TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE

THIS TRANSLATION of the Saturnalia of Macrobius was made from the text of Eyssenhardt's second edition (Teubner, Leipzig, 1893). By the time that the new Teubner text was published in 1963, the translation had been completed; however, two readings proposed by its editor have been adopted, and each has been duly acknowledged in a footnote.

The rest of the footnotes are of three kinds:

(1) Brief explanatory notes. (Two additional notes, too long for inclusion as footnotes, have been placed at the end of the translation as Appendix A and Appendix B.)

(2) References to passages in Greek and Latin authors and to certain books, to some of which a classicist might perhaps care to turn. These references are not intended to be a complete list of sources and parallels; for such information, a reader should turn to Jan's edition and to the new Teubner text.

(3) References (a) to the medieval authors Bede and John of Salisbury, made because both writers used the Saturnalia; and (b) to Isidore of Seville, because of his role as a connecting link between ancient and medieval scholarship.

A third appendix (Appendix C) contains references to lines in Homer, Lucretius, and Vergil, in which the reading cited by Macrobius differs from that of the Oxford Classical Text.

In seeking to translate the excerpts from Homer and Vergil into English, the translator has chosen to stand upon the ancient waysOriginal Latin: "stare super antiquas vias"; nevertheless, he is not unaware that there are some who may well prefer versions in a modern idiom, and they have their remedy. The translations here offered of these excerpts have little, if any, claim to originality, being for the most part recollections of earlier reading and borrowings from or adaptations of translations found in well-known works.

Columbia University Press has had the index compiled in...