364 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences , Arts and Letters. 
tent to take here and there a line. Everything that could be of service 
has been utilized and the remarkable thing is that he was not tempted to. 
use the same line twice. Indeed he seems to have checked off each line 
as fast as used and never to have repeated it without considerable varia¬ 
tion. Nor has he taken the verses in their original order but we find 
brought together in the same speech verses not only of different speakers 
but taken from very different portions of the same play. Thus of the 
prologue of the Medea verses 20-39 (excepting only 23, 24 and 
29) have been used by the writer of the XpidroS nddx a)v as follows: 
V. 20 -= 4 of the Xp. IT.; 21 sq. = 51 sq.; 25 sq. = 46 sq.; 27 sq. — 912 sq.; 
30 = 974; 31 sq. = 945sq.; 33 = 949;34 —36 = 53 —55; 37 = 489; 38 = 485; 
39 = 491. From this it is plain that he was so thoroughly master of these 
sixteen verses that he has interspersed them in one thousand lines of his 
drama. 
Inasmuch as we have here excerpts from plays of Euripides pre¬ 
served in some cases in a single manuscript and in others in only two, it 
would seem probable at first consideration that this cento would be of 
great value in determining the text of Euripides. This question was 
early investigated, soon after the appearance of Kirchhoff’s critical 
edition of Euripides, by A. Doering. 1 Kirchhoff had previously pointed 
out the fact that the MS. of Euripides used by the author of this cento 
contained without doubt the portion of the Bacchse after v. 1328, which 
our present MS. lacks, and hence was derived from an archetype which 
contained the whole of that play. 2 But Doering, after citing all those 
passages in which the Xp. IT. had preserved, as he judged, the real read¬ 
ing of Euripides, reached the conclusion that the MS. used by the 
author of the Xp. II. was inferior to the MSS. of Class I but superior to 
those of Class II of the Euripidean MSS. It is my intention in this pa¬ 
per to investigate the problem more thoroughly and to set forth clearly 
both sides of the shield, inasmuch as there was a feeling that but one 
side had been clearly shown in the articles of Doering in Philologus. 
And that the paper may not be too colossal in its magnitude, it has been 
decided to limit the present investigation to one play of Euripides, the 
Bacchse, preserved in only two MSS., a Palatinus 287 of the 14th century 
(designated by the letter P.) and a Florentinus XXXII (known by the 
designation C.) also of the 14th century which, however, contains but the 
first half of the play, lacking all from verse 756 on to the end (1392). As 
the writer of the Xp. II. has taken from the 1392 lines of the Bacchse (the 
extracts from those portions now lost in our MSS. do not come here into 
consideration) over 250 lines for his cento, over half of which are from 
1 Die Bedeutung des Tragcedie Xp. II. fur die Textkritik des Rhesus* 
Philologus 23 (1866), pp. 577-591, and Die Bedeutung der Tragoedie Xp. II. 
ftir die Euripidestextkritik, Philologus 25 (1868), pp. 221-258. 
2 Ein Supplement zu Euripides’ Bakchen, Philologus 8 (1853), pp. 78-93. 
