Preface to Propertius Michael Hendry March 12, 2000

This is a work in progress, with no end yet in sight. Even for those elegies already published (i.e. uploaded), details of the text may change as I change my mind, and the apparatus will certainly increase considerably in bulk, with many changes and additions and the occasional subtraction. Even with this proviso, an annotated text seems better than a bare one, particularly in so corrupt an author as Propertius.

The principal novelties of this edition, besides its virtual location, are (1) idiosyncratic poem-divisions in Book II (a lot fewer of them), and (2) an idiosyncratic selection of previous conjectures, with a very few of my own mixed in. With one or two exceptions compelled by the medium, my sigla follow those that are standard in printed editions. Much more information on editions consulted will be added here very soon. In the mean time, note that the oldest manuscripts, those named separately in the apparatus criticus, are N, A, F, L, and P. Printed editions generally refer to the agreement of these older manuscripts with an O or a Greek majuscule omega. I have used the former, since any browser can handle it. For conjectures found only in later manuscripts, printed editions generally use either a symbol resembling the Greek end-of-word sigma (the 'stigma'), or such words as 'Itali' or 'deteriores'. Since the first of these is not an HTML symbol and the latter two are rather unwieldy, I have used a minuscule s.

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