ABSTRACT
In November 1989, Professor Robin Nisbet held a lecture in Oxford which he gave the title “How Textual Conjectures Are Made”. He later published it in Materiali e Discussioni (1991). The article is unusual in the sense that the reader can follow Nisbet’s steps from the initial stages until he arrives at a conclusion. It is seldom to see among textual critics this kind of communicative attitude about the whole of the critical process. The author have found Nisbet’s way of going about his critical business exemplary. Of course, he has made a selection; not every one of his conjectures needs to be included. The textual problems mentioned in Vergiliana and Critica are not new; they have mostly been acknowledged as problems for centuries, some of them even in antiquity. When looking at them through the lens of editors and commentators, however, they have to a great extent been downplayed, some of them even neglected or denied.
