Editorial Principles

The first edition of the Laterculus, that of Cardinal Mai, conformed to the standard practice of his time in emending the text drastically to make it conform to standards of Classical Latinity. The edition of Mommsen, on the other hand, accurately reproduces the spelling of the single manuscript witness known to him. My own edition follows Mommsen's practice in this matter. In the case of the Laterculus, the scribe of the Vatican manuscript is separated by perhaps one generation from Theodore himself. Since the orthography and morphology of the Laterculus are similar to the characteristics of seventh-century Italian Latin as they are revealed in sub-literary texts, the ‘vulgar errors’ of the Laterculus must be treated as valuable evidence for Late Latin usage rather than the depredations made on a Classically correct original text by an illiterate scribe. Accordingly, my text is printed very much as it appears in the manuscript, with syntactic emendations confined to the apparatus criticus. The passages printed in italic in the translation are the sections of the text which are take over directly from Malalas's Chronographia.

One respect in which I have made no attempt to reproduce the evidence of the manuscript is in punctuation. My first transcription reproduced the capitalization and punctuation of the manuscript exactly.