It is not known that Victorius printed any edition containing the text of the Rei Rusticæ Scriptores in Italy. His letter to Cervinus speaks as if he was just about to edit them; but whether he did so is uncertain. “Quartam classem,” says Harles, “constituit Victorius, sospitator horum scriptorum: qui quidem num primum in Italiâ recensitos dederit eos cum Gesnero et Ernesti ignoro[635].” As far as now appears, his corrections and emendations were first printed in the edition of Leyden, 1541, where the authors it contains, are said in the title to be Restituti per Petrum Victorium, ad veterum exemplarium fidem, suæ integritati. His castigations were printed in the year following, but without the text of the authors, at Florence. The Leyden edition was reprinted at Paris, in 1543, by Robert Stephens, and was followed by the edition of Hier. Commellinus, 1595.
At length Gesner undertook a complete edition of the Rei Rusticæ Scriptores, under circumstances of which he has given us some account in his preface. The eminent bookseller, Fritschius, had formed a plan of printing these authors; and to aid in this object, he had employed Schoettgenius, a young, but even then a distinguished scholar. A digest of the best commentators, and a collection of various readings, were accordingly prepared by him. The undertaking, however, was then deferred, in expectation of the arrival of MSS. from Italy; and Schoettgenius was meanwhile called to a distance to some other employment, leaving the fruits of his labour in the hands of Fritschius. In 1726, that bookseller came to Gesner, and informed him, that Politian’s collations, written on his copy of the Editio Princeps, had at length reached him, as also some valuable observations on the rustic writers, communicated from Italy by Pontedera and Facciolati. Fritschius requested that Gesner should now arrange the whole materials which had been compiled. Selections from the commentaries, and the various readings previous to the time of Victorius, were prepared to his hand; but he commenced an assiduous study of every thing that was valuable in more recent editions. At length his ponderous edition came out with a preface, giving a full detail of the labours of others and his own, and with the prefaces to the most celebrated preceding editions. Some of the notes had been previously printed, as those of Meursius, Scaliger, and Fulvius Ursinus—others, as those of Schoettgenius, Pontedera, and Gesner himself, had never yet seen the light. Though Gesner never names Pontedera without duly styling him Clarissimus Pontedera, that scholar was by no means pleased with the result of Gesner’s edition, and attacked it with much asperity, in his great work, Antiquitatum Rusticarum. Gesner’s first edition was printed at Leipsic, 1735. Ernesti took charge of the publication of the second edition; and, in addition to the dissertation of Ausonius Popma, De Instrumento Fundi, which formed an appendix to the first, he has inserted Segner’s description and explanation of the aviary of Varro.
The most recent edition of the Scriptores Rei Rusticæ, is that of Schneider, who conceives that he has perfected the edition of Gesner, by having collated the ancient edition of Bruschius, and the first Aldine edition, neither of which had been consulted by his predecessor.
Besides forming parts of every collection of the Rei Rusticæ Scriptores, the agricultural treatises of Cato and Varro have been repeatedly printed by themselves, and apart from those of Columella and Palladius. Ausonius Popma, in his separate edition of Cato, 1590, has chiefly, and without much acknowledgment, employed some valuable annotations and remarks contained in the Adversaria of Turnebus. This edition was accompanied by some other fragments of Cato. These, however, were of small importance; and the principal part of the publication being the work on Agriculture, its sale was much impeded by Commellinus’ full edition of the agricultural writers, published five years afterwards. Raphellengius, however, reprinted it in 1598, with a new title; and with the addition of the notes of Meursius. Popma again revised his labours, and published an improved edition in 1620. Varro’s treatise, De Re Rusticâ, was published alone in 1545, and with his other writings, by Stephens, in 1569. Ausonius Popma also edited it in 1601, appropriating, according to his custom, the notes and observations of others.
Cato’s work De Re Rusticâ, has been translated into Italian by Pagani, whose version was printed at Venice, 1792; and into French by Saboureux, Paris, 1775. I am not aware of any full English translation of Cato, but numerous extracts are made from it in Dickson’s Husbandry of the Ancients.
Italy has produced more translations of the Latin writers than any other country; and one would naturally suppose, that the agricultural writings of those who had cultivated the same soil as themselves, would be peculiarly interesting to the Italians. I do not know, however, of any version of Varro in their language. There is an English translation, by the Rev. Mr Owen, printed at Oxford in 1800. In his preface, the author says,—“Having collated many copies of this work of the Roman writer in my possession, and the variations being very numerous, I found it no easy task to make a translation of his treatise on agriculture. To render any common Arabic author into English, would have been a labour less difficult to me some years ago, than it has been to translate this part of the works of this celebrated writer.”
SALLUST.
