The first volume of the edition of Manilius now completed was published in 1903, the second in 1912, the third in 1916, and the fourth in 1920. All were produced at my own expense and offered to the public at much less than cost price ; but this unscrupulous artifice did not overcome the natural disrelish of mankind for the combination of a tedious author with an odious editor. Of each volume there were printed 400 copies: only the first is yet sold off, and that took 23 years; and the reason why it took no longer is that it found purchasers among the unlearned, who had heard that it contained a scurrilous preface and hoped to extract from it a low enjoyment.
A preface to this Fifth book shall follow, but first I will take a retrospective survey of the period ; and I begin with the question of the mss.
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Before I proceed to G I must interpose a narrative.
In 1903 G was the sovereign ms. Bentley had called it so; and although he did not treat it as such, but made more use of V in restoring the text, his words outweighed his actions, as words generally do, and as they did again when he preached one thing and practised another in his dealings with the Blandinianus uetustissimus of Horace. Jacob in 1846 pronounced it interpolated, degraded it to the third place, and exalted V to the first ; but he gave no reasoned and ordered proof of his assertion, and succeeding critics one after another, from Breiter in 1854 to Bechert in,1900, condemned his judgment and upheld the primacy of G. Bechert's devotion exceeded all precedent, and M stood low in his esteem. But even this idolatry was not abject enough for Vollmer, who in Berl. Phil. Woch. 1900 pp. 1292-4 might be seen defending interpolations and corruptions abandoned by Bechert himself.
In 1903 I demonstrated the truth which Jacob had in vain asserted, and showed that G is a much interpolated ms, inferior in sincerity to L and still more to M. This is now denied by nobody and only ignored by the ignorant. The revolution was immediate and complete, and the revulsion excessive. In 1904, Berl. Phil. WGch. p. 104, Vollmer rose from his knees, renounced his faith, and stamped upon the altar; nam cupide conculcatur nimis ante metutum. The slaves of words, for whom interpolation is a name of superstitious terror, set to and disparaged G as hard as they could ; and incompetent critics, conscious of their own inability to extract truth from interpolated mss, began to insist that it should be used as little as possible. M and L were now to be the sole authorities; where they agreed, that gave the tradition; where G in contradiction gave the truth, that was conjectural emendation; and 'hatte Housman eine Ahnung von Uberlieferungsgeschichte' he would have come to the same conclusion.
If so, my sad deficiency is a blessing in disguise. Unable to soar in the void, I creep upon the earth ; and there I make the acquaintance of stony facts. They teach me, and in this preface I will teach the teachable, that G is not merely an independent witness to the text but much more than that. For the moment however I am considering it in this aspect only.
The revolution of which I was the guilty author attained its culmination in a boastful article 'de libroram Manillanorum recensione' published by Mr Paul Thielscher in Philol. where he undertook to support by, theory what Vollmer had recommended in practice.
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That G was not copied from L I shall prove by evidence of very different validity from Mr Thielscher's ; but before producing the whole of it I may as well decide the question at one stroke. II 153:
L cernis ut aduersus redeundo surgat in arcum
G cernis ut aduersus ............... surgat in arcum.
G has a blank space just sufficient to hold redeundo. In L redeundo is as clearly written as any word in the verse; it is as plain as print. It is also perfectly intelligible ; though that has no bearing on the question, since G is not one of those mss, like Ven. and Vrb. 667, which omit words because of their unintelligibility. The case is clear: G was copied from a ms in which redeundo was illegible. And there's an end on't: G is not a copy of L. L and G are not father and son but uncle and nephew.
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From the mss I now proceed to the efflorescence of editions which has enriched the opening of the 20th century.
In 1907, his 83rd year, Breiter published the first volume, text with apparatus criticus, of the edition which he had been meditating for a lifetime ; the second, a commentary, followed in 1908, a few months before his death. Though slender in bulk and and pretentious in character they were hailed by his countrymen as a 'gigantisches Lebenswerk'. This ought not to be forgotten, and the reader should bear it steadily in mind as he peruses what I am about to say.
