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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 February 2009
If all the passages of Thucydides in which transposition of words has been plausibly suggested were added up, the total would be by no means insignificant. But careful consideration has convinced me that transposition is required in a far larger number of cases than anyone, so far as I know, has yet thought, and that the transposition is not seldom of a rather surprising kind. Very often it is not a question merely of making a few words which adjoin one another exchange places. A word, two or three words, a clause, a whole sentence has to be moved, sometimes to the line preceding or following, sometimes three or four lines away, occasionally six, eight, or even ten. This is, I am convinced, the true solution of many notorious difficulties in the text of Thucydides. One or two cases of this had struck me years ago. I noted them and thought little of it. But more recently I observed, or thought I observed, quite a number of such cases in Books 4 and 5, and minute study of the other books seems to show that the same thing is true of them also.
1 Just such another error may be found at the This is obviously the last word before he begins end of ch. 8, Book 10 of the Nicomachean Ethics. in ch. 9 a sort of transition to the Politics. Yet Aristotle there winds up the account of his moral some unskilful hand has inserted after § 12 ten theory with the characteristic remark that it lines that go back to an earlier subject, not the must all be tested by facts and, if found at last discussed, and quite mar the force and finality variance with them, be regarded as a theory only. of § 12.