Book 18
9
But the other, more learned, man declared that there was no mistake, but that it was written correctly and properly, and that we ought to trust Velius Longus, a man not without learning, who wrote in the commentary which he composed On the Use of Archaic Terms, that inseque should not be read in Ennius, but insece; and that therefore the early writers called what we term narrationes, or tales, insectiones; that Varro also explained this verse from the Menaechmi of Plautus: v. 1047. Nihilo minus esse videtur sectius quam somnia, as follows: they seem to me no more worth telling than if they were dreams. Such was their discussion.
9
I think that both Marcus Cato and Quintus Ennius wrote insecenda and insece without u. For in the library at Patrae A city of Achaia, near the entrance to the Corinthian Gulf, modern Patras. I found a manuscript of Livius Andronicus of undoubted antiquity, entitled )Odu/sseia, in which the first line contained this word without the letter u: Frag. 1, Bahrens. Tell me (insece), O Muse, about the crafty man, translated from this line of Homer: Odyss. i. 1.
