The first editions of the works of Ovid were printed in 1471 by Balthesar Azoguidus at Bologna and by Conradus Sweynheym and Arnoldus Pannartz at Rome. The Bologna edition was edited by Franc. Puteolanus, and the Rome edition by J. Andreas de Buxis. Lenz's edition gives numerous readings from both editions; to judge from his reports, their texts of the Ex Ponto were derived from late manuscripts of no great value. The Roman edition, however, contained the elegant correction of iactate to laxate at ix 73.
For my knowledge of other early editions of the Ex Ponto I have relied upon Burman's large variorum edition of the complete works of Ovid, published at Amsterdam in 1727. The edition contains notes of various editors of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, among them Merula, Naugerius, Ciofanus, Fabricius, and Micyllus. Although I have occasionally quoted from these notes, they are in general of surprisingly little use, containing for the most part unlikely variant readings from unnamed manuscripts and explanations of passages not really in need of elucidation.
The principal event in the history of the editing of the Ex Ponto was the appearance at Amsterdam in 1652 of Nicolaus Heinsius' edition of Ovid. Heinsius took full advantage of the opportunity his travels as a diplomat gave him of searching out manuscripts, thereby gaining a direct knowledge of the manuscripts of the poems which has never since been equalled[11]. Heinsius also possessed an unrivalled felicity in conjectural emendation. Some of his conjectures are unnecessary alterations of a text that was in fact sound, some of his necessary conjectures are trivial, and are already found in late manuscripts of the poems or could have been made by critics of less outstanding capacities; but many are alterations which are subtle and yet necessary to restore sense or Latinity. The present edition returns to the text many conjectures and preferred readings of Heinsius that were ejected by editors of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The edition of Heinsius formed the basis of all editions published during the two centuries that followed. Of these editions the most important was the 1727 variorum edition of Burman already referred to. It is from the copy of that edition at the University of Toronto Library that I have obtained my knowledge of Heinsius' notes. Burman was apparently the first editor to make use of F. On occasion he differs from Heinsius in his choice of readings. At xvi 44 he made the convincing conjecture Maxime (codd maxima), subsequently confirmed by B and C. His notes are informative; and my note on x 37-38 in particular is greatly indebted to him.
For poem x Burman reproduced some notes from an anthology of Latin verse for use at Eton, produced by an anonymous editor in 1705[12].
In 1772 Theophilus Harles published at Erlangen his edition of the Tristia and Ex Ponto 'ex recensione Petri Burmanni'. Harles was the first editor to make use of B. In the introduction to his edition Harles relates how he wrote von Oeffele, librarian to the Elector of Bavaria, asking if there was any manuscript in the Elector's library that might be helpful in preparing his edition, and thereby learned of the existence of B. It is clear from Harles' introduction that he fully appreciated the manuscript's importance; and in his notes he gives many of its readings, pointing out where it confirmed suggestions of Heinsius and Burman. However, his text is simply reprinted from Burman's variorum edition.
W. E. Weber's text of Ex Ponto IV in his 1833 Corpus Poetarum Latinorum is in effect a reprint of the Heinsius-Burman vulgate, except that at viii 59 he prints the manuscripts' incorrect accusative form Gigantes (Heinsius Gigantas). But this fidelity to the vulgate text seems not to have been the editor's intention: in his introduction he speaks of 'Heinsianae emendationes felices saepe, superuacuae saepius ... quarum emendationum partem Mitscherlichius eiecit [Göttingen, 1796; I have not seen the edition], maiorem eiicere Iahnius coepit [Leipzig, 1828: the part of the edition containing the Ex Ponto was never published]. dicendum tamen, etiamnunc passim haud paucas fortasse latere Heinsii et aliorum correctiones minus necessarias in uerbis Ouidianis, quas accuratior codicum inter se comparatio, opus sane immensi laboris, extrudet'. It would be understandable enough if Weber, faced with the labour of editing the entire corpus of Latin poetry, found himself unable to effect a radical revision of the text of the Ex Ponto.
In 1853 there appeared at Leipzig the third volume of Rudolf Merkel's first Teubner edition of the works of Ovid, containing his text of the Ex Ponto. The part of Merkel's introduction dealing with the Ex Ponto is entirely concerned with describing the appearance, orthography, and readings of the ninth-century Hamburgensis scrin. 52 F. The manuscript ends, however, at III ii 67, and Merkel says nothing of the basis for his text of the later poems, which in general is the Heinsius-Burman vulgate.
In 1868 B. G. Teubner published at Leipzig Otto Korn's separate edition of the Ex Ponto. Korn's apparatus is the first to have a modern appearance; but this appearance is deceptive, for of the twenty sigla Korn uses, ten are for individual or several manuscripts collated by Heinsius, and only five are for manuscripts collated by Korn himself. The edition is important, since Korn was the first editor to make substantial use of B in constituting his text. Usually he printed the text of B in preference to the vulgate: 'Ceterum eas partes in quibus A caremus, β [=B] libri uestigia secutus restitui, prorsus neglectis recentiorum exemplarium elegantiis, quorum ad normam N. Heinsius, cuius in tertio quartoque libro R. Merkelius assecla est, textum conformauit' (xv).
There was some reason to review critically the vulgate established by Heinsius and Burman. Even Heinsius was capable of error; examples of this in Ex Ponto IV include his preference for the inelegant idem for ille at iii 17, for the impossible ullo instead of the better attested nullo at v 15, and for the obvious interpolation domitam ... ab Hercule at xvi 19 instead of domito ... ab Hectore. His most pervasive fault is a partiality for elegant but unnecessary emendation: often he is guilty of rewriting passages which are in themselves perfectly sound. A typical instance is vii 30: Heinsius' globos is elegant enough, but there is no reason to suspect the transmitted uiros.