Jd. W. Haynes. JHC

CLASSICAL SERIES.

EDITED BY DRS. SCHMITZ AND ZUMPT.

Q. CURTII RUFI

DE GESTIS

ALEXANDRI MAGNI,

REGIS MACEDONUM,

LIBRI QUI SUPERSUNT VIII

PHILADELPHIA:

LEA AND BLANCHARD.

PREFACE.

THE present work of Q. Curtius Rufus has come down to us incomplete the first two books, and some portions in the middle and near the end, being wanting in all the manuscripts. It would seem that the ancient copyist, who considered the first two books, containing the life and exploits of Alexander mainly after his entering Asia, to be less necessary or interesting, commenced transcribing at the third book, when Alexander having gained the victory on the Granicus, had already obtained a firm footing in Asia, and was entering upon his successful career, conquering countries which had never before been the scene of Greek military enterprise. The other gaps in the work have been filled up in modern editions, as in the present, by the supplements of the learned Freinsheim; so that the history of Alexander is continued uninterruptedly down to the point to which Curtius intended to carry it—namely, to the establishment of a regency after the death of the conqueror. The fact that the same gaps occur in all manuscripts, justifies the inference, that the manuscripts known to exist, and the number of which is eighteen, are derived from one and the same, which has thus become the mother-codex for all the others. The copies, however, present great differences in detail; for towards the end of the middle ages, the text of Curtius was subjected to a thorough revision by a scholar who was very clever, but at the same time often too bold, and from this revised copy others again were made, partly with new emendations, and partly with unintentional mistakes. In this manner we may distinguish three classes of manuscripts -namely, 1. Ancient and faithful copies, without intentional corrections, but sometimes unintelligible, because the original manuscript itself was in some parts faulty or illegible; 2. Manuscripts which betray the correcting hand of the above-mentioned scholar, but are otherwise written with tolerable accuracy; 3. Manuscripts which are based upon the revised copy, but are disfigured by numerous mistakes, arising partly from arbitrary emendations, and partly from carelessness.

The first printed editions of Curtius, which appeared towards

the close of the fifteenth century (the first is that of Venice 1471), are based upon manuscripts of the third class, because they were of more recent origin, and consequently more legible. The faults which were thus introduced throughout the text, though they consisted only in single words and their arrangement, have remained unexpunged until the most recent times, although the defects did not escape the notice of learned editors; and many parts of the text were corrected, sometimes by conjectures, but more frequently from better manuscripts, by the scholars of the sixteenth century, as by Franciscus Asulanus (in the edition of Aldus, 1525), Hadrianus Junius (1546), and Franciscus Modius (1579). Their emendations, however, met with little confidence, because the reasons and sources of their corrections were but rarely and incompletely stated. Hence other editors, and among them especially Freinsheim (1640 and 1670), who has otherwise great merits, preferred retaining the old and faulty text, and altering it only in such passages where it seemed indispensably necessary. Owing to a feeling of reverence for Freinsheim, the text as constituted by him remained unchanged in the large edition of Snakenburg (Delft and Leyden, 1724); and on the whole, in all the subsequent editions also, although the faulty nature of the vulgate became more and more obvious by comparing several ancient and good manuscripts. Schmieder (Göttingen, 1803) was the first who restored a much more correct text, though he did not act consistently throughout; his explanatory notes in Latin also deserve praise on account of his diligence and sound judgment. The present editor first published an edition of Curtius (Berlin, 1826), in which, with the assistance of more manuscripts than any of his predecessors had made use of, he restored the text, as far as possible, of the genuine and unadulterated manuscripts of the first class. In the commentary to his great edition (Brunswick, 1849), he has stated the reasons and sources of all the changes he has made in the text, giving at the same time a complete account of the different readings of both the manuscripts and the early editions. The critical reader is thereby enabled to recognise the condition of the text, and, it is hoped, to convince himself of the correctness of the course which the editor has adopted.

The text here presented is the same as that of the last-mentioned edition, to which, for all critical questions, the reader is referred. The notes accompanying the present edition do not enter into critical discussions, their object being the explanation of the text; and combined with the ample contents prefixed to each book, they furnish everything which appeared necessary to lead a studious youth to a correct understanding