De Rebus Bellicis
Part 2.  de rebus bellicis : the text edited by Robert Ireland.  BAR International Series 63 (1979) 
This extract, pp. 38-78
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3 THE TRANSMISSION OF THE TEXT
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THE TRANSMISSION OF THE TEXT

1. Five principal witnesses to the text of the group of works which includes de rebus bellicis survive, all descended from a lost manuscript (to be described in due course) which belonged to the cathedral library at Speyer. These primary sources, with their accepted sigla, are:-
C, at Oxford, oxoniensis canonicianus class. lat. 378 (de rebus beilicis on ff. 67r-77v);
M, at Munich, monacensis latinus 10291 (de rebus bellicis on ff. 171-222);
P, at Paris, parisinus latinus 9661 (de rebus bellicis on ff. 53v-63r);
V, formerly at Vienna, uindobonensis 3103, now at Trento (de rebus bellicis on ff. 53r-63v);
and the typographic editio princeps, prepared by Siegmond Ghelen (‘Sigismundus Gelenius’), and printed by Froben at Basel in 1552 (de rebus bellicis on sigs. qlr-r3v).
Other manuscripts which carry the treatise - florentinus laurentianus 913, leidensis uossianus 44, matritensis Q129, monacensis latinus 794 , parisini latinus 5825E and nouv. acq. 1424, uaticani latinus 3715  and barberinus latinus 157(809), uindobonensis 3102, and the parmensis seen by Panciroli,1 are variously derived from C M P or V and make no independent contribution to the establishment of the text.2 In addition, the equally derivative Copenhagen manuscript gottorpiensis 498 contains the pictures but not the text of the work.
The precise relationship of three of the primary sources to their archetype is ascertained from external testimony: that of the other two must be conjectured from internal evidence, and the reader is warned, once for all, that my conclusions in this respect, as in others, are more severe than those admitted by previous editors of the components of the Speyer corpus. Leaving discussion of these disputed cases (namely P and the editio princeps) until last, we may set out briefly the known facts concerning the manuscripts C M and V.

2. C was transcribed directly from Σ, the spirensis, in or about January 1436, for Pietro Donato, whose colophon states:
Exemplata est hec Cosmographia que Scoti dicitur3 cum picturis ex uetustissimo codice quem habui ex Spirensi bibliotheca anno domini m.cccc.xxxvi. mense Januario. Dum ego Petrus Donatus dei paciencia episcopus Paduanus uice Sanctissimi Domini Eugenii pape iiii Generali Basiliensi Concilio presiderem.
ex Spirensi bibliotheca ... dum ... Basiliensi Concilio presiderem: does this imply that the archetype was sent from Speyer to Basel for copying?

3. M is a copy of 1542 made directly from Σ at Speyer. It was sent in 1549 to Heidelberg, to the Pfalzgraf Ott Heinrich, who had written in 1548 to ask the Speyer authorities to lend him Σ itself for transcription. Their refusal was minuted on 26 January 1548:
Herzog Ott Heinrich pfaltzgraff schreibt vnd begert den Itinerarium Anthoninj, sonderlich das alt Exemplar Ir Gn. zu leyhen, wol dasselbig abschreiben zu lassen ... Darauf Ir gn. geantwurt: das alt exemplar sey etwas blod vnd steen m. Hn. im werck das zu renouiren.
Ott Heinrich agreed to accept instead a copy to be made at Speyer, specifying that the pictures (in which he seems to have been primarily interested) should reproduce as accurately as possible those in Σ: and the dean of Speyer directed one Dominic to prepare the new manuscript. Nothing, however, had been done by December 1549, although the authorities held out the prospect of producing the copy when the spring came round. In the meanwhile, the dean attempted to pacify the importunate Pfalzgraf by the loan of an existing tranšcript of uf die newe hand gemalet, namely M; and, the new copy still not being ready by July 1550 - a Speyer minute of 20 March discloses that no competent miniaturist had yet been found - the loan of M was converted into an outright gift, as M’s prescript records:
HIC LIBER, CVI TITVLVS, ITINERARIVM ANTONINI, ad uerum atque archetypum exemplar descriptus, Illustrissimo Principi ac domino, domino OTHONI HENRICO, Comiti Palatino Rheni, ... a Venerabilibus ac honestis Cathedralis Ecclesie, Spirensis Decano atque Canonico Dono missus est.
But Ott Heinrich refused to be satisfied, because (and here again I quote M’s prescript)
eiusdem libri picture, ... praesentis aetatis habitum, ac nouitatis formam quandam pre se ferebant, veterisque atque archetypi exemplaris Schematibus ac lineamentis non ita exacte, atque per omnia respondebant,
and it was arranged that a Master Hans should paint a separate set of pictures from tracings on oiled paper, if these could be made without staining Σ. The new reproductions, cued to the text with numbers, were placed at the back of M when it was rebound for Ott Heinrich in 1551; and with this rather unsatisfactory substitute for the uerum atque arche typum exemplar the Pfal zgraf had to make shift until the following year, 1552, when, as we shall see, he contrived to acquire Σ itself.4

4. V was completed in 1484, as its subscription proclaims. A clue to its origin is found in another Vienna manuscript, uindobonensis 3102, which exhibits the following colophon in the hand of Bernhard Cles:
librum hunc satis incorrectum ... est iussu nostro transcriptum ex antiquo exemplari in bibliotheca capitulari spirensi ... anno 1529.
The antiquum exemplar was not Σ but V, with which uindobonensis 3102 agrees essentially verbatim et iiteratim, even to the extent of copying its subscription. V therefore was in the Speyer library in 1529, and there is a powerful presumption that, like M, it was a direct apograph of Σ made for some unspecified purpose - perhaps to save wear and tear on the frail original. The supposition is confirmed by those of V’s errors which show that it is independent of the earlier copies C and P -
d.r.b. pr.12 turbae omitted in C, present in V
d.r.b.	ii.1 sub P sed V
- but that it transmits corruptions found in Σ (the lacunose laus aut prosequatur at d.r.b. pr.3) and was copied - it is necessary here to anticipate a later conclusion - from an original in insular script (d.r.b. vii.6 intoxta V, for intorta).

5. I turn now to P, of which Thompson says ‘It is not altogether certain that P is a direct copy of the Spirensis, but, if not, its intermediary is now lost.’ P undoubtedly transmits, under a layer of its own superficial corruptions, a text agreeing with that of Σ as reconstructed from the united testimony of C M and V. Thus, at d.r.b.pr.10 it inherits alieni, a lectio difficilior, and in d.r.b. xiv.3 the desperately corrupt text reads identically in all four manuscripts. That P, which was in existence by about 1443, is not a copy of the contemporaneous transcript C is evident from the presence in P of turbae, omitted by C in d. r. b. pr. 12, and from P’s correct non ferenda in d. r. b. iii. 1, where C gives conseruanda. 6 That P is not a copy of an archetype independent of is suggested by its taking over corruptions which may with reason be supposed to have originated in itself - the dittography et minori ut minori at d.r.b. v.7, the loss of a termination in d.r.b. xv.4, the spelling ASCOGEFRI in the picture-caption for d.r.b. xvi. It is therefore conceded that P derives from either directly or through an intermediary which was not C; and the case can, I think, be decided on the basis of three readings. At d.r.b. xii.3 erigunt P’s scribe at first mistook his exemplar’s r for an x, subsequently correcting it over the line; at notitia or.xii.27 P’s original cyrecei is similarly corrected to cynecei (read, of course, gynaecei); and, most revealingly of all, P twice (notitia or.xxiii.2 and 3) writes libra for libya without correction. The confusions are eminently characteristic of transcription from an insular hand, and it is clear - the demonstration follows in §16that at least the notitia dignitatum and its satellite texts, the de rebus bellicis amongst them, appeared in the spirensis in an insular script. P therefore was transcribing from an insular book carrying a text identical with that of Σ: and this must surely mean that P was transcribing from Σ itself.7

6. I proceed to the question of the exemplar used by Ghelen in preparing the first printed edition of the text. Here, as nowhere else among the problems posed by study of the Speyer notitia corpus, grammatici cert ant et adhuc sub iudice lis est, a posture of affairs for which the learned drudge of Basel is himself partly to blame. It seems to have become an article of faith, despite acknowledged difficulties in Ghelen’s title-page and preface, that his text depends somehow upon the same spirensis which is the archetype of our surviving manuscript copies; the sole ground for this supposition being that this is the only ancient manuscript containing all the works which he prints of which we have any cognizance. This casual (but, as it transpires, correct) assumption should not have been allowed to go without proof, and a substantial part of the following discussion is devoted to establishing that Ghelen did indeed draw on the tradition of the collection. The argument will then be driven to a conclusion which seems, on internal and external grounds, both logical and inevitable; which was contemplated (without adequate demonstration) by Seeck; but which Thompson (who explicitly shrank from the fundamental task, that of inquiring for resources of fact beyond the work with which we are immediately concerned) denied to be possible.8

7.  Our first step, before we enter on the specific problem of Ghelen’s 1552 notitia volume, must be to marshal a number of facts which will help us towards an understanding of the man and his methods. Between 1532 and 1554 there poured from the printing-house of Froben at Basel a flood of texts edited by Sigismundus Gelenius, Siegmond Ghelen , uir utriusque litteraturae non uulgariter callens, as the printer’s puff in his Ammianus calls him, emunctaeque naris. They make a formidable catalogue. Aurelius Victor with Eutropius and Paulus Diaconus appeared in 1532, and Callimachus’ hymns cum scholiis nunc primum editis in the same year, followed in 1533 by Ammianus Marcellinus (in a volume which also included the historia augusta, Suetonius, and a Latin Dio) and a geographici graeci in which Ghelen collaborated with Arnold van Arlen. In 1535 he printed his castigationes of the Elder Pliny, and produced an edition of Livy jointly with Bilde von Rheinau. Two years later Ghelen published a faintly eccentric philological work, a lexicon symphonum (‘quo quatuor linguarum, graecae scilicet latinae germanicae et sclauinicae9 concordia consonantiaque indicatur’) and then disappeared for a while, perhaps so that he could build up a stock of fresh material. A second edition of the lexicon was called for in 1544, and his Arnobius aduersus gentes was printed in 1546. He now began to concentrate on Greek authors: both Aristophanes and John Chrysostom appeared in 1547, the latter perhaps in collaboration with Simon Gryné, Greek professor at Basel, whom we shall meet again in another connexion and who, interestingly enough, had edited Aristophanes for Brubach of Frankfurt three years earlier. Ghelen’s Latin Josephus came out in 1548 - van Arlen had edited the Greek text in 1544 - and his anthologia palatina (reprinting the notes of Brodeau) in 1549, the year also of his Dionysius of Halicarnassus.10 He returned to Latin in 1550 with Tertullian; and a gap of two years intervenes between this and the notitia dignitatum of 1552, after which 4 there ensued another pause until 1554, the last year of Ghelen’s life, an annus mirabilis which saw the publication of his Appian, his Philo, and his Elder Pliny - this last a Lebenswerk to which the castigationes of 1535 had been a prelude. He had also found time to work on Ambrose; the edition appeared posthumously in 1555.

