Transposition of a line
Not merely words but whole lines may be transposed. Usually the error is due to the scribe having
omitted a line and then having inserted it at the point
he had reached when he discovered his mistake, either
one line late (
Epid. 635-6;
Men. 950-1) or two lines or
three lines, as the case might be. If the mistake was not discovered till the whole page was written,
1 the omitted line would be added in the top or bottom margin (the
side margins not affording room enough), with signs indicating the proper place of insertion—such as
h.d.
(“hic deest”）,
h.s. (“hoc supplendum”）, or
h.p. (“hoc ponas”）. Sometimes a copyist neglects these signs
of his original and writes the line before the first line of the page (if it stood in the top margin), or after the
last line of the page (if it stood in the bottom margin).
Men. 465, for example, appears after
v. 474 in the
minuscule MSS., though it has its proper place in
A.
Bacch. 73 is twice written in the minuscule MSS., both
in its proper place and also before
v. 65, which may have been the top line of the page in
P.
A twofold occurrence of a line is often the result of the fact that an emended version of it or a variant form taken
from another MS. had been appended in the margin by the corrector. The reason why
Bacch. 166-169 reappear in
B
after
v. 175 seems to have been that they had been written in wrong order; for the words of the repeated passage are
unchanged, and the only perceptible difference is that at its first occurrence the order is wrong (168, 169, 166, 167).
The appearance in
A of
vv. 232-3 of the
Stichus
after
v. 208, as well as at their proper place, may be due to the
scribe's having copied, when he turned over the page, the top lines, not of the left-hand page but of the right-hand
page of his original. The scribe of
P, too, at first skipped a leaf of his original containing
vv. 1162-1204 of the
Pseudolus. Hence vv. 1205-7 appear in our MSS. after
v. 1161 as well as after
v. 1204.
In
B the transposition of two long passages of the
Poenulus
（
vv. 218-284, which follow
v. 352, and
vv. 480-546, which
follow
v. 608) is, I think, the result of two broadsheets of
the original having accidentally changed places. That original was apparently, like most mediaeval MSS., disposed
in “quaternions,” i.e. gatherings of four broadsheets which were laid one upon the other, and then folded into
eight leaves or sixteen pages. Each leaf of the
Poenulus in
the original we know to have contained some 66 or 68 lines of the play (see
Appendix A). The second broadsheet of the
quaternion (that is the second and seventh leaves), containing on leaf ii vv. 218-284 and on leaf vii vv. 547-608, was
put after, instead of before, the third broadsheet. This third broadsheet (the third and sixth leaves) had on leaf iii vv. 285-352 and on leaf vi vv. 480-546.
