quality:corruption, information:extraction, information:highlighting, structural:scholar_edition, structural:expansion
Manuscript tradition

The oldest manuscript of Plautus is a palimpsest, known as the Ambrosian palimpsest (A), since it is kept in the Ambrosian Library in Milan. It is thought to date to the 5th century, but it was not discovered until 1815. This manuscript is only partly legible, since the parchment was cleaned and a copy of the books of Kings and Chronicles was written on top. Parts of the text are completely missing (for example, nothing survives of Amphitruo, Asinaria, Aulularia, or of the first 475 lines of Bacchides), and other parts are barely legible. The most legible parts of A are found in the plays Persa, Poenulus, Pseudolus, and Stichus. Despite its fragmentary state, this palimpsest has proved very valuable in correcting the errors of P.

A second manuscript tradition is represented by manuscripts of the Palatine family, so called because two of its most important manuscripts were once kept in the library of the Elector Palatine in Heidelberg in Germany. The archetype of this family is now lost but it can be reconstructed from various later manuscripts, some of them containing either only the first half or the second half of the plays. The most important manuscript of this group is "B", of the 10th or early 11th century, now kept in the Vatican library. Manuscripts C and D also belong to this family. The lost original P, from which all these manuscripts were copied, is ascribed by Lindsay to the 8th or 9th century. Because of certain errors which both A and the P family have in common, it is thought that they are not completely independent, but are both copies of a single manuscript dating to perhaps the 4th or 5th century AD.

At some stage the plays in the P family were divided into two halves, one containing Amphitruo to Epidicus (omitting Bacchides), and the other containing Bacchides and Menaechmi to Truculentus. The first eight plays are found in B, and the first three and part of Captivi are found in D. The last twelve plays are found in B, C, and D. In addition there was once a fragmentary manuscript called the Codex Turnebi (T), which was used by a French scholar called Turnèbe in the 16th century. Although this manuscript is now lost, some readings from it were preserved by Turnèbe himself, and others were recorded in the margins of a 16th-century edition discovered by Lindsay in the Bodleian Library in Oxford.

There are certain indications (for example, small gaps in the text where there appears to have been in a hole or lacuna in the parchment) that the original P manuscript was copied from an earlier manuscript with 19, 20 or 21 lines to the page, in other words it was a book very similar to A, which has 19 lines to the page, and probably it was about the same age. However, the order of plays in A is slightly different from that in the P family of manuscripts. The headings at the top of the scenes in A, containing character names, which were written in red ink, have been totally washed away, and those in the P family seem to be based on guesswork and so were also probably missing in an ancestor of the lost P codex. For this reason the names of some of the minor characters are not known.