On Agriculture and On Farming

the second book, these words are written: "Explicit the first book of Marcius Cato On Agriculture. Here begins the second happily of Marcius Terentius Varro’s Rustic Affairs." For these reasons, Bandinius, who described the codex in the Catalog of Latin Codices of the Laurentian Library (vol. II, p. 74), stated that it contained two books by Cato and two by Varro. He also indicated that an old owner’s name was written at the end of the codex as follows: "Of Franciscus Sassetti, son of Thomas, citizen of Florence." This is the very same codex that Politianus compared with the editio princeps first printed edition after the Marcian codex, and which Victorius, having taken it from the Medicean library, used; he was accustomed to calling it semi-ancient, or Gallican, or written by a Gallic man. Therefore, following Victorius, I have called it the Medicean.

Since these two codices surpass the others in age, they are joined by a certain bond of kinship and seem to have been derived from a common archetype by a path different from the rest. For they often have certain peculiar readings which, because they are not found in the Italian books, were propagated to them from an older book from which the Parisian and the Medicean had been transcribed as if from a common source. For the Medicean could not have been described from the Parisian codex itself, because some things that are corrupted or omitted in the latter alone are read intact in the Medicean, and could not be sought from the Parisian as in the others. However, I say that this book, from which both were derived, was described from the common archetype of all, and is not to be traced back to an older origin, because a few things in it were written more correctly than in the Marcian codex, and all of them are arranged in such a way that they could have been easily found by conjecture. For in very many places, the agreement of the Parisian and Medicean codices is seen in certain common and manifest errors of writing. Therefore, if these things are as I have said, a copy was made from the Marcian codex before it was brought to Florence, from which first the Parisian, and then about one hundred and fifty years later the Medicean codex, was transcribed. But he who wrote the Parisian codex expressed the old example with the greatest possible fidelity, and although he often lapsed through negligence or ignorance (for he was clearly ignorant of the things and words he described), he nevertheless changed nothing intentionally, but transferred everything into his own example just as he had found it written. Thus it happened that, although the archetype itself was not before his eyes while writing, he still preserved many things accurately expressed from it. And even those things which had been corrected in the archetype or added in the margins are found accurately repeated in the Parisian in not a few places. From this class are those things which I noted in Cato, chapters 95 and 112, and in Varro I 2, 5. Furthermore, he preserved the ancient method of spelling words more faithfully than the rest. In contrast, the Medicean codex is depraved by every kind of error. For not only are very many things in it gravely corrupted by the negligence of the one who wrote the book, but it also has manifest examples of interpolation received from an older book after it had experienced the effort of a corrector.