8.  This is not an unimpressive achievement; but it has a rival in the output of another of Froben’s client editors, Bilde von Rheinau, Bildius, later - and more grandly - Beatus Rhenanus [1485-1547], Ghelen’ s inseparable colleague, who, for reasons which will appear, has a certain claim on our attention. He began production gently in 1509 with editions of Faustus Andrelinus and Michael Tarchaniota: deserting Basel for Strasbourg, he published Pliny’s letters there in 1514, but returned to Froben’s ergastulum in time to issue in 1515 a somewhat irresponsible collection which comprised Seneca’s apocolocyntosis, Synesius de laudibus caluitii and Erasmus’ Moriae encomium. His Germania of Tacitus appeared in 1519; Velleius Pate rculus ab interitu uindicatus per Beatum Rhenanum, and the panegyrici latini, followed in 1520. In 1521 he edited a compilation of traditiones de arte rhetorica, and in the same year a Tertullian: another collection, auctores historiae ecclesiasticae, came out in 1523, and a set of corrections in the Elder Pliny in 1526. Finally, in a burst of chalcenteric activity between 1531 and 1536, Bilde produced editions of Prokopios (1531), Livy (1535; in collaboration with Ghelen), Tacitus (1536) and Origen (1536), as well as an augmented version of his auctores historiae ecclesiasticae (1535). His last years were spent .in preparing revised editions of his earlier work, and of these the most important is the editio tertia of his Tertullian (1539), for which he was able to use a new and valuable manuscript source.

9.  Bilde, despite his enormous productivity, seems to have been something of a serious scholar; Ghelen, because of his, partakes more of the character of printer’s hack, equally prepared to supply, as occasion required and at the shortest notice, copy for a Latin historian, a Greek dramatist, or a glossary of homonyms.11 But the relationship between the two men was evidently very close: they shared the same interests, they worked for the same publisher; they had at sundry times become involved in actual collaboration, whether overt (as in the case of the 1535 Livy) or implicit (Bilde’s emendations in the Elder Pliny of 1536 being taken up by Ghelen in his castigations of the same in 1535 and his edition of 1554); and Ghelen brought out a new edition of Bilde’s admired Tertullian three years after his friend’s death. 12
Another fact connects them. In the preparation of many of their editions they were able to employ newly-discovered manuscripts which permitted them occasionally to present items for the first time, more often to improve dramatically the current text of known authors. The provenance of these manuscripts is usually revealed. in the prefatory matter to the various publications. Thus, Bilde’s Velleius of 1520, the editio princeps, was printed from a book found at Murbach: this library also supplied an Elder Pliny whose superior readings were reported by Bilde in his critical study of 1526 and which may have been directly available to Ghelen for use in his subsequent work on the text. Ghelen’s Ammianus of 1533 was based on a manuscript from Hersfeld, which almost completed and very much purified the mutilated and depraved vulgate. The collaborative Livy of 1535 contained, for the first time, the fifth decad, taken from a manuscript found at Lorsch in 1527 by Simon Gryné; for the third decad, moreover, the editors were able to use a Speyer text, and, for the fourth, another book from Speyer and one from Worms. The new (1530) edition of Bilde’s Plinian emendations states that tres noui codices (they cannot now be identified) have been applied to the revision of the work; the 1535 print of his auctores historiae ecclesiasticae included a princeps (that of Nicephorus) from an unknown source; and the third edition of his Tertullian (1539) incorporated new readings from a manuscript discovered at Gorzé.

10.  These excellent and (presumably or demonstrably) old manuscripts, found and used by Bilde and Ghelen between 1520 and 1539, all belonged, so far as we are told, to cathedral libraries in a tolerably well-defined area of the upper Rhineland, not excessively far from Basel. It is interesting that they should all have become available at this late date and so closely together. Bilde and Ghelen, or their agents, had evidently been exploring the undisturbed resources of the neighbouring monastic collections. Nor were they alone, for, as we saw, Gryné, another Basel scholar, had penetrated into Lorsch in 1527; and Erasmus, for his 1518 Froben historia augusta, used a Murbach manuscript which is now lost. In patronizing the work of these men the Frobens, father and son, appear to have been aiming at the publication of two particular varieties of classical text: on the one hand, privileged and vastly improved editions of existing works, and on the other, principes. The reputation of the publisher, no less than that of the editors, may have materially assisted the processes of discovery; for the 1533 Ammianus, exemplar manu scriptum gratis et alacriter suppeditauit egregius princeps, abbas hersfeldensis: and more than one abbot may have provided a manuscript promptly and without fee when it was known why, and for whom, it was required.
But this is to speculate. What is known with distressing certainty is that all the above—mentioned manuscripts used by Bilde or Ghelen or both - two spirenses, a laurishamensis, a hers feldensis, two murbachienses, a uormatiensis and a gorzeiensis - are now wholly lost, with the single exception of six leaves of the Hersfeld Arnrnianus. Their loss has serious consequences for the criticism of the texts concerned. How reliable are the editorial reports, and to what extent are the printed texts sophisticated by unsignalized conjecture? The problem is most acute in the case of Velleius, where Bilde’s murbachiensis was an unicus and, that having disappeared, the print is codicis instar:14 and the hideous truth is revealed in the case of Ammianus, where it is still possible to confront the printed text with portions of the manuscript from which it derives. The leading characteristics of Ghelen’s editorial technique will appear from what follows, as we examine his princeps of the notitia dignitatum and its associated texts - a work which has been deliberately excluded from mention in the survey above.

11.  The contents of the manuscript used by Ghelen in the preparation of his notitia volume of 1552 are given on his title-page15 in this order: notitia dignitatum, descriptio urbis Romae, descriptio urbis constantinopolitanae, de rebus bellicis, and - ne quid de antiquo exemplari omitteretur — the altercatio Hadriani et Epicteti. The actual printed order, given and discussed below at §21 init., differs from this, and in neither case are we entitled to assume that the sequence of the items in the exemplar has been retained. Now these items, and these only, form the contents of two surviving manuscripts, uaticanus latinus 3715 and leidensis uossianus 44: but neither can have been Ghelen’s copy-text, since both are demonstrably copies of items selected from C, the Oxford transcript of the spirensis, and we shall see in the next paragraph that Ghelen could not have used C or any manuscript carrying C’s text.16 The identity of contents between these two books and the printed text is interesting; we shall recur momentarily to it: but the nature of their text precludes any attempt to identify one or other of them as Ghelen’s exemplar.

12.  The argument from contents having failed us, we are thrown back on the evidence of readings. Let it now be demonstrated that the text of the items which Ghelen prints was derived from none of the surviving direct transcripts of the spirensis. Confining our attention merely to de rebus bellicis and a few pages of notitia dignitatum, we find conclusive evidence that the manuscript used was not C:-
d.r.b.pr.12 turbae omitted by C, present in Ghelen and MPV
pr. 14 pauci C perpauci Ghelen and MPV
notitia	oc.xxix.l4 ceteros C reliquos Ghelen and MPV 
or.vi.68-9 omitted by C, present in Ghelen and MPV
Nor was it M:-
d.r.b.iv.5 auidi M cupidi Ghelen and CPV
notitia or.xxxiii: entries 24-28 transposed to follow entry 35 in M, correctly placed in Ghelen and CPV
Nor P:-
d.r.b.iv.1 existimabant P existimant Ghelen and CMV
iv.2 dirigit huiusmodi P huiusmodi dirigit Ghelen and CMV
Nor V, since V uniformly omits the illustrations, which are present without exception in the printed edition: and if it were contended that Ghelen might have derived his pictures from another source but his text from V, the supposition would be demolished by such verbal evidence as:
d.r.b.pr.10 igitur V enim Ghelen and CMP
i.7 utilitatis V uilitatis Ghelen and CMP.
In all the above cases Ghelen gives the true reading, and in none of them, I think, could critical sagacity or temerity have detected the fault, or, having detected it, so infallibly removed it.17

13.  Ghelen, then, did not use C M P or V as copy-text, and a fortiori he did not use any of their progeny. But that his text bears in erroneous readings a conspicuous and detailed similarity to that of Σ as it is reconstructed from the direct copies there is equally no doubt : -
d.r.b.pr.13 eques Σ, Ghelen: read equus
vii	inscr. exemplum Σ, Ghelen: read expositio
viii.5 extremitate Σ, Ghelen: read extremitates
notitia	or.i.38-9 duces per Σ, Ghelen: read duces xiii, per 
or.ii.1 uirorum illustrium praefectorum Σ, Ghelen: read uiri illustris praefecti
oc.xi.74-77 branbaricariorum Σ, Ghelen: read barbaricariorum. 18
And where Ghelen’s text does differ from that of his minor divergences, where they are not mere spelling-corrections, can invariably be explained as more or less intelligent and often successful conjectures based on corruptions identical with those carried by Σ:-
d.r.b.pr.7 prope propter Ghelen
xviii.7 communite Σ communitam Ghelen
notitia or.xxviii.19 traian(a)e Σ traiana Ghelen
or.xxviii.31 touia Σ iouia Ghelen
I would without hesitation explain his major variants also as the product of deliberate alteration of a spirensis-type text: a representative selection of them is discussed in §17 below. In no case need we postulate that Ghelen may have been controlling a text of the Σ-type by an independent manuscript source.

