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OF THE

AMERICAN PHILOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION

1926

I.-A Defense of the Nine-Book Tradition of Pliny's Letters

SELATIE EDGAR STOUT

INDIANA UNIVERSITY

Keil in his editio maior of Pliny's Letters (1870) relied with most confidence on the readings of the nine-book family of manuscripts (M and V). He thought the ten-book family (manuscripts B and F) interpolated; in illis continuo studio vetus scriptura immutata (Praefatio, p. xxviii). The eightbook family (D) he used chiefly as a check on the other two, without much reliance on its unsupported testimony.

In 1886 August Otto 1 attacked Keil's estimate of the manuscripts. "Dem gegenüber behaupte ich, das gerade der Mediceus [M] durchweg interpolirt ist . . . von einem gelehrtem Manne, einem Grammatiker, der mit Absicht und planmässig die Diktion seines Autors änderte und glättete und mit besonderer Vorliebe synonyme Wörter mit einander vertauschte (p. 289).” Müller (1903), Kukula (1908, ed. II, 1912), and Merrill (1922) have published critical editions of the Letters since the publication of Otto's article. They have all in gradually increasing degree accepted his conclusions as to the relative trustworthiness of the manuscripts, but they have nowhere offered any proof for this evaluation, so fundamental in justifying the change of more than three hundred readings of Keil in the texts which they offer in their editions. They have been content merely to refer to Otto's article in support of this fundamental assumption.

1 Hermes, XXI (1886), 287–306.

Since these editors have accepted the case against MV (and D) as proven by Otto and have presented no evidence in support of it, I am compelled at this late date, so long after the publication of Otto's article, to devote my attention chiefly to it in defending the MVD tradition and its important and excellent family MV. His article seems to me unsound in method, injudicial in attitude, and mistaken in results. I can account for the acceptance of his conclusions by these excellent scholars only on the assumption that they have been misled by the plausible character of his general statements and have not taken the pains to examine in the context the imposing array of proof texts which he offers, to see whether the texts one by one support his contention.

Otto's charges are definite: M (by which he means an ancestor of the MV family, and his followers so accept him) has been interpolated throughout by a learned man, a grammarian, who with definite purpose and plan changed and smoothed the text of his author, and had an especial fondness for interchanging synonyms. We are therefore entitled to ask of every example with which he supports his contention "Is this the kind of alteration that we should expect to be made by a learned grammarian who, with the correct text before him, had set about revising the text of the Letters?" When this test is applied to his examples one by one, we soon find that the relation between the proposition and the proof texts was in large part lost sight of when the latter were gathered.

In one respect Otto's method of approach to this problem is certainly correct: he seeks to prove his case by examples in which all agree that the reading of MV is incorrect. So long as a reading is in dispute among editors and critics, it is not available as a proof of corruption in any family.

He cites 101 misreadings of M, and adds (p. 291): "Ich denke, die angeführten Stellen werden in ihrer erdrückenden Zahl hinreichend erkennen lassen, dass die Vorlage, aus welcher M stammt, von einem lateinkundigen Manne durchgearbeitet war, der was ihm etwa ungewöhnlich oder nicht recht verständ

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