The Veterinary Medicine of Chiron (Mulomedicina Chironis)

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about the rustic Latin language that stablemen used around 400 AD? I ask those benevolent readers to consult the very rich indices attached to my edition, in which I have placed everything that seemed to be of any moment under inspection. But in order that they may use the indices correctly, I would like them to consider how much faith should be placed in the scribe of the Munich codex in general, whose art we recognize very quickly from the phototype table added to the end of the edition. The end of the first book of the Mulomedicina with the subscription and with four lines of the index of the second book, that is, below p. 18, 28–21, 1, is expressed in the table. [I have placed] the numbers of the Vegetian chapters, which correspond to the individual particles of the Mulomedicina, in the left margin of the two columns, so that you may connect them. For book V having been finished (§ 519), the matter was brought to an end in such a way that we expect the "dynamidia," as they are called (p. 20, 17), to follow immediately by way of an appendix. Nevertheless, do not think that books VI onwards were added from elsewhere by a reviser to the genuine work, to which not a few chapters of those books are claimed by the testimonies of Vegetius and the Hippiatrica. And that the hodgepodge of many medicines, such as we read congested in book IX § 785–976, was "at the end" of the Chironian work, Vegetius expressly confirms. That the Mulomedicina is mangled and disturbed is also recognized from the fact that we look in vain for those places to which we are delegated by the writer. It clearly conflicts with the order of books established today that we read at VII 80 § 701 (p. 220, 19): "I have demonstrated [you will demonstrate] the other passions and cures of the whole body in the fifth book." How great the chapters of the genuine work were, we perceive from III 1 § 115–228. Also elsewhere, one genuine chapter can be sewn together from several scraps, as I 2–9 § 16–26 (cf. p. 8, 29), III 12–16 § 266–274, [and] III 19–23 § 284–296. To the same little man who constituted the books and often dissected the chapters quite ineptly (cf. e.g. p. 15, 4; p. 235 ff.), the indices of the chapters prefixed to the first eight books are owed. If you wish to know with what stupidity he composed them, I would like you to compare, e.g., the inscription "on the diligence of horses" p. 231, 2 with p. 232, 9. We caught the same reviser of the work speaking in the prefaces of the sixth book (p. 171, 11) and the eighth book (p. 232, 9). But at the beginning of the Mulomedicina (p. 4, 12), the genuine author emerges. Sometimes also Apsyrtus has put on the first persona, as we understand from the Hippiatrica, cf. p. 107, 4; 132, 8; p. 148, 1. But this is a question of deeper inquiry.