CHAPTER TWENTY‐SEVEN

The Textual Tradition of Plautus

Rolando Ferri

Plautus and Republican Scholarship

The history of the text of Plautus begins with scripts of which we have no direct knowl-
edge. They were destined only for the use of actors and for circulation among theater
professionals, such as other company directors, as well as perhaps the Roman magistrates
who commissioned the plays when they kept a copy in their archives for the record. In
Plautus’s lifetime, comic performances were not regarded as part of a cherished cultural
heritage: comedies were shows for an indistinct audience of patricians, plebeians, and
slaves, and in third‐ and second‐century Rome there was presumably no market for books
containing comic texts in Latin, and probably not yet even the intellectual background for
accepting them as part of the Roman heritage (Goldberg 2005): the authors themselves,
to judge from the shadowy, elusive outlines in our sources, were not prominent social
personalities, and they may have been disinclined to follow the trail of their texts after
the show.
In fact, the transition from stage script and aide‐mémoire to book involves a process of
considerable abstraction: readers must supply the stage action with their imagination, and
Copyright © 2020. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

there is no narrator providing the main narrative and descriptive frame of the story as in
other literary genres. To all appearances, in the primitive scripts there was no well‐estab-
lished system for aiding the visualization of the stage action, because what we call stage
directions (some ancient sources knew them as παρεπιγραφαί) were limited, so far as we
know, to mostly noises and musical accompaniment. Other crucial descriptive elements,
such as stage movement, gestures, expression, and posture, were only registered by such
paratextual annotations to a very limited extent (Gammacurta 2006, pp. 249–251); and
when commentators and scholia provide information on action and voice delivery, it must
be regarded as at best an informed guess, not knowledge at first‐hand of what went on

A Companion to Plautus, First Edition. Edited by George Fredric Franko and Dorota Dutsch.
© 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Franko, G. F., & Dutsch, D. (Eds.). (2020). A companion to plautus. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated.
Created from otago on 2022-12-12 02:54:31.
 408 Rolando Ferri

(Ferri 2016, pp. 239–259). Of course, there is the possibility that some comic texts were
illustrated from a very early age, but that was an expensive feature, and one that went with
expensive reading copies of late antiquity, such as, for drama, the famous Vat. Lat. 3868
(now online, http://digi.vatlib.it/view/MSS_Vat.lat.3868), a Carolingian copy of a
late‐antique, lavishly illustrated MS of Terence.
It is a fair guess that the transformation from comic scripts to cultural icons and syllabus
authors was driven by an imperial aspiration among some sections of the Roman political
and intellectual elite to produce in the theater a competitor for the great fifth‐century stars
of the Attic canon. Admiration for the language of Plautus as an instance of “pure” Latin
was prominent only from a later date in Roman cultural history, and the appreciation of
comic humor per se was not strong or culturally prestigious enough to make comedy rec-
ommended for school syllabi. What we read today in modern critical editions is descended
not from what Plautus first composed for putting the play on stage, but from the reading
copies put on the market for learned and sophisticated readers of the Imperial age, several
centuries after the first performances of the originals, and at a point when such texts were
almost certainly no longer performed.
There seem to have been, however, reading copies of Plautus circulating at a much
earlier time, still in the late Republican period, when an unknown scholar put together a
first edition of Plautus’s Opera omnia. We don’t know his name or his motives, nor who
commissioned and financed the work, though Cesare Questa (1984a, p. 77) and Sander
Goldberg (2005, pp. 61–62) propose Aelius Stilo. We may reconstruct some of this
unknown scholar’s methodology and work process. For example, we know that he
followed the model of the Alexandrian critics, especially Aristophanes of Byzantium
(c. 257–180  bce), who was most prominent for his work on the comic writers and, to a
lesser extent, the tragic poets. His text of the tragedians was known to have been drawn from
the official copy of the Athenian archives, named after the archon Lycurgus who allegedly
had set up the document (Battezzato 2003). Aristophanes was also praised for a careful
colometry of the lyrical parts and the addition of critical signs, especially the obelus, for
marking suspected parts of the text. The Lycurgan copy, however, was already a version
that included interpolations and modifications by actors and poets, the so‐called διασκευαί
(Barrett 1964, p. 47; Pfeiffer 1968, pp. 189–194; Lehrs 1882, pp. 331–332; Slater 1986).
Recent discussions of the methodology of Alexandrian scholars suggest that these scholars
Copyright © 2020. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

treated stage scripts with some flexibility, possibly drawing on them to cull useful variants
and collate them against the Lycurgan master copy (Prauscello 2006).
On closer analysis, however, the work of the unknown Roman scholar followed unex-
plored paths, and he displayed skills and an initiative that place his output somewhat apart
from the Alexandrian predecessors, although they nevertheless remained an important
reference point for his work. First, the Roman scholar did not have an established tradition
of official copies comparable to the Lycurgan set used by the Alexandrian scholars. Second,
the Greek fifth‐century poets were already canonized in their lifetime, and certainly even
more so by the time Aristophanes edited them. Plautus did not possess the same status,
and the texts contained and transmitted in the scripts were therefore in a state of greater
flux and uncertainty. This is reflected in the state of the Republican edition, which included
in continuous sequence alternate scenes that originally had belonged to conflicting ver-
sions; the editor ostensibly sought out scripts reflecting subsequent performances and

