The probable stemma Our tentative stemma thus far, then, is No. 1 below, not No. 2 and not No. 3.

three stemmata

Robbins put P in the position of Π in this last stemma, but on the assumption that it did not contain the indices. That is not true of Π.

Further consideration of the external history of P, Π, and B Still further evidence is supplied by the external history of our manuscripts. B was at Beauvais at the end of the twelfth or the beginning of the thirteenth century, as we have seen.⁴³ Whatever the uncertainties as to its origin, any palaeographer would agree that it could hardly have been written before the middle of the ninth century or after the middle of the tenth. It was undoubtedly produced in France, as was F, its sister manuscript. The presumption is that Π¹, the copy intervening between Π and B, was also French, and that Π was in France when the copy was made from it. Merrill, for what reason I fail to see, suggested that the original of BF might be “Lombardic,” written in North Italy.⁴⁴ An extraneous origin of this sort must be proved from the character of the errors, such as spellings and the false resolution of abbreviations, made by BF. If no such signs can be adduced, it is natural to suppose that Π¹ was of the same nationality and general tendencies as its copies B and F. This consideration helps out the possible evidence furnished by the scribbling in a hand of the Carolingian variety on fol. 53^v;⁴⁵ we may now be more confident that it is French rather than Italian. But whatever the history of our book in the early Middle Ages, in the fifteenth century it was surely near Meaux, which is not far from Paris—about as far to the east as Beauvais is to the north. Now, granted for a moment that the last of our stemmata is correct, X, from which Π and B descend, being earlier than Π, must have been a manuscript in majuscules, written in Italy, since that is unquestionably the provenience of Π. There were, then, by this supposition, two ancient majuscule manuscripts of the Letters, most closely related in text—veritable twins, indeed—that travelled from Italy to France. One (X¹) had arrived in the early Middle Ages and is the parent of B and F; the other (Π) was probably there in the early Middle Ages, and surely was there in the fifteenth century. We can not deny this possibility, but, on the principle melius est per unum fieri quam per plura, we must not adopt it unless driven to it. The history of the transmission of Classical texts in the Carolingian period is against such a supposition.⁴⁶ Not many books of the age and quality of Π were floating about in France in the ninth century. There is nothing in the evidence presented by Π and B that drives us to assume the presence of two such codices. There is nothing in this evidence that does not fit the simpler supposition that BF descend directly from Π. The burden of proof would appear to rest on those who assert the contrary. Π, therefore, if the ancestor of B, contained at least as much as we find today in B. Some ancestor of B had all ten books. Aldus, whose text is closely related to BF, got all ten books from a very ancient manuscript that came down from Paris. Our simpler stemma indicates the presence of one rather than more than one such manuscript in the vicinity of Paris in the ninth or the tenth century and again in the fifteenth. This line of argument, which presents not a mathematically absolute demonstration but at least a highly probable concatenation of facts and deductions, warrants the assumption, to be used at any rate as a working hypothesis, that Π is a fragment of the lost Parisinus which contained all the books of Pliny’s Letters.

Our stemma, then, becomes,

P (the whole manuscript), of which Π is a part.

stemma of MS P

Evidence from the portions of BF outside the text of Π We may corroborate this reasoning by evidence drawn from the portions of BF outside the text of Π. We note, above all, a number of omissions in BF that indicate the length of line in some manuscript from which they descend. This length of line is precisely what we find in Π. Our fragment has lines containing from 23 to 33 letters, very rarely 23, 24, or 33, and most frequently from 27 to 30, the average being 28.4. These figures tally closely with those given by Professor A. C. Clark⁴⁷ for the Vindobonensis of Livy, a codex not far removed in date from Π. Supposing that Π is a typical section of P—and after Professor Clark’s studies⁴⁸ we may more confidently assume that it is—P had the same length of line. The important cases of omission are as follows:

32, 19 atque etiam invisus virtutibus fuerat evasit, reliquit incolumen optimum atque] etiam—atque om. BF. P would have the abbreviation for bus in virtutibus and for que in atque. There would thus be in all 61 letters and dots, or two lines, arranged about as follows:

The scribe could easily catch at the second ATQ· after writing the first. It will be at once objected that the repeated ATQ· might have occasioned the mistake, whatever the length of the line. Thus in 82, 2 (aegrotabat Caecina Paetus, maritus eius, aegrotabat] Caecina—aegrotabat om. BF), the omitted portion comprises 34 letters—a bit too long, perhaps, for a line of P. The following instances, however, can not be thus disposed of.

