A fairly common scribal error: the scribe is copying a text, in which two lines near one another start with the same word, and because he has to shift his eyes between his manuscript and the exemplar, he looks to the wrong instance of the word, skipping one or more lines. Frequently this will yield a sentence which is nonsensical when read over in context, but sometimes it is very difficult to tell that anything has been elided. This is just one of the reasons that comparison of manuscripts is important when preparing a critical edition of an ancient text.


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