Excellent general accounts of J.'s text are available and do not need repeating here, other than to state the central fact that the manuscript tradition is divided into two classes, the first represented by the ninth-century P and its congeners, the latter by an inferior, interpolated strain designated Φ by Clausen. Satire 6 has its share of problematical lines, the majority of which are most probably to be deleted as interpolations (see nn. on 65, 126, 138, 188, 209–11, 460, 558–9, 561, 614A–C), while the status of others is more controversial (cf. 133–5, 588nn.). On occasion, difficulties with meaning or train of thought have been explained by positing a lacuna (38n., 461n., 585–6n.) or else by assuming that lines have been misplaced, a solution being found either in simply reversing the order of a pair of lines (nn. on 43–4, 307–8, 347–8) or in more radical transpositions (e.g. Braund, following Ruperti, transposes 464–6 to follow 470).
By far the most distinctive feature of the sixth Satire from the textual viewpoint is the presence in a single manuscript of lines not elsewhere attested in the MS tradition: the so-called ‘Oxford fragment’. This consists of two passages, one of 34 lines (O1–34), the other of two, occurring after 365 and 373 respectively in a manuscript (Canon. Class. Lat. 41) probably written at Monte Cassino round 1100 and now held in the Bodleian library in Oxford. They were first recorded by an undergraduate, E. O. Winstedt, who had been working on textual problems in the manuscript (Winstedt 1899: 201–2).
The discovery provoked considerable scholarly debate, especially with regard to the longer passage, O1–34, which is replete with problems, both textual and interpretational, giving rise to widespread concerns about its authenticity. Three major hypotheses have been advanced: (1) the lines are the work of a forger; (2) they belong to an earlier draft by J. which the poet later rejected; (3) they are genuine, but at some stage were lost.