14.  Important evidence for the nature of the text used by Ghelen appears from the descriptio urbis constantinopolitanas, printed in the notitia volume and contained in Σ. The text of this little work is separately preserved in a manuscript written in about 940, probably at Fulda, namely uindobonensis 162 - I will call it U - which is demonstrably independent of the spirensis.19 From c. ii.12 of the text onwards U is substantially in agreement with in presenting the readings of their ultimate parent, whose corruptions (as at viii.17) and omissions (as at xi.2 and 8) are reproduced in both manuscripts. U, however, had evident difficulty in deciphering the handwriting of its exemplar, which was in an insular script, as the characteristic misreadings show: iii.4 mane for mare, iv.2 tertio for tertia, iv.10 seminotundam for semirotundam, iv.16 magnus for magnas, and notice the correction at viii . 6-7, pa~o]rticibus. That the exemplar of U was not Σ (on whose script see §16 below) is shown in this portion of the text by the habet given by Σ in vi.18, of which interpolation U is innocent, and by such divergences as confinio Σ, conuiuio U at xiii.5. But the most instructive passage of text is at the beginning, Seeck’s cc. i-ii, which are quite differently preserved in the two branches of the tradition. U is alone in exhibiting (though not with outstanding accuracy) c. i: nothing of this, or of most of the opening of c. ii, appeared in Σ, which presented a mutilated or deliberately abbreviated version of the text, beginning regio prima continet (continet om. V) domum Placidiae augustae, where regio prima continet looks like an interpolation and domum Placidiae augustae falls at line 11 of c. ii in Seeck’s edition. Σ, for its part, preserved one feature entirely absent from U, the picture at the head of the work. This, it is true, survives only in C, but blanks are left for it in M and in V (which omitted all the illustrations on principle), and C was not therefore merely inventing an appropriate frontispiece where none had existed.
Comparison of Ghelen’s text of the descriptio with the variant versions presented by Σ and U reveals that it follows the tradition of the spirensis throughout. It begins regio prima, continet in se (an editorial supplement)20 domum Placidiae augustae, and thereafter exhibits the peculiarities of Σ (vi.15 present in Σ and Ghelen, omitted in U: vi.l6 ualentiana Σ and Ghelen, ualentiaca U recte: vi.18 portum habet prosforianum Σ and Ghelen, habet om. U), sometimes modifying the text by conjecture (so the supplement mentioned above, and e.g. iii. 1 post ΣU per Ghelen21). And Ghelen prints before his text a picture agreeing - subject to the limitations of Froben’s engraver - with that copied from the spirensis by C alone.

15.  It is thus very clear that for the works which he printed Ghelen had access to a manuscript carrying their text as is appeared in the spirensis. That he did not depend on any of the copies C M P V, or on any copy of these copies, was shown earlier, and some explanation other than that of direct dependence on C must be found to explain the presence in the print of the descriptio illustration preserved in that manuscript alone.
Certain facts may now be presented concerning the spirensis itself. This book, found first by Pietro Donato in the Speyer library in or before January 1436, and last copied there when Master Hans traced the illustrations in 1550, remained at Speyer (so far as is known) until 1552, when the Pfalzgraf Ott Heinrich, already the owner of M, swooped on the cathedral library and carried off the spirensis in triumph to Heidelberg. Adjacent entries for Σ and M appear in the Heidelberg catalogue of 1556.22 Ott Heinrich died on 12 February 1559, and part of his collection was eventually removed to the library of his heir Wolfgang at Neuburg. The books so transferred were listed in October 1599, and among them were both and M. The list23 identifies and distinguishes between them by their physical appearance: Σ the itinerarius Antonini, das alt recht exemplar, was uf Pirgament geschrieben, mit alten illuminirten Figuren, gebunden in Bretter, mit weissem Leder überzogen: while M, the beme llter Itinerarius Antonini, uf Pirgament neu abgeschriben und illuminirt, durch Dechant und Capiti zu Speyr Pfaltzgraf Otthainrichen verehrt, cut a more brilliant figure, in Bretter gebunden, mit go ldtfarben Leder überzogen, uf dem Schnitt und Leder vergult und mit messen Spangen beschlagen. In 1660 M migrated to Düsseldorf, thence to Mannheim, and finally to Munich; Σ however was destroyed, whether accidentally or deliberately is not known. A single sheet, plausibly ascribed to it, survives as the former binding of a record-book of 1602/3 in the archives of Wallerstein, near Neuburg. 24
The spirensis contained a remarkable collection of items of various dates, all of a geographical, topographical or more-or-less official character. They were, in this order, and with the titles suitably adapted to modern forms of reference,
Aethici cosmographia 
itinerarium Antonini 
Dicuil de mensura orbis terrae 
notitia Galliarum 
laterculus Polemii Siluii 
de montibus portis et uiis urbis Romae 
de rebus bellicis
altercatio Hadriani et Epicteti 
descriptio urbis Romae 
descriptio urbis constantinopolitanae 
de gradibus cognationum 
notitia dignitatum.
The list divides itself neatly into two parts: first, a set of topographical treatises, without illustrations and ranging widely in date;25 and second, beginning with de rebus beiiicis, a group of six items with official connotations,26 all illustrated, and illustrated in a style consonant with that of the late fourth or early fifth century, a period to which the composition of some of the pieces can be securely ascribed. This second group clearly represents the contents of a single manuscript in which the separate works had been copied up together: the texts in the first group may not have been brought together before the compilation of the corpus which the complete spirensis represented.
When and how was this synthesis achieved? Seeck evolved a theory that the collection was assembled either by the scribe of the spirensis or by the scribe of its exemplar (which cannot have preceded it by any great distance in time, since the spirensis was, according to Seeck, no later in date than the eleventh century, and its exemplar would have had to contain Dicuil de mensura, which is firmly dated to 825). On either supposition, Seeck’s view compels us to envisage the spirensis as an organic whole, a book written throughout in a caroline minuscule which employed the open a, its text already plagued with insular corruptions which had originated at some point in a long and complicated history of copying and which are faithfully reflected in C M P and V.27

16.  But I submit that this was not the case: for it seems to me quite clear that in the group of fourth- or fifth-century texts isolated above from the contents of the spirensis (the notitia group, as I shall call them) the direct copies of the Speyer book, C M P and V, were themselves transcribing from an insular hand. This was briefly canvassed for P in §5 above, and is discussed in detail for all four manuscripts at the appropriate points in my critical apparatus. The crucial readings in de rebus bellicis are these:-
ii.6	tyrannos corrected from trrannos in V 
vii.6 intoxta V in auram M intorta CP 
xii.3 ex[r]igunt P
xix.3 ascogefrri C.
These errors point unmistakably to an insular exemplar; and observe that in these instances we are not dealing with four scribes each blindly copying the same existing corruption, a word already mangled in Σ: they are independently attempting to decipher the crabbed, unfamiliar and perhaps faded script of an insular book. Examples of the same confusions of letters can be found in one or more of C M P and V throughout the notitia-group; and we are, I think, obliged to conclude that the text of the works in this group at least was written in the spirensis in an insular hand. But Σ may not have been an insular manuscript throughout, for, if the leaf of the itinerarium Antonini found at Wallerstein is correctly recognized as a fragment of the spirensis, then that work at least, and perhaps the entire first portion of the manuscript, was written in a late ninth- or early tenth-century caroline, allegedly of Middle Rhenish type. And even without the evidence of the Wallerstein sheet we might precariously surmise from the corruptions of C M P and V that in the works outside the notitia-group they were not transcribing from an insular original: none of the typical confusions of n and r, x and r, y and r are recorded,28 despite quite unusually prolific opportunities for their occurrence in unfamiliar geographical names. We must therefore suppose that the spirensis was not an organic whole; that it consisted of at least two groups of manuscript leaves, the itinerarium and the geographical works (if they were copied up with the itinerarium) in caroline minuscule, and the notitia-group in insular minuscule, bound together to form a single book. 29

