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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2013
As is well known, the first edition of Lucan's De bello civili that offered a critical apparatus in the modern sense of the word was Carl Hosius' edition, first published in 1892, then revised and reprinted twice, the last time in 1913. It is the editions of Hosius and Bourgery-Ponchont that give us the fullest information about MSS readings. The most important edition of Lucan in this century, that published by Housman in 1926, contains, on the other hand, only a selection of readings taken over from Hosius. In his preface as well as in his apparatus Housman is eager on any occasion to demonstrate the unreliability of the codex Montepessulanus, M, the favourite of his predecessor Hosius, and a scholar who has recently re-examined an essential part of the tradition of Lucan says about him: ‘The slighting of M and the MSS in general was Housman's peculiar contribution to the study of the transmission of Lucan's text. Rather than attempt to understand the nature of the evidence, he preferred to ignore it. It would be relevant to ask an editor with such an attitude why he bothers to provide an apparatus criticus.’ These hard words come from Harold C. Gotoff, who in 1971 published the monograph The transmission of the text of Lucan in the ninth century. Gotoff's book will certainly give valuable help to a future editor of Lucan as far as the composition of the critical apparatus is concerned, but not at all, I think, to the same degree when it comes to the constitution of the text. This may perhaps sound somewhat peculiar, but I will try to make clear what I mean.
1. Apart from this edition I will refer on the following pages to the editions of Oudendorp 1728, Burman 1740, Francken 1896–7, Heitland (in the Corpus Poetarum Latinorum II) 1920Google Scholar, Housman 1926, Duff 1928 and later, Bourgery–Ponchont 3. ed. 1962–3 (which I call Bourgery), Ehlers 1973. Other works frequently referred to are: the review of Housman's edition published by Fraenkel, E. in Gnomon 2 (1926) 497–532Google Scholar (and reprinted in Fraenkel, 's Kleine Beiträge zur klassischen Philohgie II 267ff.Google Scholar); Ollfors, A., Studien zum Aufbau des Hexameters Lucans, and Textkritische und interpretatorische Beiträge zu Lucan 1967Google Scholar (these two books form together a thesis, and I refer to them as I and II respectively).
2. I am not talking now about the presumably very rare cases where we may have to reckon with variants added by the author himself.
3. It may seem superfluous to instance peruro in the sense ‘consume’, but cf. 5.27–8 Tarpeia sede perusta / Gallorum facibus.
4. As not seldom, Lucan's words remind one of the declamations of the schools, where these three ways of committing suicide are often mentioned together, e.g. [Quint.] decl. mai. 214.26 (Lehnert's edition) subtraham (sc. tibi) omne ferrum, incidam quoscumque strinxeris nexus, ab omni revocabo praecipitio. Besides, I think it has not been observed that 108 is probably the model for Stat. Theb. 9.840 abit solo post haec evicta pudore, where solo pudore is a bit odd (so that I once imagined that the verse was corrupt); Statius has not quite managed to fit the borrowed words into their new surroundings.
5. Håkanson, L., Silius Italicus, kritische und exegetische Bemerkungen (1976) 18Google Scholar.
6. Cf. the literature referred to in: Håkanson, L., Statius' Silvae, critical and exegetical remarks (1969) 68n.Google Scholar, and id.Silius Italicus (cf. n.5) 36.
7. This tendency of Lucan must be kept in mind in dealing with supposed interpolations and, not least, supposed ‘Doppelfassungen’, which play no unimportant part, for instance, in Ehlers' recent edition. I think we must be very cautious in such cases, because the objection against a suspect verse (or verses) that the thought or motif in question has already been expressed by the poet, seems to be almost irrelevant. Let us look, for instance, at 1.530 fulgura fallaci micuerunt crebra sereno; three verses later we read emicuit caelo tacitum sine nubibus ullis / fulmen, which is the same thing. 3.567 reads as follows: iam non excussis torquentur tela lacertis, and in the next verse the same thought is varied thus: nec longinqua cadunt iaculato vulnera ferro. At 3.580 we learn that irrita tela suas peragunt in gurgite caedes, but the poet immediately goes on to tell us the same thing once more: et quodcumque cadit frustrato pondere ferrum / exceptum mediis invenit vulnus in undis. Cases like these could easily be multiplied.
8. I do not know if we should lay any stress at all on the formal similarity of 6.520 nocturnaque fulmina captat.
9. Dilke's edition of book VII appeared in 1960.
10. Studien zur Textgeschichte und Textkritik, hrsgg. Dahlmann, von H., Merkelbach, R. (= Jachmann, Festschrift G.) (1959) 34CrossRefGoogle Scholar, in a discussion of Luc. 7.387–8.
11. It is true that Lucan only very seldom elides a long syllable in the fourth arsis (cf. Trampe, E., De Lucani arte metrica 16Google Scholar), but the two other instances (3.662 and 735) are metrically identical with this case, a disyllabic word being followed by – – – U.