ABSTRACT
Nonius alone has almost all the extant fragments from Ennius’s Telephus. The adversative conjunction best explains the nominative variant Telephus (Ennius Telephus et civitatem, etc.) in a part of the transmission. This is after all a minor critical issue, however. It is a natural assumption that Nonius saw a full and satisfactory meaning in the line to quote it as an adequate example among his others. The great virtue of a passive instead of an active infinitive is that the five words make up a complete sentence, in other words establish a self-contained whole, quotable and easy to understand. Easy syntax ought to prevail over complicated (and hypothetical) syntax ceteris paribus. It would be highly artificial to separate video from its nearest accusative, making civitatem object of incendere instead.