This historian was criticized in a work of Asinius Pollio, particularly on account of his affected use of obsolete words and expressions. Sulpicius Apollinaris, the grammarian, who lived in the reigns of the Antonines, boasted that he was the only person of his time who could understand Sallust. His writings were illustrated by many of the ancient grammarians, as Asper and Statilius Maximus. In the course of the ninth century, we find Lupus, Abbot of Ferriers, in one of his letters, praying his friend Regimbertus to procure for him a copy of Sallust[636]; and there was a copy of his works in the Library of Glastonbury Abbey, in the year 1240[637]. The style of Sallust is very peculiar: He often omits words which other writers would insert, and inserts those which they would omit. Hence his text became early, and very generally, corrupted, from transcribers and copyists leaving out what they naturally enough supposed to be redundancies, and supplying what they considered as deficiencies.
There appeared not less than three editions of Sallust in the course of the year 1470. It has been much disputed, and does not seem to be yet ascertained, which of them is the Editio Princeps. One was printed under the care of Merula, by Spira, at Venice; but the other two are without name of place or printer: It has been conjectured, that of these two, the one which is in folio was printed at Rome[638]; and the other, in quarto, at Paris, by Gering, Crantz, and Friburg[639]. The Venice Edition is usually accounted the Editio Princeps[640], but Fuhrmann considers both the Paris and Roman editions as prior to it. The Roman, he thinks, in concurrence with the opinion of Harles, is the earliest of all. The Bipontine editors style the Parisian impression the Primaria Princeps. Besides these three, upwards of thirty other editions were published in the course of the fifteenth century. One of them was printed at Venice, 1493, from the Recension of Pomponius Lætus, who has been accused by subsequent editors of introducing many of the corruptions which have crept into the text of Sallust[641]. There were also a number of commentaries in this century, by scholars, who did not themselves publish editions of the historian, but greatly contributed to the assistance of those who prepared them in the next. The commentary of Laurentius Valla, in particular, which was first printed at Rome in 1490, and in which scarcely a single word is passed over without remark or explanation, enriched most of the editions which appeared in the end of the fifteenth, and the beginning of the subsequent century[642]. The first of any note in the sixteenth century, were those of Aldus, Venice, 1509, and 1521. Carrio, who published an edition at Antwerp in 1579, collected many of the fragments of Sallust’s great History of Rome; and he amended the text of the Catilinarian and Jugurthine Wars, as he himself boasts, in several thousand places. The edition of Gruter, in 1607, in which the text received considerable alterations, on the authority of the Palatine MS., obtained in its time considerable reputation. The earliest Variorum edition is in 1649; but the best is that printed at Leyden, with the notes of Gronovius, in 1690. An immense number of MSS., and copies of the most ancient editions, were collated by Wasse for the Cambridge edition, 1710. He chiefly followed the text of Gruter, but he has added the notes of various commentators, and also some original observations of his own, particularly comparisons, which he has instituted between his author and the ancient Greek writers. The editions of Cortius (Leipsic, 1724), and of Havercamp (Amsterdam, 1742), are both excellent. The former, in preparing his work, consulted not less than thirty MSS., fifteen of which were preserved in the Wolfenbuttel library. He also assiduously collated most of the old editions, and found some good readings in those of Venice, 1470–1493, and that of Leipsic, 1508. Most of the editions, however, of the fifteenth century, he affirms, are very bad; and, according to him, a greater number of the errors, which [pg A-47]had crept into the text of Sallust, are to be attributed to them, than to the corruptions of Pomponius Lætus. Cortius chiefly erred in conceiving that Sallust’s conciseness consisted solely in paucity of words, so that he always preferred the readings where the greatest number of them were thrown out, though the meaning was thereby obscured, and sometimes altogether lost. The readings in Havercamp’s edition are all founded on those of Wasse and Gruter. The text is overloaded with notes: “Textus,” says Ernesti, “velut cymba in oceano, ita in notis natat.” The various readings are separated from the notes, being inserted between the text and the commentary. In the first volume, we have the text of Sallust, and the annotations—in the second, the prefaces of different editors of Sallust—his life—the fragments of his works—and the judgments pronounced by ancient authors on his writings. The text of Teller’s edition, Berlin, 1790, is formed on that of Cortius, but departs from it, where the editor conceived himself justified by the various readings of a rare and ancient edition, published at Brescia, 1495, which he had consulted. It is totally unprovided with prolegomena, or notices, with regard to the life and writings of the author, or his works; but there is appended to it a recension of the celebrated Spanish Translation, executed under the auspices of the Infant Don Gabriel, and a very full Index Latinitatis. The best of the recent German editions, is that of Lange, Halle, 1815. In this work, the editor chiefly follows Havercampus. His great object was to restore the purity of the text, which he believed to have been greatly corrupted by the rash and unauthorized alterations of preceding editors, more particularly of Cortius. Notes are subjoined, partly illustrative of Sallust’s genius and talents, and partly of that portion of Roman history, of which he treated.