Franko, G. F., & Dutsch, D. (Eds.). (2020). A companion to plautus. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated.
Created from otago on 2022-12-12 02:54:31.
 The Textual Tradition of Plautus 409

included them in a continuous run (see below on Poenulus). This procedure is different
from expunging an interpolation, as the final text is the result of accretion from different
sources, and it betrays either an aesthetic stance more open to variants, or the editor’s
bewilderment and doubts about authenticity. This procedure has a famous parallel in the
composition of the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, the Pentateuch, in which modern
scholarship has recognized the weaving together of four different traditions, often pro-
ducing doublets that were nevertheless included by the ancient editors of the Hebrew
Bible as if parts of a continuous narrative (Friedman 1987, pp. 50–65). Students of
Plautus, since antiquity, have devoted a great deal of attention to separating the authentic
from the interpolated Plautus. A modern scholar, Otto Zwierlein, devoted four important
books to the issue: his main contention is that the great majority of the double versions
present in the comedies go back to the second century bce, one or two generations after
Plautus’s death, when the plays were put on stage by different companies and adapted to
the needs and expertise of different casts of actors (1990–1992). Ancient scholars were of
course aware of the existence of interpolated versions. The fourth‐century grammarian
Charisius (Gramm. p. 266 Barwick), quoting line 545 from Bacchides in his chapter on
adverbs, comments, in quibusdam non feruntur (“these lines are not present in some
manuscripts”), and as it happens the line is part of a sequence (540–551) omitted by the
oldest manuscript, A (on the “revival” text and the conflicting evidence of the two families
of Plautus MSS, see pp. 411–414).
The earliest imitations of Plautus outside a theatrical context appear in Lucilius (c. 130 bce);
in the same period, interest in dramaturgical questions and in the authenticity of some of
Plautus’s plays is revealed by fragments of Accius (Deufert 2002, pp. 44–47). Was Accius also
a driving force behind the Plautus industry? He would have had the resources to deploy assis-
tants seeking out the huge output in the various archives. Also important, however, is recall-
ing that the edition was a collection of rolls, each containing perhaps a single comedy, two at
the most. It may have taken a large space on the shelf, or several boxes, if it included all
comedies ascribed to Plautus, which ran to 130. Another feature of this “edition” was a care-
ful arrangement of the colometry, the metrical structure of the lyric parts. Lyric passages were
highlighted by indenting (eisthesis), which made them stand out on the page against the
spoken parts in trochaics or senarii, and there were several different types of eisthesis to
distinguish different metrical systems (Questa 1984a, pp. 23–24).
Copyright © 2020. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Plautus was not the only author whose works made the transition from actors’ scripts to
library shelves at this period. W.M. Lindsay, in his fundamental study of the sources of
Nonius Marcellus (1901, pp. 7–10) showed conclusively that this lexicographer, living as
late as the fourth century in the town of Thubursicum in Northern Algeria, had access to
volumes of the dramas of Ennius, Pacuvius, and Accius as well as, among the comic writ-
ers, Novius, Afranius, Turpilius, and Pomponius. However, these books must have been
bibliographical rarities, and probably mostly rolls rather than codices, the more recent and
durable format, although even on this there is no general agreement (Gatti 2011, pp.
49–62). Unfortunately, not much is known about the characteristics of these editions,
apart from the fact that they ordered plays alphabetically by title, and that probably meters
and colometries were well understood, perhaps in a way not dissimilar from that described
above for Plautus. Outside the circles of specialists such as Nonius or grammatical writers,
these authors were probably little read and gradually disappeared during the early Empire.

