for the purposes of distinction. Thus in Greek cursive MSS. notes were often written in uncials; the use of majuscules or capitals for headings and for the initial letters of lines is well known. (b) Omissions of letters. (c) Shiftings of letters, sometimes by syllables. This is very common in half intelligent or half mechanical copying. In printing we get the disarrangement of type which is known as “pie.” (d) Confusions of symbols and abbreviations.
(a) Examples of confusion of capital letters from Shelley's poems are: Prometheus, i. 553, “Mark that outcry of despair " for “Hark”; Hellas, 472, “Hold each to the other in loud mockery” for “Told.” Of cursive letters: Marenghi, 130, “the dim ocean” for “the dun ocean”; Letter to Maria Gisborne 126, sqq., “,above | One chasm of Heaven smiles like the age of Love | On the unquiet world” for “eye.” (b) Translations from Goethe's Faust; sc. i. 46, “To live more beastily than any beast,” for “beastlily”; ii. 165, “eye” for “eyne” (in spite of the rhyme with 163). (c) Prometh., iv. 575, “Neither to change, nor flatter, nor repent,” for “falter.” In Latin MSS. we often find a mere jumble of letters. (d) Confusion of words through abbreviations is very common in ancient MSS., where they were much employed. At a famous place in the doxology of 1 Timothy iii. 16, the MSS. vary between ὅς (or ὅ) and Θέος. In uncial writing OC () might easily be miswritten or altered to ΘC (Θέος) or vice versa.
Loss of Letters, Syllables, Words or Lines, through Similarity of Writing: Homoeographon.—When similar letters or groups of letters stand next to each other, one of these is liable to be omitted. This is the simplest case and is called haplography.
Similarity operates differently if the similar groups stand in different lines of the exemplar. Then the copyist's eye is apt to slip from the first of two similarly written groups to the second; and he will thus omit all that is between. The term homoeoteleuton (“similarity of ending”) is often used of these omissions, but it is not adequate, as similarity anywhere may produce the same result.
Examples of homoeographon and haplography. Shelley's Cenci, v. 4, 136, “whose love was [as] a bond to all our loves”: a similar omission in Witch of Atlas, 599. In Stanzas written in Dejection near Naples the two lines 4, 5, “The purple noon's transparent might, | The breath of the moist earth is light," were printed in the 1st edition, “The purple noon's transparent light," owing to the homoeographon “might” “light.”
Omissions through Simple Negligence.—Groups of letters, words, syllables and lines are often omitted without any contributory cause. Short words or such as are not necessary to the sense are especially prone thus to disappear.
Examples of omission. Shelley's Prometheus, iii. i, 70, “No refuge! No appeal! Sink with me [then];” Cenci, i. i, 26, “Respited [me] from Hell! So may the Devil | Respite their souls from Heaven!”; Hellas, 657, “Bask in the [deep] blue noon divine”; Julian and Maddalo, 218, where “Moans, shrieks, and curses, and blaspheming prayers” is absent in the earlier editions though required for the rhyme; so lines 299-301 of the Letter to Maria Gisborne.
Repetitions: Dittography.—Letters, groups of letters, words and lines may be written twice (or even oftener) instead of once.
Other repetitions of words already written and anticipations of words yet to be written are also found, through the scribe's eye wandering into the preceding or the following context. Wherever the word or group of words repeated is not the one that he has just copied loss is liable to occur.
- ↑ For the convenience of the general reader these errors have been illustrated as far as possible from English authors and especially from the poems of Shelley (ed. Hutchinson).
