in his copious commentary takes membrana to be the wrapper of the roll; and it can of course have no other meaning; for in Catullus' days the Romans used only papyrus, never parchment, for a regular liber or uolumen. Books made up like ours and written on parchment seem to have come into use about Martial's time; and even if they had been known to Catullus, to take the word here in this sense would make nonsense of the context. Now, that plumbo denotes the small round plate of lead which, instead of pencil or stylus, the ancients employed with a regula to rule straight lines along the page, we all know: see Rich s. v. and Beckman whom he cites. Ellis quotes nine passages from the Greek anthology to illustrate the word and concludes that 'Derecta plumbo' is a condensed expression for plumbo notata lineis ductis ad regulam'. But not one syllable does he say as to the purpose or the meaning of scoring over these purple or saffron-coloured wrappers with 'lineis ductis ad regulam'; nor do I believe any explanation can be given.

Well, and what then are the 'pumice omnia aequata'? omnia must include all the objects mentioned in 6 and 7. Thus Suffenus, after getting his brightpainted bosses, his scarlet lora, his purple wrappers, must have employed his pumice it would appear to scrub them clean of all their ornament, in this shewing himself indeed 'infaceto infacetior rure'.

Tho' Auantius, Guarinus, Statius, Muretus, Scaliger, Graeuius, Vossius, Doeringius, Silligius, Lachmannus, Hauptius, Rossbachius, Schwabius, Muellerus, Ellisius, Baehrensius, are there to check my presumption, I feel no doubt that v. 8. is to be joined with what follows: When you read these thousands of verses, kept so straight by the lead and evened all with

pumice, yon fine and well-bred gentleman Suffenus turns out a common hind or ditcher'. If the arrangement of the sentence be called in question, I would refer to my note on Lucr. v 789 where I have given 5 like passages from him: take v 430 Tecta solo iungens atque omnia dextera laeuis Donec in obscurum coni conduxit acumen take too Cat. 66 65 Virginis et saeui contingens namque leonis.

8 pumice om. aeq.: the precise import of these words may be questioned; but in all the Latin passages which Ellis cites here, and in 1 2 'pumice expolitum', he has mistaken the meaning. In these, as well as in Ov. trist. II 1 13 Quod neque sum cedro flauus nec pumice leuis; Mart. 1 66 10 pumicata fronte si quis es nondum; 117 16 Rasum pumice, there is no reference whatever to preparing the papyrus for writing. They one and all mean that after the uolumen was completed and rolled up, both ends of the closed roll were smoothed and polished with pumice: Ovid's 'geminae poliantur pumice frontes' shews this clearly; but so do the other passages, tho' not so directly, as in most of them it accompanies their receiving their purple cover. In our passage the words I think mean that after the verses had been all fairly written out on their ruled lines, the pumice was applied to remove all inequalities in the writing, all blots, portions of ill made letters and the like. For we must remember that in ancient writing the pen used was course and thick, the letters were large and irregular compared with our print. For the contrary case of blots being left from neglect comp. Prop. v 3 3 Siqua tamen tibi lecturo pars oblita derit Haec erit e lacrimis facta litura meis; Ov. her. 11 1 Siqua tamen caecis errabunt scripta lituris, Oblitus a dominae caede libellus erit; trist I 1 13 Neue litura

rum pudeat cet.; III 1 15 Littera suffusas quod habet maculosa lituras, Laesit opus lacrimis ipse poeta suum. Suffenus would not neglect his blots.

It can hardly I think refer to the previous smoothing of the papyrus, by which the letters would lie more smoothly on the surface. Ellis says 'the inequalities of surface produced by the fibres of the papyrus were removed by pumice stone'. This may have been so, tho' he gives no authority for his statement, his citations, as I have said, referring to something totally different. Pumice was applied indeed in subsequent ages to prepare parchment for writing, as I find in a passage of Hildebert of Tours, the reference to which I have got from the English Cyclopaedia: sermo XV col. 733 ed. 1708 Scitis quid scriptor solet facere: primo cum rasorio pergamenum purgare de pinguedine et sordes magnas auferre; deinde cum pumice pilos et neruos omnino abstergere. quod si non faceret, littera imposita nec ualeret nec diu durare posset. postea regulam apponit cet.'.