Franko, G. F., & Dutsch, D. (Eds.). (2020). A companion to plautus. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated.
Created from otago on 2022-12-12 02:54:31.
 410 Rolando Ferri

The Second‐Century Edition and the Antiquarian

Revival of Early Latin
The next phase in the history of the transmission of this text is obscure and can only be
guessed at from indirect and circumstantial evidence. In the Augustan period, early Latin
authors gradually fell out of favor, perhaps out of the great change in literary standards
and concomitantly with the great explosion of new talents and great works, such as the
Aeneid, Catullus’s Carmina, the Odes of Horace, and elegiac poetry. The watershed in
Roman literary history occurs at some point between Quintilian, who does not even men-
tion Plautus in his précis of literary authors, singling out only Afranius and Terence for
praise, and Fronto, a couple of generations later. Fronto, an African from Cirta, is the first
to draw extensively from Plautus, whom he greatly loved and admired.
There is evidence that an archaizing trend in the literary taste in the second century
produced new interest and poured new intellectual energies into the Plautus workshops.
Fronto, Apuleius, and Gellius are the main representatives of the new archaizing move-
ment, which led to a revival of interest for Plautus. The questions arise whether such
change went hand in hand with the establishment of a new edition, and what the features
were of books (in roll format) produced in this age. The great German scholar Friedrich
Leo suggested that a new edition had been composed by the scholar Valerius Probus. Our
main source for Probus’s life (Suet. Gramm. et rhet. 24) says that he was from Berytus,
modern day Beirut, then a Latin colony and a focal point for Latin studies for the whole
Greek East even into the sixth century. He was appalled at the state of the copies of early
Roman authors that came into his hands and poured great energy into reviving study of
early poets (Leo 1895, pp. 21–23). However, although a great deal is known about
Probus’s output on other authors, most famously Vergil, there is virtually nothing con-
necting Probus and Plautus, and it is doubted that he produced a new edition by seeking
out the best manuscripts and collating them, or annotating variants and suggesting
expunctions (cf. Zetzel 2018, pp. 70–74).
At least one element seems certain: the innovative feature of the division of plays into
scenes by means of scene titles containing the names and the roles of the speaking parts,
which was not a feature of Greek dramatic scripts. Scene headings were obviously not vis-
Copyright © 2020. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

ible on stage: it was only a way of making the stage action visible in reading copies, and it
is unlikely to have been devised, at least as we have it, by stage directors, because routinely
such scene headings disregard all non‐speaking parts, which are clearly important and
relevant for a director. A passage in Gellius (NA 10.3.19) is, in my view convincingly,
adduced in support of this view (Deufert 2002, pp. 221–223) because Gellius describes
the Roman magistrates’ retinue, the Bruttiani, as acting “in the capacity of those who are
called ‘floggers’ in the plays, lorarii.” Such a word, in fact, is not found anywhere in the
text of an extant Roman play, and is rare in Latin, where it generally means “makers of
hides.” The required meaning occurs basically only in the scene‐headings for those indi-
vidual scenes in which such characters are present and pronounce a line. This suggests that
Gellius was familiar with a text form that had such a paratext, and it was so normal for him
as to become an essential part of the “play” (fabula). Indeed, the first clues that speak of
Roman drama as divided into scenes are at the end of the second or the beginning of the

Franko, G. F., & Dutsch, D. (Eds.). (2020). A companion to plautus. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated.
Created from otago on 2022-12-12 02:54:31.
 The Textual Tradition of Plautus 411

third century, when in Apuleius and Tertullian we encounter the first occurrences of the
word scaena used with the same sense as English “scene,” as “a distinct unit in a longer
dramatic action” (Ferri 2008, pp. 675–681).
With Gellius, we have reached the second half of the second century, a time in which
we can reconstruct the circulation of an edition of Plautus containing only a selection of
21 plays thought to be authentic, in rolls, not codex format, containing division into
scenes (acts seem to have been a topic for scholarly discussion but are not marked in our
earliest manuscripts), sigla for all speaking parts (usually Greek letters, a, b, γ, δ, regardless
of characters’ names), stichometric counts at the end of singles scenes, abbreviations for
marking sung or spoken parts as c(anticvm) and d(i)v(erbivm), and a careful, accurate
presentation of the text highlighting metrical differences by the means of a regular system
of indentation of the lines. Most of these, except the metrical argumenta and, crucially,
scene‐headings, were inherited from the Republican edition.

The Archetype of the Direct Tradition and the

Fifth‐Century Division into Two Branches
There is a wide chronological gap between the second‐century edition, sometimes called
“Hadrianic,” and the emergence of the direct manuscript tradition in the fifth century. In
the meantime, Plautus continued to circulate, but we catch a glimpse of what its text was
like only from lexicographical authors and glossaries, and it is not simple to understand
how these materials crossed paths with the direct tradition. The most important of these
works is Nonius Marcellus’s De compendiosa doctrina, written in Africa at the end of the
fourth century, a vocabulary of early Latin drawing its lemmata from individual authors as
well as specialized glossaries of early Latin. Nonius’s text, when we can compare it with
the direct tradition, yields independent and even better readings, even if he ultimately
depends on the same second‐century edition as our extant manuscripts (Deufert 2002,
pp. 320–329). Our earliest manuscript witness is the Ambrosian palimpsest (A, Milano,
Biblioteca Ambrosiana, formerly G 82 sup. now S.P.9/13‐20, V century). This manu-
script must have come to Milan from the northern Italian monastery of Bobbio, whence
it was removed at some point in the fifteenth century. In 1815, the Italian Angelo Mai,
Copyright © 2020. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