Breiter's papers in Fleckeisen's Neue Jahrbuecher, vol. 139 (1889) and vol. 147 (1893), were the most estimable contribution made to the study of Manibus after Jacob's edition. The corrections of Ellis were rather more numerous, and one or two of them were very pretty, but his readers were in perpetual contact with the intellect of an idiot child : in Breiter's articles the good preponderated, and he thought and wrote like a sane man and a grown man. His edition therefore, when at last it came, was a severe disappointment; and on a general view it detracts from his merit. It was not senile, but it showed that an edition was an undertaking beyond his powers. His recension is to be commended in so far as it maintains a fairly just balance between the rival mss and avoids the bias of Bechert on one side and of Jacob on the other ; but his use and choice of emendation was haphazard, and his own new conjectures, extorted by the task of editing, were without exception worthless. In his apparatus criticus he persisted in retain the cod. Cusanus, because he was much too old to take example by me; he wantonly deceived the less wary of his readers with an inaccurate collation of G, which others had collated accurately; and his collation of L, which should have been a boon and a blessing, because much fuller and more minute than Bechert's, was an insidious peril and a pernicious nuisance. His eyesight was evidently feeble, and did not serve him well in collating mss or correcting proofs; but that is not enough to account for the bucketfuls of falsehood which he discharged on an ignorant and confiding public. In book III, which is much the shortest book, his apparatus, consisting of fewer than 350 lines, contains more than 110 definitely false statements : I do not reckon its frequent and deceitful omissions, nor the equally deceitful consequences of the editor's ignorance of his trade.
The commentary is plain and concise, but meagre, and a student without other resource would starve on it. Breiter's chief purpose was to explain for novices the astrology of the poem, but his knowledge of the subject was neither original nor adequate. Verbal interpretation is often lacking. Critical discussion is generally shunned, and Latinity gets little attention. Falsehoods, blunders of every sort and size, self-contradictions, misinterpretations, miscalculations, misquotations and misprints leave few pages undisfigured.
In 1911 an elaborate edition of the second book was produced by Mr. R. W. Garrod. I declined to review it on its publication, leaving it a fair field in which it received no competent criticism except from Mr J. G. Smyly in Hermathena 1912 pp. 137-68. Mr. Garrod brought to his task activity and energy, a brisk intelligence, and a strong desire to shine. His book, unlike the work of a later editor, was the fruit of independent investigation, diversified reading, and genuine industry. The most valuable part of its contents was the new and enlarged knowledge of the cod. Venetus provided by his discovery of Gronouius' collation in the margin of a book of Bentley's. There is one passage, 681 sq., which Mr Garrod, though not the first to understand it, was the first to explain, because the interpreters had not understood it; but I do not think that any other of his interpretations is both new and true. His conjectures were singularly cheap and shallow, and his impatience of more circumspect emendators, such as Bentley, broke out at 689 in insolence. The apparatus criticus is neither skilful nor careful, often defective and sometimes visibly so; I have counted more than 60 positive misstatements, of which only a minority can be laid at Breiter's door. The translation is dexterous and serviceable, but has an average of more than three false renderings to the page, not counting the suppression of inconvenient words and the insertion of convenient ones. Some of his interpretations were so little pondered that he changed them in the course of his work without perceiving it: there are more than a dozen places where translation and commentary contradict one another, and at 409 discrepancy is not confined to them. An astrological figure on p. 146, borrowed from others, is false in four particulars to the editor's own text.
