On Agriculture

I have considered; I have adopted the more potent discrepancy. However, in revising the words, I realized that I had to disagree with Keil quite often: for although no page fails to show that he corrected a great many things excellently, I nevertheless thought that one must return to the books more frequently, abandoning the pursuit of lightness and uniformity to which he had attributed too much, sometimes aligning with other learned men, such as Leo, Wilamowitz, Reitzenstein, Ellis, Norden, and Schoell, and in certain few places accepting my own conjectures. But not even so will the critical apparatus easily teach those who use it that this repeated edition, although the publisher ordered my name to be inscribed upon it, has ceased to be Keil's. Moreover, in order that the close connection between the second and the former edition might be more apparent, I decided that the information regarding critical resources and editions which Keil set forth in this place should be transcribed word for word.

IVThe writing of the archetype, therefore, had to be sought partly from those things which Politian and Victorius annotated or received from the book itself, and partly from the apographs which now survive.

Politian’s excerpts are read in a copy of the editio princeps of the writers on rural matters, printed at Venice by Nicolaus Jenson in the year 1472, which is now preserved in the public library of Paris. For in it, by the hand of Politian in the year 1482, the readings of the codex, which was at that time in the library of S. Marco in Florence, were annotated in such a way that whatever was read differently in the manuscript book than in the printed copy was added either in the margins or between the lines of the edition.

Victorius, who himself also used the codex at the time when it was in the Marcian library, published the books of Cato and Varro on rural matters together with 'explanations of his own corrections on Cato, Varro, and Columella' in the year 1541 at Lyons, by Sebastian Gryphius. He, however, not only was the first to correct from an ancient codex the books of Cato and Varro, which were reported as being heavily corrupted in the older editions, but also often indicated the readings of the manuscript book in his explanations; in some places he even noted that a mark of error had been placed in the ancient codex.