SYLVA CRITICA CANADENSIUM. 91 



hiigel, assign to Marcus those words which follow delector. Thus they 

 read: "Marcus. Sed credo, Quinte, ut c. s., sic etiam s. m. recte 

 reqiiiri." Either of these readings fails to account for the presence 

 of several letters in the MSS. The following reading appears to me 

 to be free from objection on this score: delector; sed recte, credo, 

 requiro .... modum. M. Becte requiris. With regard to the 

 emendation here proposed, it is necessary to remark that recte credo 

 would degenerate into recedo through one of the most frequent 

 sources of corruption in MSS., viz., the confusion of the letters t and 

 c ; it would be superfluous to adduce examples of this well known 

 fact. Another step in this progress of error would be the omission, 

 almost regular in MSS., of recurrent letters, which would account for 

 the disappeai-ance of ct and e; and, finally, the letter r being indicated, 

 rather than written, by a dash, woiild readily escape notice. Thus 

 the word j^rogressa, which immediately follows, is said to be given as 

 pcessa or processa in the best MSS. 



11. Ihid., IT. XXV. 63. Here Yahlen gives the reading of the best 

 MSS. as " JVam et Athenis iam illo mores a Cecro2)e,'ut aiunt, per- 

 mansit hoc ius terra humandi." He proposes nam et Athenis, (nosfis) 

 iam illos mores, &c. The reading given in the text of Nobbe, Klotz, 

 and Halm — nam et Athenis ille mos a Gecrope, &c. — is said to be 

 found as an interlinear correction of the MSS. Halm, however, in a 

 foot note, speaks of the passage as a locus nondum sanatus. A state- 

 ment which Madvig makes in his Adversaria (Yol. I., p. 40), that 

 the words mores and maiores are occasionally interchanged in MSS., 

 suggested what I conjecture to have been the original reading, 

 namely : Ram et A thenis iam illo a Gecrope, maiores ut aiunt, ckc. 

 " For at Athens too, even from the time of the famous Cecrops, as the 

 ancients say, &c." The confusion of maiores with mores would lead 

 naturally to this transposition of the words. The age of Cecrops 

 would appear to have passed into a proverbial expression for the 

 remotest antiquity, the words ut aiunt being regularly used in quot- 

 ing a proverb. 



12. Yirgil, Georgics, B. III., v. 348. 



"Omnia secum 

 Armentarius Afer agit, tectumque Laremque 

 Armaque AmyclfBumque canem Cressamque plxaretram : 

 Non secus ac patriis acer Romanus in armis 

 Injusto sub fasce viam quum carpit, et hosti 

 Ante expectatum positis stat in agmine castris, " 



