Surviving Works, Vol. II

I was not even able to add the accents, as is customary, to indicate the places where the numbers are corrupt. Regarding the Plautine passage that is read in Sat. III, 16, 2, I recently consulted F. Ritschelius, and I cannot but set down here what he shared with me out of his extraordinary kindness.

The distinguished man says that those verses of Baccaria (that is how the name of the play should be written) are commonly held to be Saturnian, and that verses of that kind can be reconstructed roughly as follows:

Who is the mortal ever affected by such fortune
As I am now, whose pomp of belly is carried here?
Or this one, who as a sturgeon lay hidden for me in the sea before,
I shall return his side to the hiding place of [my] teeth and jaws.

But since it was entirely unlikely that Plautus had composed Saturnian verses, and there was no need for a violent, but rather a slight, change to create optimal iambic septeneters—a meter which it is agreed that poet used most frequently—it seems these verses should rather be written thus:

Who is the mortal ever affected by such good fortune
As I am now, whose [bountiful] pomp of belly is carried here?
Or this one, who for me in the sea — the sturgeon lay hidden before,
I shall return his side into its hiding place with my teeth and jaws.

Bona fortuna [good fortune] is read similarly in the Aulularia (I, 3, 22.), in Cicero (in Verr. IV, 3, 7.), and often in inscriptions. F. B. Vel (v. 3.) is the same as velut [just as], and it is read vel hic [or this] so also elsewhere, as in Menaech. V, 2, 119. In the last verse, the word order: Eius in latebras reddam latus is less to be approved. From the word manibus [hands], which was falsely read in Macrobius, maxillis [jaws] is too remote; it can hardly be attributed to that age to use mandibulis [mandibles], but even malis [jaws] could easily have been changed into that word; dentibus [teeth] with the last syllable lengthened is not to be criticized in Plautus.

The subjects treated in the books of the Saturnalia demanded a fuller commentary; yet I maintained the plan I had proposed for myself. I interpreted—mostly through the words of ancient writers, as much as my meager resources allowed—what Macrobius wrote, rather than anxiously seeking whether what he taught was true. If I had wanted to do that everywhere, I would hardly have found an end, especially in mythological matters and in the interpretations of Virgil's words; but I did not deliberately omit things of that kind which had been debated by others in other places ⁶).

⁶) To Sat. V, 18, 2 sqq, you should add what R. Klotzius very recently observed (Neue Jahrb. f. Phil.