Attic Nights

to Varro’s Annals original: "Varronis annales" and, in book X 23, to his books on the Life of the Roman People original: "de vita populi Romani"; I find them nowhere else named. But if I now descend into this field, which is more full of thorns than of fruits, where no Medea will assist me as I plow, I am not unaware that I will perhaps incur similar reproaches. Yet, I am held by the hope that in some matters I will propose what is as true as it is new, and in others, I will incite those who are more skilled to either overcome error and vice or to complete a task only just begun; in all, I hope to offer a more open field that can be approached with greater ease. In this matter, I trust that just as the parallel passages of other writers, which I have placed before the critical apparatus in this edition, have been useful to me, so too they will be useful and welcome to others who run in this arena, both for preserving, healing, and supplementing the text, and for uncovering the sources of Gellius, which are for the most part buried. Although it is not the work of one man to collect them all, and it is certain that many pertaining to this have escaped me, since I have experienced enough that one is taught by the day, I dare to affirm that I have supplied sufficiently suitable material for distinguishing these questions in a portion of the chapters. Nor did I enter upon this path alone. For besides those men to be named shortly—whose resources I eagerly seized, although I did not always agree with their reasoning—and others, such as Wissowa and Linke in Macrobius, Hertz had already excellently prepared the same path, and it fell to me to add a few things to the examples collected by him from Ammianus, Nonius, and others. But even for the help I received in collecting these from that man, even though he is deceased, I owe it to the supreme courtesy of Ricardus Foerster of Wrocław toward me. For when Hertz had undertaken to provoke a critical and exegetical edition of Gellius, and had spent that labor—a sample of which he had already proposed in the index of the summer lectures of Wrocław in the years 1877 and 1883—strenuously and diligently upon the first five books and a few chapters of the others, that treasure fell into the hands of his colleague Foerster upon his death. When I requested to examine it, he most humanely granted me the freest use of both the commentaries and the Gellian copy, which was sprinkled here and there with notes by Hertz, especially with the conjectures of learned men. Although there were things in this commentary from a man assiduous in books and letters that one might wish to remove, I testify with a grateful heart that in these earlier books my own resources were more than once both augmented and corrected. I will now indeed set forth not only the chapters I have treated anew, but also, where the matter has already been settled, I will note very briefly what I endorse; for since dubious inquiries ought to rest upon certainties, it is to be hoped that these be ready at hand. I will, however, pass over—lest I exceed the permitted space—cases where, since Gellius clearly and sincerely named his authors, everything is clear, and the few instances where there is not even room for conjecture.