prefect of the Ambrosian Library, recognized traces of an ancient script beneath a sixth
century copy of a Vulgate Book of Kings, which he set out to decipher with the use of
chemical reagents. The chemicals damaged the manuscript very badly, but Mai and later
scholars, most notably Wilhelm Studemund (1889), were able to extract a great deal from
it. In fact, three ancient books had been reused, after washing away their texts: Plautus’s
comedies, Seneca’s tragedies, and a Gothic Bible. The ancient Plautus book comprised, in
89 quires at least, the 21 plays of the selection, including Vidularia (although nothing of
Amphitruo, Asinaria, or Aulularia is extant). A was a conscientious edition with some
scholarly ambitions: it was provided with production notices (extant only for Stichus and
Pseudolus) and division into scenes, and it contained a carefully edited text that tended to
eliminate dittographies (Pasquali 1952, pp. 333–335).
A produced no known descendants in the manuscript tradition of Plautus before a
church scribe washed away its text to make room for Scripture. In France, however,

Franko, G. F., & Dutsch, D. (Eds.). (2020). A companion to plautus. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated.
Created from otago on 2022-12-12 02:54:31.
 412 Rolando Ferri

another late‐antique manuscript of the comedies, Π, was the origin of a second family of
manuscripts, the one to which all remaining witnesses belong. This is called the “Palatine”
(P) family, because two of its most important representatives, B and C (see below) were
once in the library of the Elector Palatine at Heidelberg, ransacked by the Catholic army
in the Thirty Years War and brought to Rome as a gift to the Pope. About two hundred
manuscripts of Plautus altogether have come to us (Tontini 2002b; Tontini 2010), but
almost all of them are Humanist apographs of D, and for the most part nineteenth‐ and
early twentieth‐century editors of Plautus relied only on A and the three oldest manu-
scripts of the Palatine branch.
The crucial representatives of the Palatine group of manuscripts are B (Città del
Vaticano, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Pal. Lat. 1615, http://digi.vatlib.it/view/
MSS_Pal.lat.1615), C (Heidelberg, Universitätsbibliothek, Pal. Lat. 1613, http://digi.
ub.uni‐heidelberg.de/diglit/cpl1613/0126), and D, (Città del Vaticano, Biblioteca
Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. Lat. 3870, http://digi.vatlib.it/view/MSS_Vat.lat.3870, also
known as Ursinianus from the name of an original possessor, Cardinal Fulvio Orsini), all
dating from the tenth or eleventh century and written in German scriptoria. Of these, only
B has the complete text of the 20 plays, including the incipit of the 21st, Vidularia. Both
C and D offer shortened versions of this list, with only 12 plays in C and 16 in D. This
sundering happened because the ancestor of the P‐group was a very long manuscript, and
it must have been dismembered for speedier copying of separate parts, producing descend-
ants with a defective corpus such as C and D.
Sixteenth‐century scholars also had access to another witness related to the Palatine
family and subsequently lost: T, the so‐called codex Turnebi, named for its original discov-
erer, Adrien de Turnèbe, who found and collated it in the Benedictine abbey of Sainte
Colombe de Sens, in Bourgogne. In fact, Codex T is only known imperfectly, from
Turnèbe’s marginalia (transcribed by yet another French scholar, François Duaren, in a
printed Plautus edition in his possession). These extracts confirm that Turnèbe’s manu-
script was related to BCD, with which it shared important corruptions and lacunae.
However, T also preserved correct readings absent in the other manuscripts of the P
group, and of such quality that they cannot have been arrived at by conjecture (Lindsay
1898, pp. 7–8). T therefore was a twin of the parent manuscript of the extant P group.
For example, in the Rudens, 698–699 (illos scelestos … fac ut ulciscare nosque ut hanc tua
Copyright © 2020. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

pace aram opsidere / patiare: elautae ambae sumus opera Neptuni noctu, “avenge us on
those criminals … and allow us to sit at your altar with your permission. We were both
washed clean by Neptune’s doing last night”), a prayer to Venus pronounced by the main
female character, Palaestra, all P‐manuscripts, as well as T, had lost the initial words in the
lines. B, the best representative of P, leaves a blank at the beginning of each line to show
that the exemplar was defective, that is it had lost the left side of a page, or the ink had
been damaged by either water or something else. On the other hand, T preserves a diffi-
cult word at Poenulus 977: facies quidem edepol Punica est. gugga est homo (“He looks
Carthaginian enough, truly. The fellow is a gugga”; probably racial abuse identifying the
foreign‐looking man), a passage where all other P‐manuscripts have only the first half‐line,
facies quidem edepol.
The two families of manuscripts, A and P, differ over a sizeable number of individual
readings, as well as displacements and omissions, and finally additions of single words and

