Some ancient authors have descended to modern times in one ms only, or in a few MSS derived immediately or with little interval from one. Such are Lucretius, Catullus, Valerins Maccus, and Statius in his siluae. Others there are whose text, though in the main reposing on a single copy, can be corrected here and there from others, inferior indeed, but still independent and indispensable. Such are Juvenal, Ovid in his heroides, Seneca in his tragedies, and Statius in his Thebais and Achilleis. There is a third class whose text comes down from a remote original through separate channels, and is preserved by MSS of unlike character but like fidelity, each serving in its turn to correct the faults of others. Such are Persius, Lucan, Martial, and Manilius.
If I had no judgment, and knew it, and were nevertheless immutably resolved to edit a classic, I would single out my victim from the first of these three classes: that would be best for the victim and best for me. Authors surviving in a solitary ms are by far the easiest to edit, because their editor is relieved from one of the most exacting offices of criticism, from the balancing of evidence and the choice of variants. They are the easiest, and for a fool they are the safest. One field at least for the display of folly is denied him : others are open, and in defending, correcting and explaining the written text he may yet aspire to make a scarecrow of the author and a byword of himself; but with no variants to afford him scope for choice and judgment he cannot exhibit his impotence to judge and choose.
But the worst of having no judgment is that one never misses it, and buoyantly embarks without it upon enterprises in which it is not so much a convenience as a necessity. Hence incompetent editors are not found flocking to texts like Valerius Flaccus and leaving texts like Manilius' alone. They essay to edit the latter no less promptly than the former; and then comes the pinch. They find themselves unexpectedly committed to a business which demands not only the possession, but the constant exercise, of intellectual faculties. An editor of no judgment, perpetually confronted with a couple of MSS to choose from, cannot but feel in every fibre of his being that he is a donkey between two bundles of hay. What shall he do now? Leave criticism to critics, you may say, and betake himself to any honest trade for which he is less unfit. But he prefers a more flattering solution: he confusedly imagines that if one bundle of hay is removed he will cease to be a donkey.
So he removes it. Are the two MSS equal, and do they bewilder him with their rival merit and exact from him at every other moment the novel and distressing effort of using his brains? Then he pretends that they are not equal: he calls one of them 'the best ms,' and to this he resigns the editorial functions which he is himself unable to discharge. He adopts its readings when they are better than its fellow's, adopts them when they are no better, adopts them when they are worse: only when they are impossible, or rather when he perceives their impossibility, is he dislodged from his refuge and driven by stress of weather to the other port.
This method answers the purpose for which it was devised: it saves lazy editors from working and stupid editors from thinking. But somebody has to pay for these luxuries, and that somebody is the author; since it must follow, as the night the day, that this method should falsify his text. Suppose, if you will, that the editor's 'best ms ' is in truth the best : his way of using it is none the less ridiculous. To believe that wherever a best ms gives possible readings it gives true readings, and that only where it gives impossible readings does it give false readings, is to believe that an incompetent editor is the darling of Providence, which has given its angels charge over him lest at any time his sloth and folly should produce their natural results and incur their appropriate penalty. Chance and the common course of nature will not bring it to pass that the readings of a ms are right wherever they are possible and impossible wherever they are wrong: that needs divine intervention; and when one considers the history of man and the spectacle of the universe I hope one may say without impiety that divine intervention might have been better employed elsewhere. How the world is managed, and why it was created, I cannot tell; but it is no feather-bed for the repose of sluggards.
