consulted both Vaticans and a copy of C which Kellermann[1] had made for Schultze.
The original manuscript, C 361, is of parchment and contains, besides the De Aquis, the De Re Militari of Vegetius and a part of Varro's De Lingua Latina. It had seen hard usage before it came to the monastery, some leaves being torn and some chapters much mutilated. Poleni places its date at the end of the thirteenth or the beginning of the fourteenth century, while the catalogue of the library of Monte Cassino assigns it to the end of the eleventh or the beginning of the twelfth. Bücheler thinks it belongs to the thirteenth rather than the eleventh. It is written in minuscules which were growing dim even when copied by Gattola; to-day some parts of the manuscript are so obscure as to be difficult to read. Various portions were copied in red ink;[2] the punctuation is erratic; sentences sometimes begin with capitals, again with small letters; no intervals are left between words except where the intention is to show that something is missing from the text; but in places where lacunae are found, the spaces left do not always seem proportioned to the words to be supplied.
There are traces of emendation by some hand of a later century; dots, originally omitted, have been placed over the letter i; marks of abbreviation have
- ↑ quo qui epigraphica studia attigerunt, auctorem sciunt nullum esse certiorem. B.
- ↑ e.g. the words at the beginning of the preface: Incipit prologus iuliifrontini in libro deaqueductu urbis: at the end of chapter iii.: Explicit prologus; after chapter lxiii.: liber primus explicit, liber secundus incipit; the names of the aqueducts at the beginning of chapters lxv-lxxiii.
