PREFACE OF THE EDITOR

Graevius, Dukerus, and Seebodius might have employed better manuscripts, but they did so rather carelessly and did not even indicate their age. Aem. Baehrens, whom those who criticize for futile conjectures often forget has served Latin writers well by bringing forward codices that had lain buried in long neglect, rightly and deservedly ordered in the Rhenish Museum vol. XXX (1875) p. 629 that, besides the Nazarianus, other manuscripts of the same family, though of the greatest age, should be used. Mindful of this advice, while I was searching libraries for the sake of the philosopher Seneca and the Latin mythographers, I also inspected codices of Florus everywhere. Among these, although I found none related to the Bamberg codex, and most of those related to the Nazarianus belonged to the fourteenth or fifteenth century, yet some existed that were closer in age to the Nazarianus without, however, being copied from it.

The oldest of these, and the one much less defiled by interpolations than the others, is the Leidensis Vossianus in oct. 14 (L). It is written on thick and brownish parchment of octavo format (0.21 x 0.15) in a hand of the eleventh century that is sufficiently elegant, which at first used paler ink, but from folio 25 used darker ink. The same hand corrected quite a few things while writing, and others with darker ink after it had already brought the codex to completion. There are seventy-seven leaves of continuous script with twenty-three lines each. The inscriptions of books and chapters are painted in red lead or other colors, and the first words of the chapters are written in capital letters. It contains, besides Florus (fol. 1–72), the first seven summaries original: "periochas" of Livy, of which the final sentence of the last one (res praeterea — continet) has been omitted. Beck also dealt with it in his 'critical and paleographic observations on the epitome of Florus' p. 8 and elsewhere, and in the 'Woelfflinian commentaries' p. 162 sq. It differs, however, so much from N that it could in no way have flowed from it, but it belongs to another branch of the same family, from whose codex both the editio princeps first printed edition and the 'vulgate script' were derived. This fact, although it suffers from the same transposition of leaves as that one, of which I must speak below,