As so much has been written at various times on the Ancient Book and as the above passage is a 'locus classicus' on the subject and as the alteration, first made by Auantius and adopted after him by every editor down to the present day, has introduced no small amount of confusion into the question, I have not hesitated to discuss the matter with some, tho' I hope not unreasonable, prolixity, I shall be surprised and mortified if I be thought not to have established the main points of my argument: I have external Ms, authority, I believe I have also intrinsic truth and reason, on my side. I will add a few more remarks, which may be looked on as supplementary to Ellis' copious commentary.

9 cum legas tu: this use of the 2nd pers. sing. potent. is so common and has been illustrated by me elsewhere at such length, that I will just cite here, merely because he chances to use the same word, Mart. 11 27 Laudantem Selium cenae cum retia tendit Accipe, siue legas siue patronus agas. 10 unus caprimulgus: this use of unus, taken it would seem from the conversational idiom of common life and so characteristical of the manner of Catullus, has been illustrated so copiously by Holtze I p. 412, Wagner aulul. 563 and others, that, tho' I have collected examples from authors of various ages, I will quote only one passage from the antiquarian Arnobius, because when he wrote it he may have had our passage in his thoughts, and because I want to bring him forward again in support of a reading in the next poem: Adu. nat. IV 35 in bubulci unius amplexum.

11 tantum abhorret ac mutat: 'so unlike himself, so altered is he' Ellis, who then gives many illustrations of this very common intransitive sense of mutat, and I could add many more. But he does not supply a single example of abhorret for abhorret a se; and this needed illustration much more than mutat did; and I am unable to offer any, tho' this would seem to be the meaning called for. Comparing Cie. de orat. II 85 sin plane abhorrebit et erit absurdus; and Livy xxx 44 6 qui tamen [risus] nequaquam adeo est intempestiuus, quam uestrae istae absurdae atque abhorrentes lacrimae sunt: I would ask whether, as in those two passages, so here too abhorret may not be synonymous with absurdus est. 13 tersius: I reprint below my former paper in favour of tersius (or, tertius), which I feel little doubt is what the poet wrote. Baehrens has adopted the same reading: Ellis does not condescend

to notice it, but sticks to the old correction tritius, tho' he brings nothing in support of it but the 'tritae aures', which I tried to shew was nothing to the point. 14 rure, 12 modo scurra, 2 urbanus: Plaut. most. 15 Tu urbanus uero scurra, deliciae popli, Rus mihi tu obiectas? 21 manticae quod in tergo est: the half of the wallet which is on his back': Livy III 14 3 iuniores, id maxime quod Caesonis sodalium fuit; XXI 52 2 quod inter Trebiam Padumque agri est; XXII 4 1 quod agri est inter Cortonam urbem Trasumennumque lacum; xxx 20 5 quod roboris in exercitu erat; Aen. Ix 274 campi quod rex habet ipse Latinus; Lucr. IV 372 quod liquimus eius; Ter. heaut. 1048 quod dotis dixi.

[Reprinted from the Journal of Philology, vol. 5 p. 305]

22 12 and 13

Scurra has the same meaning here which it has in Plautus: a townbred fine gentleman, the opposite of one brought up in the infacetum rus: 'Urbani assidui cives quos scurras uocant'; 'Tu urbanus uero scurra, deliciae popli, Rus mihi tu obiectas'. The 'homo uenustus et dicax et urbanus' of v. 2, and the 'bellus ille et urbanus' of 9 are expressions synonymous with scurra: [Cic. pro Quinct. 11 nam neque parum facetus scurra Sex. Naeuius neque inhumanus praeco est umquam existimatus:...libertate usus est quo impunius, dicax esset]. Compare too Pliny epist. IV 25 3, who is imitating Catullus, though the scurriliter there has at the same time the bad sense which it afterwards acquired: quid hunc putamus domi facere, qui in tanta