GAULMINI PRAEFATIO.

GAULMIN’S PREFACE.

Amicable reader, we now provide you for the first time with Psellus’s On the Operation of Demons original: "περὶ ἐνεργείας δαιμόνων", which has never before been edited in Greek; furthermore, we provide the notes which we wrote daily as our assigned task 1. You will judge what I have achieved in them according to your candor, just as I will indicate it to you in accordance with my modesty. I took the greatest care to ensure you had the author’s very own words as corrected as possible; but even this was not permitted due to the haste of the workers, whom I did not oversee. I corrected what was corrupt in the manuscripts; I explained what was difficult; I restored what was interpolated: all with great trust in you, but greater in myself.

"It is necessary to be religentem scrupulous/attentive, but to be religiosum superstitious/obsessive is a sin."

Indeed, I hate, worse than a dog or a snake, those men who treat books as if they were observing omens, and who judge a mistake in a book as if they had found a weasel on the road: they are the laziest of mortals, who still do not know this: that they know nothing.

1) He makes the same claim about his notes above on page XV and page XIX, in the words of his printer and his own; also toward the end of page 275.

2) "A line from an ancient poem, surely worthy of memory," as found in Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights, 4.19.