R. Klotz, Praefatio tomi II

PREFACE TO VOLUME II.

Although in the preface which I subjoined to the first volume of Clement it has been sufficiently explained what I followed in preparing this edition, nevertheless it seems that a brief word should be said concerning these books of the Stromata also, lest what I then said chiefly concerning those books which are contained in the first volume should seem to have been said concerning these books also. For the case of these books is far different from that of those. For whereas several manuscripts, and those of very diverse authority, contain those books, the Stromata seem to us to have been preserved in one codex only, though that a sufficiently ancient one, from which first flowed the Florentine edition, which for the most part, with manifest faults scarcely excepted, exhibits the reading of that most ancient manuscript. Hence Fr. Sylburg prudently derived his edition in such a way as to remove the blunders of copyists, as far as in him lay, while not concealing in what places it had been necessary to depart from the editio princeps. From his edition the rest emanated, of which one is more faulty than another. One however is a little better, I mean that which J. Potter took care to publish, although he too received most of the faults into his edition, which ought to seem the more wonderful because he had the collation of the Paris manuscript whence he could learn what the critics had done falsely and what rightly. For whether that manuscript is the same which P. Victorius had used in preparing the Florentine edition, or another, yet it is derived from the same source, has the same lacunae as the editio princeps, has the same text of Clement, has the same faults of the copyists, manifest and more hidden alike, so that the collation of it which is subjoined to the Potterian edition contains almost no other diversity except where editors most unskilled in the critical art without any judgement had departed from the edition of Victorius or Sylburg, with the exception of a few places where something was changed either from the authority of other writers or from the conjecture of learned men: that this is rightly said by me will be more than sufficiently clear from the critical annotations which I shall subjoin to the last volume. Wherefore I do not wish to write down here examples, which are almost innumerable, of the most shameful errors. This I say, that I have committed to print the edition of Sylburg, which formerly too I said ought to be followed, in such a way as to compare it with the Paris manuscript, an accurate collation of which Potter exhibited, and to receive on the credit of the Potterian edition the older contributions which other critics had made, and to collect the more recent ones from the commentaries of learned men; wherein what I have received from others, and what I have myself laboured through, will be clear from the critical annotation. Yet this too I must profess here, that I neither wished nor was able now to institute a new recension of these books; that I have undertaken an accurate revision no skilled person will deny. Finally, this seems to me worthy of note, that the Sylburgian edition was published in the year 1592. For I see that many, among whom are even those whom I did not think could be deceived in these matters, cite those editions which are altogether unworthy of Sylburg as Sylburg's, such as the Paris and Cologne editions, so that I have often seen a page number of the Sylburgian edition cited to which the edition of Sylburg never reached, which was published from the printing-house of Hieronymus Commelin in 1592, and consists of 386 pages.