Two
joining fragments with writing on both sides. The side which is likely to have
been the front is probably complete at the foot but is less likely to have been
complete at the top; it is complete at the right but not the left. Most of this
side is taken up with four lines of shorthand, for which see [122].
At the foot, and almost certainly upside down in relation to the shorthand, is
part of one line.
The rest of the tablet is not blank but the ink which survives does not look like
writing and is perhaps best described as pen trials; there are some such ink
marks after QVINTIA in line 2, but they do not resemble letters.
We are confident that this is to be classed as a writing exercise, both because
of the repetition and because it has been written on a tablet which was
previously used for another purpose and was no doubt then discarded. It was a
commonplace to use lines from literature for such purposes, which is one reason
for thinking that this text may be literary. The other reason is the hand in
which it is written: it is a capital script, not unlike the script of [118]
and possibly the work of the same writer. I, N, T
and A are very similar, but V is made in a more
rounded form, and the writing in general is not as elegant as [118].
Q breaks the bilinearity with a long diagonal descender,
especially noticeable in line 1 on the back.
Quintia
must be a name; we have considered the possibility that it is the start of the
longer name Quintianus, but the ink marks after QVINTIA in line 2
on the back do not support this.
We therefore suggest the possibility that we have an attempt to write
the first line of Catullus 86, which begins: Quintia formosa est multis.
It is worth noting that Catullus is an author not represented in the literary
papyri (see Pack (1965)).