The Comedian Vatronius

Extract

All that we know of this writer comes from an item in the collection of pseudoPlacidus, who, like Nonius Marcellus, collected scholia from MSS. of Republican authors, and with laudable accuracy recorded the exact phrase used by the author as well as the scholium which explains the phrase. The great Latin Thesaurus (cf. Journ. Phil. XXXIV. 258) now makes a practice of distinguishing these valuable items (by the label ‘ps.-Plac.’) from the worthless Placidus items (labelled ‘Plac.’). A phrase labelled ‘ps.-Plac’ in the Thesaurus may, as a rule, be accepted as the ipsa uevba of a Republican writer; and the next editor of fragments of Republican Dramatists, etc., must bear this in mind. The Oxyrhynchus Papyri enable us to see the kind of MSS., provided with a very few short (or long) marginal scholia, from which pseudo-Placidus (I wish we knew his real name) made his apparently haphazard collection, a collection of which only a part, possibly a very small part, has survived.