PREFACE.

by which the works of Macrobius—which even now have not been winnowed by a critical fan—might be thoroughly emended.

With this apparatus, not as much is accomplished as I would like, for none of the many and great lacunae that leave the Saturnalia as if gaping open are filled, nor do any brilliant emendations shine forth. But a benefit is gained, which is significant enough in an author whom many use in investigating antiquity: namely, that you may know with certainty what Macrobius wrote in each passage and what others have intruded, and you need not be in doubt (as happens very often to those who use the Bipontine edition, which is widely circulated but entirely lacking in annotation) whether faith should be placed in the words read in those parts that have survived from antiquity.

To ensure this as much as was in my power, I accepted the critical apparatus at my disposal, except for omitting obvious errors of the scribes and inconsistent orthography, which I treated in Chapter III of the prolegomena in such a way that it seems nothing more need be added, except that in the first few sheets, without my consultation, the spelling of certain words was followed differently than in the subsequent ones. As for the Greek, since in the codices it is often written in Latin letters, and in the editions of the excerpts on the differences and similarities of the Greek and Latin verb the elements of both languages are often mixed within the same word, I have used Greek letters wherever the form was Greek. I have organized the matter such that I have marked the manuscripts with capital letters and editions with lowercase, and where several are marked with the same letters and distinguished only by numbers (such as v 1 2 3 or p 1 2) and agree with each other, I have placed only one letter (v or p). The signs v 1 2 3, that is, v 1, v 2, v 3, signify the three Venetian editions that were at hand: since v 2, like the other editions of that age, almost entirely agrees with v 1, the signs v 1 and v 3 are not rarely used, where the sign v 1 also includes the second edition, v 2. I have ordered the signs in a series of years; where several consecutive ones needed to be joined, I placed only the first and last with the sign (-) in between 6). To make it easier to understand what such a compendium means, on every right-hand page above the critical apparatus I have placed the signs for all editions preceded by Edd., which [compen-]

6) Thus v-g (= v, i, a, h, g) signifies all editions from Venetian I up to Gryphian IV, i.e., all editions that appeared before the Stephanian; while s-b (= s, p, d, z, b) signifies all those after the Stephanian; and v-gb (= v, i, a, h, g, b) signifies all editions that appeared before the Stephanian along with the Bipontine.