Abstract

There is an almost overwhelming mass of material available to the scholar who wishes to investigate the history of the text of Terence's plays. The manuscripts themselves number over 450 and of these over 100 belong to the period 800-c. 1300. No one, however, has undertaken a comprehensive recension of even the older group of medieval manuscripts. One reason for this is that the extent to which contamination has occurred makes classification extremely difficult, another is that it is unlikely that the laborious task of examining and studying so many manuscripts will produce much new evidence for the text itself. Many of the corruptions which survive in the plays probably arose at an early stage in the tradition and prior to the archetype of the manuscripts which have been used by past editors. Any marked advance in the constitution of the text would seem to depend on the discovery of a manuscript which belonged to a different tradition.