94, 10 alia quamquam dignitate propemodum paria] quamquam—paria (32 letters) om. BF. Cetera and paria, to be sure, offer a mild case of homoioteleuta, but not powerful enough to occasion an omission unless the words happened to stand at the ends of lines, as they might well have done in P. As the line occurs near the beginning of a letter, we may verify our conjecture by plotting the opening lines. The address, as in Π, would occupy a line. Then, allowing for contractions in rebus (18) and quoque (19) and reading cum (Class I) for quod (18), cetera (Class I) for alia (20), we can arrange the 236 letters in 8 lines, with an average of 29.5 letters in a line.

123, 10 sentiebant. interrogati a Nepote praetore quem docuissent, responderunt quem prius: interrogati an tunc gratis adfuisset, responderunt sex milibus] interrogati a Nepote—docuissent responderunt om. BF. Here are two good chances for omissions due to similar endings, as interrogati and responderunt are both repeated, but neither chance is taken by BF. Instead, a far less striking case (sentiebant—responderunt) leads to the omission. The arrangement in P might be

Here the dangerous words interrogati and responderunt are in safe places.

We may add two omissions of F in passages now missing altogether in B. 69, 28 quod minorem ex liberis duobus amisit sed maiorem] minorem—sed om. F. Here again an omission is imminent from the similar endings minorem—maiorem; that made by F (29 letters and one dot) seems to be that of a line of P where the arrangement would be:

There may have been a copy (P²) intervening between P¹ and F, but doubtless neither that nor P¹ itself had lines so short as those in P; the error of F, therefore, may be most naturally ascribed to P¹, who omitted a line of P.

130, 16 percolui. in summa (cur enim non aperiam tibi vel iudicium meum vel errorem?) primum ego] in summa—primum (59 letters) om. F. As there are no homoioteleuta here at all, we surely are concerned with the omission of a line or lines. Perhaps 59 letters would make up a line in P¹ or P². Perhaps two lines of P were dropped.

Similarly we may note two omissions in B, though not in F, which may be due originally to the error of P¹ in copying P.

68, 5 electorumque commentarios centum sexaginta mihi reliquit, opisthographos] -torumque—opisthographos om. B. Allowing the abbreviation of que, we have 59 letters and one dot here. The omitted words are written by the first hand of B at the foot of the page. Of course the omission may correspond to a line of P¹ dropped by B in copying, but it is equally possible that P¹ committed the error and corrected it by the marginal supplement, F noting the correction in time to include the omitted words in his text, B copying them in the margin as he found them in P¹.

87, 12 tacitus suffragiis impudentia inrepat. nam quoto cuique eadem honestatis] suffragiis—honestatis om. m. 1, add. in mg. m. 2 B (54 letters, with que abbreviated). This may be like the preceding, except that the correction was done not by the original scribe of B, but by a scribe in the same monastery. The presence of homoioteleuta, we must admit, adds an element of uncertainty.

So, of the passages here brought forward, 94, 20; 123, 10 and 69, 28 are best explained by supposing that B and F descend from a manuscript that like Π had from 24 to 32 letters in a line, while 32, 19 and 130, 16 fit this supposition as well as they do any other.

One orthographic peculiarity is perhaps worth noting: we saw that B did not agree with Π in the spellings karet and karitas.⁴⁹ We do, however, find karitate elsewhere in B (109, 8), and the curious reading Kl∴facere, mg. calfacere, for calfacere (56, 12). This is an additional bit of evidence for supposing that a copy (P¹) intervened between P and B; P had the spelling Karitas consistently, P¹ altered it to the usual form, and B reproduced the corrections in P¹, failing to take them all, unless, as may well be, P¹ had failed to correct all the cases.

Thus the evidence contained in the portion of BF outside the text of Π corroborates our working hypothesis deduced from the fragment itself. We have found nothing yet to overthrow our surmise that a bit of the ancient Parisinus is veritably in the city of New York.

EDITORIAL METHODS OF ALDUS.

