Astronomicon

But even this idolatry was not abject enough for Vollmer, who in Berl. Phil. Woch. 1900 pp. 1292-4 might be seen defending interpolations and corruptions abandoned by Bechert himself.

In 1903, on pp. xxvi-xxviii of my first volume, I demonstrated the truth which Jacob had in vain asserted, and showed that G is a much interpolated MS, manuscript inferior in sincerity to L and still more to M. This is now denied by nobody and only ignored by the ignorant. The revolution was immediate and complete, and the revulsion excessive. In 1904, Berl. Phil. Woch. p. 104, Vollmer rose from his knees, renounced his faith, and stamped upon the altar; Latin quote: "for that which was too much feared beforehand is now greedily trampled underfoot." The slaves of words, for whom interpolation is a name of superstitious terror, set to and disparaged G as hard as they could; and incompetent critics, conscious of their own inability to extract truth from interpolated MSS, began to insist that it should be used as little as possible. M and L were now to be the sole authorities; where they agreed, that gave the tradition; where G in contradiction gave the truth, that was conjectural emendation; and 'if Housman had an inkling of the history of the manuscript tradition' he would have come to the same conclusion.

If so, my sad deficiency is a blessing in disguise. Unable to soar in the void, I creep upon the earth; and there I make the acquaintance of stony facts. They teach me, and in this preface I will teach the teachable, that G is not merely an independent witness to the text of a but much more than that. For the moment however I am considering it in this aspect only, as one of a's three representatives.

The revolution of which I was the guilty author attained its culmination in a boastful article Mr Thielscher made the impression which he desired and had no cause to be dissatisfied with his reception. "It was the merit of Paul Thielscher to have brought light into the chaos of the Manilian tradition," said Mr M. Schuster in Burs. Jahresb. vol. 212 p. 89. Mr Schuster could not be expected to know the facts, but an editor of Manilius showed equal ignorance: van Wageningen p. iii "from those things which Paulus Thielscher argued about the recension of the Manilian books, it sufficiently appears that all those books... flowed from one and the same exemplar" etc. The obvious truth that the MSS manuscripts of Manilius, as of most authors, are descended from an archetype was demonstrated by Jacob in 1846 and at greater length by Bechert in 1878. That they form two families was demonstrated by Bechert at the same time. The chief novelties in Mr Thielscher's article were the errors which I am about to refute. 'de librorum Manilianorum