istakes, was, on the
whole, careless of the sense, as of the metre; he seems to have been a
mechanical copyist, excellent in penmanship, but [v.03 p.0124] intent only
on the letters. The MS. has received corrections or small supplements from
at least two different persons. One of them (Kenyon's A^2) was
contemporary, or nearly so, with the scribe. The other (A^3) was
considerably later; he wrote a Roman cursive which might belong to the end
of the 1st century A.D., or to the early part of the 2nd. The correctors
seem to be generally trustworthy; though, like the scribe, they were
inattentive to metre, passing over many metrical faults which could easily
have been removed. They appear to have compared their MS. with another, or
others; but they sometimes made a bad use of such aid, intruding a false
reading where their text had the true one.

Breathings are generally added, especially rough breathings; the form is
usually square, but sometimes partially rounded. Accents are added, not to
all words, but only, as a rule, to those which might cause doubt or
difficulty to the reader. This was the Alexandrian practice, accents being
regarded as aids to correct reading, and more liberally used when the
dialect was not Attic. In accordance with the older system, the accent is
not written on the last syllable of a word; when the accent falls there, a
grave accent is written on the preceding syllable, or on two such syllables
(_e.g._ [Greek: blechras, pauthales]).

As Kenyon observes, no MS. of equal antiquity is so well supplied with
accents. The MS. which comes nearest to it in this respect is the Alcman
fragment in the Louvre, which is of similar or slightly higher age,
belonging perhaps to the early part of the 1st century A.D.; and in that
MS. the comparatively frequent accents were doubtless designed to aid
readers unfamiliar with Alcman's Laconian Doric. With regard to other
grammatical or metrical signs ([Greek: prosoidiai]) used in the Bacchylides
MS., there is not much that calls for special remark. The punctuation,
whether by the scribe or by correctors, is very sparse, and certainly
cannot always be regarded as authoritative. The signs denoting the end of a
strophe or antistrophe (_paragraphus_), of an epode (_coronis_), or of an
ode (_asterisk_), are often omitted by the scribe, and, when employed, are
sometimes placed incorrectly, or employed in an irregular manner.

EDITIONS.--F. G. Kenyon, _Ed. princeps_ (1897);