Franko, G. F., & Dutsch, D. (Eds.). (2020). A companion to plautus. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated.
Created from otago on 2022-12-12 02:54:31.
 The Textual Tradition of Plautus 413

even groups of lines. Lindsay (1904, pp. 142–144) attempted to trace back these divergences
to an early time in the history of the text of Plautus, when there still survived a manuscript
derived from the original of Plautus and another, later manuscript descended from a “revival
text,” a script of a company manager putting Plautus on stage at some point after the play-
wright’s demise. But is this view tenable?
The strongest argument against it is the presence of a significant number of common,
even trivial, errors shared by the two families. If the two branches could really be traced to
the earliest stages of the Plautus tradition, such mistakes should not be there: they could
not possibly go back to a Plautus autograph or autographs (Deufert 2002, pp. 302–316).
A straightforward case of error common to A and P occurs at Poenulus 1179–79a, an aria
in anapaests where one of the female main characters describes the temple of Venus with
these words: aras tus, myrrhinus, omnis odor / complebat (‘Incense, myrrh, and every
aroma filled the altars”), in which the two branches displayed a corrupt text, Arabus
(Arabius in P), that marred the meter. A more interesting case occurs in Pseudolus, in a
passage where the protagonist describes the peculiar walk of the pimp, not walking ahead
but slanting along the walls: ut transuorsus, non prouorsus cedit, quasi cancer solet. (“how
he sidles sidewise, not forwards, just like a crab,” 955). The text printed here was pre-
served only by an indirect source, the grammarian Varro (Ling. 7.81), in a discussion of
adverbs. Varro incidentally preserves, in the accompanying commentary of the line, a
description of the action as he may have seen it onstage, letting us know something of the
amble/way of walking of the leno that is otherwise not evident from the text:

Prouersus “straight ahead” is said of a man who is turned toward that which is in front of him;
and therefore he who is going out into the vestibule, which is at the front of the house, is said
prodire “to go forth” or procedere “to proceed.” But since the brothel‐keeper was not doing
this, but was going sidewise along the wall, Plautus said “how sidewise” (transl. R.G. Kent).

Here Varro preserves the correct reading against both branches of the manuscript
tradition, both with the reading non prorsus uerum ex transuerso (Deufert 2002, pp.
149–150).
There are also several other lines of argument to counter Lindsay’s thesis. Most notably,
Poenulus has two, arguably even three, competing endings, presumably the result of com-
Copyright © 2020. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

bination of scripts from different companies. Both our branches seem to have preserved
this compilation: if P had been the “revival” text and A Plautus’s own copy, they would
conceivably have transmitted one or the other ending, but not both (or all three).
It is therefore inevitable to assume that a single manuscript, earlier than A and Π, was the
last common ancestor of the direct tradition. Scholars give this reconstructed manuscript the
siglum Ω. It must have been written at some point in the fourth or fifth century, and it
already included only 21 comedies, like the “Hadrianic” edition, of which it had inherited
all main paratextual and editorial features. It was marred by numerous copy errors, some-
times explanatory glosses, which had been in origin interlinear or marginal explanations that
migrated into the text to replace an obscure word, in an age that knew little or nothing of
early dramatic meters and was therefore deaf to Plautus’s elaborate rhythms.
A strong clue to a common origin of our manuscript from an archetype already in codex
format is the arbitrary division into two lines of any line 45 to 50 syllables long, as happens

Franko, G. F., & Dutsch, D. (Eds.). (2020). A companion to plautus. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated.
Created from otago on 2022-12-12 02:54:31.
 414 Rolando Ferri