Apart from its damage to the author, it might perhaps be thought that this way of editing would bring open scorn upon the editors, and that the whole reading public would rise up and tax them, as I tax them now, with ignorance of their trade and dereliction of their duty. But the public is soon disarmed. This planet is largely inhabited by parrots, and it is easy to disguise folly by giving it a fine name. Those who live and move and have their being in the world of words and not of things, and employ language less as a vehicle than as a substitute for thought, are readily duped by the assertion that this stolid adherence to a favourite Ms, instead of being as it is, a private and personal necessity imposed on certain editors by their congenital defects, is a principle; and that its name is 'scientific criticism' or 'critical method.' This imposture is helped by the fact that there really are such things as scientific methods and principles of criticism, and that the 19th century was specially distinguished by a special application of these methods and principles which is easily confused, by parrots, with the unprincipled and unmethodical practice now in question. Till 1800 and later no attempt was made by scholars to determine the genealogy and affiliation of MSS: science and method, applied to this end by the generation of Bekker and Lachmann, Madvig and Cobbed, have cast hundreds of MSS, once deemed authorities, on the dust-heap, have narrowed the circle of witnesses by excluding those who merely repeat what they have heard from others, and have proved that the text of certain authors reposes on a single document from which all other extant MSS are copied. Hence it is no hard task to diffuse among parrots the notion that an editor who assigns preponderant authority to any single ms is following the principles of critical science, since the question whether the ms really possesses that authority does not suggest itself to the creature of which Pliny has written 'capiti eius duritia eadem quae rostro.' Nay more: the public is predisposed in favour of the falsehood, and has reasons for wishing to believe it true. Tell the average man that inert adhesion to one authority is methodical criticism, and you tell him good news: I too, thinks he, have the makings of a methodical critic about me. '
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But still there is a hitch. Competent editors exist; and side by side with those who have embraced 'the principles of criticism' there are those who follow the practice of critics: who possess intellects, and employ them on their work. Consequently their work is better done, and the contrast is mortifying. This is not as it should be. As the wise man dieth, so dieth the fool: why then should we allow them to edit the classics differently? If nature, with flagitious partiality, has given judgment and industry to some men and left other men without them, it is our evident duty to amend her blind caprice; and those who are able and willing to think must be deprived of their unfair advantage by stringent prohibitions. In Association football you must not use your hands, and similarly in textual criticism you must not use your brains. Since we cannot make fools behave like wise men, we will insist that wise men should behave like fools: by these means only can we redress the injustice of nature and anticipate the equality of the grave.
To this end, not only has the simple process of opening one's mouth and shutting one's eyes been dignified by the title of 'eine streng wissenschaftliche Methode,' but rational criticism has been branded with a term of formal reprobation. 'Butter and honey shall he eat,' says Isaiah of Immanuel, 'that he may know to refuse the evil and choose the good.' This is a very bad system of education: to refuse the evil and choose the good is 'der reinste Eclecticismus.'
By this use of tickets it is rendered possible, in a world where names are mistaken for things, not only to be thoughtless and idle without discredit, but even to be vain of your vices and to reprove your neighbour for his lack of them. It is rendered possible to pamper self-complacency while indulging laziness; and the scientific critic, unlike the rest of mankind, contrives to enjoy in combination the usually incompatible luxuries of shirking his work and despising his superiors.
Thus are good MSS converted into implements of destruction. In books like Manilius and Lucan, preserved in various copies of equal merit, the editor cloaks his frailty by feigning that their merit is not equal: in books like Juvenal and Ovid's heroides, where one ms far excels the rest, he feigns that it excels them further, and tries hard to treat it not merely as the best but as the sole authority. The poet is brought low that the ms may be exalted.
Ouid. her. xiv 19 sq. Hypermestra to Lynceus:
quam tu caede putes fungi potuisse mariti,
scribere de facta non sibi caede timet.
Problem. To inflict upon these verses the greatest possible injury by the least possible alteration.
Solution. The cod. Puteaneus (which has the errors teneratae for temeretae in verse 17, dexterae for dextrae in 18, and nocts ... lucis for lucis ... noctis in 22) has here the error marito for mariti, ablative to suit the nearer 'fungi' instead of the remoter 'caede': adopt this error (alas that we must forgo the other three) and punctuate as follows,
quam tu caede putes fungi potuisse, marito
scribere de facta non sibi caede timet.
Thus we shall enfeeble the first clause by subtracting mariti, ridiculously enfeeble the second clause by adding marito and in order to deal these two blows we shall only change one letter. QE.F. When Mr R Ehwald, whose exploit this is, proceeds 'der antithetische Parallelismus der Gedanken im Hexameter und Penttmeter wird nur gewabrt durch das marito des Put.: so entspricht sich tu und marito' I do not regard his words as a piece of impudence; I regard them simply as speech divorced from thought.
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Again, when neither P nor the others have preserved the truth, and it becomes our business to discover it, Mr Buecheler and his followers ignore the fact, though they do not deny it, that the inferior family is independent of P, and refuse to avail themselves of the help it proffers; their aim being not so much to recover the original as to maintain what they fondly deem the scientific attitude of hopping on one leg instead of walking on two.
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whereupon Mr Ehwald must needs carry the corruption further with 'lurbe mea, quae iam non adeunda inilti.' By such tactless preference the Alarciantis of Ovid, like the Neapolitanus of Propertius and the Blandinianus uetustissimus of Horace, is made to do the author more harm than good; and a better ms still, the Puteaneus of Statius, in the hands of Mr Koblmann, has darkened even the annals of the Labdacidae with a shade of adventitious horror. Theban incest and Theban parricide have lost part of their direness by familiarity: Theban false quantities are new.
