Ausoniana

Extract

1. talis Atlantiaco quondam ballaena profundo
cum uento motuue suo telluris ad oras
pellitur.

Mosella 144–6

In his exceptionally flattering notice of The classical text (C.P. 71 (1976) 185–7) Professor Shackleton Bailey questions my approbation of what might be called Madvig's Principle: that the transmitted text must be demonstrably faulty before a critic ventures to emend it. His reservations are just; and this passage of the Mosella neatly exemplifies the point on which he puts his finger. I see no way of proving that Ausonius did not write what the manuscripts offer; yet I think it more than probable that ‘uento’ is a corruption due to the adjacent ablatives and that the original reading was the more exquisite and euphonious ‘uenti’. If so, we have a pleasingly recherché, though hardly obscure or difficult, instance of the ἀπὸ κοινοῦ construction: a hybrid, it would seem, of the two kinds discussed by Housman at Manil. 4. 726, that in which ‘substantiuum ad duo adiectiua pertinens secundo demum adiungitur’ and the slightly commoner sort in which ‘duorum genetiuorum medium nomen ponitur’. This is one of those cases in which one cannot possibly be sure that one is not, as even Heinsius was apt to do, offering to improve the author rather than his copyists, but–utrum in alterum abiturum? (There is, after all, something to be said on occasion for rules of thumb.)