On Agriculture and On Farming

had perished, he noted things in a similar way to Victorius: "thus far I have emended with the most ancient codex." For the remainder is indeed missing in that one. He calls the day of the Bacchanalia, on which he writes that the work was completed by him, the vigil of the Lenten fast, which day that year was the nineteenth of February. He noted the readings of the codex partly between the verses themselves, partly in the margins of the edition, in such a way that, wherever the edition disagreed with the writing of the codex, he corrected the very words to match the codex. In this, he usually marked with an underlined line, in the published exemplar, the individual or few letters to which the discrepancy of the writing pertained, and he superscripted the letters which were read in the manuscript book in place of these. If he found anything added in the edition that was not read in the codex, he marked the words he wanted to be deleted with a similarly underlined line. Likewise, where things were omitted or transposed, he corrected or added them in the words themselves where possible. Then, when the discrepancy was more serious, he wrote the entire reading of the codex in the margin and indicated where it pertained by adding certain signs. He corrected the inscriptions by which the chapters of the books are distinguished in the first edition, in Cato’s book, just as he had found them written in the codex, and he deleted the numbers added by the editor. In those places where he presented the entire inscriptions transcribed from the codex, he usually signified that they should be held as rubrics by placing the letter R before them. In Varro’s books, he deleted both the chapter numbers and the titles themselves.

A few months after collating the Marcian codex, Politian used another manuscript book, whose readings, written in red, he added to those he had inscribed from the previous one. Regarding this, after the subscription placed above, he wrote these things, also inscribed in red: original: "Contuli et cum altero semiuetere codice, sed mendosiore. Vnde scilicet ea sumpta sunt quae uideas rubrica esse notata. Anno eodem Mense Decembri. Ang. Idem." "I also collated it with a second, semi-ancient codex, but one more faulty. From which, evidently, those things were taken which you see marked in red. In the same year, in the month of December. The same Angelo." However, he did not append every discrepancy of reading from this second codex, as he had done in the former, but he extracted a few, which seemed most worthy of record, which he similarly inscribed partly in the margins, partly between the lines. Otherwise, the readings of the two codices are quite clearly distinguished by the different color of writing he used in noting them, and, except in a few places where one might doubt from which codex the annotation was taken due to the dark color of the ink, they are still easily distinguishable.