Page:Propertius - tr. Butler - Loeb 1912.djvu/23

 ϛ. In addition to these MSS. there are a large number of inferior fifteenth-century MSS. Among these are two MSS. which since the edition of Baehrens have appeared in the apparatus criticus of modern texts. They are (1) the Codex Daventriensis (1792), now at Deventer, and the Codex Ottohoniano-Vaticanus (1514), now in the Vatican. Both are late-fifteenth-century MSS. Mr. O. L. Richmond (Journal of Philology, . 161) has shown that they do not deserve the position assigned to them by Baehrens, and that they must be ranked among the inferior MSS. as possessing no independent value.

Where MSS. other than N, A, F, L, μ, υ are mentioned their catalogue reference is given.

The text of Propertius is undoubtedly very corrupt. The sequence of thought is at times so broken that the reader necessarily concludes that one of two things has happened: (a) couplets have been lost, or (b) the order of the lines has been dislocated. While the second alternative is possible, and while various scholars (the best example is Professor Postgate in the new Corpus Poetarum Latinorum) have attempted to save the situation by wholesale transposition, as yet no scientific system of transposition has been discovered, and no satisfactory theory has been put forward to account for the dislocation. The first is therefore the safer course.