On Agriculture

I decided to place the readings that appeared to me to have been written in the ancient codex, [based] on the apographs and the excerpts of Politian and the edition of Victorius; where it seemed necessary, I added the dissenting readings of Politian and the apographs enclosed in brackets, or, where the judgment was less certain, I placed each reading side by side. In this, those things which had not been changed by Politian in the editio princeps I indicated with the letter V, and those which he had annotated from the codex I indicated with the mark of the name Pol.. Although I did not annotate everything in which the testimonies of the apographs disagreed with Politian—but rather omitted many things in which the error of Politian or the scribes was manifest—nor in these cases, in which I placed both readings, could the reasons be indicated by which I was moved to attribute greater authority to one testimony or the other.

The studies of emendation appear most anciently in the Paris and Medicean codices. For since they often agree with each other while the remaining books disagree, they also exhibit a few things that are corrupted in them as corrected; in other cases, the Medicean codex alone provides an emended reading. Since all those things are therefore so constituted that they could easily have been found by conjecture, I say that they should not be repeated from an ancient memory of an uncorrupted text, but attributed to the zeal for emendation. For it seems that an apograph was once made from the archetype with some emendations of the ancient text, from which, when the Paris and Medicean [codices] were later derived as if from a common source, those things which were written in that [apograph] were propagated to both books; in the Medicean codex, however, which was written most negligently and corrupted by many very serious interpolations, many things are corrupted, yet some are correctly emended, which I indicated with the added letter m.

The books of Varro were published together with the books of the other writers on rural matters first in the year 1472 at Venice by Nicolaus Jenson, which edition was overseen by Georgius Merula. Although he used the greatest license and changed very many things rashly, he was nevertheless the first to correct many things that were corrupted by open scribal errors, although some of these