rubric, the confusion may have arisen in this way, reading: habet haec muilier. MULIIER: aliter catuli olent, aliter suis = the young smell differently to different people, and still differently to their mothers (suis),' i. e. 'the mother knows.' For catuli = 'children' cf. haec canes (Trin. 172, Poen. 1236) = hic homo, ego. If in a rubricated MS the first mulier fell out by haplography, and the chain of succession to A passed through a non-rubricated MS,2 the gap (cf. supra, vs. 206, for B's treatment) may have come to be the full line in A, whereas B, etc., may represent the real state of things better, as in Stichus, vs. 5II (cf. Fennell, p. xix). I note now a place where Gray seems to me to have gone wrong in his individual comment. In vs. 35 Stratippocles had lost his arms. Epidicus cries 'Dreadful.' Thesprio replies: 'It's happened before; it will be an honor to him, as it has been to others before.' In this Gray sees a political allusion. Instead, the element of literary parody is specially strong in the Epidicus. Stratippocles' arms have just been likened to those Thetis brought to Achilles. In vs. 490 an allusion has been made to Iphigeneia at Aulis; here, just after the Homeric touch I would see a reference to Archilochus and his elegiac poem on his abandoned shield.3
I observe that the foregoing notes on Plautus proceed from the extreme, conservative standpoint that the MSS are a better guide than metrical theories, and as between a violation of metrical norms and text correction that would be improbable in a prose author, I have preferred the latter alternative. I have doubtless gone too far myself in this direction.