Florus, Epitome of Roman History and Fragment

PRAEFATIO EDITORIS

of which only the beginning survives such that it is clear it was h or l or b, not t as Jahn thinks. Therefore, hic should be written, not tum. Indeed, there is an abundance of those things that pertain to orthography. Nevertheless, where Halm thought he saw more in the erasures than Jahn did, he sometimes erred. For instance, p. 47, 5, after butteone (Buteone B according to Halm), it is not cs that was erased but m; p. 54, 12, the erasure in which the last three letters of the word eurus are read is not so large that flans, which Halm conjectures should be added, could have been written in it; finally, p. 84, 5, Halm did not see that in the erasure after quippe, that very word, which the scribe had repeated by mistake, had been deleted.

All other manuscripts of Florus that have survived differ from the Bamberg codex in such a way that they must all be attributed to the same family. Of this fairly large number, the oldest is the Palatinus Latinus 894 (N), once kept in the library of the monastery of the blessed Nazarius at Lorsch, and therefore called the Nazarianus by learned men after Salmasius. Since I have described it more accurately in the 'Rheinisches Museum' vol. XLIV (1889) p. 66 sq., I shall repeat here only the more important points. It was therefore transcribed in the middle or end of the ninth century on thick and yellowish membranes of quarto format (0.25 × 0.17). There are single columns, twenty-five lines per page. It was corrected first by the same hand (N¹) and, it seems, by using an archetypum master copy, either while writing or when the codex was finished, when the initial letters and quire numbers were added with darker ink. Jahn often did not distinguish from this hand the second hand of the twelfth century (N²), which corrected certain light errors, but much more often corrupted readings that were sound or suffering only from minor faults. For this matter, one example may suffice: p. 82, 6, when N had changed flagrans into fira clans, N² ruined the passage in such a way that he wrote in the margin vel dira clades1) in periocha Livii sexta eundem correctorem notam S. C. non senatus consultum, sed scandalum interpretari iam dixi 'musei Rhenani' XLIV (1889) p. 67. In the sixth summary of Livy, I have already said in 'Rheinisches Museum' XLIV (1889) p. 67 that this same corrector interprets the note 'S. C.' not as 'senatus consultum', but as 'scandalum'.. This book...