Aldus’s methods; his basic text W E may now return to Aldus and imagine, if we can, his method of critical procedure. Finding his agreement with Π so close, even in what editors before and after him have regarded as errors, I am disposed to think that he studied his Parisinus with care and followed its authority respectfully. Finding that his seemingly extravagant statements about the antiquity of his book are essentially true, I am disposed to put more confidence in Aldus than editors have granted him thus far. I should suppose that, working in the most convenient way, he turned over to his compositor, not a fresh copy of P, but the pages of some edition corrected from P—which Aldus surely tells us that he used—and from whatever other sources he consulted. It may be beyond our powers to discover the precise edition that he thus employed. It does not at first thought seem likely that he would select the Princeps, which does not include the eighth book at all, and contains errors that later were weeded out. In the portion of text included in Π, P has thirty-two readings which Aldus avoids. In most of these cases p commits an error, sometimes a ridiculous error, like offam for officia (62, 25); the manuscript on which p was based apparently made free use of abbreviations. Keil’s damning estimate of r⁵⁰ is amply borne out in this section of the text; Aldus differs from r in sixty-five cases, most of these being errors in r. He agrees with ς in all but twenty-six readings.⁵¹ Aldus would have had fewest changes to make, then, if his basic text was ς. This is apparently the view of Keil,⁵² who would agree at any rate that Aldus made special use of the ς editions and who also declares that p is the fundamentum of r as r is of the edition of Pomponius Laetus.⁵³

It would certainly be natural for Aldus to start with his immediate predecessors, as they had started with theirs. The matter ought to be cleared up, if possible, for in order to determine what Aldus found in P we must know whether he took some text as a point of departure and, if so, what that text was. But the task should be undertaken by some one to whom the early editions are accessible. Keil’s report of them, intentionally incomplete,⁵⁴ is sufficient, he declares,⁵⁵ “ad fidem Aldinae editionis constituendam,” but, as I have found by comparing our photographs of the edition of Beroaldus in the present section, Keil has not collated minutely or accurately enough to encourage us to undertake, on the basis of his apparatus, an elaborate study of Aldus’s relation to the editions preceding his own.

The variants of Budaeus in the Bodleian volume We may now test Aldus by the evidence of the Bodleian volume with its variants in the hand of Budaeus. For the section included in Π, their number is disappointingly small. The only additions by Budaeus (= i) to the text of Beroaldus are: 61, 14 sera] MVDoa, (m. 1) Π serua BFuxi, (m. 2) Π; 62, 4 ambulat] i cum plerisque ambulabat r Ber. (ab del.) M; 62, 25 quoque] i cum ceteris p̷ouq (ue) Ber.; 64, 23 Quamvis] q Vmuis Ber. corr. i.

This is all. Budaeus, who, according to Merrill, had the Parisinus at his disposal, has corrected two obvious misprints, made an inevitable change in the tense of a verb—with or without the help of the ancient book—and introduced from that book one unfortunate reading which we find in the second hand of Π.

There is one feature of Budaeus’s marginal jottings that at once arouses the curiosity of the textual critic, namely, the frequent appearance of the obelus and the obelus cum puncto. These signs as used by Probus⁵⁶ would denote respectively a surely spurious and a possibly spurious line or portion of text. But such was not the usage of Budaeus; he employed the obelus merely to call attention to something that interested him. Thus at the end of the first letter of Book III we find a doubly pointed obelus opposite an interesting passage, the text of which shows no variants or editorial questionings. Budaeus appears to have expressed his grades of interest rather elaborately—at least I can discover no other purpose for the different signs employed. The simple obelus apparently denotes interest, the pointed obelus great interest, the doubly pointed obelus intense interest, and the pointing finger of a carefully drawn hand burning interest. He also adds catchwords. Thus on the first letter he calls attention successively⁵⁷ to Ambulatio, Gestatio, Hora balnei, pilae ludus, Coena, and Comoedi. The purpose of the doubly pointed obelus is plainly indicated here, as it accompanies two of these catchwords. Just so in the margin opposite 65, 17, a pointing finger is accompanied by the remark, “Beneficia beneficiis aliis cumulanda,” while 227, 5 is decorated with the moral ejaculation, “o hominem in diuitiis miserum.” Incidentally, it is obvious that the Morgan fragment was once perused by some thoughtful reader, who marked with lines or brackets passages of special interest to him. For example, the account of how Spurinna spent his day⁵⁸ is so marked. This passage likewise called forth various marginal notes from Budaeus,⁵⁹ and other coincidences exist between the markings in Π and the marginalia in the Bodleian volume. But there is not enough evidence of this sort to warrant the suggestion that Budaeus himself added the marks in Π.

