Substitution of a gloss for the word it explains
We have seen in the last chapter that a gloss, or explanatory word, written in the original MS. over a
difficult word, has often in the copy been inserted in the text. In many cases it has been substituted for
the word which it was designed to explain (cf.
p. 54).
Thus in Virgil
“rara per ignaros errent animalia montis,
”
the
ignotos, which is in some MSS. substituted for
ignaros, seems to be nothing but an explanation of
the unusual passive sense of
ignaros, and its appearance
in the text is due to the error of some copyist, who found in his original:
“
rara per ignarosignotos errent animalia montis,”
and who wrongly imagined that the purpose with
which
ignotos had been written above
ignaros was to
correct a mistake and not to explain a difficult term.
The suprascript gloss was often preceded by the contraction
i. or
id with cross-stroke through d, standing for
id est. In
Capt. 832, a line quoted by Nonius as an instance
of the adverb
assulatim, “in splinters,” from
assula, “a splinter”:
“
príusquam pultando ássulatim fóribus exitium ádfero,”
we find
assulatim replaced in the minuscule MSS. by the
two words
vel assultatim. This may have been a suprascript
gloss, but was more probably a suprascript variant reading.
For a variant or emendation was usually preceded by
vel,
written
vl with cross-stroke through l (often mistaken for
ut), or l with cross-stroke (so here in
B), or else by
al.,
standing for
alter or
aliter or
alius codex.1 In
Asin. 670 this
sign
al. is miscopied
ADOL(escens) in
D.
The practice of writing interlinear and marginal glosses was a very old one; and the substitution of the explanation
for the explained word is often of very early date. In the
description of the greedy guests in
Mil. 762 P has:
“
séd procellunt se ét procumbunt dímidiati dum áppetunt,”
a line which scans perfectly, and has nothing about it to excite suspicion, were it not that it recurs fifteen lines below,
having been rewritten, probably in the bottom margin of the page in the proto-archetype (see above, p. 35), in this form:
“
sed procumbunt in mensam dimidiati petunt,”
perhaps originally
sed procumbunt sed in mensam dum
dimidiati petunt (or
dimidiati dum appetunt). Now in the
dictionary of Festus we find the old word
procellunt explained
by
procumbunt, though in another passage of the
same dictionary this line is quoted as
sed procumbunt in
mensam. This makes one suspect that the line as written by Plautus was:
“
séd procellunt séd2 in mensam dímidiati dum áppetunt,”
and that
procumbunt is a gloss on
procellunt se in mensam,
which at an early period found its way into the text.
In early dictionaries, or “glossaries,”
3 as they are called,
the stock interpretation of O. Lat.
oro tecum is
rogo te.
This gloss has ousted the Plautine word in
A in
Most. 682,
where
P begins the line rightly with
bonum aequomque oras,
but
A destroys the metre with
bonum aequomque rogas. The
same gloss appears in
P in
Pers. 321, a line which in
A
ends with
quod mecum dudum orasti, but in
P with
quod me
dudum rogasti. 
