The Poems of Tibullus and the Elegies of Sulpicia

Nor does any seem to exist that is older, if perhaps you except the excerpts of Scaliger with the Cuiacian fragment, and I know not whether one English manuscript of Heinsius. A proof of this matter is that in mutilated passages, even in those manifestly corrupted, all books conspire in the corruption; which could not happen unless they had all flowed from one source. It is probable that the older book has now perished; for Tibullus does not seem to have been joined with that Propertius which was dragged out of a wine cellar by the young Pontanus (that is, around the year 1440). Nor could the Cuiacian book, whose fragment Scaliger used, have been the source of the others, because it has readings alien and diverse from the trustworthiness of all the rest. Furthermore, it is not sufficiently explored whether that codex, to which the gaps in Tibullus are owed, was the very one from which those more recent ones were described. It could have proceeded, and its copy as well, from some older one which had been damaged by age, mold, or chance, and it could have experienced this fate not long after the time of Tibullus. For the monuments of the Augustan age, including the works of genius, seem to have perished for the most part in the very first centuries, especially by the fires of the city which occurred under Nero and during the civil war that followed his death. I conclude this also from the fact that it was given to the credit of Domitian that he took the greatest care to repair libraries consumed by fire, with copies sought from everywhere: Suetonius, Domitian 20.

When, toward the end of the 15th century, old books began to be struck at the press, the manuscripts of Tibullus that were at hand were handed over, and they were not very corrected, as happened also with other ancient writers. No one has yet examined the editio princeps of 1472 accurately enough; however, it becomes probable that the Venetian edition of 1475 was expressed from it, as it also includes the Silvae of Statius, which that earlier one contained. From this, after a long comparison was instituted, I understood that the Reggio edition of 1481, the Vicentine of 1482, and the Leipzig edition (without year) were derived, though corrected in some places one way and in some another. Those editions generally prefer those readings which learned men restored from manuscripts. Yet, by some fate, this class of ancient editions has been neglected by subsequent editors and not inspected, unless perhaps by Muretus; or once or twice by the elder Douza.