Complete Works of Lactantius, Vol. II

and the Vienna codex 717 (14th c.). I have cited this Vienna codex twice in the apparatus (at lines 64 and 68) when presenting readings that are usually attributed to old editions rather than codices.

A certain aid for emending the corrupted places of the poem—among which are those disturbed by the damage of time or by scribes, or by both—is provided by the passages of the authors whom the poet followed and those of the writers who imitated him or adapted him to their own use in some other way. I have placed in the apparatus the passages of this kind collected in the Burmann edition, then others indicated by Baehrens, Birt, Riese, Weyman (from Zeno of Verona at lines 163 ff., Rheinisches Museum XLVII, 640), and others, to which I have added some from Venantius Fortunatus, the Pseudo-Cyprian, and others. Herm. Gaebler gave a summary of how the author of the Anglo-Saxon poem entitled The Phoenix followed or changed the Phoenix of Lactantius (On the Authorship of the Anglo-Saxon Phoenix Poem, 1880, pp. 6 ff. [= Wuelcker’s Anglia III, 491 ff.]), and Frid. Lauchert also touched upon it (History of the Physiologus, 1889, pp. 112 ff.). I have examined this accurately with a certain friend of mine who is very skilled in that language, but without any certain profit for restoring the poet's words: for the Anglo-Saxon poet, whom Gaebler and others believe to have been Cynewulf, rendered those very passages which are depraved in the Latin poem with such liberty that you might suspect he wished to cover up, in some way, those same damages of the poem which have vexed more recent scholars.¹ — To most

¹ A notable passage of this kind is line 234 (Grein) of the Anglo-Saxon poem, where the words crescit in umbra original: "grows in the shadow" (referring to the worm) seem to correspond to line 103 of the Latin poem, which is poorly handed down in the oldest codices: creuerit inmensum subitus (or subitur or subito) tempore certo original: "it will have grown immense, sudden at a certain time". But how the words of Lactantius can be corrected so as to approach the meaning of the imitator, I, for one, do not see. Lauchert (pp. 113 f.) thinks that the Anglo-Saxon, in this place, also looked to another author who had some connection with the so-called Physiologus: a conjecture I fear is not correct. For throughout this very passage of the Anglo-Saxon poem, there are found traces of the Latin that are not in the least doubtful, and Lauchert did not indicate any other passage in the first part of the poem (lines 1–380), which is composed after the example of the Latin, that he might have taken from another source; for the other part, lines 381–677,