Laudator Temporis Acti

Plautus, Stichus. Trinummus. Truculentus. Tale of a Travelling Bag. Fragments. Edited and translated by Wolfgang de Melo (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013 = Loeb Classical Library, 328), pp. 294-297 (Truculentus 262-264):

AST comprime sis eiram.
TRVC    eam quidem hercle tu, quae solita es, comprime,
impudens, quae per ridiculum rustico suades stuprum.
AST “eiram” dixi: ut decepisti! dempsisti unam litteram.

262 eam P, meam A, eram Spengel

AST Do keep your distress in check.
TRVC No, you, who are used to doing it, keep your mistress in check,¹⁰ you shameless creature! You jokingly advise a country lad to have sex.
AST I said “distress”: how you’ve tricked me! You’ve changed one letter.

¹⁰ The word ira, “anger, distress,” originally contained the diphthong ei in its first syllable; in Plautus’ day the diphthong was still written and possibly still pronounced, though it is more likely that in pronunciation it had already developed into a closed ē. Truculentus (probably deliberately) misunderstands the word as ĕra, “mistress,” which leads to a different interpretation of comprimere: Astaphium had intended the meaning “keep in check, control,” whereas Truculentus interprets it as “keep in check, rape.” In the Latin, Astaphium goes on to say that Truculentus removed one letter (eira → era); in the translation this is rendered as “changing one letter” (distress → mistress).

In line 262, de Melo put the manuscript reading eam into his Latin text, but translated Spengel's conjecture eram. The conjecture, evidently approved by de Melo, belongs in the Latin text. I might also note in the critical apparatus that the spelling eiram (262, 264) is due to Geppert—the manuscripts have iram.

Labels: typographical and other errors