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Preface
I can’t recall exactly how I had initially stumbled across this little book of Erasmus’ or why I was moved to transcribe it. In the beginning, I believe it was the simplicity of the text that convinced me it might be useful for students of Latin, but I was also interested in running through it myself.
After completing the copying, I set about adding footnotes with references to mentioned works and was interested in noting when Erasmus made use of a particular phrase or idiomatic Latin expression.
At the time of copying, about two years ago, I was completely unfamiliar with Greek, and could not make out the text at all on the PDFs I was copying from. I have gone back and attempted to correct most of the Greek text, though there are likely still errors that will need be emended in later editions. Greek expressions are used rarely, but they do occur.
It should be said once again that this is not a critical text. I paid almost no mind to which scanned edition I was copying. Sometimes corruption or ink blotches forced me to find another copy of the text, wherein I met with other discrepancies that were resolved by splitting the difference between what I had on hand. The final version here is a cohesive whole, but does not necessarily reflect any one single edition of a text. The Leiden Edition is the main source as it provided the most clear public domain text to copy from.