PREFACE.

When I was editing the so-called Latin Anthology described from the Salmasian Codex in the year 1869, I conferred it again with the codex and transcribed the 'Julius Caesar' cosmography from the same book. I soon noticed that this particular version had not yet been edited. With this discovery, I was called back to the geographical studies for which I had felt an affinity since childhood. After other projects were completed, I formed a plan to publish that cosmography of Honorius, joined with everything that pertains to the chorography of Agrippa (as many today are of the opinion that they are closely linked). I added other things to these, led especially by the intention to include booklets that were still scattered and dispersed, but I omitted all those things which M. Pinder and G. Parthey have already edited with the greatest diligence (I speak of Pomponius Mela, the Itineraries, the Ravennate Geographer with Guido, and Dicuil). I also omitted the notices of the seats of the bishops who participated in the councils (although useful, they are foreign to this collection), descriptions of Rome (which Henricus Iordan is about to edit), and expositions of the Holy Land, as well as the poems of Avienus and Priscian, which should rather be received in collections of Greek geographers, and finally the very copious but useless jumble of Aethicus Ister. If you exclude these, my collection is similar to that which C. E. Glaeser once proposed to himself, though he did not complete it, cf. New Rhenish Museum vol. II p. 159. We have also heard that others have considered similar projects, among whom I first knew Conrad Peutinger, who it is agreed had in mind to edit the Latin geographers. I did not think the lists of provinces that Otto Seeck recently added to his edition of the Notitia dignitatum Register of Offices should be omitted. I also hope that I have done something not ungrateful to many by including the first fruits of Christian cosmography, which I have placed at the end of the book.

I have included in brackets those things which, while existing in the best books, I believe should be deleted; I have distinguished with italics those things which seem to be added to the words transmitted in the best codices. Through a certain strange inconsistency, the typesetter represented the letter m placed next to a vowel, sometimes correctly with a line macron as is customary, sometimes with a line bent like this a horizontal wavy line or tilde symbol, and sometimes by placing the letter itself: I ask for indulgence regarding this matter, which I could not prevent.