IX

EDITOR'S PREFACE

and other books of the same class, and they reject many excellent readings of Iordanes and the Bamberg codex as foul interpolations. Indeed, Beckius (Commentat. Woelfflin. p. 166) even suspects that their archetype suffered the hand of an 'not unskilled' interpolator in the fifth or sixth century. We see, therefore, that the same intricate and sufficiently difficult question has arisen in editing Florus which obscures or has obscured the criticism of so many other writers. For, not to mention those famous Nibelungen codices, the condition of Aeschylus and Sophocles, Thucydides, Plato, Lucian, Cicero, certain books of Caesar, Seneca, the tragedies and philosophical books, Lucan, and finally others, is very similar. But since critics who applied themselves to these writers had for a long enough time withdrawn into two parties waging fierce war among themselves—of whom the former contended that all the rest were derived from the most ancient codex and that their peculiar readings should be rejected as mere scribal conjectures, while the latter wanted them to be taken into account—now the matter has arrived at the point where, with the increased commerce of libraries transmitting codices to one another and the ease of travel, one investigates more diligently into more recent books, or at least it is permitted to investigate more than was done or could be done in the age of Bekker, Lachmann, and Orellius. For although we must hold fast to that law which they established—that from the jumble of manuscripts one or few should be chosen that excel others in quality and age, and which must be followed as leaders and standard-bearers in establishing a writer’s speech—nevertheless, one must avoid the sloth and inertia of those who shout with greater confidence, the fewer they have known, that all other codices flowed from them or were 'impudently interpolated.' And I am not speaking of those books which experienced the emending and interpolating hands of the 'Italians' in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but there exist not rarely, besides the primary books written from the eighth to the eleventh century, other books of the second order of writers much read in the Middle Ages.