Since Rose collected Petronius' ‘adaptions of Lucan’ found in the Bellum Civile, there has been renewed contention as to whether these adaptations are real or imagined, with George, Sullivan, and now Slater leading the debate.

The phrase ei mihi is used fifteen times by Plautus. On all but one occasion these words introduce a new speaker. The single ‘exception’ is, I suggest, rather an error of transmission. I quote the line in context, Bac. 1171–4 NIC. Ni abeas, quamquam tu bella es, malum tibi magnum dabo iam. BACCH. Patiar, non metuo, ne quid mihi doleat quod ferias. NIC. Ut blandiloquast! ei mihi, metuo. SOR. Hie magis tranquillust. 1173 non – blandiloquast uno versu B 1174 SOROR (...) B: B D. (shrink)

This line involves a variety of important points.

The several verbal responsions of this couplet to the preceding one are clear, and as mando produces mandata, so testor derives, I think, from testis. Read me teste ‘Idaei…’; ‘with me as witness…’. This reading adds greatly to the humour of the situation, where the hen is charged, in his presence, with caring for the fox. For testis as a witness to the audible cf. fors me sermoni testem dedit.

So Shackleton Bailey in his recent Teubner edition . Housman's remarks are germane.

The scribes of the Latin poets were not, as a rule, in the habit of interpolating exclamatory particles; on the contrary, their tendency was to trivialise. The particle io has MSS authority in two passages in Ovid where distinguished critics reject it. Kenney in the Oxford Text of Ars Amatoria 3.742 prints. labor, io: cara lumina conde manu.

The recent editors, Luck , Hanslik , and Goold , allow into the text these emended instances of en.

Some time ago I noted that the generally accepted emendations a! fuge , and a! ducere are suspect , 71–2). In his recent Loeb edition , Goold in the latter passage restores the MSS. reading adducere; in the former, quisquis es assiduas aufuge blanditias, he prints Tappe's tu fuge for MSS. aufuge. The best solution, it seems to me, is one which the modern editions, Propertiana included, are of a mind to ignore: Markland's heu fuge.

To the host of suggestions I would add the sense of the passage is, ‘I have never annoyed you with petulant language, with the things the mob in the heated forum is accustomed to say, that you suffer me to… But I have often…’ His was, as line 41 explains, the language of poetry. The contrast between the language of the forum and poetry is an obvious one, and is made elsewhere by Propertius ‘turn tibi pauca suo de carmine dictat (...) Apollo et vetat insano verba tonare foro. at tu finge elegos’ . In the present passage the contrast is between the common language typical of the angry mob and the original verses of the exclusus amator. It is particularly bitter that he should be condemned to the ‘trivio’ which, like the forum, is the very milieu of the type of language he has eschewed. (shrink)