Medical Compositions

whose carelessness—with syllables ineptly joined, or separated from one another, or shamefully transposed—rendered words wretchedly dislocated, sometimes even defrauded of some part of themselves at the beginning, middle, and end of words, or indeed entirely, sometimes increased due to the similarity of an empty letter, and with words mixed in doubtful positions, unhappy shadows arise. Tolerable is the diligence of those who, having inserted interpretations into the spaces between the lines or written them on the margins, inserted each in its own place, caring little whatever had been grafted on by more recent hands, or handled with more negligence in the order of the chapters, provided they omitted nothing. Nor are those to be entirely reproved who restored fading letters even from obscure traces. Furthermore, it was a work of a bolder spirit to change vocabulary due to ignorance of the Latin language: even if Galen in Commentary II on Hippocrates' Aphorisms II concerning the Medical Office granted this to Artemidorus and Dioscorides, provided they understood the subject well. Not even Marcellus of Bordeaux avoided this stigma, whose work we have indicated elsewhere was variously interpolated at his own discretion.

Why say more? It is the most just complaint of Galen: the first scribe erring, the second and third erred. Hence there was no end to hallucination: so that Ruellius is to be blamed all the less, who undoubtedly restored in many places what had rotted away due to the carelessness of a previous age. Thus Pliny says most truly in Book XXV, Chapter II: The varying lot of transcribers degenerates much. We have heard that Synesius, a man of flourishing eloquence, desired uncorrected codices for himself, by which he might test the eustochian accuracy or good aim of his own genius. My own insignificance forbade me from conceiving this in thought. Yet, with Minerva not unwilling, with Mercury favoring the common cause, and with the consensus of venerable antiquity, I have restored Scribonius to himself and his people with as much fidelity as was permitted, so that he might always appear with a native and original face, and with such moderation that I would not rashly force anything upon the reader without the authority of the ancients,