El texto de Ovidio, <i>Amores</i> II 10.9 y el topico del <i>nauigium amoris</i>

The reading errant ut seems nonsensical in Ou., Am. II 10.9. The literary topos involved in this passage (nauigium amoris: comparison between love and seafaring) is quite frequent in classical poetry. The examples of the motif provided strongly suggest that the first term of the simile in line 9 must be Ovid himself. This admitted, errant ut is clearly wrong. Several of the conjectures proposed (auferor ut, erro uelut) are adequate from a literary point of view, but Birt’s (errantem ut) is to be preferred for linguistic and paleographical reasons