The commentary, which is full and mainly original, contains much more truth than error, but it contains so much error that the only readers who can use it with safety are those whose knowledge extends beyond Mr Garrod's ; though even a student quite ignorant of the subject must discover, if intelligent and attentive, that some things which the editor tells him, for instance at 361-70, cannot possibly be true. What is taken at second hand is not always verified, and Bouche-Leclercq's prodigious blunder (astr. Gr. p. 374) about Hor. carm. i 12 50 orte Saturno is introduced at 509 as if original. Unconscious ignorance here and there exults too merrily, and it cannot be said that Mr Garrod's attainment in scholarship corresponds to his pretensions. Few will listen to a lecture at 747 sq. on elision in Latin poetry from a metrist who has not found time to read even his own text of one book of Manilius, and does not know what he has printed at 3 and 275 and 341 and 385 and 542 and 860. But this seems to be a sort of English book which Germans admire, as they once admired Wakefield's Lucretius, and it was greeted as ' Garrods trefflicher Kommentar', 'das herrliche Werk', 'das vortreffliche Buch '. There were no such bouquets for me; and perhaps the re ader will do well to consider how far my judgment of Mr Garrod's performance may have been warped by the passion of envy.
It is comprehensible that Breiter and Mr Garrod should aspire to edit Manilius, or a book of Manilius, and should attempt the enterprise; but why Jakob van Wageningen took it into his head that the world would be the better for an edition from him, and fetched his paste and scissors to this particular spot, I cannot imagine.
For the text which he published with Teubner in 1915 he professed to have collated G and L himself and to have procured photographs of M. Yet the apparatus criticus contains more than 200 false reporta of the mss, and much of this falsehood is borrowed falsehood. ... The number of conjectures which he ascribes to those who were not their authors is nearer 300 than 200; and although my editions of books I and II had already appeared, and correction was there if he wanted it, he would not look. He had not learnt to write an apparatus criticus. He had not even learnt to read an apparatus criticus : he shows ignorance of the lections of the cod. Flor. in dozens of places where Bechert's silence had made them known to every instructed student. The text is neither conservative nor intelligently amended; conjectures are admitted without respect of merit, the last dregs of Breiter and the topmost froth of Mr Garrod are gulped down together, and the mss are nowhere more readily deserted than where their tradition is sound. Of his own conjectures, which are few, I can accept only one. The index is almost as full of errors as the apparatus criticus.
The Latin commentary was separately published in 1921 with no small magnificence by the royal academy of sciences at Amsterdam. What it most resembles is a magpie's nest. With the rarest of exceptions, all that it contains of any value, whether interpretation or illustration, is taken from others, and usually without acknowledgment. A reader new to the author and the editor might mistake van Wageningen for a man of learning; but with my knowledge of both I can trace every stolen penny to the pouch it came from. On p. 41 the note of seventeen lines upon verses 149-166 may seem to indicate a considerable amount of reading, and so it does, for it is from Ed. Mueller de Pos. Man. auct. p. 2. On pp. 43 sq. thirty-three consecutive lines, equally impressive, are a mosaic put together from pp. 3 and 4 and 7 of the same treatise and from F. Malchin de auct. quib. qui Pos. libr. met. adhib. pp. 15 sq. P. 178 consists of thirty-seven lines: seventeen of them are mine. From those of his predecessors who wrote in Latin he copies many whole sentences word for word, especially from Fayus and me. I am his chief resource in books I and III; my fourth volume appeared when his compilation was nearing completion and is therefore plundered less; in book II his wants were so abundantly supplied by the ampler and more elementary commentary of Mr Garrod that he left mine unread, only dipping into it here and there.
Some of his thefts he took measures to dissemble. Sextus empiricus, whose polemical treatise is the best introduction to Greek astrology, he had never read, and almost every word of that author which appears in his notes has been taken from mine. But he had enough originality to alter my references. At m 257 his inapposite reference to Bouche-Leclercq and Boll we means of diverting attention from the fact that his note is a reproduction of mine.
In adorning her humble home with extraneous objects the magpie is not more helped by her freedom from scruple than she is hindered by her defects of taste and judgment. Diamonds and broken glass are all one to her, and she picks up and carries off what a discriminating thief would leave in the gutter. At II 1 Mr Garrod had made the irrelevant and unhappy remark that Homer was held by some to be [greek text] a fact which Manilius, if it occurred to him, took good care not to mention. Van Wageningen, having read this note and forgotten his own text, said ' 1-1 1 Homerus laudatur primus tea et astrologus '.
