PREFACE

It happened almost by chance that we transferred the partnership, formerly joined by our most beloved teacher Ritschelius Friedrich Ritschl for the purpose of editing Plautus, to Varro's books on the Latin language. For when one of us offered himself to the publisher to be included in the Teubner Library edition, he discovered that an agreement on this matter had already been reached with the other. Therefore, it was decided to enter into a partnership for this task as well. We did not regret this new token of friendship, even though we argued bitterly between ourselves on not a few points, until either one yielded to the other, or we conceived of an entirely new opinion, or, having admitted a "non liquet" original: "non liquet" meaning "it is not clear", we left the matter in the middle. We did not wish to distinguish between our individual efforts, so that we might more openly declare that we have set down nothing which we do not concede could be admissible in some way, and at the same time to signify that we do not attribute too much to ourselves regarding our discoveries and the praise for discovery.

But as the work progressed, we were moved from a simple recognition, which both of us had considered from the beginning, to managing a larger edition. For we understood that both a new collation of the Laurentian codex original: "codicis Laurentiani" was necessary, and that both the interpretation and the constitution of the words would be much aided by the addition of "testimonies." Under this name, we comprehend not only the passages exhibited by articulate writers in the words of Varro, which are few, but also a wealth of parallel passages and homoiotēton similarities. Where we selected the better ones, we only indicated the rest. We do not doubt that quite a lot could be added to this apparatus, since we applied our effort to seeking out these testimonies rather late. But even so, anyone who compares the passages we have cited as "testimonies" with the commentaries of our predecessors will easily understand that much can be gained from it. From the great number of those commentaries, we have intentionally omitted not a few things that could be adopted from the richer apparatus of the Spengels. Finally, we decided that both fuller prolegomena and added annotations and enlarged, slightly differently formatted indices were necessary.

Although we had decided from the beginning to add the fragments of the remaining grammatical writings of Varro, we did not desist from this plan, although Funaioli Gino Funaioli in the meantime inserted these into the first volume of Roman Grammatical Fragments in 1907, and Wessnerus Paul Wessner will soon, we hope, insert them into a collection of all of Varro's remains.