ABSTRACT
In the three first stanzas of Carm. 3. 14 Horace describes the public celebrations on the occasion of Augustus’s return from a long and relatively uneventful Spanish campaign in 24 B.C. The participation of Livia and Octavia marks the occasion as a grand one. To replace the unsatisfactory manuscript readings (male nominatis/male ominatis) conjectures have been numerous, but only Bentley’s male inominatis is worthy of serious discussion. Bentley’s palmary emendation inominatis verbis has won far too little recognition in view of its eminence. In the course of the last 100 years, only Shackleton Bailey has adopted it in his text. It is especially disappointing that it is not approved by the authoritative voices of Nisbet and Rudd nor by Rudd in his Loeb edition. Gordon Williams tried, in vain in the author's view, to discredit this conjecture in his commentary.
