APPENDIX.

In order to be satisfied as to the authenticity of the works commonly called Classical, it is important to ascertain in what manner they were given to the public by their respective authors—to trace how they were preserved during the long night of the dark ages—and to point out by whom their perishing remains were first discovered at the return of light. Nor will it be uninteresting to follow up this sketch by an enumeration of the principal Editions of the Classics mentioned in the preceding pages, and of the best Translations of them which, from time to time, have appeared in the Italian, French, and English languages.

The manuscripts of the Latin Classics, during the existence of the Roman republic and empire, may be divided into what have been called notata and perscripta. The former were those written by the author himself, or his learned slaves, in contractions or signs which stood for syllables and words; the latter, those which were fully transcribed in the ordinary characters by the librarius, who was employed by the bibliopolæ, or booksellers, to prepare the productions of an author for public sale.

The books written in the hand of the authors were probably not very legible, at least if we may judge of others by Cicero. His brother Quintus had complained that he could not read his letters, and Cicero says in reply: “Scribis te meas literas superiores vix legere potuisse; hoc facio semper ut quicumque calamus in manus meas venerit, eo sic utar tamquam bono[492].”

But the works,—at least the prose works,—of the Romans were seldom written out in the hand of the author, and were generally dictated by him to some slave or freedman instructed in penmanship. It is well known that many of the orations of Cicero, Cato, and their great rhetorical contemporaries, were taken down by short-hand writers stationed in the Senate or Forum. But even the works most carefully prepared in the closet were notata, in a similar manner, by slaves and freedmen. There was no part of his learned compositions on which Cicero took more pains, or about which his thoughts were more occupied[493], than the dedication of the Academica to Varro, and even this he dictated to his slave Spintharus, though he did so slowly, word by word, and not in whole sentences to Tiro, as was his practice in his other productions. “Male mihi sit,” says he in a letter to Atticus, “si umquam quidquam tam enitar. Ergo ne Tironi quidem dictavi, qui totas periochas persequi solet, sed Spintharo syllabatim[494].”