Compendium of Learning (Compendiosa Doctrina), Vol. I

VI
PREFACE.

What spurs, what stimuli will be applied to one who has undertaken Horace after Bentley, Ovid after Heinsius, Lucretius after Lachmann, so that you might be equal to the skill of these men, or at least not too inferior? Now, what glory, what honor can there be if you have surpassed Gerlach or those like Gerlach in the art of judgment or in knowledge of grammar?

Furthermore, critics who are rightly so called, even if they occasionally deviate from the truth in more difficult passages—which is the weakness of human nature—usually treat the remainder in such a way that nothing can be added or taken away. But the efforts of those who most recently edited Nonius were such that you could not trust them safely even with a single letter. Hence, how many annoyances, how much weariness do you think arose for us?

Meanwhile, through the course of the years, and especially in most recent times, I know not how, the opinion and reputation of our Nonius has been miraculously increasing among scholars; and I have often been asked by those known and unknown alike, in letters sometimes supplicating, sometimes threatening in jest, to finally put the finishing touch to it.

Nor can it seem a wonder that this book, which you hold in your hands, has been demanded more impatiently by some, while the studies of the most ancient Latin language, deservedly initiated by Lachmann and Ritschelius, are still flourishing, to which certainly much was missing before a recension of the Nonian work, tempered by art and reason, had appeared.

For although most things of the oldest Latinity are still obscure and intricate due to the ruin with which the monuments of the geniuses prior to Cicero have been afflicted, the condition of that language would be much more precarious and abandoned if the Compendiosa Doctrina of Nonius did not exist.

For what, to mention a few things, would we know about the satires of Varro without this? How great a part of Ennius and Lucilius, how great a part of the tragedians and comedians after Plautus is contained therein! For I pass over the fact that many errors of the books that have survived can be removed by employing Nonius.

And by Hercules, because of the passages of writers that he cites, he has been frequented at all times, and by being tested by learned men, he has provided nearly infinite material for dispute, both for critics of the highest and lowest order. For who would care much about Nonius himself, a man of the most foolish Roman type?

But the claim by some that his use would now be small or none, because the authors cited by him have been edited anew with greater art and care than before over recent times, is from every point of view the most false and vain.