in modern editions of Plautus when a trochaic octonarius has too many syllables to fit the
page layout or the printing cage. In rolls, the right‐hand margin was not predetermined,
and a verse with one or more syllables than average would not greatly matter. In codices,
the “page mirror” was more rigidly defined, and thus an ancient editor devised a system
for indicating that a word or two belonged to the previous line even when written under-
neath. This overflowing below the line was not based on metrical incisions, but was arbi-
trarily chosen to suit scribal convenience. The identical occurrence of line divisions in two
widely separated branches of the manuscript tradition is a sure sign of a common origin
that enables us to trace it to the last common ancestor of the two families, and it proves
that the ancestor was already a codex rather than a series of rolls.
Plautus was not known or studied widely in the Middle Ages, but the first eight come-
dies (Amphitruo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Captivi, Curculio, Casina, Cistellaria, and
Epidicus) had some circulation at least in the eleventh century and later. This is the period
from which we can date a group of manuscripts written in France and Southern England,
two areas with close cultural ties. These manuscripts (whose sigla in modern critical edi-
tions are EVJO) contain only the first eight comedies, or parts of these, and are shown by
several significant errors to form a separate, but not inferior, branch in the P family of
manuscripts (Chelius 1989, pp. 130–135). They are of relatively limited value for editors
because of the small portion of text they contain, but they preserve a few correct readings
against the rest of the P branch. The most significant of these manuscripts is probably J
(London, British Library, Royal 15.C.XI), written at Salisbury Cathedral at the end of the
eleventh century or at the beginning of the twelfth. It is the product of careful copying
and revising, revealing the hand of a scholar capable of correcting a faulty text by conjecture
and perhaps comparing other manuscript sources. For example, J preserves the correct
Greek text at Casina 729, dabo tibi μέγα κακόν (“I’m gonna give you un chingadazo”/“I’m
gonna te faire très mal”), albeit in the transliterated form meca cachon, against all other P
manuscripts except T.
In 1429, the great scholar and theologian Nicolaus Cusanus discovered in the Cologne
Cathedral Library codex D, which was subsequently brought to Italy and gave rise to
numerous copies. The Humanist reception of Plautus in Italy was a product of this discov-
ery (Sabbadini 1905, pp. 111–112; Sabbadini 1914, pp. 327–352; Questa 1984b, pp.
174–191), although some Italian Humanist sources seem to have been influenced by the
Copyright © 2020. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

French “eight plays” manuscripts (Questa 1991, p. 693).

The Early Printed Editions and the Nineteenth‐

Century “Rediscovery” of Plautus
The first printed edition of the twenty comedies was edited by Giorgio Merula and was
published in Milan in 1472. Its documentary foundations were two or three manuscripts
of the Itala recensio, the descendants of D. Merula faced many difficulties, and in his pref-
ace he did not claim to be able to perform wonders. The metrical analysis was particularly
impenetrable to him, and his edition brims with blatantly flawed line divisions inherited
from D: colometry was often confused, for example by running subsequent lines into one,
even in dialogic scenes in senarii. Another hurdle was the presence of words unfamiliar to

Franko, G. F., & Dutsch, D. (Eds.). (2020). A companion to plautus. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated.
Created from otago on 2022-12-12 02:54:31.
 The Textual Tradition of Plautus 415

him, both because of archaic morphology and phonetics and on account of the relatively
far‐fetched and sometimes unpredictable collocations and imagery. The edition, for exam-
ple, inherited archetypal corruptions simple enough to mend, such as Poenulus 669–670
quo accures magis, / trecentos nummos Philippos portat praesidi (“just so that you take
greater care, he’s carrying three hundred gold coins for security”), for which our medieval
manuscripts read accurres … praesibi. While the correction accures was already in Poggio’s
own copy (Città del Vaticano, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vaticanus Latinus 1629),
prae sibi, which is not acceptable Latin for Plautus, was left untouched. However, the
place of Merula in the apparatus of modern Plautus editions is not inconsiderable, because
Merula was a more‐than‐adequate Latinist, even if his documentary basis and the knowledge
of early Latin metrics and language were still too primitive at the time to provide much
assistance for emendation and interpretation (Ritschl 1868, ii, p. 38).
Not very long after Merula’s edition, Plautus’s fortune in print experienced a very drastic
improvement with the 1552 publication of a new edition by Joachim Camerarius of
Bamberg, a professor in Leipzig who had had the good fortune of exploiting by far the best
and earliest extant manuscript of the Palatine branch, B, given to him by a former teacher.
How his teacher had obtained a tenth‐century manuscript or whence never became known,
but it was presumably from a sale of very old manuscripts in the monastery of Freising near
Munich. After Camerarius’s death, his heirs bequeathed the manuscript to the court library
of the Elector Palatine.
Friedrich Ritschl (1806–1876) was arguably the most important scholar of Plautus’s
text of modern times, even though he never completed his plan to edit the entire Plautus
corpus and only produced editions of eleven comedies in the years 1849–1854 (Trinummus,
Miles Gloriosus, Bacchides, Stichus, Pseudolus, Menaechmi, Mostellaria, Persa, Mercator,
Poenulus, and Rudens; a second edition of only Trinummus was published in 1871).
Those editions were in themselves a remarkable achievement; even more so were his stud-
ies on manuscript tradition, text, language, prosody, and the meters of Plautus (for the
most part collected in Ritschl 1866–1879). Ritschl’s groundbreaking and important work
left its stamp on all subsequent Plautine scholarship to date. He was also the first to restore
the original name of the playwright, Titus Maccius Plautus; to all earlier scholars the play-
wright was known as Marcus Accius Plautus, a name derived by comparing the form found
in the then‐recently‐discovered Ambrosian palimpsest with various corrupt forms in
Copyright © 2020. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Mercator and Asinaria (Ribbeck 1879–1881, p. 100). Ritschl availed himself of numer-
ous factors that made a significant difference from earlier scholarship. First, he realized
that a thorough understanding of early Latin was indispensable for attempting to solve the
problems posed by the comedies, and he was in fact among the promoters of the Corpus
inscriptionum Latinarum, for which he edited a volume of the earliest documents, the
Priscae latinitatis monumenta epigraphica, in 1862. Ritschl also realized that the study of
early Latin glossaries sometimes opened a window onto a vista almost entirely new for the
Plautine vocabulary. In this field, too, he himself produced important studies on two glos-
saries with Plautine words (Ribbeck 1879–1881, pp. 2, 100–110, 430), and he encour-
aged two of his best students, Georg Goetz and Gustav Loewe, to produce more, which
in turn became the Corpus glossariorum Latinorum in 7 volumes, published between 1888
and 1923. Ritschl also spent two years in Milan early in his life studying the Ambrosian
palimpsest, but equally important was his balanced assessment of the overall value of the

