The Birthday Book (De Die Natali)

Nunnesius also put effort into correcting the fragment, and his notes were published by Schottus after his human observations. The chapters on metrics are also read in Putschius (gramm. auctt. ant. p. 2723 sqq.) and Gaisford (scriptores Lat. rei metr. p. 404 sqq.).

There could be no doubt which path I had to follow. For only the codices D and R hold authority; for although they are tainted with many and foul errors, yet, if you except a few passages, the scribes transcribed quite faithfully what they seemed to read in the archetype codex; which has resulted in them mostly agreeing even in their faults, or differing in such a way that the source of the common error can escape no one. Yet R cannot have been copied from D itself, so that each must be considered in the place of a single codex. For although D is far older and otherwise excellent, it was not written by the scribe with such diligence that it lacks many wrongly written passages, which are read correctly in R; conversely, the scribe of codex R sins in other places, mostly by omitting words See p. 5, 10. 36, 2. 42, 1. 62, 9; 10. But on p. 52, D omits the word "father", which R recognizes., more rarely by adding interpolations Cf. p. 5, 2. 42, 12.. The other codices are of small importance; for besides being swarming with errors of the kind usually found in more recent books, the scribes not rarely corrupted the text further while attempting to correct what they did not understand. Wherefore, if they ever have a good reading that D and R do not offer, it has no more authority than the conjecture of any learned man.