XVIIII

DE CODICIBVS ON THE CODICES

Claudian p. 32) and J. A. Fabricius (Bibliotheca Latina III 214, ed. Ernesti, and Bibliotheca Latina Mediae et Infimae Aetatis I, p. 330), so that it seems sufficient, as far as it can be done, to investigate from what time the books of Martianus began to be used in schools.

Therefore, Fabricius already praised this passage of Gregory of Tours (Book X, at the end), where the author, having exhorted whoever was to be his successor to preserve his book diligently, says among other things: "But if our Martianus, whoever you are, priest of God, has educated you in the seven disciplines—that is, if he has taught you to read in grammar, to notice the propositions of arguments in dialectic, to recognize the types of meters in rhetoric, to collect the measurements of lands and lines in geometry, to ring out the modulations of sounds with the songs of sweet accents in harmonics—if you have been so trained in all these things that our style seems rustic to you, I do not even then beg that you tear away what I have written." Guadetus and Tarannus, in the Paris edition of 1836, noted that these things which I have appended, along with the entire final part of the tenth book, were omitted in the Colbertine codex, observing simultaneously that Cointius judged "those things which follow were added by some modern." And it would truly be easy to judge this matter if the French editors had reported with a little more care on the authority of their codices and had noted the variety of the script. For I do not know if it can be concluded from the silence of the editors that that epilogue is read in the Cambrai codex ('written in the 8th and 9th centuries') and the Royal B codex; for similarly, in the Cluny codex, other things are substituted for this epilogue, and those that are, it seems, much less suitable. But since they had said in the preface (p. XIII) that "Royal B agrees in almost all things with the Cluny codex," you might rightly doubt the good faith of those who noted nothing about Royal B in this place. Nevertheless, I consider it probable that in other codices—