Erroneous emendations
The wrong separation of words in MSS. can
sometimes be remedied by a stroke of the pen.
Madvig's brilliant restoration of a passage of Seneca's
Epistles (89. 4) is a well-known example: “
philosophia
unde dicta sit, apparet: ipso enim nomine fatetur quid
amet. Sapientiam ita quidam finierunt, ut dicerent
divinorum et humanorum sapientiam”. In this passage
the QUIDAMET of the Archetype had been wrongly
broken up by a Carolingian scribe into
quidam et, so
that the MSS. offered:
ipso enim nomine fatetur
quidam et sapientiam ita quidam finierunt; and
modern editors printed:
ipso enim nomine fatetur.
Quidam et sapientiam ita * * quidam finierunt, supposing
a sentence to have dropped out after
ita.
Similarly in
“quid nos dura refugimus
aetas?
”
the
durare fugimus of certain MSS. is easily emended.
But usually the wrong separation of words brought
other mistakes in its train. In the
Persa of Plautus,
v. 587, we have seen
(p. 3) that
aequom hic orat, “he
talks justice,” written AEQVOMHICORAT, was in the
Carolingian archetype of our minuscule MSS. wrongly
broken up into
aequo mhi (mihi) corat. The natural
consequence was that copyists fancied this
corat to be
a misspelling of
curat, so that we have in the manuscripts
C and
D aequo mihi curat. Another example has been
already quoted from
v. 546 of the same play.
Quia
specie quidem, written QVIASPECIEQVIDEM, was
broken up into
qui aspeci equidem, and was changed — how
could it be otherwise? — to
qui aspexi equidem, the
aspeci being taken for a misspelling of
aspexi. A
curious instance is found in
v. 288 of the
Menaechmi,
where
opsonatu redeo, “I come back from catering for
dinner,” appeared first as
opso nature deo, then as
ipso
naturae deo. 
