On the Shoulders of Giants: Appraising the Criterion of divinatio in the cases of Adamance Coray and A. E. Housman

Resumen

The careful reader has no difficulty in detecting and thus recognizing the attested in the critical apparatus readings which proceed from attempts of great scholars. In order to elucidate or even make such an attempt intelligible, one may undertake a lifetime effort to an aptitude for perceiving the matter in question. This should be carried out to balance probabilities arising out from the weighing of the regarded infallibility of the manuscript tradition or from the appraising of the act of conjectural emendation. But in extreme cases of a wrongly transmitted passage the conjectural critic may have to incur censure in the way of divinatio upon the «improbable» text.