But it is in books where there is no best ms at all, and the editor, in order to escape the duty of editing, is compelled to feign one, that the worst mischief ensues; and those authors whose text the kindness of fortune has transmitted from a remote original through separate channels of equal purity are now deprived of their advantage and mechanically consigned to depravation for fear a sluggish brain should be required to work: butchered to make a German holiday, or an English one. Persius indeed, who is the most striking example of such transmission - both P on the one hand and AB on the other are exceedingly corrupt, yet each family so repairs the errors of the other that few Latin writers have a sounder text - has suffered less than might have been expected from the tendency of his editors to lean heavily, some on one prop, others on the other. Lucan is not so lucky.
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But no more dismal example of an author corrupted through and through by the very means which fortune has ordained for his preservation and restitution, is anywhere to be found than the two last editions of Manilius. To elude what Byron calls 'the blight of life - the demon Thought,' Messrs Jacob and Bechert have committed themselves respectively to the Vossianus and the Gemblacensis, the devil and the deep sea. Having small literary culture they are not revolted by illiteracy, having slight knowledge of grammar they are not revolted by solecism, having no sequence of ideas they are not revolted by incoherency, having nebulous thoughts they are not revolted by nonsense: on the contrary, the illiterate and ungrammatical and inconsecutive and meaningless things with which both MSS abound are supposed by their respective votaries to be 'Manilian,' and each believes himself a connoisseur of the poet's peculiar style. Strange to say, their conception of that style is identical; and the two texts, though based on opposite authorities and diverging in innumerable details, have in their general aspect a conspicuous and frightful similarity. The Manilian peculiarities of V are just like the Manilian peculiarities of G, for the simple reason that they are neither Manilian nor peculiar. They are ordinary corruptions; and Jacob can see that this is so in G, and Bechert can see it in V. And after all, though they may mount their hobbies, they cannot stick in the saddle. Again and again their favourites offer readings which they are forced to abandon, and to accept the readings of the rival: but these lessons they hasten to forget, and are no wiser next time.
Thus far of the places where our MSS dissent, and the reading of their archetype is to be regained by choice and comparison. Where they agree, there the text of the archetype is before us, an archetype, like themselves, corrupt and interpolated; and now begins the business of correcting this. But first, in every place where the tradition is thus clearly ascertained comes the question whether this be not itself the truth; and it is no simple question. The Romans are foreigners and write to please themselves, not us; Latin poets compose Latin poetry, which is very unlike English or German poetry; and each writer has his own peculiarities and the peculiarities of his generation and his school, which must be learnt by observation and cannot be divined by taste. In Manilius, an author both corrupt and difficult, who since the revival of learning has had few competent students, it is no cause for wonder that even after Scaliger and Bentley there remains as much to explain as to emend, and that these toiling giants, amidst loads of rubbish, have carted away some fragments of the fabric. A properly informed and properly attentive reader will find that many verses hastily altered by some editors and absurdly defended by others can be made to yield a just sense without either changing the text or inventing a new Latinity; and I think that I have often vindicated the MSS by a reasonable explanation in passages where my betters had assailed them.
But those who can understand what Scaliger and Bentley and Gronouius and Heinsius and Lachmann could not understand are now so numerous, and their daily exploits in hermeneutics are so repulsive and deterrent, that I have avoided nothing so anxiously as this particular mode of being ridiculous; and it is likely that my dread of seeming to march with the times has led me here and there to err on the side of caution, and timidly to alter what I might without rashness have defended.
The art of explaining corrupt passages instead of correcting them is imagined by those who now practise it to be something new, a discovery of these last twenty years. But man is not thus tardy in devising follies. Wakefield's Lucretius, to go no further back, is a stately monument of the craft; Gerent plied it busily in Cicero and Fickert in Seneca before ever Mr Buecheler wrote a word, and in Alschefski's Livy the style produced a masterpiece as yet unrivalled by Mr Sudhaus himself. What stamps the last twenty years with their special character is not the presence of such scholars as these but the absence of great scholars. During the other part of the 19th century, before the North-German school had entered on its decline, critics of this order were no less plentiful than now,- the poor are never cast out of the land, says the scripture, - but they were cowed and kept under by critics of another order. To-day this tyranny is overpast: the Lachmanns and Madvigs are gone, the Mosers and Forbigers remain; and now they lift up their heads and rejoice aloud at the emancipation of human incapacity.