Aldus and Budaeus compared It is of some importance to consider what Budaeus might have done to the text of Beroaldus had he treated it to a systematic collation with the Parisinus. Our fragment allows us to test Budaeus; for even if it be not the Parisinus itself, its readings with the help of B, F, and Aldus show what was in that ancient book. I have enumerated above⁶⁰ eleven readings of ΠBF which are called errors by Keil, but of which nine were accepted by Aldus and five by the latest editor, Professor Merrill. In two of these (62, 33 and 64, 3), Budaeus, like Aldus, wisely does not harbor an obvious error of P. In two more (62, 16 and 65, 12), Beroaldus already has the reading of P. Of the remaining seven, however, all of which Aldus adopted, there is no trace in Budaeus. There are also nineteen cases of obvious error in the ς editions, which Aldus corrected but Budaeus did not touch. I give the complete apparatus⁶¹ for these twenty-six places, as they will illustrate the radical difference between Aldus and Budaeus in their use of the Parisinus.

Here is sufficient material for a test. Aldus, it will be observed, whether or not he started with some special edition, refuses to follow the latest and best texts of his day (i.e., ς) in these twenty-six readings. In one sure case (60, 15) and eleven possible⁶² cases (61, 18; 62, 26; 63, 5, 12, 15, 17 bis, 23 bis; 64, 2, 5), his reading agrees with the Princeps. In four sure cases (63, 4, 22; 65, 15; 66, 9) and one possible one (63, 9), he agrees with the Roman edition; in two sure (61, 12; 66, 11) and three possible (63, 2; 66, 7, 12) cases, with both p and r. Once he breaks away from all editions reported by Keil and agrees with D (62, 6). At the same time, all these readings are attested by ΠFB and hence were presumably in the Parisinus. In two cases (65, 11, 24), we know of no source other than P that could have furnished him his reading. Further, in the superscription of the third letter of Book III (63, 20), he might have taken a hint from Catanaeus, who was the first to depart from the reading corneliae, universally accepted before him, but again it is only P that could give him the correct spelling corelliae.⁶³

If all the above readings, then, were in the Parisinus, how did Aldus arrive at them? Did he fish round, now in the Princeps, now in the Roman edition, despite the repellent errors that those texts contained,⁶⁴ and extract with felicitous accuracy excellent readings that coincided with those of the Parisinus, or did he draw them straight from that source itself? The crucial cases are 65, 11 and 24. As he must have gone to the Parisinus for these readings, he presumably found the others there, too. Moreover, he did not get his new variants by a merely sporadic consultation of the ancient book when he was dissatisfied with the accepted text of his day, for in the two crucial cases and many of the others, too, that text makes sense; some of the readings, indeed, are accepted by modern editors as correct.⁶⁵ Aldus was collating. He carefully noted minutiae, such as the omission of et and iam, and accepted what he found, unless the ancient text seemed to him indisputably wrong. He gave it the benefit of the doubt even when it may be wrong. This is the method of a scrupulous editor who cherishes a proper veneration for his oldest and best authority.

Budaeus, on the other hand, is not an editor. He is a vastly interested reader of Pliny, frequently commenting on the subject-matter or calling attention to it by marginal signs. As for the text, he generally finds Beroaldus good enough. He corrects misprints, makes a conjecture now and then, or adopts one of Catanaeus, and, besides supplementing the missing portions with transcripts made for him from the Parisinus, inserts numerous variants, some of which indubitably come from that manuscript.⁶⁶ In the present section, occupying 251 lines in Π, there is only one reading of the Parisinus—a false reading, it happens—that seems to Budaeus worth recording. Compared with what Aldus gleaned from Π, Budaeus’s extracts are insignificant. It is remarkable, for instance, that on a passage (65, 11) which, as the appended obelus shows, he must have read with attention, he has not added the very different reading of the Parisinus. Either, then, Budaeus did not consult the Parisinus with care, or he did not think the great majority of its readings preferable to the text of Beroaldus, or, as I think may well have been the case, he had neither the manuscript itself nor an entire copy of it accessible at the time when he added his variants in his combined edition of Beroaldus and Avantius.⁶⁷

But I do not mean to present here a final estimate of Budaeus; for that, I hope, we may look to Professor Merrill. Nor do I particularly blame Budaeus for not constructing a new text from the wealth of material disclosed in the Parisinus. His interests lay elsewhere; suos quoique mos. What I mean to say, and to say with some conviction, is that for the portion of text included in our fragment, the evidence of that fragment, coupled with that of B and F, shows that as a witness to the ancient manuscript Aldus is overwhelmingly superior to either Budaeus or any of the ancient editors.

