Kenney_and_Clausen B.M.W.(eds.) - Get a Free Blog

BOOKS AND READERS IN THE ROMAN WORLD
poems being placed extra ordinem paginarum ' outside the sequence of columns' (9
praef.; cf. zpraef.). Since the columns were not numbered, and their ordo could begin
as close to the beginning of the roll as convention and the taste of the copyist dictated,
it is difficult to see what exactly the phrase means. There is more than one possibility:
(i) The two passages in Martial (and possibly, for instance, the Epigramma to the threebook
edition of Ovid's Amores) refer to an addition made to the clean copy of the book
just before it left the author's hands; it was an easy matter to add another sheet of
papyrus to the left-hand end of the roll (cf. above, p. 18). But nothing is specifically
said about adglutinatio, and in the copies made from the original exemplar peculiarities
of this kind would not have been reproduced: the scribe would simply have copied the
text as it now stood, starting at the normal place on his clean roll, (ii) The ordo paginarum
was a matter of scribal differentiation. Martial is distinguishing between the text
of the book proper, written in regular columns, and the prefatory matter, set off in
some way from the rest and differently treated, thus appearing to stand to the left of a
notional line from which the ordo began, (iii) The Epigramma was -written at the
beginning of the roll on the outside. This last is the solution favoured by (e.g.) Birt
(1882) 142, id. (1913) 301, Wendel (1949) 26—7; a few examples of Greek rolls so titled
have survived (Turner (1971) i