On Medicine

The Critical Annotation will repair what I omitted to do, moved by too much reverence for the codices. I do not believe there is any reason why the authority of the codices should hold us back, nor indeed their consensus; for whoever is accustomed to handling ancient parchments judges the very context of the speech they exhibit by the laws of critical art, since the context itself provides the props by which it can be determined which passages are genuine and which are not. The decrees of this art in such matters can undoubtedly be opposed to some extent, and the personal reasoning of any editor is not always foreign to them: for this reason, a measure must be applied to this use of critical art, and reasons must be given everywhere, which I have never neglected to do, as to why you acted this way and not otherwise.

There exist almost as many codices exhibiting Celsus as there are editions of this writer; yet it is far from the case that the same value or the same authority is to be attributed to all of them. In the first place, it must be noted that all these codices proceeded from the same prototype; for all of them, for example, exhibit a large lacuna (page 154, 6 of my edition) and other somewhat smaller ones (page 144, 35; 153, 26; 154, 6; 212, 17; 238, 3; 292, 25; 305, 26 and 362, 4) which are obvious. All of them, moreover, have the same glosses, both Greek and Latin, as I have already noted above. As far as the age is concerned, they are to be distributed into two classes, of which one consists of the Vatican VIII, the Medicean I*) "The first Medicean codex, Plut. 83, is preserved in the Medicean Library in Florence. It is the same Medicean codex that Rhodius and Cocchius praised. It was written in the beginning of the 12th century. Baptista Pallavicinus, Bishop of Reggio, undertook to correct it; in doing so, he allowed himself such liberty that he made it into an entirely different work. However, he used a very ancient and very corrupt exemplar, as he himself says; from which it can be gathered that he changed some things by conjecture. Otherwise, that exemplar seems very similar to the one from which the other Mediceans (II-VII) are derived. — The eighth Vatican codex (Vat. VIII = No 5951) was written in the 10th century, though not by the same hand. In this codex, as in the Medicean I, there is no division of the books into chapters; there are, however, as in that one, several titles inscribed in the margin." Targa. — It ends with these words in book VIII, chap. 21 (p. 360, 27) "and into the interior and in," as the most friendly man abounding in learning, now living in Rome, Du Rieu, informed me; but not in these: "The knee truly and in, as." and the Parisian...