John Percival Postgate

“ A desultory sequence of ideas, an excessive vagueness and indirectness of expression, a peculiar and abnormal latinity, a constant tendency to exaggeration, and an immoderate indulgence in learned and literary allusions-all these are obstacles lying in the way of a study of Propertius. But those who have the will and the patience to surmount them will find their trouble well repaid. For power and range of imagination, for freshness and vividness of conception, for truth and originality of presentation, few Roman poets can compare with him when he is at his best. ”

“ A reading may be impugned on a number of grounds: that it gives no sense or an inappropriate sense, that it involves a usage or an idiom not current at the assumed time of writing, or foreign to the reputed author, or to the style in which he then was writing, that it involves some metrical or rhythmical anomaly, or that the connexion of thought which it produces is incoherent or disorderly. These charges cannot be played off against each other. It is no answer to the objection that a reading in some Roman poet makes nonsense to say that its Latinity is perfect or its metre excellent. ”

“ Paradoxical as it may seem, the mechanical corruptions of a stupid but faithful copyist may tell us more than the intelligent copyings of a less faithful one.
A nice question is how far any alteration of the text of the exemplar is compatible with fidelity. Is a scribe, who recognizes under a corruption the word certainly intended, to perpetuate the error of the exemplar? Considering the liability of corruption to breed corruption we can hardly blame him if he does not, and we may say that it is no derogation to his fides if he makes self-evident corrections. ”

“ Where the critic has ascertained the earliest form of a reading in his text, he will apply to it the tests of intrinsic probability. No part of a text can be considered exempt from this scrutiny, though for a very large part of it it may be dispensed with. It should, however, be here observed, that whoever takes a reading without investigation, on the authority either of a manuscript or of a great scholar, or of a number of scholars, ceases for the time being to be a textual critic. ”

“ Legitimate doubt arises when the evidence pro et contra of documental and intrinsic probability is equal, or nearly equal, or when documental probability points strongly to one side and intrinsic probability to another. Illegitimate doubt is the uncertainty of the doubter as to whether he has examined the whole of the evidence. ”

“ Many persons appear to suppose that decisions upon doubtful points can be avoided by the expedient of leaving the traditional reading in possession of the text. The rule is a simple one and easy to apply. But owing to the constitution of the human mind it has consequences which possibly they have not contemplated. The great works of classical literature are not studied as pathological specimens, and they will be studied the less the more they contain to repel and disquiet the reader. ”

“ Interpolation.—This is the deliberate alteration of an exemplar by way of substitution, addition or omission, but when it takes the particular form of omission it is naturally very hard to detect. Interpolation then always has a motive. The most frequent motive is the removal of some difficulty in the sense, expression or metre of the text, and especially obvious gaps or corruptions which the interpolator endeavours to fill or to heal. Fraudulent interpolation, whether the fraud be pious or otherwise, does occur, but is comparatively rare. ”

“ But this method of representation is a very imperfect one; we may easily impose on ourselves and others by strained and ambiguous renderings. A more subtle danger to which we are especially liable in the case of a dead language is that of our acquiescing in a sense which satisfies us but which would not have satisfied the ancient writer. Above all we must avoid applying our own standards of taste, style and morality to the judgment of the text before us. The textual critic has no concern with what the writer ought to have thought or said ”

“ It emerges because in all judgments on textual matters it is presupposed that they will be acted on, that a reading accepted will remain in the text, a rejected one obelized, enclosed between brackets or removed, and, in this last case, something else substituted in its place.
The “conservative” critic's chief concern is for the safety of the traditional and by preference the transmitted text. He urges very rightly that if alteration is carried beyond a certain point it cuts away its own foundation, and so all certainty is destroyed. His objective is the minimum of change. ”

“ But the reason why the vast majority of them fail is that the vast majority of them should never have been made at all. Their proposers do not take even elementary precautions to be right. An inquirer who examines the stars with a shilling telescope is not likely to make observations of value, and even a trained astronomer has to allow for his “personal equation”—a point to which even a finished critic rarely attends. Successful emendation requires a rare union of qualifications—insight, prudence, patience and familiarity with the author emended and the conditions of his text. ”

“ Proper names, technical expressions, quotations from foreign languages, and frequent change of subject, are all likely to cause difficulty to a scribe and error in his work.
Careful and continuous regard to the various kinds of errors and defaults that are found in transcription will enable us to judge whether a reading which it is suggested stood in the archetype of our text is likely to have been corrupted to the reading, or readings, which stand in the extant manuscripts or editions. ”

“ It is true that Cynthia, whose health appears to have been Weak, does not seem to have survived the separation long. But a careful study of the seventh poem of the last book, in which Propertius gives an account of a dream of her which he had after her death, leads us to the belief that they were once more reconciled, and that in her last illness Cynthia left to her former lover the duty of carrying out her wishes with regard to the disposal of her effects and the arrangements of her funeral. Almost nothing is known of the subsequent history of the poet. ”

“ But there are two tests of a more objective character that may be used—orthography, and indication of lacunae or other faults in his exemplar. A scribe who preserves in his spelling the traces of a bygone age is probably trustworthy. If faithful in small things, he is likely to be faithful in great. A scribe again who scrupulously records the presence of a lacuna or illegibility in what he is copying, inspires us with confidence in the rest of his work. ”

