Adnotativncvla Plavtina

Extract

To discuss Professor Lindsay's doctrine of ‘Breves Breviantes’ would involve writing a long article, for which there is no space in the April number of the Class. Quart. But it would be wrong in me to pass his treatment of Plaut. Bacch. 1106 by without comment. What he calls ‘a sane view of the law of B.B.’ (Class. Quart, for January, p. 50) involves the emendation of a number of lines which are in other respects quite above suspicion. In these circumstances would it not be the wiser course to reconsider the supposed ‘sane law’ rather than to attempt to alter the text so as to make it fit a law which is not admitted by some of the most eminent of modern critics (e.g. Seyffert and Skutsch)? Emendation is particularly unfortunate in this instance, because the metre is anapaestic, and the suggestion of Professor Lindsay that the word Philoxene may be ‘a gloss to indicate the speaker or a misinterpretation of some marginal indication of a speaker’ is surely ill-considered; for the speaker is Nicobulus, and the speakers of adjacent lines are given correctly, so far as I see, in the MSS. Such a gloss would, then, be meaningless. Professor Lindsay's attempt at emendation of this line is, in fact, striking evidence of the bankruptcy of the ‘sane view‘ of iambic shortening to which he has unfortunately committed himself.