Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1896 edition. Excerpt: ... INTRODUCTION There is no Latin author the study qf whose text has The Text of at once such interest and such value for students of spectaTvaiue textual emendation as Plautus. For the text of DEGREES DEGREESg DEGREES7 Plautus is on the one hand not nearly so certain as Emendathe text of Virgil, of which we have some half-dozen complete or fragmentary MSS. dating from the third to the sixth century, nor on the other so hopelessly uncertain as the text of Propertius, of which no MS. exists that is older than the thirteenth or fourteenth century. It is still full of difficulties, in spite of the labours of a large number of scholars for a large number of years, though' each month--I might almost say each week--sees a difficulty removed; and now that we have at last a full collation 1 of all the important MSS., we may hope to attain before long to a completely satisfactory text. 2 The study of the text of Plautus has thus all the fascination of a problem which 1 In the large Teubner edition by Ritschl's three pupils, Loewe (now dead), Goetz, and Schoell, the last volume of which appeared in 1894. Some additions and corrections will be found in the critical apparatus of the small Teubner text by Goetz and Schoell (Leipzig 1893-6). 2 The text which modern criticism seeks to discover is that of the first edition or, as an ancient edition is generally called, "recension" of Plautus, which is variously referred to the time of Varro by Ritschl, and to the age of Hadrian by Leo (Plautinisehe Forsehungen chap. i). has not yet been solved, but which evidently can, and sooner or later must, be solved. Even an untrained student may at any moment by an ingenious conjecture remove a difficulty, and thereby open the way to the resolution of a score of similar proble