His own original contributions offer little temptation to larceny, and he might say with Iago 'who steals my purse, steals trash'. He writes for readers who crave such lore as 'Colchida : Medeam.parentis: Aeetae ' Well for them if all the information supplied them were equally true; but they have an ignorant instructor. Ignorant of fact: ignorant of fable: prodigiously ignorant of Latin.
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Such a scholar cannot hope to understand the thought of a Latin author.
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He does not shrink from open falsehood. I 432 'ut olim, cum Iuppiter Aram constituit, maxima erant sidera, quibus usus eat, ic nunc quoque maxima manserant (moneo propter Bentleium, qui legit: fulget) '. To have written this under any circumstances would have been to profess gross and wiful ignorance of the starry heavens : to write it after Bentley's note is something worse.
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His opinions, not being his own, are not permanently held, but picked up and dropped again, and he lived from hand to mouth on the borrowed beliefs of the moment.
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In my addenda to books I-IV I have borrowed from van Wageningen and Mr Garrod whatever I thought worth borrowing; and my superstitious practice of acknowledging obligations will enable anyone to see how little it is.
The apparatus criticus is embedded in the commentary and the two are closely interwoven ; and that is as it should be. The usual separation of inseparable things, interpretation and criticism, is injurious to both but especially to the latter. It is the expedient of editors who wish to shirk discussion of their text because they fear that they could not defend it. Criticism apart from interpretation does not exist ; and ' critical edition ' is the most inappropriate of all names for the thing to which custom applies it, an edition in which the editor is allowed to fling his opinions in the reader's face without being called to account and asked for his reasons.
'Operam maximam eamque satis fastidiosam posui in primo emendationis cuiusque auctore inuestigando '. I am one of the few who can echo these words of Lachmann's: most editors have souls above such things, and some of them so much prefer error to knowledge that even when we patient drudges have ascertained the facts for them they continue to disseminate misinformation. There is another set of facts which I am almost alone in commemorating, for it is desired to suppress them. Many a reading discovered by conjecture has afterwards been confirmed by the authority of mss and I record the occurrence, as instructive, instead of concealing it, as deplorable. The resistance of conservatives to true emendation is perpetual, and to enjoy credit in the future they must obliterate their past. When therefore a conjecture has turned out to be a manuscript reading, and they have gnashed their teeth and accepted it as such, they try to make the world forget that they formerly condemned it on its merits. Its author, who bore the blame of its supposed falsehood, is denied mention after the establishment of its truth; and the history of scholarship is mutilated to save the face of those who have impeded progress.
There is an industriously propagated legend that many of my own corrections are 'violent' or 'palaeographically improbable', by which it is merely meant that they alter a good number of letters. Violence and palaeographical improbability do not consist in that: they consist in ignoring the habits of copyists ; and the terms should not be used by those to whom the habits of copyists are imperfectly known. A conjecture which alters only a single letter may be more improbable palaeographically than one which leaves no letter unaltered. The greatest change which I have admitted is none of my own but Breiter's quaeue (iacent) for contra (iacent) in ii 253, which is what Manilius must have written. It is less violent, resumes less unwonted behaviour in the scribes, than the universally accepted conjecture quorum for quarum in m 300; and quorum has worse features than violence. If I had to name three of my own conjectures which I judge to be quite certain, I should be inclined to choose I 423 equit Ioue for esurcione, IV 800 ubi ab his ope suruptor for ubi pisce suruptor, and v 461 uix una trium for atri luxum; two of which, I can well believe, will make the hair stand up on many uninstructed heads.
