ABSTRACT
It is to no small credit of Mario Geymonat that he discovered the reading uidet in the Verona palimpsest (V) in the middle of the 1960s.2 This reading turned also up in the 9th-century Neapolitanus (n). In Sabbadini's edition (1930) there was no trace of this variant. Geymonat himself (1973) adopted videt in his text as did Horsfall (2008). But Williams (1973), Perret (1977), Paratore (1978), Goold (1999), Ganiban (2008), Rivero et al. (2009) and Conte (2011) were still convinced that vident was the right choice (if ever they paid serious attention to the alternative). In favour of videt Horsfall argues: "V. has directed Pyrrhus' gaze to the heart of the palace, and only now back to the foreground, immediately inside the doors . . . after the change of subject, the sing. here brings the reader back to the singulars of 479–82, and it is easy to see how the plur. here could be no more than an ill-considered consequence of the plurals in the previous verse".