History repeats itself, and we now witness in Germany pretty much what happened in England after 1825, when our own great age of scholarship, begun in 1691 by Bentley's Epistola ad Milium, was ended by the successive strokes of doom which consigned Dobree and Elmsley to the grave and Blomfield to the bishopric of Chester. England disappeared from the fellowship of nations for the next forty years: Badham, the one English scholar of the mid-century whose reputation crossed the Channel, received from abroad the praises of Duebner and Cobbed, but at home was excluded from academical preferment, set to teach boys at Birmingham, and finally transported to the antipodes: his countrymen, having turned their backs on Europe and science and the past, sat down to banquet on mutual approbation, to produce the Classical Museum and the Bibliotheca Classica, and to perish without a name. I will not be unjust, and I hasten to add that no modern German editor with whom I am acquainted is quite so ignorant as the average English editor of those days: the resemblance lies in the determination to explain what the MSS happen to offer, and the self-complacency which this frame of mind begets. It does not seem to strike these gentlemen that if their practice is right the practice of those great men who in the last century won for Germany the captaincy of European scholarship was wrong; that this recurrence to the methods of Wakefield must acknowledge itself to be what it is, a revolt from the methods of Lachmann; and that living Germans cannot long continue to trade upon the reputation of dead Germans whose principles they have abandoned and reversed. They now pretend that the relapse of the last twenty years is not a reaction against the great work of their elders, but a supplement to it. To the Lachmanns and Bentleys and Scaligers they politely ascribe the quality of Genialitat: there is a complementary virtue called Umsicht, and this they ascribe to themselves. Why, I cannot tell: ... for assuredly there is no trade on earth, excepting textual criticism, in which the name of prudence would be given to that habit of mind which in ordinary human life is called credulity.
The average man, if he meddles with criticism at all, is a conservative critic. His opinions are determined not by his reason, - 'the bulk of mankind' says Swift, 'is as well qualified for flying as for thinking,' - but by his passions; and the faintest of all human passions is the love of truth. He believes that the text of ancient authors is generally sound, not because he has acquainted himself with the elements of the problem, but because he would feel uncomfortable if he did not believe it; just as he believes, on the same cogent evidence, that he is a fine follow, and that he will rise again from the dead. And since the classical public, like all other publics, is chiefly composed of average men, he is encouraged to hold this belief and to express it. But beside this general cause there are peculiar circumstances which explain and even excuse the present return to superstition. At the end of the great age, in the sixties and seventies, conjecture was employed, and that by very eminent men, irrationally. Ritschl's dealings with Plautus and Nauck's with the Attic tragedians were violent and arbitrary beyond all bounds; and their methods were transferred to the sphere of dactylic poetry by Behrens, a man of vast energy and vigorous intelligence but of unripe judgment and faulty scholarship, who with one hand conferred on the Latin poets more benefits than any critic since Lachmann and with the other imported ten times as many corruptions as he removed.
This could not last, and a student of the world's history might have predicted what has now ensued. Error, if allowed to run its coarse, secures its own downfall, and is sooner or later overthrown, not by the truth, but by error of an opposite kind. When this misuse of conjecture had disgusted not only the judicious but the greater number of the injudicious, there followed a recoil, and it now became the fashion, instead of correcting the handiwork of poets, to interpret the handiwork of scribes. The conservative reaction was chiefly fostered by the teaching and example of Messrs Vahlen and Buecheler: men of wide learning and no mean acuteness, but without simplicity of judgment. Once set going by critics of re ute, the movement, commended by its very nature to the general public, has prospered as downhill movements do ; and its original leaders, as usually happens to those who instruct mankind in easy and agreeable vices, are far outdone by their disciples. In racing back to the feet of Alschefski Messrs Buecheler and Vahlen are hampered by two grave encumbrances: they know too much Latin, and they are not sufficiently obtuse. Among their pupils are several who comprehend neither Latin nor any other language, and whom nature has prodigally endowed at birth with that hebetude of intellect which Messrs Vahlen and Buecheler, despite their assiduous and protracted efforts, have not yet succeeded in acquiring. Thus equipped, the apprentices proceed to exegetical achievements of which their masters ire incapable, and which perhaps inspire those masters less with envy than with fright: indeed I imagine that Mr Buecheler, when he first perused Mr Sudhaus' edition of the Aetna, must have felt something like Sin when she gave birth to Death.
