VI

EDITOR'S PREFACE

much decay it has suffered in manuscripts by adding, omitting, changing, and interpolating. However, once the art of printing was invented, this calamity was even increased. For since the person who managed the editio princeps first edition in Paris around the year 1470 had delivered for transcription a codex of very poor quality, as usually happens1) Just as the 'works' of our poets were reprinted in type, it is certain that the worst and most recent copies—and indeed those to which the most shameful errors had been sprinkled by plagiarists—were handed over to the printers., few things were corrected by the learned men who applied themselves to Florus after him, while many more were defaced with new errors. This continued until the two men, Claudius Salmasius, whose corrections Ianus Gruterus made public, and Ioannes Freinshemius, promoted the recension and emendation to an amazing degree. The latter, imbued with an excellent knowledge of Roman history and the Latin language, removed more faults than anyone before him. The former, having perceived not only the quality of the Nazarian codex, but also the traces of another recension detected in Iordanes, laid firmer foundations upon which emendation could rest. Those learned Dutch and German men who followed them—besides I. G. Graevius, who first showed that Florus should be counted more among the rhetoricians than the historians—did not accomplish much in either editing or explaining. Therefore, that common reading, as it was called, reigned and was anxiously preserved in this monument of antiquity as well, until the age of C. Lachmann, an immortal man. For he was not only useful to Florus as an example of the method and reason by which ancient writers should be edited, but he knew that in the Bamberg library—which was then being opened to the studies of learned men primarily through the praiseworthy work of Iaeck—a codex was preserved, with the help of which Florus could be significantly emended...