Franko, G. F., & Dutsch, D. (Eds.). (2020). A companion to plautus. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated.
Created from otago on 2022-12-12 02:54:31.
 416 Rolando Ferri

Palatine tradition. It was from reflection on the evidence of the scene titles in P (in A they
were in red ink, which faded completely, leaving blank spaces) that Ritschl discovered
the true meaning of the sigla c(anticvm) and d(i)v(erbivm), which first restored to the
palliata its nature as a musical drama in which spoken and sung parts alternated.
After Ritschl’s death, his editorial work was continued by this pupils Gustav Loewe,
Georg Goetz, and Friedrich Schoell (Leipzig, 1871–1894). Plautus was the ground
where perhaps all most important Latin textual critics of the nineteenth century tried
their mettle: two other fundamental editions were those of Friedrich Leo (Berlin, 1895–
1896) and W.M. Lindsay (Oxford, 1903–1905). An important project of a complete
new critical edition of the comedies, the editio Sarsinatis, is still in progress (2001–). Its
main characteristics are the accurate assignment (in the apparatus) of conjectures to
Humanist and early modern scholarship and a much more detailed presentation of relevant
manuscript readings, including paratextual and colometric information transmitted by the
manuscripts, with special attention to the layers of corrections by subsequent hands, especially
in manuscripts B and D.

FURTHER READING

For general assessments of the working and editorial methods of Republican scholar-
ship, see Zetzel (1981). Tarrant (1983) offers the best concise treatment of the prin-
cipal manuscripts and their relationships. On the “Hadrianic,” or second‐century
critical edition of the comedies, see Bader (1970). Pasquali (1952) contains a very
lucid illustration of the different principles adopted by the late antique scholars
responsible for A and Π. Stockert (2014), using Cistellaria as a study case, describes
how the late antique palimpsest A yielded precious new information through multi-
spectral photography and further digital elaboration. Tontini (2002a) examines the
reception of the “eight‐comedy” Plautus in the late Middle Ages (Petrarch, Boccaccio,
the French and Italian pre‐Humanists), the discovery and impact of codex D, and
the textual critical and editorial activities of Quattrocento intellectuals, including the
division of plays into acts.
Copyright © 2020. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

REFERENCES

Bader, B. (1970). Szenentitel und Szenenteilung bei Plautus. PhD dissertation. Tübingen.
Barrett, W.S. (1964). Euripides: Hippolytos. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Battezzato, L. (2003). I viaggi dei testi. In: Tradizione testuale e ricezione letteraria antica
della tragedia greca (ed. L. Battezzato), 7–31. Amsterdam: Hakkert.
Chelius, K.H. (1989). Die codices minores des Plautus: Forschungen zur Geschichte und
Kritik. Baden‐Baden: Valentin Koerner.
Deufert, M. (2002). Textgeschichte und Rezeption der plautinischen Komödien im Altertum.
Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Ferri, R. (2008). ‘Scenes’ in Roman Drama: a lexical note. Classical Quarterly 58: 575–681.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S000983880800075X.

