The Veterinary Medicine of Chiron (Mulomedicina Chironis)

so that we often do not know how to join words together, especially since the scribe did not distinguish sentences. Nor does the perpetual mixing of cases and genders cause small annoyances for readers. Indeed, a large part of the Mulomedicina has survived in such a corrupt state that, when the other witnesses (Vegetius, the Hippiatrica veterinary treatises, Pelagonius, Columella) generally fail to assist us, an Oedipus is needed to solve the riddles of the biform old man referring to the text's corrupted state, if the gods permit. Indeed, we very often seem to be hearing a stammering child: words dissolved from any structure of the sentence, limbs scattered and conglomerated by repetition, the most putrid offspring of medieval scribes—who will cleanse this pestilent sewer?

But for him who will skillfully and to the best of his ability endeavor to clean out this immense filth, the danger looms that, in the heat of cleansing, he may sometimes wrongfully remove and discard things that are characteristic of rustic Latin speech, as if they were merely inventions of medieval scribes. For when we examine those parts of the Mulomedicina that have survived fairly well on the whole, there can be no doubt that the work was composed by a very crude and utterly boorish man, whom Vegetius rightly said was sullied by a lack of eloquence and the baseness of the speech itself. But who today could inflexibly define what we should forgive a half-shaven muleteer flourishing in 400 AD? You may recognize that rascal's childish ignorance from the fact that he translates what Apsyrtus said: "And this, moreover, has been found from the Georgics of Mago the Carthaginian" original: "καὶ τοῦτο δὲ ἐκ τῶν Γεωργικῶν Μάγωνος τοῦ Καρχηδονίου εὕρηται" as: "And let us not omit this, which was discovered by rustic magi, which they call the Carthaginian portal," cf. below p. 146, 21.

Since these things were so, I persuaded myself that the only true course was to leave the context of the words, however obscured by the filthiest barbarism, intact on the whole, unless I thought I could restore corrupted and senseless words to their original state. But since I was not unaware that even the most learned person would be driven mad by the amount of futile barbarisms of every kind, I also threw away not a few of them. So as not to bury the annotations in their mass,