ON THE EIGHT LINES USUALLY PREFIXED TO 

 HORAT. SERM. I. 10/ 



By WILFRED P. MUSXAKD. 



The eight lines usually prefixed to Horace, Satires, 

 I. 10 are found only in some of the mss. of Keller and 

 Holder's third class. They are unknown to the mss. of 

 classes I and II, and to z and the whole E- family of 

 class III. They were apparently unknown to the Scholiasts, 

 who would surely have considered them obscure enough 

 to require some explanation. Mavortius did not know 

 them. In F/' and some other mss. they appear as the be- 

 ginning of satire 10, while in {i;mp they form a continua- 

 tion of satire 9. 



On this external evidence almost all the editors have 

 condemned the lines as an interpolation, and either 

 marked them off by brackets or omitted them altogether.* 

 They appear as part of the text in Zarotto's Milan edition, 

 in the first and second Aldine editions, and in the Paris 

 edition by R. Stephanus. But even in the fifteenth cen- 

 tury Landino rejected them, and most of the older editors 

 followed his example. Some editors have separated them 

 from the text but prefixed them to the satire, others have 

 printed them separately in their commentaries, while 

 many have omitted them altogether. Thus they do not 

 appear in ten of the Venice editions (for the omission in 

 the first eight Landino was responsible ), in Bentley's, Wake- 

 field's and some twenty others. Lambin ascribes them to 

 some ' semidoctus nebulo ' who wished to explain the open- 



'This paper offers no now theory as to the moaning, authorship or date of 

 these obscuro lines. It is merely an attempt to collect and arranse the various 

 opinions that have been expressed with regard to them. 



-I owe the greater part of the facts presented in this andtlie following para- 

 graph to Kirclmer's edition of the first book of the Satires (Leipzig, 1854), p. 142. 



