The Poems of Tibullus and the Elegies of Sulpicia

I had left the critical part of the book untouched from the beginning; soon, however, while reading, I understood that this too had to be reconsidered. First, because I saw that I had attributed too much to the authority of Scaliger and Broukhusius in other places, even though I had already departed from it in many; and then, because in the sources and propagated streams of the Tibullian reading, following earlier interpreters, I had been completely blind. For now, there were at hand many old editions, and among these the Vicentine, but especially the Aldine, not to mention the Gryphian, Colinaean, and Plantinian, an apparatus which had been lacking among the others in the previous review. There was also a greater experience in critical matters, so that I could now more sagaciously investigate the vicissitudes and fortunes of the Tibullian reading and of the poem as propagated through manuscripts and editions. I have set forth the summary of this matter in the commentary, placed beneath this preface, regarding the reading or context of Tibullus. Regarding individual readings in individual places, I have either changed previous observations or appended new ones born from a new comparison of the books. I have also now consulted the Corvinian Tibullus, along with the variety of readings added by a learned hand to the old Vicentine edition, and with another derived from the hand of Iacobus Tollius, about which I have warned more diligently in the same commentary. In that commentary, I have dealt with this whole genre, and especially with the editions of Tibullus, much more accurately than could have been done by me in the past. For, apart from the one they mention as having been struck in 1472, there is hardly any edition of Tibullus that I have not inspected, either then or now, and I have investigated whence the reading was derived. Nor did I think it alien to the duty of a good interpreter to revise the Life of Tibullus and, having cut away vain guesses, to leave those things that can be said with some reliability. I would wish that I have carried out this task in such a way that young men who wish to test their strength in this genre might have an example they can use for treating other, heavier subjects.