PREFACE OF THE EDITOR

Font cum Furthermore, for editing Florus, we have a twofold aid: that of the historians whom he either used himself or whose sources he plundered, and those who converted the epitome for their own use. However, since these are very important and to be placed in almost the same rank as the best codices, we must use them much more cautiously. For, to say nothing of the drive to innovate inherent in those who copy others' books and that one writer uses his source differently, do not forget auct Flo that Florus is a rhetorician who seeks new colors and strives to vary cleverly said things from his predecessors. Therefore, mindful of Caesar's I came, I saw, I conquered, he intentionally says of Pharnaces (II 13, 63): Caesar... crushed him like lightning, because at one and the same moment he came, struck, departed. Then, in II 12, 6, where he calls Fulvia a most worthless whore, but more innocent than the patricians, it could not be otherwise than that Sallust, whom he follows in this whole chapter,1) was in his mind, having called her a noble woman in Conspiracy of Catiline 23, 3. Thus, since Quintilian (III 7, 5) had said in the well-known and frequently told fable about Romulus and Remus: thrown into the flowing water, with which Arnobius (IV 3) and the book On Famous Men (1, 2) agree on the verb of throwing, it could easily happen that Florus (I 1, 2) preferred cast into the flowing water—which B and Jordanes have—over the other version, which C also placed, whether by chance or because it was found somewhere. A similar drive to vary is seen in the fact that, when Livy (I 7, 1) and others had used the form vultures in the same fable, Florus (I 1, 6), as B attests, preferred the rarer vulturios vultures, which was changed back to the former by Jordanes and in C.2) To add a third example, Florus (I 7, 3), most aptly to signify Tullia's impiety, said of her: carried by her carriage over her bloody father, she drove on the terrified horses (so B and Jordanes). For although the reading of the other recension seems to be confirmed by places in Livy (I 48, 7), Justin (XLI 6, 5), and the book On Famous Men (7, 18), it is also clear that a simple verb instead of a compound, which Florus uses with the same meaning also in II 13, 68, could very easily have occurred to some interpolator.

1) See below p. LVIII.
2) In the long narration of the same event which is in the booklet On the Origin of the Roman People 23 (ed. B. Sepp, Eichstätt 1885), vulturios is found twice, vultures once.