17.  The connexion of Ghelen with this book may now be investigated. We have seen (§13) that collation of his text reveals that it is, basically in accord with that of the spirensis, and it was suggested that all variants in the print, of whatever magnitude, are the result of editorial conjecture. This will require extensive demonstration; let de rebus bellicis and the first few chapters of the notitia dignitatum serve as test cases.
We will begin with some of Ghelen’s successes. At d.r.b. pr.17 he could correct prope (so Σ) to propter without difficulty, and Σ's  communite was easily rectified at xviii.7.  portatilis, which Ghelen prints for the corrupt portanti at xviii.8, is self-evidently conjectural and, I judge, right: but the libido coniectandi overcame him at v.6, where his limites Arabum for limites, arabunt is an emendatory exploit worthy of the mature Bentley; and his sine for sane in xix.2 betrays a woeful (but probably not wilful) misunderstanding of the drift of the author’s meaning. Σ ‘s corruptions in pr.3 nec te, 31 pr.13 eques, viii.3 extremitate, and the defects in xiv.3, all eluded him - perhaps fortunately, since their appearance in his text shows that his exemplar reflected the most minute peculiarities of the Σ tradition. He did his best with the wretched alio in v.4, accenting it as an adverb (with no perceptible improvement in the sense); and he had the tact not to meddle with uenientum in ix. 1.32 He rightly deleted the dittographic ut minori in v.7, and I acquiesce in his removal of et from the headings of c. x. In neither case does Ghelen give any indication that he has eliminated matter from the text, but we are not therefore to assume that he was following a manuscript which carried a version of the text modified from that of the spirensis, for the silent deletion of difficulties is an outstanding characteristic of the Gelenian critical method. Just so he excised aut from the received laus aut prose quatur in pr.3, where we nowadays perceive the loss of a word before the verb. There are convincing parallels in his treatment of the texts of Ammianus 33 and the notitia, where a spectacular deletion will be commented upon shortly.
Turning, then, to the opening chapters of the notitia, we find ample evidence here also that Pasquali’s congetturatore abilissimo e praticissimo ... ma anche altrettanto audace is at work on a text of purely Σ-type. praesentalis for prassentat was obviously necessary at or.v.26 (the mistake had probably resulted from the misapprehension of the abbreviation praesental_), and the supplement IX at or. vii.38 required of its restorer only the ability to count. But he was not so fortunate with consularem for consularitatem at or.i.78, or with Aegyptum for aegyptiacam at or.i.80; and graecorum for graecarum at or.i.24 is the result of a faulty articulation of the context. In or.i.40 his Libyae for the important corruption librarum misses the obvious truth with almost deliberate perversity;34 and magistri for magister at or.v.75 is wholly unprovoked. From his reading of or.xxiii.2-7, 9-14 he inferred a lacuna after or.i.29 which he filled with the apparently missing name Augustamnica an alteration which in turn necessitated the change of the numeral in or.i.24 from V to VI. As in de rebus bellicis, so in the notitia some genuine difficulties escaped him, the missing entry after or.vii.34, for example; and patent incoherencies were concealed by silent deletion, as in the illustration to or.vi, where entry 24, a duplicate of 22 as regards the caption but without a coloured device on the shield, is suppressed. There are certain curiosities. In one entry (or. i. 5) Ghelen adds a marginal note, cued in the text with a dagger: text +in praesenti ii, margin alias, praesentiales siue praesentales. Either he thought emendation unnecessary here, or, more probably, he was simply drawing attention to the unusual terminology: he is certainly not reporting a variant from another manuscript. And this is not all: immediately following the numeral ii what appears to be a jotting made by the editor in the printer’s copy has actually crept into the text, which reads, in full,
MAGISTRI equitum & peditum +in praesenti II. Alij III.
But this is by no means the full extent of Ghelen’s interference with the text; when he is confronted with an exigency of typography rather than of criticism, his expedients can be shockingly arbitrary. Thus, notitia or.ii.59 is followed in the printed book by or.iii.4 sqq., the series of entries ii.60-71 being entirely cut out and the illustrations at the head of c.iii temporarily deferred: moreover, iii.33 is replaced by ii.72 with its text ruthlessly altered and interpolated (uterque praefectus ... ipsi praefectos emittunt) to suit the faulty plural uirorum illustrium praefectorum of iii.l, 4 ad 20, which had arisen in or before Σ from the wrong expansion of an abbreviation. By these brutal means the letterpress of cc. ii-iii is neatly concluded at the foot of sig. blr, leaving blv free to carry the full-page plate of the insignia of the praefectus praetorio per Illyricum with its caption. Sig. b2r contains only the small plate of the other illustration to c. iii (Macedonia and Dacia); b2v and b3r are necessarily occupied by the illustrations and captions to c. v;35 and the printed text resumes with the lists of c. v (Seeck’s 26 sqq.) on b3v. These violent alterations have been carried out with a certain low scholarly cunning, and they are to be imputed not to Froben’s caster-up or compositor but to the learned editor, who must have been present in the printing-shop when the copy was being marked for composition.36

18.  I have dwelt longer on Ghelen’s differences from the tradition of the spirensis than on his resemblances to it; but the essential similarities are sufficiently obvious, and what required demonstration was that whenever he diverges from the Σ-text we are nowhere entitled to conclude that he was using a manuscript independent of Σ, or even that he had more than one manuscript at his disposal. What, then, was the manuscript which he used? That it must have been the spirensis itself I would argue from strong external and admittedly weaker internal evidence. We have seen (§§ 9—10) that for some time before the appearance of the notitia volume in 1552 Ghelen and Bilde von Rheinau had been exploring the monastic libraries of the Upper Rhine, amongst them Speyer; and the spirensis of the notitia had been located and publicized in 1525 by — Bilde von Rheinau himself.37 It is inconceivable that his sinister crony Ghelen did not know of the manuscript almost from the moment of its discovery. What is curious is that neither scholar printed it immediately. Permission to do so might at first have been refused because of the fragile condition of the manuscript alleged in 1548; but both Bilde and Ghelen seem to have had their methods for the eventual extraction of old copies from recalcitrant authorities. In any case, neither was unoccupied at the time: the new murbachiensis of the Elder Pliny claimed Bilde’s attention in 1536, and Ghelen, the junior partner in their enterprises, had arrived in Basel from Venice only in 1524; he was perhaps not to be trusted with a princeps until he had shown his paces for Froben in a less responsible task.
Both men must have been interested in the discovery by Simon Gryné, in 1527, of the laurishamensis of Livy’s fifth decad; and when subsequent researches at Speyer bore splendid fruit in the shape of texts of decads four and five - the uormatiensis of decad four being also to hand - the production of a new Livy must have taken precedence over much else. Moreover, by 1533 Ghelen had secured the hers feldensis of Ammianus and was working, for Froben, on an edition to rival Accorsi’s and replace that of Erasmus.38 These tasks completed, he could turn to the notitia: his manuscript was certainly available to him in 1536, when, as we shall see in the Excursus below, Froben’s artist cut one of the wood-block illustrations for the book. Another picture, however, as we shall also see, was not engraved until 1550; the edition appeared in 1552; and (since the interval between 1550 and 1552 poses no problem, as allowance has to be made for the cutting of perhaps more blocks than one and for the setting of the letter-press) we are left to find a reason for the gap between the illustration dates. Infrequent access to the fragile and jealously-guarded Speyer exemplar is the obvious explanation of this, as it might also in part explain the eleven years’ delay between the location of the manuscript and the cutting of one picture-block in 1536; though appeals to the bad condition of the spirensis inevitably depend on the veracity of the authorities in informing Ott Heinrich that their book was in a poor state, necessitating actual repair in 1548. An insular manuscript might well have been falling apart by then, but the possibility remains that Speyer’s reply to the Pfalzgraf was an excuse concocted to try to keep the book out of the hands of an acquisitive bibliophile (and perhaps of destructive editors also). The probability of a link between the condition of the spirensis and the time taken to produce the printed text will be noticed in the Excursus at the end of this section: here I will only insist that Ghelen’s strong interest in Speyer, his proven use of two other spirenses, and his presumed knowledge since 1525 of the existence of the Speyer notitia, are valid enough external reasons for believing that this manuscript was the direct source of his text. 39

19. That Ghelen made direct use of the spirensis in preparing his edition of the notitia-group texts may also, I believe, be sustained from the internal evidence of two unusually interesting readings in de rebus bellicis. At the end of c. vii.2 Σ’s writing of the word intorta was (or had become) sufficiently indistinct to confuse two of the scribes copying from it. V misread the insular r as an x: M, bewildered by the shapes of round t and open a, and unhappy about the end of the word, produced the wildly wrong in auram. 40 C and P wrote the word correctly: is this a tribute to their superior discernment, or had damage occurred to intorta between the dates of C and P and that of V? Now Ghelen's text contains no hint of a word resembling intorta, and for iaculatur he reads eiaculatur. What does this mean? Evidently that he could not fully decipher the reading in his exemplar of the word between radiis and iaculatur.41 Neither C nor P was his exemplar, as we have seen (and as this variant further shows); and he could surely have corrected intoxta if V had been his copy-text (which, as we have also seen, it was not). Either, then, Ghelen was using M, with its ghastly error in auram: or he was using a (lost) copy or twin of the spirensis which wrote the word indistinctly or wrongly: or he was using the spirensis itself. But he did not use M: lost transcripts are not to be postulated unnecessarily: arid given the possibility that Ghelen could have had access to Σ between 1525 and 1552, no alternative need be supposed. Ghelen, I contend, saw the doubtful reading in the spirensis, and his solution of the problem is entirely typical: the unclear word is suppressed, and iaculatur is wilfully extended, perhaps to compensate for the preceding excision.
The second important reading is at xxi.1, where all four apographs of Σ present us with componatis. Gundermann is right in restoring comparatis; the error arose from an easy misreading of insulars. But it is, I think, unlikely that all four manuscripts would misread the same two letters in precisely the same way, although they are elsewhere guilty of committing the same fault independently in a single letter. componatis must therefore, on this view, have been the reading of Σ, an error which tends to show that Σ was itself transcribing from an insular hand.43 But P, having duly transcribed componatis, felt misgivings about what he had written, and placed expuncts under the letters na, without, however, suggesting alternative interpretations (he cannot have intended a deletion). This is exceptionally instructive. P had no doubts concerning the o before the n (which incidentally reinforces the contention that componatis was in Σ); his dissatisfaction was with n and a, which, in transcription from insulars, is understandable; but he evidently came to the conclusion that that was what the letters in his exemplar really were. Now it is precisely these two letters, na, which are altered in Ghelen’s reading here, compositis. Had Ghelen been able to read comparatis securely, even he could have had no reason to change it; but two crucial letters were in doubt in his copy-text, the same two letters which had puzzled one scribe copying from Σ; and Ghelen, concerned (unlike C M and V) to produce Latin, was forced to improvise on the basis of what could be read without difficulty. We are, I think, driven to conclude that Ghelen had before him the very manuscript which deluded C M and V and troubled P, namely Σ itself. It would be excessively rash to postulate a lost congener of C M P V intervening between Ghelen and the spirensis at this point, since this hypothetical manuscript, if it were in doubt as to the reading - and the probability is that it would not have been -, must either have given Σ’s letter-forms in facsimile or have already interpolated compositis (by conjecture, since P’s failure to offer alternatives for the letters na shows that it was unsafe to copy them as anything else). And a gemellus of Σ would have had to present exactly Σ’s unclarity. It is altogether more economical to suppose that no such intermediary or twin existed.
It is appropriate at this point to return briefly to a notorious reading in de rebus bellicis which has already been mentioned, namely uenientum at the end of ix.1, shared by Ghelen with P and V against the uenientium of C and M. If my contentions as to Ghelen’s copy-text are correct, then of course he took his reading directly from Σ, and P and V must have preserved the truth by accurate transcription (which admittedly is the last thing we expect from V) rather than stumbled upon it by a fortunate error.