Mr Theodor Birt, who possesses, like Ezekiel Spanheim and Rudolf Merkel before him, an erudition almost redeeming his want of a critical faculty, began his career in the seventies With a profusion of clumsy conjectures which found no acceptance; accordingly, when the tide turned, Mr Birt was ready to follow it, and to try his band at defending, the corruptions which he had not skill to remove. Propertius has these verses, ii 13 46-9,
Nestoris est uisas post tria saecla cinis.
cui si tam longae minuisset fata senectae
Gallicus Iliacis miles in aggeribus,
non ille Antilochi uidisset corpus humari,
in which Gallicus, by reason of its great and manifest absurdity, has been attacked with many conjectures, none convincing. Mr Birt, Rhein. Mus. vol. 51 p. 527, explains 'quia Galli ex Ilio oriundi, Gallicus iam ille miles fuerat qui contra Graecos in aggeribus Iliacis pugnauit' Ay sure; and 'quia Romani ex Ilio oriundi,' Hector was a Roman (strange that the Romans never call him so); and Alfred the Great, by parity of reasoning, was a New Zealander; and Martin Luther was an African, which accounts for his propensity to innovation.
Mr Friedrich Leo is a distinguished scholar and critic who has written several good books and one book which is not good, a commentary on the culex; and this has received more praise and exerted more influence than any of the others. Naturally so ; for its faults are congenial to the multitude and easy of imitation.
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The promptness with which these scholars defend the corrupt and the ease with which they explain the inexplicable are at first sight a strange contrast to the embarrassment they suffer where the text is sound and the difficulty they find in understanding Latin. Indeed it may almost be said of them that if they are to construe a passage fluently the passage must be corrupted first. But the one phenomenon is only the result of the other. If a man is acquainted with the Latin tongue and with the speech of poets, he is sharply warned of corruption in a Latin poet's text by finding that he can make neither head nor tail of it. But Mr -Vollmer and his fellows receive no such admonitory shock; for all Latin poets, even where the text is flawless, abound in passages of which they can make neither head nor tail. Thus they gradually come to regard Latin poetry as having absurdity for its main characteristic; and when they encounter in a corrupt passage the bad grammar or nonsense which they habitually impute to an author by misunderstanding what he has written, they encounter nothing unexpected. ....
It is natural and even inevitable that those who mistake poets' sense for nonsense should mistake scribes' nonsense for sense.
By this time it has become apparent what the modern conservative critic really is : a creature moving about in worlds not realised. His trade is one which requires, that it may be practised in perfection, two qualifications only: ignorance of language and abstinence from thought. The tenacity with which he adheres to the testimony of scribes has no relation to the trustworthiness of that testimony, but is dictated wholly by his inability to stand alone. If one cannot discriminate between grammar and solecism, sequence and incoherency, sense and nonsense, one has no protection against falsehood, and believes all the lies one is told. And critics who treat ms evidence as rational men treat all evidence, and test it by reason and by the knowledge which they have acquired, these are blamed for rashness and capriciousness by gentlemen who use MSS as drunkards use lamp-posts,- not to light them on their way but to dissimulate their instability.
I hope and believe then that my numerous defences and explanations of passages attacked and altered by Scaliger and Bentley are not such as would have occurred to Mr Vollmer or Mr Sudhaus, and that I have nowhere encroached on the ample field which Manilius' text affords them for the exercise of their favourite industry and the display of their peculiar prowess. I sometimes amuse myself by trying to forecast their operations.
When a passage is apparently inexplicable and probably corrupt, then comes the question, by what means shall we correct it? and here, first of all, we must have no favourite method. An emendator with one method is as foolish a sight as a doctor with one drug. The scribes knew and cared no more about us and our tastes than diseases care about the taste of doctors; they made mistakes not of one sort but of all sorts, and the remedies must be of all sorts too. Haase in Seneca, for ever assuming lacunas, and Baker in Cicero, for ever assuming glosses, are examples of editors maimed by their own whims: criticism requires a mind as various as its matter, nimble, flexible, empty of prepossessions and alert for every hint.
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This commentary is designed to treat of two matters only; what Manilius wrote, and what he meant. From the illustration of his phraseology and his vocabulary, and from the elucidation of his language, I have purposely abstained: not that I despise this industry, but because life is short, and I have chosen other business which is more difficult and more important.
Housman's commentary on Manilius, book one (part one)
Housman's commentary on Manilius, book five
My name is Chris Borthwick. My other enthusiasms - issues involved with, inter alia, IQ, FCT, disability, and the golden hemorrhoids of 1 Samuel 6 - may be found on my home page.