The Extant Works of Macrobius, Vol. 2

In the preface to volume I, page VIII, I mentioned the annotations in the margin of the London edition copy which is in the public library at Dorpat, which M. L. Mercklin sent to me. That learned man expended the greatest effort in transcribing those annotations, adding the page and line numbers of the Zeunian edition, which he knew I possessed: I, however, nowhere made mention of them. Why this was done, I cannot fail to say here, lest I appear either negligent or ungrateful. I stored away the letter sent to me in the year 1841, reserving it for another time, or rather, as happens, I hid it, so that when I was about to write my own annotations, I could not find them, nor did I stumble upon them until very recently. If I had had them beforehand, I would have been freed from no small labor in searching for the Virgilian passages, which Zeunius did not indicate in a certain part of book IV of the Saturnalia, and in correcting the little book On the Differences and Similarities of the Greek and Latin Verb, in which I was left without almost all resources. Those annotations, if credit is to be given to I. A. Noesselt, in whose possession that copy of the London edition once was, were written by Ioannes Albertus Fabricius, which indeed, as he says, both the hand or handwriting reveals, as well as the index of writers whom Macrobius had cited, although this is far richer than that which you will find in Fabricius, Bibl. Lat. T. III, p. 137 sq. ⁷) Regarding what he said about the index of writers, I confess I do not know what is intended: Mercklin saw that those things refute rather than support that opinion, who indeed added that there are read on the front of the book some things written by the same hand about the fragments of Macrobius which would be entirely in agreement with those things which are read in Fabricius, Bibl. Lat. III, p. 186. The same man discovered another trace by which to track down the author of those annotations. For he wrote near Sat. V, 13, 25: "See what I said on Longus p. 39."; but Mercklin did not know any more than I whether Fabricius had written anything about Longus or Longinus. They contain, however,

u. Paed. Suppl. XVII, p. 618) R. Klotz well observed, that Virgil in the opening of the Georgics said:

Poculaque inventis Acheloia miscuit uvis
not because, as Macrobius wishes, the Greeks, moved by the authority of the Dodonaean oracle, often put Achelous for any water at all, but because near this river grapes had been discovered.

⁷) Of the V. edition, it seems; for in the IV. edition this index is not read at all, and in the edition arranged and augmented by Ernesti it is read in vol. III, p. 186 sqq. Cf. pref. Fabric. vol. I, p. XLIII. Furthermore, it should be noted that Fabricius did not take his index of writers from the London edition, which the person who wrote these annotations used, but prefixed to it the words: Ex editione Io. Isacci Pontani Lugd. Bat 1628.