20.  It is a remarkable fact that, of the nine great Latin manuscripts used by Bilde or Ghelen or both between 1520 and 1552, seven have completely disappeared, and the other two are represented only by fragments. Bilde is known to have sent the murbachiensis of Velleius to the printer as copy; it may never have come back.44 The hersfeldensis of Ammianus, which also seems actually to have been lent to the editor (‘exemplar manu scriptum . . . suppeditauit . . . abbas hersfeldensis’) may similarly have gone to the press: if so, it was at some time returned, since the six fragments of it now at Marburg were found serving as dust-jackets to account-books at Schloss Friedewald, near Hersfeld. The Speyer corpus, of which we apparently possess a single leaf, was found in its home library in 1552 by Ott Heinrich. Questions arise, to which the reader may supply his own answers. Does the partial or total loss of these manuscripts imply that they were all at some time used in or near the printing-shop, suffering an ill-treatment which resulted in, if not their immediate destruction, then at least some damage which hastened their eventual collapse? Who was responsible for this? Was the Speyer corpus, or a part of it, ever lent, even briefly, to Basel after 1525, as it may have been in 1436, when C was copied? In fact, are its known fragility and ultimate ruin further evidence that Σ was used by Ghelen?

21.  Two problems remain. The first concerns the contents of the 1552 edition, which, it will be remembered, consist of notitia dignitatum, descriptio urbis Romae, descriptio urbis constantinopolitanae, de rebus bellicis, and -- ne quid de antiquo exemplari omitteretur — disputatio Radriani et Epicteti. Neither this, the title-page order, nor the actual printed order - descriptio Romae, descriptio constantinopolitanae, notitia, de rebus bellicis, disputatio — reproduces the sequence of these items in Σ; and, despite the profession that nothing has been omitted from the antique exemplar, the little memorandum de gradibus cognationum, which was placed in Σ between the descriptio constantinopolitanae and the notitia, is not printed, nor indeed are any of the works outside the notitia-group. These facts admit of the following explanations:
(a) The order of the contents. This need cause us no disquiet. A sixteenth-century editor would not have felt himself bound to preserve the arrangement of his copy-text, and bibliographical considerations show that the contents have been so ordered that the notitia falls in the very centre of the printed book, symmetrically surrounded by the remaining matter. The modern treatises by Bilde and Alciati, which follow the preface and are strictly speaking extensions of it, completing the preliminary quire, together with the descriptiones urbium (Rome preceding Constantinople, as in Σ), occupy 21 pages of type: then comes the notitia: and de rebus bellicis and the disputatio (these two texts also in their Σ order) complete the print in another 21 type-pages. As for the title-page order, Ghelen or his publisher was clearly intent on securing the greatest possible typographical prominence for what was considered the most important item in the collection: thereafter the titles are in the printed order of the works.
(b) ne quid de antiquo exemplari omitteretur. If the spirensis was (as we have argued) a composite manuscript, it may have been obvious to Ghelen that the insular leaves containing the notitia— group texts were more archaic in appearance than the caroline leaves of the preceding portion of the book, and he may have wished to put only the more ancient section into type. This is improbable. It is much more likely that he was concerned to print only the spectacular illustrated items, as the written copies uaticanus 3715 and leidensis uossianus 44 were content to transcribe these alone from C; the script of this section could have helped to confirm that these illustrated texts constituted an exemplar separate from the rest of the manuscript and of undoubted antiquity. It is barely possible that Ghelen was permitted to extract these leaves from Σ and use them for a while in Basel: this would add verisimilitude to his (or his printer’s) proclamation of an antiquum exemplar whose contents were given in full.
But in fact one treatise from among the notitia-group had been left out, the de gradibus cognationum, which consists of a tabular illustration and a short block of descriptive text. Its omission may have to be explained as a conscious excision made by a printer pressed for space and unable to include even so short a work without upsetting the planned make-up of his book. Something in the preliminaries, one feels, might with advantage have been spared to make room for de gradibus, which could have been printed on two pages in the chosen format and in Froben’s standard roman type; but we must accept that Ghelen or Froben had legitimate reason for prefixing to the notitia Bilde’s fragmentary but patriotic essay on Illyricum and Alciati’s somewhat etiolated observations on Roman public offices. And given this, it can be seen by correlation of the collation-formula and the list of contents45 that no two pages of the book are vacant, and that insertion of an extra sheet (say in quire p, to bring it up to a ternio) would have spoiled the distribution of the text over the quires and into 21 type-pages on each side of the notitia. Addition of a sheet would have further entailed either finding another one-leaf treatise to print or leaving an unsightly blank. Deliberate omission at the printing stage seems therefore the most probable reason for Ghelen’s not giving de gradibus. A remote possibility is that the page carrying this text may have been missing from the fragile spirensis when Ghelen used the book: remote, in view of the undoubted presence in Σ of de gradibus when M was copied from it in 1542. A final bibliographical speculation is best relegated to a note.46

22. The last remaining question concerns a sentence in Ghelen’s epistle dedicatory which appears to convey information about the provenance of the manuscript which he used in preparing his text. It reads in extenso as follows: Ghelen is addressing the surgeon André Vesale, Vesalius, on sig. *2v of the printed book:
caeterum haec NOTITIA, dum Romana res staret, adseruata penes Primicerium notariorum, et tandem afflicto ac penè exciso imperio, cum caeteris spoliis in barbarorum manus delata, nunc demum ex ultimis Britannis antiquariorum studiis repetita, innotescit auspicio felici tui nominis, aeque clan ac gratiosi apud omnes quibus cordi sunt bonae literae.
It is difficult to know how seriously we should take what is proposed here, especially since Ghelen regards his manuscript as the actual working copy of the notitia - and I suppose of its satellites also - used in the office of the western primicerius notariorum in the early fifth century. Manifestly it can not have been. But what was his reason for believing that it came ex ultimis Britannis? Perhaps he recognized the insular script of the notitia-group leaves as characteristic of manuscripts written by the remotest Britons: perhaps there existed at Speyer some evidence, or at least a tradition, that Britain was the origin of this portion of the manuscript. The existence of such a tradition may be reflected in the alleged connexion of the first work in the Speyer corpus, the Aethici cosmographia, with the Irish scholar Moelbrigte, Mariangelus Scotus (1028-?l082): hec cosmographia que Scoti dicitur, as C, alone among the apographs of Σ, describes it. Moelbrigte left Ireland for Cologne in 1056, was at Fulda between 1058 and 1069, and spent the rest of his life as a recluse at Mainz: it is suggested that he brought with him from Ireland a manuscript of Aethicus at least, and perhaps also texts of other components of the Speyer corpus. The supposition, if correct, would be of signal importance, because, if Moelbrigte carried over a text of the notitia-group with the Aethicus, that text should have formed the very set of leaves which - it is conjectured - was bound up into the spirensis.48 But a tradition of a British origin for this section of the manuscript may have persisted without reference to Moelbnigte’s reputed connexion with the Aethicus, and in either case the tradition, if it ever existed, may have been mistaken. There is, after all, no overwhelming necessity to connect Σ’s notitia-group portion, on grounds of content or script, with Moelbrigte or Britain at all. It may never have left Germany: for, if these texts formed part of a western archive, the separate originals of its contents may have been held at the administrative centre at Trier, and both the insular spirensis and its postulated insular parent49 could have been written in the paradoxically-named continental insulars at any one of the Anglo-saxon foundations in Germany, at Fulda, for instance, at Hersfeld, or at Echternach. But here the piling of speculation on speculation becomes profitless, e se’ venuto in parte | dov’ io per me più oltre non discerno.
NOTES

