Philosophical Works of Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Vol. 3

as being added, indeed, by interpolators without any good omen; he lamented with me that the Epistles of Seneca had been edited twice in very recent times before the editors could have used the more abundant resources for correcting them, which it was established were prepared and ready at the hands of certain people¹. Then the learned man directed his plan for a Commentary, to be attached to his edition, such that from these things which concerned the correction of the context, he would select only those which were of some greater moment, and he would turn his primary care toward the interpretation of the more difficult passages, while he began to urge and exhort me to continue to labor on the critical part, and either to share with him my Notes regarding the whole work, to be brought to light one day along with his own Annotations, or to command that the text itself, amended by my judgment and illustrated by critical observations, be brought into the public, however the occasion might allow. I accepted the condition, and I applied the most diligent effort I could to our Philosopher; and since Matthiæ has professed that he will not publish his Annotations before that apparatus of variant readings appears in public, which Ruhkopf signified he would insert into the sixth volume of his Seneca...

¹ I refer to that apparatus prepared by the care and study of Ign. Aug. Fessler, at the expense of the bookseller Korn of Wrocław; which contains (as Ruhkopf says in the Pref. to Sen. vol. IV, p. 6 sq., and in our own ed. vol. I, p. XII) a famous abundance of variant readings from manuscript codices, which are preserved in the Ambrosian Library at Milan, in Vienna, Strasbourg, Bern, Altdorf, Erfurt, Helmstedt, Erlangen, and Wolfenbüttel. Those materials had been collected with this intent, that with their help a new and most perfect edition of Seneca's works would be prepared, which had been promised with great fanfare in the year '95 of the last century, to be brought into the public three years later (see Intelligenzblatt der Allg. Lit. Zeitung, 1796. No. 24.), but it never appeared in public. Those same materials, recently purchased with the funds of the Weidmann bookstore, after the Epistles of Seneca had already been edited by Ruhkopf and Matthiæ, have come into the hands of Ruhkopf, as he himself teaches in the same Preface, p. 7 sq., and he signifies that hope has been given to him that collations of some Vatican and Florentine codices will soon follow. As for the variety of readings communicated to Fessler from the Strasbourg codices, I recently understood from an obscure indication that it was procured by my formerly learned colleague and predecessor in the care of public Libraries, Oberlin.

² In the Program mentioned above, p. 4.