Page:Juvenal and Persius by G. G. Ramsay.djvu/79

 source of corruption is that its original readings have been often corrected by later hands from the tenth century onwards. These corrections, indicated by the letter p, are for the most part taken from one or other of the mass of inferior interpolated MSS., but their faults can sometimes be repaired from other sources which are more closely allied to P itself.

Apart from P and the host of interpolated MSS. stand three important fragmentary sources, viz.; (1) Scidae Arovienses, consisting of five leaves found at Aarau in 1880; (2) the Florilegium Sangallense; (3) third, and most important, are the lemmata of the ancient scholia, which often contain the correct reading of P which has been corrupted in the text by p.

Over against P and its small cluster of kinsfolk stand the several hundreds of Juvenal's vulgar MSS. dating from the ninth century to the sixteenth, infected one and all with a plague of interpolation from which P and its fellows are exempt. Halfway between the two camps (older than P, and not much interpolated) lies a considerable fragment, the Codex Vindobonensis of the ninth century, containing i. 1 to ii. 59 and ii. 107 to v. 96. After these Professor Housman selects seven MSS. of the interpolated class, which he calls A, F, G, L, O, T, U, and from which a true reading or its traces are occasionally to be found. To these MSS. collectively he lxxv