The asyndeton of cum without a grammatical connective ruins the flow of this otherwise elegant final flourish to Pliny's famous public oration in praise of Emperor Trajan, and thus at this point the text has long been considered lacunose by some editors.Footnote ¹ Heumann's proposal <si> cum, which has found a supporter in Baehrens among others,Footnote ² will certainly not do, as it vitiates the admirable tricolonic structure of the passage by interjecting a fourth si. Schwarz hesitantly proposed an omission of et before cum, which was conjectured more assuredly by Keil and has since been accepted by Whitton.Footnote ³ However, with respect to palaeography, the arguments of Schwarz and Whitton are more difficult to defend in practice than in theory, because this simple omission of a small word is no more likely than Heumann's original si, which at least could have been lost after the last ligature -ti at the end of substi-ti in minuscule script; if si had similarly been written in ligature with a long-shafted s, the two would have resembled each other, while on the other hand the same cannot be said of ti and et.Footnote ⁴ The case for the loss of the particle et therefore remains fragile and, rather than accepting an option that is not especially compelling, it makes more sense simply to print the manuscripts’ reading when the meaning of the passage is already clear, as Mynors did in his OCT, unless a better emendation may be offered.

Nor is Mynors's opposition to the existing emendations by printing the manuscripts’ text as we have it an isolated incident. He had been anticipated by Müller, who was long ago sceptical of the proposals by Heumann and Schwarz, just as subsequently Durry, Schuster, Radice and Moreno Soldevila all showed equal discretion in balking from acceptance of either conjecture for their respective editions.Footnote ⁵ More recently, Vannini has again judged Schwarz's et in particular quite unsatisfactory, questioning the need for any emendation whatsoever and opting instead to take the whole of cum … malui as a parenthetical restatement of what has come before within the same train of thought, and so punctuated.Footnote ⁶ Whitton would seem to agree with this characterization of the sentence's logic, despite his endorsement of Schwarz: it is precisely when Domitian disclosed (profiteretur) his hatred of good men to Pliny that the orator realized (uiderem) what sort of implied shortcuts to offices were available—that is, only those involving a different path of wickedness, in which he was unwilling to participate.Footnote ⁷ Yet it is difficult to see how the matter can be resolved with new punctuation alone, as proposed by Vannini; hence the support by some for Schwarz's emendation. But, if what we have here is truly an aside summarizing the first protasis of this conditional sentence, then the sense of our passage would call for some missing word signalling that aside. What is needed is more attention to diagnosis of the error before we attempt treatment.

Despite the explicit interpretation by both Whitton and Vannini that this section is an elaboration on the first of the three protaseis (si cursu … substiti), rather than a separate condition in itself warranting <si>, neither scholar pays any notice to how Pliny begins similar side-notes elsewhere in the Panegyric, where they are usually introduced by a parenthetical conjunction or adverb (for example nam, Pan. 8.4, 89.2; autem, 66.4, 83.5; tamen, 86.4).Footnote ⁸ It is this point that ultimately weakens the argument for et, which like si is faulty on stylistic grounds. Since it is well known that cum was sometimes spelled qum (or quum/quom), let me suggest <quippe> cum, where quippe has fallen out before qum through haplography (substiti qu[ippe q]um), helped along perhaps by scriptio continua. The adverb quippe appears frequently throughout this speech (for example Pan. 1.5, 10.5, 18.3, 29.3, 32.3, 44.6, 45.6, 71.6, 77.7, 93.1), and indeed indicates just such an aside earlier in the Panegyric (13.1–2):

The introduction of an explanation by means of an emphatic quippe is typical in Latin, especially to pick up on something that was mentioned just beforehand. We might compare the style of the following passage from one of Pliny's Letters (Ep. 8.6.4), where this word immediately begins a clarification (offeruntur – quippe offeruntur …), just as in our passage:

In particular, a causal particle such as cum often follows quippe. For the sequence of quippe before cum, a suitable parallel may be found in the words of Quintus Fabius during his speech to Scipio in Livy's Book 28: … quippe cum prae te feras temptare te magis quam consulere senatum ‘… for you make it clear that you are sounding out the Senate rather than consulting it’, 28.45.4.Footnote ⁹ Based on these comparisons, it is likely that a scribe's eye jumped immediately to qum from substiti, skipping over the conjunction quippe accidentally in his transcription of the speech's conclusion, especially when one considers that quippe could also be written as qpp.Footnote ¹⁰ This is the most plausible explanation of what happened to the end of Pliny's Panegyric, since some word is widely thought to have dropped out, and the adverb is demonstrably part of the orator's typical vocabulary. Ergo, punctuate this part of the sentence with parentheses or dashes as suggested by Vannini, but read <quippe> cum.