The Satyricon

...and the remaining verses of the Moretum. Subscribed on page 232: "124 verses. The Moretum, a book of the boy Virgil, ends."

Page 233: The poem of the poet Claudian concerning the phoenix begins, which ends on "nocendi" on page 237.

In Petronius, each page has forty-eight verses up to page 208; from page 209, which begins a new quaternion, forty-one verses, the size of the letters being spaced further apart. The leaves of the whole codex have suffered damage externally in the bottom margin, as the width of the margin prevented the damage from encroaching upon the written words. From the side of the page, the same hand, besides corrections, frequently added unusual or unheard-of words and scholia, such as on page 206 "atraliptae" oil-anointers (p. 29, 16), "coccinea" scarlet (p. 29, 18), "Polectice" polishing (p. 29, 19), "symphomacum" a medicinal compound (p. 30, 2), "edictum" decree (p. 30, 6), "caduceum" herald's staff (p. 30, 16). The writing is nowhere obscure, but is composed somewhat carelessly due to haste. It is not easily possible to distinguish 'n' and 'u', or 'c' and 't', and the abbreviations for "et," "quia," "et," and "etiam." We do not know whether "ta" and "tam" signify "tan" (and thus "tanquam" as if and similar should be pronounced with an 'n' or an 'm') unless the syllable is written out in full. Joined words are sometimes incorrectly distributed, such as "interimi atraliptae"; more often, a large letter begins the first word of a sentence. The limbs and joints of the speech are generally distinguished by a period or an oblique line, or a comma placed over a period. Rarely, if you except the poems, is the continuous flow of words interrupted. A new grammarian furnished the margin and the codex itself with chapter numbers after Johannes Boschius divided the satires into chapters "according to the edition of Johannes Mercerus," which had been produced at Geneva in the year 1629. A transcript of this codex was exactly made by Johannes Lucius the Dalmatian in Rome in the year 1668, published at Amsterdam in 1670 by Johannes Blaevius, and repeated in 1671. Conradus Bursianus, for the sake of Otto Jahn, and most diligently Henricus Keilius, for the second Amsterdam edition, reviewed the codex at Paris. I followed their authority wherever I testified against Lucius, whether silently or openly, regarding A and H.

B: The Bern Codex, on parchment, in quarto format, of the 10th or 11th century, marked MSS. LIT. 357, two parts of a larger volume...