Franko, G. F., & Dutsch, D. (Eds.). (2020). A companion to plautus. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated.
Created from otago on 2022-12-12 02:54:31.
 The Textual Tradition of Plautus 417

Ferri, R. (2016). An ancient grammarian’s view of how the spoken language works:
pragmalinguistic observations in Donatus’s Commentum Terentii. In: The Latin of
the Grammarians: Reflections about Language in the Roman World (eds. A. Zago and
R. Ferri), 239–277. Brepols: Turnhout.
Friedman, R.E. (1987). Who Wrote the Bible? New York: Summit Books.
Gammacurta, T. (2006). Papyrologica Scaenica. Alessandria Edizioni dell’Orso.
Gatti, P. (2011). Nonio Marcello e la Compendiosa doctrina. In: The Latin of Roman
Lexicography (ed. R. Ferri), 49–62. Pisa: Fabrizio Serra.
Goldberg, S.M. (2005). Constructing Literature in the Roman Republic: Poetry and Its
Reception. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lehrs, K. (1882). De Aristarchi Studiis Homericis. Leipzig: Hirzel.
Leo, F. (1895). Plautinische Forschungen zur Kritik und Geschichte der Komödie. Berlin:
Weidmann.
Lindsay, W.M. (1898). The Codex Turnebi of Plautus. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Lindsay, W.M. (1901). Nonius Marcellus’ Dictionary of Republican Latin. Oxford: James
Parker and co.
Lindsay, W.M. (1904). The Ancient Editions of Plautus. Oxford: James Parker and co.
Pasquali, G. (1952). Storia della tradizione e critica del testo. Florence: Le Monnier.
Pfeiffer, R. (1968). History of Classical Scholarship: From the Beginnings to the End of the
Hellenistic Age, vol. 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Prauscello, L. (2006). Singing Alexandria: Music Between Practice and Textual
Transmission. Leiden: Brill.
Questa, C. (1984a). Numeri innumeri: Ricerche sui cantica e la tradizione manoscritta di
Plauto. Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo.
Questa, C. (1984b). Parerga Plautina. Struttura e tradizione manoscritta delle commedie.
Urbino: QuattroVenti.
Questa, C. (1991). Review of K.H. Chelius, Die codices minores des Plautus: Forschungen
zur Geschichte und Kritik. Athenaeum 79: 690–694.
Ribbeck, O. (1879–1881). Friedrich Ritschl: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Philologie, I‐
II. Leipzig: B.G. Teubner.
Ritschl, F. (1868). Opuscula philologica, II. Leipzig: B.G. Teubner.
Sabbadini, R. (1905). Le scoperte dei codici latini e greci ne’secoli 14 e 15. Florence:
Copyright © 2020. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Sansoni.
Sabbadini, R. (1914). Storia e critica di testi latini: Cicerone. Donato. Tacito. Celso.
Plauto. Plinio. Quintiliano. Livio e Sallustio. Commedia ignota, 327–352. Catania:
Battiato.
Slater, W.J. (1986). Aristophanis Byzantii Fragmenta post A. Nauck collegit, testimoniis
ornavit, brevi commentario Instruxit. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Stockert, W. (2014). The rebirth of a codex. Virtual work on the Ambrosian palimpsest
of Plautus. In: The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Comedy (eds. M. Fontaine
and A.C. Scafuro), 690–698. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Studemund, W. (1889). Fabularum reliquiae Ambrosianae Codicis rescripti Ambrosiani.
Berlin: Weidmann.
Tarrant, R.J. (1983). Plautus. In: Texts and Transmission. A Survey of the Latin Classics
(ed. L.D. Reynolds), 302–307. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Franko, G. F., & Dutsch, D. (Eds.). (2020). A companion to plautus. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated.
Created from otago on 2022-12-12 02:54:31.
 418 Rolando Ferri

Tontini, A. (2002a). La tradizione manoscritta umanistica di Plauto. Novità e problem.

In: Due seminari plautini (eds. C. Questa and R. Raffaelli), 529–538. Urbino:
QuattroVenti.
Tontini, A. (2002b). Censimento critico dei manoscritti plautini. 1. Biblioteca Apostolica
Vaticana. Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei.
Tontini, A. (2010). Censimento critico dei manoscritti plautini. 2. Le Biblioteche Italiane.
Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei.
Zetzel, J.E.G. (1981). Latin Textual Criticism in Antiquity. New York: Arno Press.
Zetzel, J.E.G. (2018). Critics, Compilers, and Commentators: An Introduction to Roman
Philology, 200 BCE‐800 CE. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Zwierlein, O. (1990–1992). Zur Kritik und Exegese des Plautus I‐IV. Stuttgart: Franz
Steiner Verlag.
Copyright © 2020. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Franko, G. F., & Dutsch, D. (Eds.). (2020). A companion to plautus. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated.
Created from otago on 2022-12-12 02:54:31.