On Agriculture and On Farming

by the same hand, but were added later. In Varro, there is no certain distinction of chapters, neither in the first book, for which an index of chapters had been prefixed without the addition of numbers, nor in the second or third book. However, in a few places, rubrics headings or sections written in red ink were added in the margins to indicate the arguments of the matters being treated or to signify the division of parts, or the words themselves, which had been written continuously, were distinguished by certain signs added later. Furthermore, certain singular letters written in the margins pertain to distinguishing the parts of those things being discussed, although they were written at a different time, and it is not certain in all cases what they signify. In the first writing, many things were corrected, of which some must undoubtedly be attributed to the same scribe who wrote the codex. For he himself often corrected errors committed in copying, adding letters or words he had omitted either above the line or in the margin. To these, which are numerous, others are added, also written in ancient times but in a slightly different manner, as it seems, concerning which it can be doubted whether they were written by the same scribe who later corrected the copy by comparing it with the archetype, or by another. Entirely different from these are others which were corrected in the very words or added in the margins at a much later time, no older than the fifteenth century. Mercerus used this codex in his notes on Nonius a Roman grammarian (pp. 61, 62, 302, 1103) and in Tacitus, Annals III 42. Later, Gesnerus and Schneiderus used the same; Gesnerus had a collation made by Theodorus Ryckius, as he states in his preface (p. VII), and Schneiderus writes in his preface (p. IX) that he had a codex collated with the Comelinian edition by Ioannes Fridericus Gronovius. However, both noted only a few things from it.

The Laurentian Codex 30, 10, written on parchment of the largest format in the fourteenth century, contains these books of Cato and Varro after Vitruvius’s books on architecture. The pages are divided into two columns, with elegant writing and letters flexed and adorned in various ways on both sides of the lines; many are also gilded and painted. It is of the type that used to be called gallicum cursivum Gothic cursive script. Cato’s book, mutilated by the cutting away of the first leaf, begins at chapter 3, 2: "oil-press, wine-press, many jars." Varro’s first and third books were written without headings; in the third, the subscription the concluding sentence of a manuscript is also omitted, "having attained all the whole — I have explained, keep it. Explicit." But after the first and before...