Our examination of the Morgan fragment, therefore, leads to what I deem a highly probable conclusion. We could perhaps hope for absolute proof in a matter of this kind only if another page of the same manuscript should appear, bearing a note in the hand of Aldus Manutius to the effect that he had used the codex for his edition of 1508. Failing that, we can at least point out that all the data accessible comport with the hypothesis that the Morgan fragment was a part of this very codex. We have set our hypothesis running a lengthy gauntlet of facts, and none has tripped it yet. We have also seen that Π is most intimately connected with manuscripts BF of Class I, and indeed seems to be a part of the very manuscript whence they are descended. Finally, a careful comparison of Aldus’s text with Π shows him, for this much of the Letters at least, to be a scrupulous and conscientious editor. His method is to follow Π throughout, save when, confronted by its obvious blunders, he has recourse to the editions of his day.

The latest criticism of Aldus Since the publication of Otto’s article in 1886,⁶⁸ in which the author defended the F branch against that of MV, to which, as the elder representative of the tradition, Keil had not unnaturally deferred, critical procedure has gradually shifted its centre. The reappearance of B greatly helped, as it corroborates the testimony of F. B and F head the list of the manuscripts used by Kukula in his edition of 1912,⁶⁹ and B and F with Aldus’s Parisinus make up Class I, not Class II, in Merrill’s grouping of the manuscripts. Obviously, the value of Class I mounts higher still now that we have evidence in the Morgan fragment of its existence in the early sixth century. This fact helps us to decide the question of glosses in our text. We are more than ever disposed to attribute not to BF but to what has now become the younger branch of the tradition, Class II, the tendency to interpolate explanatory glosses. The changed attitude towards the BF branch has naturally resulted in a gradual transformation of the text. We have seen in the portion included in Π that of the eleven readings which Keil regarded as errors of the F branch, three are accepted by Kukula and five by Merrill.⁷⁰

Since Class I has thus appreciated in value, we should expect that Aldus’s stock would also take an upward turn. In Aldus’s lifetime, curiously, he was criticized for excessive conservatism. His rival Catanaeus finds his chief quality supina ignorantia and adds:⁷¹

“Verum enim uero non satis est recuperare venerandae vetustatis exemplaria, nisi etiam simul adsit acre emendatoris iudicium: quoniam et veteres librarii in voluminibus describendis saepissime falsi sunt, et Plinius ipse scripta sua se viuo deprauari in quadam epistola demonstrauerit.”

Nowadays, however, editors hesitate to accept an unsupported reading of Aldus as that of the Parisinus, since they believe that he abounds in those very conjectures of which Catanaeus felt the lack. The attitude of the expert best qualified to judge is still one of suspicion towards Aldus. In his most recent article,⁷² Professor Merrill declares that Keil’s remarks⁷³ on the procedure of Aldus in the part of Book X already edited by Avantius, Beroaldus, and Catanaeus might safely have been extended to cover the work of Aldus on the entire body of the Letters. He proceeds to subject Aldus to a new test, the material for which we owe to Merrill’s own researches. He compares with Aldus’s text the manuscript parts of the Bodleian volume, which are apparently transcripts from the Parisinus (= I);⁷⁴ in them Budaeus with his own hand (= i) has corrected on the authority of the Parisinus itself, according to Merrill, the errors of his transcriber. In a few instances, Merrill allows, Budaeus has substituted conjectures of his own. This material, obviously, offers a valuable criterion of Aldus’s methods as an editor. There is a further criterion in the shape of Codex M, not utilized till after Aldus’s edition. As this manuscript represents Class II, concurrences between M and Ii against a make it tolerably certain that Aldus himself and no higher authority is responsible for such readings. On this basis, Merrill cites twenty-five readings in the added part of Book VIII (viii, 3 quas obvias—xviii, II amplissimos hortos) and nineteen readings in the added part of Book X (letters iv-xli), which represent examples “wherein Aldus abandons indubitably satisfactory readings of his only and much belauded manuscript in favor of conjectures of his own.”⁷⁵ Letter IX xvi, a very short affair, added by Budaeus in the margin, contains no indictment against Aldus.

