OF TIBULLUS

Ianus Dousa the elder had received varieties of readings for Tibullus from Lipsius, which he, while he was in Rome, had excerpted from the ancient trustworthiness of parchment codices, from which he recorded the more notable ones in his Praecidanea Pre-cuttings/Preliminary studies on Tibullus, chapters 15 and 16. There are among them some which are found in no other books, so that a suspicion might easily arise that Lipsius used a book more ancient than ours; truly, they are nearly of such a kind that they might appear to have proceeded from the genius of some learned man. For—a point that must at least be warned by me here—when the study of ancient letters was revived, many in the 14th and 15th centuries turned their genius to Roman poetry, and Tibullus was especially the one whom the Italians eagerly imitated. I have already praised Hercules Strozza, Sannazarius, and Pontanus above; he who approaches the delights of the Italian poets will see others. It was done through the zeal of these most ingenious men that copies of Tibullus, corrected by learned men and even with gaps filled in, were circulated everywhere; and indeed, such copies were, in the true sense, interpolated. Many things, therefore, had to be eliminated, especially in the first reviews of Muretus, concerning which we have warned in individual places. And since these things had not escaped Jos. Scaliger, a man most excellent in the power of judgment and genius, when it seemed to him that he detected not a few places in the elegies of Tibullus that were connected by no bond of sense, he should have stopped at saying that the first and second [elegies] of the first book consisted of excerpts of many elegies; instead, he arrived at the point of transferring several verses from a less convenient to a more convenient place, as it seemed to him. He maintained this endeavor in Propertius as well, and in Manilius, and in the satire of Sulpicia, with Dousa and Barthius indeed approving. And he thoroughly dissected the first elegy of our poet, as he did most of those of the first book, and like the mangled limbs of some Absyrtus A mythological figure whose body was dismembered and scattered by his sister Medea., he dispersed its parts. Indeed, though I may concede that some pages and some verses, which we have sometimes seen done, for example in Lucian, *) have been transposed, yet it is incredible that, in

*) Scaliger in the commentary, p. 216. Read the life of this poet by L. Gyraldus; there you will see the

exemplar from which all the Tibullus [texts] that exist today are propagated, disturbed by several transposed pages.