“ But, for all that, his range is limited; and in power and compass of imagination, in vigour and originality of conception, in richness and variety of poetical treatment, he is much his rival’s inferior. The same differences are perceptible in the way the two poets handle their metre. Tibullus is smoother and more musical, but liable to become monotonous; Propertius, with occasional harshnesses, is more vigorous and varied. It may be added that in many of Tibullus’s poems a symmetrical composition can be traced, although the symmetry must never be forced into a fixed and unelastic scheme. ”

“ There is hardly a page of Ovid which does not show obligations to his poems, while other writers made a more sparing use of his stories.
A just appreciation of the genius and the writings of Propertius is made sensibly more difficult by the condition in which his works have come down to us. Some poems have been lost; others are fragmentary; and many are more or less disfigured by corruption and disarrangement. The manuscripts on which we have to rely are both late and deeply interpolated. Thus the restoration and interpretation of the poems is one of peculiar delicacy and difficulty. ”

“ As regards the use of testimonia, it may be observed to begin with that their value must depend on the trustworthiness of the texts of the writers from whom they are taken, and further upon that of the text used by the translator, the excerptor or the quoter, about which we can know nothing for certain, though we may sometimes make probable inferences. In the case of quotations we must allow for failures of memory.
Many times in the course of his investigations the critic will be confronted with problems which cannot be resolved by considerations of transcriptional or documental probability. ”

“ It is a weakness of conservative critics to extol interpretation (or exegesis) at the expense of emendation. Some have even ventured to say that the successful defence of a passage in a text is a greater service than its successful correction. This is not true. The service to the text is the same, what was previously dark being now made clear. But the emendation deserves the higher praise as being in most instances the more difficult achievement. ”

“ A copy, qua copy, can never be the equal of the exemplar, and it may be much its inferior. This deterioration increases with the number of successive copyings. Let us suppose that from a text which we will call A a copy has been made which we will call B, and from this again a copy which we will call C. If the copyist of B goes wrong once and the copyist of C twice in a hundred times, then, assuming that there is no coincidence or cancelling of errors, the relative correctness of the three texts A, B, C will be 100 (absolute correctness) , 99 and 97.02. ”

“ In the three first cases his judgment will be governed by considerations of intrinsic probability alone: but in the last it must regard transcriptional probability as well. No alteration of a text, or emendation, is entitled to approval, unless in addition to providing the sense and diction required, it also presents a reading which the evidence furnished by the tradition shows might not improbably have been corrupted to what stands in the text. These tests, and these alone, are emendations bound to satisfy; but others are often tacitly imposed upon them. ”

“ But inasmuch as there are many persons, including most makers of school editions, who prudently and modestly desire a better road to truth than their own investigations can discover and think thus to find it, it will not be amiss to observe on the one hand that the concurrence of a succession of editors in a reading is no proof and often no presumption either that their agreement is independent or that their reading is right ”

“ That a text may be improved by the comparison of different MSS. is not a modern discovery. It has long been known, and the knowledge has led to the production of what are known as conflated manuscripts or Misch-codices. These are MSS. produced by “crossing” or “intermixture.” In the following stemma M and N are “mixed” or “conflated” MSS., being formed by the blending of readings from the “pure” or “unmixed” codices A, B and D, E respectively.
Intermixture may take place to any extent, and the more of it there has been the more difficult does it become to trace the transmission of a text. ”

“ If there are a number of instances where there is faultiness which is hard to remove, it is probable that the evil lies too deep for emendation. The author's own carelessness may be to blame, or, as in the case of Virgil and Lucan, he may not have been allowed to put the finishing touches to his work.
Certain lapses from grammatical correctness and metrical regularity that we find in the poems of Shelley are undoubtedly due to the author, though the number of these has been reduced (as Mr Buxton Forman has pointed out) with our improved knowledge of the sources of the text. ”

“ As a source for the text it is superseded by the printed edition, and if there is more than one, then by the latest printed edition, which has been revised in proof by the author, or, in certain cases, by his representative; and the task of the textual critic is restricted to the detection of “misprints,” in other words, of errors which the compositor (the modern analogue to the scribe) has made in “setting up” the manuscript, and which have escaped the notice of the proof-reader and the author or his representative. ”

“ Such doubt is much more frequently felt than acknowledged, and its effect upon critical work is highly injurious. On the one hand, it is apt to take refuge in an uncritical acceptance of the traditional readings, and, on the other hand, to produce a crop of hesitant and mutually destructive conjectures which a reader naturally resents as a needless waste of his time. ”

“ The support which a reading gains from the evidence of the directly transmitted text and from the auxiliary testimonia may be called its documental probability. To restore a text from the documental evidence available we must know and weigh the causes which tend to vitiate this evidence in its various kinds. We shall speak first of those which affect the direct transmission of texts. ”

“ It is probable that we have lost some of the genuine poems of Tibullus. On the other hand, much has come down to us under his name which must certainly be assigned to others. Only the first and second books can claim his authorship. The first book consists of poems written at various times between 30 and 26. About the second book we can only say that in all likelihood it was published before the poet’s death in 19. It is very short, containing only 428 verses, and apparently incomplete. In both books occur poems which give evidence of internal disorder ”

“ Scholars since the Renaissance have not always been above inventing codices to obtain currency for their own conjectures. The codices of Bosius (1535-1580) are just as imaginary as the “old plays” which appear as the source of so many of the quotations that head the chapters of the Waverley novels, and suspicion rests on Barth, Lambinus and others. ”