Abstract

Some of the more difficult archetypal corruptions to detect are those that occurred, not when a scribe was mindlessly copying what was before him, but when he was paying some attention to the sense of his text and departed from his exemplar by wrongly anticipating how the sequence of thought would develop. The resulting text may give sense, even though it does not reflect what the author wrote. It is suggested here that such a process led to corruption at Seneca, Thyestes 33 and Lucan, B.C. 2.279. In the former what was originally the subject of a verb has been transformed into the object; in the latter, the reverse has occurred