Abstract

The text of Martial is fairly good, though not as good as many editors seem to think. We have three separate sources from which our manuscripts are derived, which are called by Lindsay in the O.C.T. AA, BA and O.1 All three sources seem to have suffered from editing, AA less than the others. In A.D. 401 one Torquatus Gennadius seems to have emended the text . We do not know whether all three sources were affected by this recension: all we know is that the BA family are the only manuscripts that mention it. But there are many signs of recension discernible in the readings of the other families too, e.g. pas-sages which have evidently had grammar or syntax thrust upon them—and in these I do not include the now obscure allusions and the dead jokes past recall