In this article, twelve new emendations are offered on the text of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura. At 1.454 non tactus is proposed for the unparalleled intactus; at 2.99 et partim is suggested for the awkward pars etiam; at 2.258 quomque (late-Republican cumque) is advanced for quemque; at 2.615 the metrically problematic inuenti sint is altered to inueniantur; at 2.733 the unique use of nigrant is dispensed with by reading the expected nigra sunt; at 3.267 et tamen is made more naturally adversarial as at tamen; at 3.774 ne fessa is altered to the more Lucretian defessa (reading ne for et earlier in the line); at 4.160 the unusual feminine celer (his) is altered to (his) celeris; at 4.306 (331) the difficult gerund insinuando is changed to the gerundive insinuandis; at 4.318 (343) multisque is replaced with the more idiomatic multoque; at 5.323 the stark phrase deminui debet recreari is reordered as debet deminui et recreari; finally, at 6.266 uementes is read for the otiose uenientes. The discussion proceeds on the basis of the universally accepted stemma, namely that the three Carolingian manuscripts (O, Q, S) are the sole manuscripts with textual authority. The more than fifty surviving Renaissance manuscripts ultimately derive from O, but they remain a fertile source for conjectures
In this article, three textually problematic passages from the Ciris, a variously dated short poem from the Appendix Vergiliana, are discussed. In line 63, it is suggested that B. Kayachev’s proposal to change erroribus auctor to auctoribus error should be accompanied by an emendation of istorum to est idem (the meaning of the line will then be “the mistaken versions of the less authoritative poets are actually not unanimous”). In line 90, it is proposed to read Aonisin… placeat instead of omnia sim… liceat (“let the Muses be benign to the idea of giving renown to my version of Scylla”). Greek forms of Dative in -sin often provoke similar nonsensical errors, and aoni- could be transformed into omnia uia loss of a at the beginning of the line and a misunderstood attempt to restore it above the text. In line 208, it is hardly possible to be sure what was the original reading in place of the transmitted iactabat (hardly appropriate and perhaps introduced by a scribe under the influence of the parallel passage in Verg. Ecl. 2.5), but it is argued that to the set of possibilities considered by the scholars one should add alternabat (meaning “relieved watch”)