There is a dictum of Haupt, quoted with approval by Housman and others: "If the sense requires it, I am prepared to write Constantinopolitanus where the manuscripts have the monosyllabic interjection o". The point he is making is that emendation must start from the sense. But the failure to explain how Constantinopitanus came to be corrupted into o may leave others with certain doubts as to whether that is what the sense was. Until those doubts are stilled, the conjecture has the status of a diagnostic one.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
Pages
▼
Monday, December 05, 2011
O or Constantinopolitanus?
M.L. West, Textual Criticism and Editorial Technique (Stuttgart: B.G. Teubner, 1973; rpt. 2003), p. 58: