Philosophical Works of Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Vol. 3

cavit 1; meanwhile, to our Exterus, who asked me if I had anything prepared regarding Seneca (whose new edition he was then laboring to produce from the press of the Bipontine Society), I was by no means reluctant to hand over these Moral Epistles of that Philosopher, amended as best I could by my own care and study, according to the prescription of ancient books and the laws of the critical art.

It remains for me to render an account of those readings which I judged were to be preferred to others in controversial places, and of other emendations which, by our own conjecture—though indeed very rarely—I thought should be introduced in certain desperate passages. To this end point the Critical Notes which I promised in the title of the work 2: in which indeed it will seem not inconveniently done if I have occasionally annotated even certain slighter discrepancies of our codices, or even some monstrous hallucinations of the copyists, from which a certain judgment might be formed concerning the character and custom of each codex. But before I dismiss the reader to those Notes, I understand that I must speak somewhat more clearly both about our Strasbourg Codices themselves and about other aids I have used to procure this edition; which topic I shall dispatch with as brief a discussion as I can.

That oldest and most approved of our codices, which I have been accustomed to mark with one of these signs, ms. a. Arg. a. or even simply a., is written clearly and magnificently on thick parchment, consisting of 132 leaves, distributed through seventeen quires of square format. From the duct of the pen and the entire character of the script (in which, to note this, the diphthongs æ and œ are correctly distinguished from the simple vowel e, and are almost constantly expressed explicitly by two letters; nor does any compendium of writing occur, except for the figure & for et, placed mostly in the middle of words, and the diphthong æ very rarely indicated by the tail of the letter e appended), you would undoubtedly conclude that this codex was written around the ninth century after Christ 3, and indeed that it had been

1 In the Pref. to vol. IV, page 9 (in our ed. vol. I, p. XIV).
2 Which title we have inserted in our foreword to this volume.
3 Both the form of the majuscule letters and the minuscule is nearly similar