PREFACE.

For this reason, those points in which my method differs from that of F. Osann must also be derived from this. In the excerpts from the book on the differences and similarities of the Greek and Latin verb from the Vienna manuscripts, I have marked on the other page Ms. V. Manuscript of Vienna and on the other Ed. ε Edition ε, and I have inserted into them, enclosed in parentheses, the chapter numbers of the Analecta Grammatica, from which they were taken. In the Commentaries and in the Saturnalia, I have also thought it right that the summaries of individual chapters, written by Arnold of Wesel, should have their place in this critical apparatus. Because I inserted into the same the notations of the passages to which Macrobius refers—either those preceding or following in his own work—and those which he cites from others, as well as Cicero in the Commentaries on his Dream of Scipio, I did this first because I was not going to add anything else to this edition; secondly, I did not want to change anything, because in this way these notations occupy the least amount of space, and because they are not rarely of value in either establishing or detracting from the reliability of a reading.

Which manuscripts I followed most of all in emending the works of Macrobius I have demonstrated in the prolegomena, chapter V; it remains for me to speak of the method I used in establishing what they call the context of the words. There is hardly any need to warn that in such an author, the authority of the manuscripts carries the greatest weight. Wherever the manuscripts presented something probable, I accepted it, at least from the inferior ones, where what I found in the better ones did not seem capable of being admitted at all. But wherever I was destitute of the help of the manuscripts, I preferred to place what I thought I could attain by conjecture in the annotation rather than to eject a reading, even if false, that was confirmed by the authority of the manuscripts or many editions, unless perhaps it seemed that absolutely no doubt could be raised; in which matter I gave the greatest weight to the customs of the speaker and the flow of the sentences. I used conjecture more freely in the grammatical excerpts, as there was only one manuscript of them existing. The conjecture I accepted in Cicero's Dream of Scipio (chapter II, § 3), which was disapproved of by F. Osann, I have tried to defend in some part in the Addenda; I will present other things elsewhere. I followed a method of punctuation such that I restricted the abundance of commas by which sentences were distracted, especially in the Bipontine edition. I therefore removed superfluous commas between enumerated individual words and after participles and those by which relative clauses were enclosed, provided they contained some attributes; but I left them where something seemed to be added as if by way of a parenthesis parenthesis, or where the sentence would be implicit if the punctuation were removed. I rarely used a semicolon, where indeed an punctuation mark between a colon and a comma was required. In this method of mine of punctuating, someone might perhaps criticize that it is not sufficiently consistent; but when there was an option, whether to look out for consistency or for the clarity of the sentences, I decided that the former should be postponed to the latter, which must be held as the highest law in such a writer.