Columella: On Agriculture, Vol. I (Loeb)

important manuscripts (see p. xx of Vol. I), which fall into two classes: (a) the two 9th–10th century manuscripts and (b) the two best of the 15th-century manuscripts. The photostats, which were used by Dr. Ash for his collation of Books III and IV, were purchased with a grant provided by the Faculty Research Fund of the University of Pennsylvania. The only point in which my text of these books differs from that of Dr. Ash is that I have not had the opportunity—which Dr. Ash had—of comparing my text with that of the manuscript known as Morganensis 138, formerly Hamiltonensis 184 in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York.

For some unexplained reason, the text of Book V, especially from Chapter VIII to the end, is in a worse condition than any other part of the work. There is the further complication that, from Chapter X to the end, the text, though slightly longer, is closely identical with that of De Arboribus, Chapter XVIII to the end. It seems certain that the De Arboribus is part of an earlier and shorter treatise which was afterwards superseded by the De Re Rustica. It is a question of how far the text of these similar chapters in the De Rustica and the De Arboribus should be corrected from one another. There are numerous places in which the text of Book V is deficient or careless, and these can be corrected from the De Arboribus, but it also appears that the author made a good many verbal changes as well as inserting new matter. I have, therefore, refrained from making the two slightly different versions correspond exactly and have kept the manuscript reading in both treatises where it makes sense—very often the same sense in slightly different...