Valerius Maximus: Memorable Deeds and Sayings

They took great care—a practice that occurred very rarely—not to add words above the lines or to delete them by drawing small lines underneath, which would change the text. Instead, they generally erased several words or entire lines and inserted a new reading, spacing or compressing the letters so that the blank space was fully filled by the new reading. Kempf (p. 79, n. 1) already provided a very clear example of this from 2, 10, 8, where four lines of Martialis Martial, with the poet's own name added, had been crammed into the archetype. When the Bernese corrector realized they were spurious but did not wish to simply strike them out, he rewrote nine lines with letters that were quite spread out and extended. This is why entire lines or several words often appear erased in the codex, where it becomes clear from the testimony of other codices that the correcting hand added or removed nothing but individual letters to a word. In such places, when it was necessary to fill the original space by spreading out the letters, I indicated in the critical notes, for the sake of brevity, that the words in question were written over a larger erasure. Although it is deeply regrettable that we often do not know what the first hand’s writing was in the Bernese manuscript, it has remained untouched by more recent interpolations, which tend to be the worst. Apart from the hands of the three later scribes that we just discussed, a more recent hand is almost nowhere to be found in the codex, with the exception of one place—and a notable one at that—where Kempf himself failed to notice a reading that is completely different from the rest. For in the final example, which is read at 1, 1, Ext. 4 before the large lacuna that all Valerii libri books of Valerius possess, it is commonly published thus:

For having excepted in the strait from its own citizens who were practicing piracy a golden goblet of great weight, which the Romans had dedicated to Pythian Apollo in the name of tithes, after the people had been stirred up to divide it, as (Timasitheus, prince of the Liparitans) discovered, he took care that it be carried to Delphi.

The final sentence in the codices used by Pighius appears much fuller: as he discovered [it had been] snatched from the hands of the plunderers by the Romans and dedicated to Pythian Apollo in the name of tithes, he took care that it be carried to Delphi.