1.  This is parmensis palatinus 1280, saec. xvi (I.G.Maier, 27 Latomus [1968].96 sqq., quoting P.F.Girard’s identification on p.103 note 1). Panciroli gave merely a summary of the contents of de rebus bellicis, but presumably he knew it exclusively from the Parma manuscript.
2. According to R.Neher, in his Tübingen dissertation of 1911 on the anonymus, parisinus 5825E is a copy of P, uaticanus barberinus 157 a copy of M, uindobonensis 3102 a copy of V [this is certain: §4 above with note 5], and all the rest copies of C.
3.  The scribe is of course using the heading of the first work in the collection as a general title for the book.  On the implications of the reference to Scotus see §22.
4.  I will transcribe here, for their importance in textual and iconographic studies of Σ and M, the extracts from the Speyer minute-book printed by Preisendanz in 1 Zeitschrift für Buchkunde (1924).15-16:
A (26 January 1548) - Itinerarius. Hertzog Ott Heinrich pfaltzgraff schreibt vnd begert den Itinerarium Anthoninj, sonderlich das alt Exemplar Ir. Gn. zu leyhen, wol dasselbig abschreiben zu lassen. Haben m. H. darum geredt vnd in ansehung, das die alten herren es nie mher außzuleyhen beschlossen, für gantz beschwerlich geacht, es Ir. gn. zu leyhen, wollen ehe Ihr gn. em exemplar verfertigen lassen. Darauf Ir gn. geantwurt: das alt exemplar sey etwas blod vnd steen m. Hn. im werck das zu renouiren, so das vol pracht, wolle sie Ir gn. (wo anderst Ir gn. als dan noch daruff bedacht, em Exemplar zu haben) ems vertigen lassen.
B (3 February 1548). Hat Hertzog Ott Heinrich wider ge— schrieben, das Ir. gn. zu friden mit einer Copeij, mit beger das die figuren wie die alten solien gemalet werden, weicher muhe haib Ir gn. sich woll werden zu halten wissen; darauf soil Tymenick vicarj es in der Dechanej schreiben.
C (5 December 1549). Hertzog Ott Heinrich pfaltzgraff, hat des Itinerarij halb m. Hn. Dhumbdechan geschrieben vnd angemanet. Ist Ir F. G. geschrieben, wie das geschrieben exemplar vf die allt handt noch nit gemalet, man wolle vf den fruling, so es wieder warm, vleiß ankeren, das es gemalet; wo es aber ir g. benugig sein wolle, wolle man Ir g. em exemplar vf die newe hand gemalet zuste llen. vf solchs hat er wider geschrieben vnd begert, das man Ime wolle das gemalet zu sehen an schaden zuschicken. Ist be— willigt.
D (20 March 1550). Des Hertzog Ott Heinrichen vertrostung geschehen, den Itinerarium vf die alt hande malen zu lassen, vnd aber khein maler zubekomen, ist dem fabricken maister bevolhen sich besser vmbzuthun vnd wo kein maler zubekomen, deß dem Hertzogen zu berichten.
E (1/2 June 1550). Nachdem vf m. Hn. schreiben, das der geschrieben Itinerarius vf die alt hande zu malen, nit mag bestelt werden, Hertzog Ott Heinrich zu friden, das man Ime den Ihringen, so Ir. gn. hieuor besichtigt vnd vf die newe hande gemalt ist, vngebunden zuschicke vnd darbey anzeigen wolle, waß der rest, ist bedacht wiewol derselbe vf 69 gld gecost, ir gn. soichen verfertigten Itinerarium zu schencken vnd Ir gn. den namen zu antwurten lassen, weß Ir gn. für sich selb dem Stifft zu gutten gebe, muse man geschehen lassen vnd zu Danck annemen.
F (continues E). Hat Hertzog Ott Heinrzch wiederumb begert, dieweil der Itinerarius, so m. Hn. Ir gn. verert, zu wit vf die new handt gemalet, das m. Hn. vnbeschwerdt sein wolten, seine maler, so Ir Gn. derhalben geschickt, vf geoldrenckt pappeir, die cite figuren durchzeichnen zu lassen, vnd dieweil m. Hn. nit wissen, ob es on schaden geschehen moge, so ist bedacht, Meister Honsens Molerns Rhat dar zu zuhoeren. Wo es on schaden gesein moge, so ist es bewiliget.
Thompson’s account of M seems to me confused.
5.  uindobonensis 3102 naturally presents some independent readings, all of which, however, are evident distortions of unclarities in V.
6.  For P’s early history see Thompson, pp.7-8.
7.  Those who regard alieni in d.r.b. pr.7 as corrupt would claim this as very strong evidence of P’s descent from Σ and not from a gemellus of that manuscript, since the perversion of terminations was a characteristic of the Σ text (see my critical note ad loc.). If correct, as I believe it to be, the reading is less decisive.
8.  On page 11 of his edition, lines 6-7. The enormous mass of material on parts of the tradition of the notitia, laboriously put together by I.G.Maier in 27 Latomus (1968).96-141 and in 28 Latomus (1969).960-1035, insofar as it reflects upon the source of the editio princeps, is susceptible of interpretation in more than one way.
9.  Bohemian; Ghelen was a native of Prague.
10.  This sudden spate of Greek activity is remarkable. Perhaps Froben, whose publishing house was (as Ghelen expresses it in his notitia preface) literatorum commodis iam dudum deditissima, had signified a desire to have some new editions of Greek authors amòng his stock; and Simon Gryné’s recent appearance on the scene may also be significant. Not that Ghelen lacked Greek; before going to Basle in 1524 he had studied at Venice under Mousouros, whose teaching was admired by - amongst others - Bilde von Rheinau (see J.E. Sandys, A history of classical scholarship 2.79 note 4, for Bilde’s punning encomium).
11.  The kindest possible verdict on Ghelen as critic is perhaps that of Pasquali in Storia della tradizione e critica del testo2 p.82: il Gelenio, se in fondo era uno studioso onesto, era anche un congetturatore abilissimo e praticissimo di lingua e stile, ma anche altrettanto audace.
12.  But Ghelen based his text on a different manuscript, the fifteenth-century uolaterranus 298 (5404) 
13.  Without space or adequate pretext to work out these contentions in detail here, I will record my belief that Ghelen’s Ammianus was prepared not, as has occasionally been suspected, through heavy dependence on Accorsi’s edition (which carried readings and the text of books 27 sqq. from the hersfeldensis or one of its close relatives), but was edited firstly, in books 14 to 26, on the basis of the 1518 Froben print controlled by the hersfeldensis, and subsequently, in books 27 to 30.9.6 (where reliqua in archetypo desiderabantur), by working directly from the Hersfeld text. Ghelen, I think, supplied his printer with composite material from which to set up the new edition: a copy of the 1518 Froben (Erasmus’ reedition of Castelli’s 1517 editio bononiensis) emended by collation with the hersfeldensis, plus a modified transcript from that manuscript of books 27 sqq.., a very long stretch of consecutive text unknown to editors before Accorsi and himself; the whole, and perhaps especially the latter portion, suitably revised on established Gelenian principles. Froben’s desire to have editions of important texts more saleable than those of his rivals is evident in all this. Castelli edits (for Benedetti of Bologna) what was known of Ammianus in 1517, and Froben forthwith commissions Erasmus to re-edit (in fact, to do little more than reprint under a greater name) Castelli’s text: Accorsi edits (for Otmar of Augsburg) an augmented Ammianus in May 1533, and two months later Ghelen’s new Froben appears. Two months is a cruelly short space of time in which to collate, edit and put into print a text of about 125,000 words in a poor tradition, and very conceivably Ghelen had been working on Ammianus for some years, with knowledge of the Hersfeld manuscript; but the publication of Accorsi’s sensationally-improved edition must have been the final stimulus to the production of a replacement of the now obsolete 1518 Froben. Of course Ghelen may occasionally have appropriated, or independently conjectured, readings which appear in Accorsi, or, for that matter, elsewhere: but I would prefer to consider him in general as a treacherous witness to the Hersfeld manuscript than as a shameless borrower who mangled what he took.
14.  See infra, note 44, for a brief description of Bilde’s copy for his Velleius; and in detail, Woodman’s edition (1977) of Velleius 2.94-131, pp.3 sqq. of the Introduction.
15.  I give a type-facsimile of the title-page of the editio princeps in my critique of previous editions of de rebus bellicis, printed infra as an appendix to this section. Before the ancient works Ghelen prints his own epistle dedicatory and two modern essays, Bilde on Illyricum and Alciati on Roman public offices: vide the contents-list in note 45, and, for the effects of the inclusion of these treatises on the casting-up of the copy for the book, § 21.
16.  uaticanus 3715, which today lacks about half the text of de rebus bellicis, actually copies out C’s colophon, exemplata est hec cosmographia e.q.s. (supra, §2).
17.  Critical sagacity would above all have been defeated in the case of V, whose text is shockingly corrupt throughout. Seeck should not have said, on p. ix of his edition of the notitia, that apographa eius (sc. codicis spirensis) quattuor extant, quae omnia ea cum cure facta sunt ut etiam in minimis rebus conspirent: this is scarcely true of M and grossly false of V. We may further discount the possibility (Thompson, p.12) that Ghelen’s exemplar may have been uaticanus 3715, which alone states - a statement which recurs on Ghelen’s title-page - that de rebus bellicis is addressed to Theodosius and his sons. uaticanus 3715 is a copy of C, and Ghelen’s text is in detail not one which any copy of C could present (supra, §12). Furthermore, his qualified statement - uetustus liber DE REBVS BELLICIS ad Theodosium Aug. & filios eius Arcadium atq; Honorium, ut uidetur, scriptus - implies guesswork; ut uidetur should not have been written if there was manuscript evidence for the address. Ghelen knew his ancient history, and merely made an unlucky inference from the imperatores, imperator and filii of the text: a mistake suggested perhaps by the references in the descriptio constan tinopolitanae to thermas arcadianas, domum Pulcheriae augustae, thermas honorianas, cisternam theodosianam and so on. But note that, since Ghelen knew only the mutilated form of the descriptio text (supra, §14), the cue for the identification cannot have come from the direct allusion to Theodosius in the preface to that work (line 14 of Seeck’s edition), a section of the text transmitted uniquely by uindobonensis 162 outside the Σ tradition.
18.  Why did Ghelen fail to correct this?
19.  It is called V by Seeck, who in his apparatus to the descriptio changes the siglum of uindobonensis 3103 from V to S1 - an unnecessary and confusing alteration. uindobonensis 162 may be consulted in Unterkircher’s photographic facsimile, umbrae codicum occidentalium 2 (Amsterdam 1960).
20.  continet in se is the regular formula of introduction (cc. ii-vii, ix-xv): c. viii alone has habet autem in se.
21.  Ghelen was much given to this sort of tinkering; compare his equally gratuitous prae for pro in de rebus bellicis i.9.
22.  The entries are printed by Thompson, p.9.
23.  Text of the following descriptions of Σ and M from Thompson, p.9.
24.  Fürstlich Oettingen-Wallerstein'sche Bib liothek, Schloss Harburg, MS.I, 2, 2 0, 37. The fragment is confidently ascribed to Σ by competent authorities (apud Thompson p.10 and Maier, 27 Latomus (1968).98) and it is very convenient, though by no means essential, to believe that their attribution is correct; see infra, §16.
25.  The Speyer library seems to have been well provided with topographical texts. C, having copied (at Speyer? §2) the contents of Σ, adds the demensuratio prouinciarum and Cyriac of Ancona de septem mundi spectaculis, but admits, at the head of the demensuratio, that this work non erat in praecedenti codice, sed de antiquissimo libro. desumpta. Was the Cyriac from the same source? and did the antiquis simus liber duplicate some or all of the Σ items?
26.  The altercatio Hadriani et Epicteti can be described as an official text only by the exercise of extreme sophistry, and its presence in the notitia-group remains mysterious. I can only suggest that if (as I am inclined to believe) the collection was assembled in the scriptorium of an insular foundation from separate originals, some of them perhaps having survived as a bundle from an official source, then the didactic, even pedantic quality of the altercatio should have appealed to men trained in the insular tradition, and the fact that the text is a para-philosophical dialogue with an emperor as protagonist may have helped to justify its inclusion in a technical collection of imperial character.