The first virtue of an emendation is to be true; but the best emendations of all are those which are both true and difficult, emendations which no fool could find. It is humiliating to reflect how many of the type commonly called brillant - neat and pretty changes of a letter or two - have been lighted upon, almost fortuitously, by scholars whose intellectual powers were beneath the ordinary. Textual criticism would indeed be a paradise if scribes had confined themselves to making mistakes which Isaac Voss and Robinson Ellis could correct. But we know by comparing one with another that they also made mistakes of a different character; and it is these that put a good emendator on his mettle. First he must recognise them, then he must deal with them suitably. Anxious adherence to the ductus litteraram is the fruitful parent of false conjectures. It seduced even such men as Scaliger and Porson : it led Scaliger to write ultimus ex solido tetirans in iv 757 ; it made Porson spoil his famous correction of Eur. Ion 1115 by omitting a necessary particle. The merits essential to a correction are those without which it cannot be true, and closeness to the mss is not one of them; the indispensable things are fitness to the context and propriety to the genius of the author. The question whether the error presupposed was great or small is indeed a question to be asked, but it is the last question. With vulgar judges it is the first, though usually the last as well. This detail is their favourite criterion, because it can be discerned, or they think it can, by a bodily sense, without disturbing the slumbers of the intellect.
It surprises me that so many people should feel themselves qualified to weigh conjectures in their balance and to pronounce them good or bad, probable or improbable. Judging an emendation requires in some measure the same qualities as emendation itself, and the requirement is formidable. To read attentively, think correctly, omit no relevant consideration, and repress self-will, are not ordinary accomplishments; yet an emendator needs much besides: just literary perception, congenial intimacy with the author, experience which must have been won by study, and mother wit which he must have brought from his mother's womb.
It may be asked whether I think that I myself possess this outfit, or even most of it; and if I answer yes, that will be a new example of my notorious arrogance. I had rather be arrogant than impudent. I should not have undertaken to edit Manilius unless I had believed that I was fit for the task; and in particular I think myself a better judge of emendation, both when to emend and how to emend, than most others.
The following stanza of Mr de la Mare's 'Farewell' first met my eyes, thus printed, in a newspaper review.
Oh, when this my dust surrenders
Hand, foot, hip, to dust again,
May these loved and loving faces
Please other men!
May the rustling harvest hedgerow
Still the Traveller's Joy entwine,
And as happy children gather
Posies once mine.
I knew in a moment that Mr de la Mare had not written rustling, and in another moment I had found the true word. But if the book of poems had perished and the verse survived only in the review, who would have believed me rather than the compositor? The bulk of the reading public would have been perfectly content with rustling, nay they would sincerely have preferred it to the epithet which the poet chose. If I had been so ill-advised as to publish my emendation, I should have been told that rustling was exquisitely apt and poetical, because hedgerows do rustle, especially in autumn, when the leaves are dry, and when straws and ears from the passing harvest-wain (to which 'harvest' is so plain an allusion that only a pedant like me could miss it) are hanging caught in the twigs; and I should have been recommended to quit my dusty (or musty) books and make a belated acquaintance with the sights and sounds of the English countryside. And the only possible answer would have been ugh!
My first reception was not worse than I expected. I provoked less enmity and insolence than Scaliger or Bentley in proportion as my merits were less eminent and unbearable than theirs. But my disregard of established opinions and my disrespect for contemporary fashions in scholarship made the ignorant feel sure that I was greatly and presumptuously in error and could be put down without much difficulty; and critiques were accordingly published which I do not suppose that their authors would now wish to rescue from oblivion. Not by paying any attention to any of them, not by swerving an inch from my original principles and practice, but by the mere act of living on and continuing to be the same, I have changed that state of things; and the deaf adder, though I can hardly say that she has unstopped her own ears, has begun to stifle her for fear that they should reach the ears of posterity. Perhaps there will be no more posterity for learning; but the reader whose good opinion I desire and have done my utmost to secure is the next Bentley or Scaliger who may chance to occupy himself with Manilius.
Housman's commentary on Manilius, book one (part one)
Housman's commentary on Manilius, book one (part two)
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.