PREFACE.

A small Maltese cross ornament precedes the start of the text. ✠ the audacity of the copyists, who, when they lacked the descriptions of the Twins and the Crab by Germanicus, inserted scraps from Avienus so that the images would not lack the explanations written beneath them. It is surprising that the editions of Germanicus, which are older than the Grotius compilation—especially the Aldine, the Basel, the Morellian, and the Sanctandrean editions—agree in very many places, even in the most nonsensical errors, in omitted verses, or in lines that are transposed or miserably distorted; for the things that Morellius corrected in his notes are few, and are for the most part typographical errors from the Aldine edition. Therefore, all these editions seem to have flowed from the Aldine. Grotius deserved very well for amending the fragments of Germanicus, partly by the aid of a manuscript codex, which I have already mentioned, partly by following Aratus and his commentators, and partly also by contemplating what the matter itself, about which Germanicus was speaking, would demand.?

*) Regarding the editions of the Aratean works of Cicero, Germanicus, and Avienus, see the preface to Volume I.