Surviving Works, Vol. II

In the preface to volume I, page VIII, I mentioned the annotations written in the margin of the London edition copy which is in the public library at Dorpat, which M. L. Mercklinus sent to me. The very learned man expended the greatest effort in describing those annotations, adding the page and line numbers of the Zeunian edition which he knew I possessed; I, however, nowhere made mention of them. I cannot but state here why this was done, lest I appear either negligent or ungrateful. Having stored the letter sent to me in the year 1841 for another time, or rather, as often happens, having hidden it away, I did not find it when I was about to write my own annotations, nor did I come upon them until very recently. If I had had them beforehand, I would have been freed from no small labor in searching for the Virgilian passages, which Zeunius did not indicate in some part of book IV of the Saturnalia, and in amending the booklet On the Differences and Similarities of the Greek and Latin Verb, in which I was destitute of almost all resources. Those annotations were written, if I. A. Noesseltius—in whose possession that copy of the London edition once was—is to be trusted, by Ioannes Albertus Fabricius, which indeed, as he says, both the handwriting and the index of writers whom Macrobius had cited reveal, although this [index] is far richer than the one you will find in Fabricius' Bibl. Lat., Vol. III, page 137 sq. ⁷) Regarding what he said about the index of writers, I confess I do not know what it means; Mercklinus saw that these things contradict rather than support that opinion, and he indeed noted that there are some things written on the front of the book by the same hand concerning the fragments of Macrobius which would entirely agree with those things read in Fabricius' Bibl. Lat. III, p. 186. The same man discovered another trace by which the author of those annotations might be investigated. For this person wrote next to Sat. V, 13, 25: „See what I said on Longus, p. 39.“; but Mercklinus discovered nothing more than I did about whether Fabricius had written anything on Longus or on Longinus. However, these annotations contain

u. Paed. Suppl. XVII, p. 618) that Virgil in the beginning of the Georgics said:

And mixed Acheloian cups with discovered grapes

not for the reason that Macrobius wants—that the Greeks, moved by the authority of the Dodonaean oracle, often used Achelous for any water—but because grapes had been discovered near this river.

⁷) Of the V. edition, as it seems; for in the IV. edition this index is not read at all, and in the edition arranged and augmented by Ernesti, it is read in Vol. III, p. 186 sqq. Cf. preface of Fabricius, Vol. I, p. XLIII. Furthermore, it should be noted that Fabricius did not take his index of writers from the London edition, which the person who wrote these annotations used, but prefixed the words to it: From the edition of Io. Isaacus Pontanus, Leiden 1628.