A Brief Post on Mistakes

 

Errare humanum est.  To err is human.  This is proved in the frequent misattribution of this quotation to the Roman philosopher Seneca.  It seems the kind of thing he might have said, but we have no evidence that he actually said it.  But is that a really big deal?  If making mistakes is human, then perhaps we should just learn to live with them.

When Mistakes Matter

At some point in my Latin classes, we talk about how the Latin texts they read in their books came into existence.  We have no autographs from any ancient author, which is to say, we have no manuscripts written in their own hand.  We possess copies of works by people like Homer and Plato and Cicero and Vergil, but we do not have even one scrap of papyrus in their handwriting.  Copies were made even in their day, and then copies of those copies were made, after which copies of copies of copies were made, and so on down through the ages.  If you have ever copied something, however, you know that it is easy for your eyes to skip words, to write the same word twice, or to make other errors in transcription.

When I was a graduate assistant in Classics at The University of Texas, I was grading a set of etymology exams for a certain professor and noticed that a large number of the students had incorrectly defined a particular word.  Even stranger was that they had all misdefined it in the same way.  The word was "anthropocentric," and these students had defined it as an adjective related to the belief that "man is the center of the unwise."  I have often told my own students that if an answer does not make sense, it is probably wrong, but this professor had obviously not given such advice.  Eventually I figured out what had happened.  Apparently a student with illegible penmanship had shared his notes with the class, and although he had written "universe," the word looked like "unwise," and that was what the students had memorized for the test.

This kind of thing happened all the time in the transcription of ancient texts across the centuries, especially when those doing the copying did not know the language they were transcribing.  As a result, scholars have poured much work into establishing authoritative versions of texts by comparing the various manuscripts and applying philological rules to resolve discrepancies.  For more on this, see Max Hardy's excellent article in the online journal Antigone.

A Calligraphic Goof

I encountered this scribal problem firsthand recently after putting on our dry erase board the Verse of the Week for our Latin III class.  A student had come to see me before school, and as we talked, my eye wandered over to the board, and suddenly I saw the error, but even that I corrected incorrectly.  In the picture above you can see the Latin of 1 Peter 3:15.  The first word in the next-to-last line is posenti, which is not a Latin word at all.  I began to think about the verse and, not having memorized it in Latin, assumed that I miswritten petenti, figuring that since "e" and "o" are similar, my brain had simply taken one for the other.  Furthermore, because there are two instances of the long "s" in satisfactionem immediately above, I had mistakenly used the long "s" instead of "t."  My mental emendation had the benefit of keeping the sense of the verse, but when I actually looked at the Vulgate, I found that not only had I misspelled a word, but my intended correction was wrong as well.  The actual word in that verse is poscenti, and I had left out the letter "c."

The corrected version

I quickly changed the word on the board, and all was well, but it was an interesting reminder of the kind of thing that happened countless times as scribes copied the works of antiquity.  It is also a reminder of the debt of gratitude we owe classical philologists who have produced reliable texts that we can be quite confident express what the ancient authors wrote.