Eustochia e critica congetturale: tra Bentley, Ruhnken, Housman (poi Nisbet e Pasquali)

Housman used to say criticus nascitur, non fit. He borrowed the motto from Ruhnken’s Elogium of Hemsterhuys and reused it in his famous essay The Application of Thought, just as he borrowed from the same Elogium the two key qualities for a critic, ἀγχίνοια and εὐστοχία, in the preface of his Manilius. Therefore, it is not by chance that Nisbet called Eustochia the “Muse of Textual Conjecture”, nor that Pasquali said that a palaeographer nascitur et fit.