27.  Seeck in 9 Hermes (1875).229, and in his edition of the notitia, p.ix with p.xxvi.
28.  A sweeping statement, but I believe it to be true in the cases of those texts and manuscripts for which printed collations are available.
29.  I cannot claim that the concept of the spirensis as a composite manuscript is new; Schnabel (29 Sitzungsberichte der Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, phil.—hist. Abteilung (1929).242 sqq.., at p.257) devised it before me. His conclusion has been impugned by Lehmann and Thompson: I reached it independently, without consultation of Schnabel’s article, and have left my text as I at first wrote it. ualeat quantum ualere potest. Comparison of Schnabel’s position with mine will show that I accept a more orthodox grouping of the contents of than he proposes; and I would tend to set the terminus for the writing of the notitia-group leaves quite one hundred years before his ninth-century limit. We need suppose only one intermediary stage between and the individual archetyrpes of the notitia-group works; see the note immediately following.
30.  Seeck's speculations as to the archetype of fall of course. I do not find it necessary to assume, with him, a long history of copying of the notitia-group. The text of C - on the whole the best surviving copy of Σ - is of distinctly high quality, and some of its errors are undoubtedly self-inflicted; and between it and the separate originals of the texts in the group there need have intervened only one manuscript, in which the collection was first made, and whose presence in the background may be felt in certain corruptions discussed in my critical notes to d.r.b.pr.5 and xxi.l.
31.  That this was a corruption already existing in Σ is suggested in my critical note to xxi.1.
32.  The necessity for the reduction of the termination in clausuia is discussed in my critical note to ix.l.
33.  See supra, note 13, for an opinion on the copy for Ghelen's Ammianus. For his practice of silently deleting desperately corrupt or defective text in Ammianus see, for example, his proceedings at 28.4.26 (lacunose matter in MV omitted by Ghelen), 28.5.1 dum MV omitted by Ghelen (read dux with de Valois), 30.3.5 sacramenti et inti MV, et inti omitted by Ghelen (perhaps read et ritus with Clark).
34.  librarum may have been the reading of Σ: see note 43.
35.  Seeck’s postulated c. iv is lost. It was missing from the spi— rensis, for C M P and V know nothing of it. But observe that in view of Ghelen’s butchery of the text in this area it would be unsafe to conclude solely from his omission of 'c. iv' that he was using a text of spirensis-type.
36.  I have treated this extraordinary piece of Gelenian misrepresentation in some detail because it must be understood that the telescoping of the text here is not due to Ghelen’s having followed a tradition other than that of Σ but arises purely from the accommodation of text to typographical circumstances. His methods were not wholly arbitrary; they can be observed and defined (supra, §17 with note 33, and, for another aspect of his technique, note 21); but they were pervasive, and his inveterate habits of trivial (and often unnecessary) emendation, the silent deletion of difficulties, and abbreviation, must be constantly borne in mind by those dealing with any text in which Ghelen is to be employed as a witness to a deperditus.
37.  Thompson, p.8; P. Lehmann in Sitzungsberichte der bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, phil.—hist. Abteibung 1934.iv.12 sq.
38.  Further consideration of Ghelen’s Ammianus supra in note 13.
39.  The timetable of Ott Heinrich’s requests for the loan of the spirensis (supra, note 4) shows that Σ was ostensibly at Speyer continuously from January 1548 to June 1550; and in 1552 the Pfalzgraf descended on the library and removed the manuscript to Heidelberg. Thompson (p.11), rehearsing an argument of Seeck’s, avers that the presence of Σ at Speyer ‘during the years 1542 [the date of M]-1552’ precludes Ghelen’s having used it as copy. It does no such thing; indeed, it would rather encourage than preclude it.	It is even a possible explanation of the authorities’ unwillingness to let Ott Heinrich have the book that they were reserving it for Ghelen’s use. Σ had been discovered at Speyer in 1525 by Bilde von Rheinau; it was still there in 1542 and from 1548. Throughout this period we have no evidence that it ever left Speyer, and since it is on the whole improbable (despite the possibility explored in §20) that so important and fragile a book would have been lent to Ghelen, restricted access to it in the library seems altogether the best explanation of the time taken in producing the edition. Ghelen’s glancing reference to the fortuitous (and, by implication, recent) discovery of the text must be viewed with appropriate scepticism: equidem cupiebam, he says to Vesale, iam ante extare monumentum aliquod mutuae nostrae beneuolentiae: uerum tua humanitas hoc quod primum fors obtulit, aequi bonique consulet (ed. pr. sig. *2v).
40.  The confusion of open a with u, though certainly characteristic of transcription from insulars, is not confined to copies made fr)m an exemplar in such a hand. The confusion of a and o is slightly more suggestive, that of a and t noticeably more so, and the cornbined evidence has perceptible weight.
41.  Typographical convenience did not have to be taken into account here.
42.  It must be distinctly understood that when in this and later Contexts I speak of a ‘lost copy of the spirensis’ I mean a transcript of Σ intended, as C M P and V were intended, to serve as an independent copy of the text with no ulterior purpose in view. I do not refer to any transcript which Ghelen might himself have made, or have had made, to serve as printer’s copy if the use of Σ itself for this purpose was denied him. Whether the compositor set up his text from the actual pages of the spirensis, as Pickel’s printer set up Hrotsuith in 1501 (infra, note 44), or whether he used a prepared transcript, or whether he worked from a transcript plus the original, as Bilde’s printer did with Velleius (infra, note cited), cannot be ascertained. But a transcript made by or for Ghelen would eventually, after editorial correction by him, be indistinguishable from the final text of the extant printed book. What I am trying to show is, not that Ghelen did not at some time have his own working copy of the spirensis, but that he actually saw and used that book, and that his text is, beneath a layer of alterations, a direct witness to Σ independent of C M P and V.
43.  See my critical note ad loc., where CMPV’s incredible nec te in d.r.b. praef.5 is also considered in this light. Could CMPV’s librarum for libyarum at notitia or.i.40 have been in Σ? - that is, did Ghelen find more to change here than the number in conjuring up his emendation Libyae?
44.  The copy which Bilde eventually dispatched to Froben consisted of two books, the ‘monstrously corrupt’ murbachiensis itself and an even fouler transcript hastily made from the Murbach text by a friend shortly after the exemplar had been brought to light. The printers were directed ut uetus exemplar non minus quam exemplum inspicerent: an instruction which might mean not only that the parent could be used to correct errors in its offspring but also that necessary corrections had been entered indiscriminately in both. (For a discussion of the transmission of Velleius, and of Bilde’s editorial manoeuvres in producing his text, see Woodman’s edition  of Velleius 2.94-131, pp.3 sqq.). A notorious instance of an antique manuscript still extant which was used as printer’s copy is the tenth-century gandershemensis of Hrotsuith, sent to Hoeltzel’s shop in Nuremberg for Pickel’s (“Celtis”) print of 1501 and never returned to Gandersheim; it survives, interpolated with editorial matter and smudged with printer’s ink, in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (as codex monacensis latinus 14485). A possible case of a manuscript transcribed specifically to serve as printer’s copy may be identified in a fifteenth-century Augustine de ciuitate dei now at S. Scolastica, Subiaco; this seems, from details of its readings and lineation, to have been the copy supplied for the editio princeps of the text, printed by Sweynheym and Pannartz at Subiaco in 1467. (Details and photographs of the Gandersheim and Subiaco codices in Adrian Wilson, The making of the Nuremberg Chronicle, Amsterdam 1976, pp.32 sqq.)
45.  The collation is: roy.20, *8 a-o6 p4  q-r6 (on a problem in the last quire see next note), and the contents: *1r title, *1v blank, *2r-v Ghelen: epistula nuncupatoria, *3r-*5r Bilde von Rheinau: Illyrici descriptio, *5v Alciati: epistle prefatory to his essay de magistratibus, *6r-*8v Alciati: de magistratibus ciuilibusque et militaribus officiis, a1r-a3v descriptio urbis Romae, a4r-a6r descriptio urbis Constantinopoleos, a6v-p4v notitia dignitatum, q1r-r3v de rebus bellicis, r4r-r5r altercatio Hadriani et Epicteti, r5v colophon, r6r blank, r6v device.
46. I was once inclined to think that Froben had made a physical alteration in the make-up of the last quires of the printed book, since the leaf which should be r4 lacks a signature, contrary to the printer’s practice in all the other ternios in the volume. Quire r could therefore, it seemed, be a duernio (in which case r4 would naturally be left unsigned), and the following leaves, the supposed r5 and r6, might not after all be conjugate with r2 and r1 respectively but might constitute a separate, unsigned cancel unio. This would imply that some change had been made in the contents at the end of the book, perhaps reflecting an abandoned intention to print de gradibus cognationum in this area. But examination of the water-marks and chain-lines of the paper seems to show quite clearly that ‘r4’, ‘r5’ and ‘r6’ are conjugate respectively with the signed leaves r3, r2 and r1; and the absence of a signature for r4 is probably the result of a careless (or aesthetically-inspired) omission of the direction-line below the picture-block which ‘r4’ carries, showing Hadrian and Epictetus in debate.
47. It is not necessary for me to say again that Ghelen did not use C (supra, §12) and cannot have seen this ascription there. But it may have existed as a note written into the spirensis, whence both C and Ghelen have reported it.
48. On purely temporal grounds, Moelbrigte’s text of the notitia-group, if he ever had one, cannot have been the lightly-corrupted insular archetype of Σ, errors in which are tentatively isolated in my textual notes to d.r.b.pr.5 and xxi.l. To speak plainly, I am not inclined to believe that he imported a notitia-group manuscript at all. Nevertheless, the insular connexion with official and topographical texts is interesting and suggestive. Anglo-saxon foundations on the continent were stocked, presumably from their parents, with texts of this kind (for Speyer, see supra, note 25); the books - among them, I must insist, the spirensis of the notitia and its satellites - are or were in insular script; and we have proof that at least one eighth-century scholar, an Englishman working on the continent, had read one of the works in the notitia group (a fact which may reflect unfavourably on the view that the group was unknown in continental monasteries until Moelbrigte’s migration in the eleventh century). Alcuin writes (epist. 88 ad fin.: Duemmler, m.G.h. epp. iv = epp. aeui karol. ii, p.133 lines 4-9: a.d.793-796?): de epistola interrogasti, quid esset. nam epi super, stola habitus grece dicitur. unde Hadrianus imperator Epitetum philosophum inter alias inquisitiones interrogauit quid esset cinctum. at ille uidens eum epistolam manu tenentem respondit quod manu tenes, uolens intellegere quasi supercinctorium esset epistolae sigillum, quo a foris uestiatur cartula. hanc habeto interpretationem, donec meliorem inuenias uel ueriorem. The reference to the altercatio Hadriani et Epicteti is perfectly clear: I transcribe the relevant lines (they form the very opening of the text) from Ghelen’s edition, sig. r4v:- HADRIANVS. Quid erit nobis si cinctum soluas, neq; nudaberis ipse? respice corpus, quo & doceri possis. EPIC. Epistola est.
49.  See critical notes on d.r.b. pr.5 and xxi.l; note 43 above; and, for a possible feature of this manuscript’s layout, the critical note on the chapter-heading of d.r.b.xvi.

