Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/385

 1920 377 Notes and Documents Textual Errors in the Itinerary of Antoninus Probably every scholar who has considered the subject will agree that the difficulties which hamper us in the British part of the Itinerarium Antonini Augusti are not to be attributed, in any considerable degree, to our ignorance of some of the details of the Roman road-system in Britain, but, almost exclusively, to errors, either in the transmission of the text, or in the original compilation of the Itinerarium. ' Very little has been done for the detection of these errors ; and antiquaries have been encouraged to exercise their ingenuity in the elusive pursuit of roads and stations which never existed. The history ^ of the text of the Itinerarium, so far as we are able to follow it, would not lead us to expect serious errors in transmission. It is true that the text of the part relating to Britain rests upon a single manuscript, which survived until the beginning of the Carolingian revival, when two copies of it were made. This manuscript, however, was probably of the fourth century and written in capitals. It can hardly have been far removed in date from the time of the compiler. Of the two copies, one, the Vindobonensis L, still survives ; the other copy is lost, but many of our existing manuscripts are derived from it. The fourth-century manuscript was in some places diffi- cult to read : at pp. 478-9, in the eighth Iter,^ it is clear that the scribe of the Vindobonensis was imable to read the first letters of the names Dano, Segeloco (for which he has Ageloco), Lindo, Crococalana, and Margiduno ; of the Croco- of Crococalana, he could make nothing but loco, which he wrote in the margin, prefixing R^ (for require). But the text of the manuscript has, in general, been correctly transmitted to us, except that the numbers given at the headings of the routes have, in many cases, been altered in order to bring them into conformity with » See Cuntz in Wiener Studien, xiii. (1891), 177, and xv. (1893), 260. dam, 1735). The number of the Iter is added in conformity with English usage. non habens, si poteram, temptavi ; ergo, ubi minus potui, R litteram apposui.' (See E. Dummler in Zeitschrift fur devisches Altertum, neue Folge, ii. (1869), 21.)
 * The references in the text are to Wesseling's edition of the Itinerarium (Amster-
 * This is explained by Ekkehart : ' ego quidem corrigere per me, exemplar aliud