Aldus’s methods in the newly discovered parts of Books VIII, IX, and X The result of this exposure, Professor Merrill declares, should convince “any unprejudiced student” of the question that “Aldus stands clearly convicted of being an extremely unsafe textual critic of Pliny’s Letters.”⁷⁶ “This conclusion does not depend, as that of Keil necessarily did, on any native or acquired acuteness of critical perception. The wayfaring man, though a fool, need not err therein.”⁷⁷ I speak as a wayfarer, but nevertheless I must own that Professor Merrill’s path of argument causes me to stumble. I readily admit that Aldus, in editing a portion of text that no man had put into print before him, fell back on conjecture when his authority seemed not to make sense. But Merrill’s lists need revision. He has included with Aldus’s “willful deviations” from the true text of P certain readings that almost surely were misprints (218, 12; 220, 3), some that may well be (as 217, 28; 221, 12), one case in which Aldus has retained an error of P while I emends (221, 11), and several cases in which Aldus and I or i emend in different ways an error of P (222, 14; 226, 5; 272, 4—not 5). In one case he misquotes Aldus, when the latter really has the reading that both Merrill and Keil indicate as correct (276, 21); in another he fails to remark that Aldus’s erroneous reading is supported by M (219,17). However, even after discounting these and possibly other instances, a significant array of conjectures remains. Still, it is not fair to call the Parisinus Aldus’s only manuscript. We know that he had other material in the six volumes of manuscripts and collated editions sent him by Giocondo, as well as the latter’s copy of P. There could hardly have been in this number a source superior to the Parisinus, but Giocondo may have added here and there his own or others’ conjectures, which Aldus adopted unwisely, but at least not solely on his own authority; the most apparent case of interpolation (224, 8) Keil thought might have been a conjecture of Giocondo’s. Further, if the general character of P is represented in Π, Book X, as well as the beginning of Book III, may have had variants by the second hand, sometimes taken by Aldus and neglected, wisely, by Budaeus’s transcriber.

The Morgan fragment the best criterion of Aldus With the discovery of the Morgan fragment, a new criterion of Aldus is offered. I believe that it is the surest starting-point from which to investigate Aldus’s relation to his ancient manuscript. I admit that for Book X, Avantius and the Bodleian volume in its added parts are better authorities for the Parisinus than is Aldus. I admit that Aldus resorted throughout the text of the Letters—in some cases unhappily—to the customary editorial privilege of emendation. But I nevertheless maintain that for the entire text he is a much better authority than the Bodleian volume as a whole, and that he should be given, not absolute confidence, but far more confidence than editors have thus far allowed him. Nor is the section of text preserved in the fragment of small significance for our purpose. Indeed, both for Aldus and in general, I think it even more valuable than a corresponding amount of Book X would be. We could wish that it were longer, but at least it includes a number of crucial readings and above all vouches for the existence of the indices some two hundred years before the date previously assigned for their compilation. It also supplies a final confirmation of the value of Class I; indeed, B and F, the manuscripts of this class, appear to have descended from the very manuscript of which Π was a part. We see still more clearly than before that BF can be used elsewhere in the Letters as a test of Aldus, and we also note that these manuscripts contain errors not in the Parisinus. This is a highly important factor for forming a true estimate of Aldus and one that we could not deduce from a fragment of Book X, which BF do not contain.

Conclusion I conclude, then, that the Morgan fragment is a piece of the Parisinus, and that we may compare with Aldus’s text the very words which he studied out, carefully collated, and treated with a decent respect. On the basis of the new information furnished us by the fragment, I shall endeavor, at some future time, to confirm my present judgement of Aldus by testing him in the entire text of Pliny’s Letters. Further, despite Merrill’s researches and his brilliant analysis, I am not convinced that the last word has been spoken on the nature of the transcript made for Budaeus and incorporated in the Bodleian volume. I will not, however, venture on this broad field until Professor Merrill, who has the first right to speak, is enabled to give to the world his long-expected edition. Meanwhile, if my view is right, we owe to the acquisition of the ancient fragment by the Pierpont Morgan Library a new confidence in the integrity of Aldus, a clearer understanding of the history of the Letters in the early Middle Ages, and a surer method of editing their text.

Notes to Part II