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Omission due to hole in leaf of archetype

In the Casina we find in all or some of our minuscule MSS. blank spaces left at regular intervals, indicating the omission of words. At the same intervals we find lines in which no lacuna is indicated in our MSS., but which present a defective number of syllables, a word being patently omitted at the beginning of one line and at the end of another. Omissions of this kind may be referred without hesitation to a hole in the leaf of some archetype; and if we count the number of lines in these intervals, we can estimate the number of lines on a leaf and (by halving that number) on a page of this archetype.1

1 The “gappy” archetype of Plautus was not the minuscule archetype P, but an earlier one. If we consider how soon indications of a lacuna vanish in the transmission of a text, we may be disposed to believe that the archetype in question was that archetype in capitals (p. 8) from which P was directly copied. It had from nineteen to twenty-one lines on a page (A has nineteen lines on a page); and it is not impossible that its gappy condition was due to its being a papyrus and not a vellum MS. (For details of these lacunae see Schoell's Introduction to the Casina pp. x sqq.）

An Introduction to Latin Textual Emendation Based on the Text of Plautus. W. M. Lindsay. Anne Mahoney. edited for Perseus. London. Macmillan. 1896.

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