Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Nonius Marcellus' Dictionary of Republican Latin
If we can satisfy ourselves that we really possess the key to the composition of the 'de Compendiosa Doctrina, ' the benefit to the textual criticism of Nonius will, of course, be enormous. But there will be another benefit of greater importance and reach ing a wider circle of students. It is from the 'de Compendiosa Doctrina' that most of the fragments of the lost Republican literature come. No editor of these fragments has yet found any 'certain plan of arranging them in proper order. All that an editor could do hitherto, in arranging, let_ us say, the fragments of a tragedy of Accius or of the 'history of Sisenna, was to guess from the nature of each passage the incident to which it referred, and roughly assign to it this or that place in the sequence. But if it can be established that N onius' quotations from authors, whose whole works we possess, follow a definite and unvarying order in his pages, corresponding to the order in which the passages quoted occur in these authors' works, we may surely infer 'from the known to the unknown' that his citations from these lost authors observe a similar sequence. We thus get a clue to the place occupied by each passage quoted from Accius or Sisenna in the particular tragedy or book of history in which Nonius found it.
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