Omission of small word not necessary to sentence
A common case of omission in MSS. of Latin authors is the omission of small, unimportant words,
pronouns, particles, and the like, which are not necessary for the apprehension of the sense of the
sentence. This plays a great part in the MSS. of Plautus; for this author delights in the otiose use of
personal pronouns (
ego, tu etc.) or particles (
vero, nam
etc.), which a scribe who copied clause by clause and not word by word was very prone to omit. In
Bacch. 134, for instance, “
ibidem égo meam operam pérdidi, ubi tú tuam”,
the
ego is retained by
B, but was dropped in the
original of
CD. That
B is right we see from the quotation of this line by Charisius, who quotes it with
ego; but the absence of the pronoun leaves no trace on the sense or metre of the line; and there were probably
several lines with this error in
P, which afford us no possibility of detecting the omission. A large
number of cases of hiatus have been removed by Ritschl from the text by the insertion of small words
of this kind into the lines as they are presented in our minuscule MSS.
Bacch. 1170 may serve as example.
The reading of all our minuscule MSS. is “
senex óptime quantumst ín terra, sine hoc exorare ábs te”,
leaving the metre (anapaestic) defective. Ritschl restored the metre by inserting
me after
sine:
“
sine me hóc exorare ábs te”. The liability of small words such
as pronouns and prepositions to be omitted, through the practice of joining them in writing with longer
neighbouring words, has been already mentioned in
ch. i. § 4: so that editors are justified in resorting to
the insertion of words of this kind to remove a hiatus or to supplement the defective number of syllables in a line.
