PREFACE

Since the copies of the smaller edition, with which Henricus Keil had purified the books of Varro's On Rural Matters in the year 1889, had been sold out, and the most honorable publisher wished for me to undertake the task of a second revision, I thought that I should not deny my efforts either to the memory of that most venerable man, with whom I was joined by a bond of both friendship and devotion, or to the wishes of the patrons of that most illustrious press. Thus, I began to collect whatever I saw had been contributed by others to the emendation of these books, to examine the author's words with intense care, and to revise the critical apparatus. Since no one after Keil has doubted the critical resources he used or the method by which he believed the original script of the archetype codex could be recovered, nor did I have any reason to doubt them myself, I wished to state clearly that I have acquiesced in those things which he composed with diligent labor and prudent judgment, except that I preferred to reduce the apparatus, which he had intended to be bipartite, into a simpler form. Certain things that had been less correctly presented in the apparatus were long ago corrected in a commentary published some years later: I transferred these corrections, and certain others sought from the larger edition, into the apparatus, and I have annotated nothing beyond that. Keil had already restored the scripts of the archetype with mostly very sound judgment, and I have followed him in such a way that I preferred to attend to clarity rather than brevity. In matters of orthography, I have published the script of the archetype; in this regard, I judged that the charge of inconsistency was by no means to be avoided. I have therefore admitted maioris, minoris, praegnationis, and the like, nor have I restored the so-called assimilation except where I found it in the books. — The testimonies to be inscribed again from the larger edition [are] not