THE EDITOR’S PREFACE.

If I had been free to choose an author upon whom to expend my labor in editing, I would have settled upon almost any other writer more readily than Orpheus original: "Orpheum"; refers to the legendary Thracian poet and musician to whom various ancient Greek poems, collectively called the "Orphica," were attributed in antiquity.. But since C. Fritsch Caspar Fritsch, a member of the prominent Fritsch publishing family in Leipzig., realizing that a new edition was needed now that the copies of Gesner’s Johann Matthias Gesner (1691–1761), a famous German classical scholar whose edition of Orpheus was the previous standard. Orpheus were sold out, asked me to undertake the task: although it was a troublesome business, I did not wish to refuse so honorable a man.

I must briefly indicate the method I have employed in editing this author. And even though I realized that many of the things contributed by Gesner—a timid old man, and one more skilled in the Latin language than the Greek—could be omitted without loss to anyone, I nevertheless decided that the notes of both Gesner and Eschenbach Andreas Christian Eschenbach (1663–1722), a scholar who published a significant edition of the Orphic hymns in 1689. should all be preserved. This was to ensure that, if I appeared to have deleted anything according to my own judgment, it would not create a longing for the previous edition. I have omitted only the translations of the Argonautica A poem telling the story of Jason and the Argonauts from the perspective of Orpheus. and the Lithica A poem describing the mystical and medicinal properties of gemstones. made by Gesner; these seemed useless unless corrected, and if they were corrected, they seemed useful only to schoolboys. As for Scaliger’s Joseph Justus Scaliger (1540–1609), one of the greatest scholars of the Renaissance. translation of the hymns, which not infrequently [reflected the text] which he preferred—