Abstract

I offer some notes on the text of Propertius. In the apparatus to individual passages Ω is employed to indicate the archetype, i.e. the consensus of N and A. Only two quires of A are extant, and after 2. 1. 63 its place is taken by descendants: F, L and P. These derive more immediately from a manuscript of Petrarch, copied from A in the Sorbonne in 1333, and now lost. The delta mss. I discard; they are too interpolated and contaminated to aid in the reconstruction of Π. They may contain some elements of truth independent of N and A/Π, but J. L. P. Butrica has shown that another group of mss. headed by Vat. Lat. 3273 has a stronger claim to be cited in the apparatus for these readings, as it antedates Δ. However, as the matter is controversial and not of vital importance for my discussions, the group is here ignored. In the absence of a satisfactory arrangement of the humanistic conjectures into groups akin to those introduced by Mynors in his Catullus, I use the age-old catch-all ς for unauthoritative readings found in fifteenth-century mss.