Omission of a line or passage
The omission of a word like malus or magis in the examples male <malus>, <magis> magis, may have been intentional. It was unintentional if the eye of the writer passed at the moment of writing from the one group of letters to the other similar or identical group. But it was intentional if the writer regarded male malus as a miswriting, left uncorrected in the original (see ch. iv. § 3), and magis magis as an error of dittography (ch. iv. § 4). About the omission of a line or passage there is seldom this doubt. In the great majority of cases it is due to two lines having had the same ending, so that the eye of the copyist, as he was finishing the one line, wandered to the ending of the other. In the Miles Gloriosus v. 554 ends with the words quod viderim, and so does v. 556: “fateór. Quid ni fateáre id ego quod víderim?Et ibi ósculantem meum hóspitem cum ista hóspita
vidísti. Vidi: cúr negem quod víderim?
” The consequence is that vv. 555-6 were omitted in P, and would have been lost to us if we had not the testimony of A for this passage. The same thing has happened in a passage of Horace,
where certain MSS. omit v. 50. And it is an error of very common occurrence in MSS. of all authors. St. Jerome, commenting on a passage of the Prophet Jeremiah (xxx. 14): “propter multitudinem iniquitatis tuae, dura facta sunt peccata tua. Quid clamas super contritione tua? insanabilis est dolor tuus; propter multitudinem iniquitatis tuae et propter dura peccata tua feci haec tibi”, explains the omission in the Septuagint of the words from quid clamas to iniquitatis tuae in this way, but supposes the omission to have been intentional (“videlicet quia secundo dicitur “propter multitudinem,” etc., et qui scribebant a principio additum putaverunt”). It is extraordinary how trifling a case of homoeoteleuton may lead to a lengthy omission. For example, the mere occurrence of the syllable que in two similarly-ending lines (v. 507 and v. 509) of the speech of an undutiful son in the Bacchides, “nam jám domum ibo atque áliquid surrupiám patri.“teque dum procedis, io Triumphe!
non semel dicemus, io Triumphe!
civitas omnis dabimusque divis tura benignis,
”
id istí dabo. ego istanc múltis ulciscár modis.
adeo égo illam cogam usque út mendicet méus pater,
” has been enough to occasion the loss of the intervening words in the Ambrosian Palimpsest, which presents the passage in this form: “nam jám domum ibo atque út mendicet méus pater
”, —a line which, curiously enough, is metrically correct, and which, so far as metre is concerned, offers no indication that anything has been lost. The case of mere words or syllables being omitted through homoeoteleuton is almost as common. Manuscripts of Aulus Gellius i. 4. 8 offer enutabatque for enodabat dijudicabatque. And in
, the repetition of the syllable -is has caused the omission of captis in some MSS.
