Florus, Epitome of Roman History and Fragment

PRAEFATIO EDITORIS

and those written in the twelfth, thirteenth, or early fourteenth century. These are undeservedly confused by very many learned men with those most recent ones and are scarcely examined. If, however, any of their readings becomes known from somewhere—which they are forced to concede as the only true one, even against their will—it is called a lucky conjecture of some librarian, or certain abbots of wondrous sagacity are imagined to have devised such thingsoriginal: "1) cum tales viros qualis Servatus Lupus Ferrariensis fuit rarissimos fuisse constat, tum nusquam hic in epistulis de scriptoribus a se ex ingenio emendatis loquitur, sed de suorum exemplarium vitiis comparatione aliorum codicum sanandis." Although it is agreed that men such as Servatus Lupus of Ferrières were very rare, he nowhere speaks in his letters of writers emended by his own wit, but rather of healing the vices of his own copies through the comparison of other codices.. As if those same little men, whom we see stumbling and faltering most shamefully in no difficulty, had surpassed the Scaligers, Bentleys, and Hermanns in acuteness in other, most gravely corrupted places. Codices of this kind, therefore, must be examined more diligently than is done by most, and if they contain readings not handed down in older ones and not suspected of fraud, they should be called upon for aid in such a way that not all of their discrepancies are noted, but only the more serious ones and those more worthy of mention.

But now let us return to Florus. For since it is agreed that every writer must be edited according to his own standard, we must do the same in the crisis of this author s: whose codices neither Jahn nor Halm had known, nor did they collate them for use in such a way that they could be said to have been exhausted to the last grain of dust.

Therefore, the Bambergensis E III 22 (B) holds the leading place in age among all the codices of Florus—a fact which must be noted against Sauppe (opusc. opuscula/minor works p. 609)—inasmuch as it was transcribed as early as the beginning of the ninth century, whereas the writing of the Nazarianus referring to the Palatinus Latinus 894 already verges so much toward the following century that it seems it should be attributed to the middle or end of the tenthoriginal: "2) v. quae 'musei Rhenani' XLIV (1889) p. 67 exposui." See what I have set forth in 'Rheinisches Museum' XLIV (1889) p. 67.. The membranes are of a smaller quarto format (0.13 × 0.19) and are quite thick and dark, on whose pages 53 to 214—for the 'History of Dares Phrygius' and the 'Breviary of Festus' by slightly more recent hands precede—Florus is written in individual...