PREFACE

A new translation of this author, though long overdue, might still appear premature at this moment when new editions of the text are promised. However, a most valuable portion of the work, the Epistles of Epicurus, has appeared in a new critical edition; and the text of the biographies is unlikely to undergo any radical reconstruction. There is substantial agreement that the manuscripts are late; that the scribe of the best one, the Borbonicus, did not know Greek; and that the mistakes which they all share likely originated in their common archetype. Reconstructing the text of an author from such sources would have been difficult in any case; this difficulty is increased by the misfortune that the Editio Princeps The first printed edition. was printed not from the Borbonicus or the Parisiensis, but from a worthless, interpolated, later manuscript.

The efforts of early editors to remove the grossest blunders lasted more than a century and resulted in the edition of Marcus Meibomius, which includes the commentary of Aegidius Menagius Gilles Ménage.. After the publication of this edition, our author fell into neglect until the nineteenth century brought a fuller study of better manuscripts, initiated by Cobet and carried on especially by Usener for Book X. If anyone holds that this is too early a time for a translator who has not first revised the author's text, I...