Astronomicon

recensione review/edition published by Mr Paul Thielscher in Philol. LXVI (1907) pp. 106–125, where he undertook to support by theory what Vollmer had recommended in practice. He contended that G was a copy of L as corrected by L². On p. xxv of my first volume I had tacitly and incidentally refuted this theory before ever it was propounded; but it was nevertheless embraced in 1915 by van Wageningen in the preface to his recension: in the preface only, for in his recension itself he treated G throughout as an independent authority and sometimes allowed it too much weight. To prove his contention Mr Thielscher on pp. 123–5 selected 75 examples. They are simply examples compatible—though one at least, iv 414, is not compatible—with his hypothesis; and he might easily have cited 750 or 7500. Every one of them is equally consonant with the true hypothesis, that G and L are derived from a common source; and most of them, being cases of simple agreement, are equally consonant with a third hypothesis, that L is derived from G. If L, as Mr Thielscher supposes, is older than G, and this hypothesis therefore impossible, that only makes the futility of such argument more obvious. That L’s corrections are not all of them older than G he himself admitsAbout albanas iv 659 he is of two minds: on p. 110 it "passed into the Gemblacensis," on p. 116 it is "later than the Gemblacensis."; some of them are in fact much later; and one of these he has had the ill luck to include among his proofs of G’s derivation from L. It is at i 684, where L has positos with a added above, and G positas: the superscript a is in the hand of which I speak on p. 100, a hand of the 13th century or later; so that if, as Mr Thielscher will have it, one is derived from the other, G must be the source. This mischance may perhaps bring home to him the truth, which should have been self-evident, that simple agreement between two MSS manuscripts is no proof that either is derived from the other; and most of his examples are of this kind,—places where G and L² have the same reading, as iii 2 saltos LM, saltus GL², or where G and L have the same reading, as i 520 puncto L²M, ponto GL. Another such, iv 422 ponti L²M, christi GL, is paraded by van WageningenVan Wageningen on the same page makes the false and calumnious statement, repeated by Mr Bickel Rhein. Mus. 1926 p. 333, that Traube, like Mr Thielscher, held G to be an apograph of L. Traube was guilty of no such impertinence: he knew that this was a question not for him but for scholars conversant with Manilius. What he said, Philol. 1907 p. 122, was what a palaeographer could say without immodesty: that L seemed to him, so far as he could judge from photographs, rather older than G. p. vi, who calls it, heaven knows why, "the most serious of all"; and Mr M. Schuster in Bursian’s Jahresbericht vol. 212 p. 90 unreservedly agrees with him and says "this one example may suffice." The argument is that