APPENDIX

PREVIOUS EDITIONS OF THE TEXT
I give this conspectus substantially after Neher and Thompson. One preliminary observation may be of service to users of the Oxford edition. Thompson confesses (p.17 n.3) that he had not seen a copy of a 1729 reprint of Labbe’s work mentioned by Neher. He therefore gives no bibliographical details to supplement Neher’s bare references. Fortunately I can come to the rescue here. The curious reader will find our treatise execrably printed with the notitia dignitatum and its related texts by Javarina, in the folio corpus byzantinae historiae, Venice 1729, volume xviii, where de rebus bellicis, with no illustrations, occupies pp.32-36 of the second pagination series.
GHELEN   (Gelenius): the editio princeps, with notitia dignitatum, &c., Basel (Froben) 1552. I transcribe the unwieldy title-page:-
NOTITIA VTRAQVE/CVM ORIENTIS TVM OCCIDENTIS/ VLTRA ARCADII HONORIIQVE CAESARVM TEMPORA,/ illuſtre uetuftatis monumentum, imò theſaurus prorſum incomparabilis./ PRAEcedit autê D.Andreæ Alciati libellus, De magiſtratib. ciuilibusq'; ac/ militaribus officijs, partim ex hac ipſa Notitia, partim aliunde deſumptus./ CVI ſuccedit deſcriptio urbis Romæ, quæſub titulo Pub. Victoris circum/fertur: & altera urbis Conſtantinopolitanæ incerto autore, nunquā antehac/ typis excuſa, Imperialium uidelicet ac primariarū ſedium utriuſq; Reipub./ SVBiungitur Notitijs uetuſtus liber DE REBVS BELLICIS ad Theo/doſium Aug. & filios eius Arcadium atq; Honorium, Ut uidetur, ſcri-/ptus, incerto autore. ITEM, ne quid de antiquo exemplari/ omitteretur, Diſputatio Adriani Aug./ & Epicteti philoſophi./ (Froben's device)/ BASILEAE, M D LII / Cum gratia & priuilegio Imp. Maieſt. ad annos quinq;//
de rebus bellicis appears on sigs. q1r — r3v, with woodcut blocks of all the illustrations.
SCHRIJVER (Scriverius): in his edition of Vegetius, &c., Leiden (Plantin) 1606/7; de rebus bellicis on pp.81-102. Text from Ghelen with further emendations; picture-blocks (smaller than Ghelen’s and heavily modernized) taken from passages of de rebus bellicis printed by Stewech in his cornmentary on Vegetius, Antwerp (Plantin) 1585, repeated twice at Leiden, separately in 1592 and with Schrijver’s Vegetius in 1606/7.
PANCIROLI (us): a summary of the contents of de rebus bellicis appears in his edition of notitia dignitatum, &c., Venice (de Franceschi) 1593 and [posthumously] 1602. Panciroli never in fact edited the text of the treatise; but a new edition of his notitia work (Lyons [de la Porte] 1608) contains, in addition to the summary, the de rebus bellicis itself (on pp.201-222). A further edition (Geneva 1623) re-arranges the materials and relegates the treatise to an appendix (pp.24-39) . It is not known by whose authority the text - Ghelen’s, modified only by misprints - was inserted into the 1608 edition of Panciroli: Rhuardesius of Cahors, who added notes to Panciroli’s commentary, or Maranus of Toulouse, who prepared the indices to the volume, may have been responsible for its inclusion.
Ph. LABBE: in his notitia dignitatum, &c., Paris 1651: de rebus bellicis, without illustrations, on pp.164-189. Ghelen’s text, very slightly altered. Reprinted in Javarina’s corpus byzantinae historiae, Venice 1729 (see my headnote supra) One of Labbe’s readings is a great curiosity, and deserves to be recorded here, since it will find no place in an apparatus uere criticus. The title of Picture II, FELIX INCHOATIO e.q.s., is tacked on to the end of c.iii by the addition of the words ut sit. The picture itself being suppressed, the resulting text has a certain specious plausibility: formas et magnitudinem tam aereae quam aureae figurationis pictura praenuntiante subieci, ut sit felix inchoatio sacrae diuinaeque monetae. The cue for this feat of misdirected ingenuity was no doubt taken from the closing sentence of c.vi, imaginem tormentorum orationi subieci, ut sit facilis imitandi confectio.
SCHNEIDER:	in anonymi de rebus bellicis liber, Text und Erlaüterungen; Berlin (Weidmann) 1908. A worthless verbatim reprint of Ghelen’s edition, of interest only in that it reproduces, in a reduced size, the splendid picture-blocks of the editio princeps - an insufficient excuse, one feels, for the reproduction of the sixteenth-century text as well.
S. REINACH: in Un homme d’idées au bas-empire (16 Revue archéologique [sér.5], 1922, pp.205-265); text of de rebus bellicis on pp.255-265. Noteworthy as being the first attempt to control the Gelenian textus receptus by collation with a surviving MS (in this case parisinus latinus 9661, our P): adequate recognition of this in Thompson, p.17. The text which Reinach presents, however, is marred by faulty collation, and is so disfigured by misprints and bad readings as to belie even the modest claim (p.205) that it is à peu près lisible: adequate condemnation of this in Thompson, p.18.
E . A.	THOMPSON: in A Roman Reformer and Inventor: being a new text of the treatise de rebus bellicis, with a translation and introduction by E.A. Thompson: Oxford (Clarendon Press) 1952. Text on pp.91-105, English paraphrase on pp.106-123. The publication of this book, precisely four hundred years after that of the editio princeps, marked an epoch in the study of the treatise: its editor rescued from oblivion a work of crucial importance for our study of the fourth century; he provided the first acceptably critical edition of the text; he took the unknown author seriously, and commented on his ideas with much learning; and he laid, singlehanded, the foundations on which no less than fifteen specialists have built in the present volume. It is not surprising that, amidst such a diversity of materials, some parts of the work should seem less satisfactory than others, and that certain legitimate topics of investigation (quae quidem non ignota sunt illi, quem alia plura sollicitant a nobis aliena) should have been neglected. The text (it may be thought) required greater firmness of handling, the variants more attentive consideration, the style more subtle comment. I must not lay myself open further to the charge of envy or ingratitude, particularly since I am wholly indebted to Thompson’s meticulous collations for my reports of the MSS: uerum quia illum quaedam occupatum effugiunt, otio persuasus, non adeo a rerum commoditatibus peregrinus, utilia undique redacta conferre gestiui. si quid uero libentius oratio mea pro rerum necessitate pro— tulerit, aestimo uenia protegendum, cum mihi promissionis imp lendae gratia subueniendum est propter philosophiae libertatem.
EXCURSUS
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