Page:Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica.djvu/9

 PREFACE

volume contains practically all that remains of the post-Homeric and pre-academic epic poetry.

I have for the most part formed my own text. In the case of Hesiod I have been able to use independent collations of several MSS. by Dr. W. H. D. Rouse; otherwise I have depended on the apparatus criticus of the several editions, especially that of Rzach (1902). The arrangement adopted in this edition, by which the complete and fragmentary poems are restored to the order in which they would probably have appeared had the Hesiodic corpus survived intact, is unusual, but should not need apology; the true place for the Catalogues (for example), fragmentary as they are, is certainly after the Theogony.

In preparing the text of the Homeric Hymns my chief debt — and it is a heavy one — is to the edition of Allen and Sikes (1904) and to the series of articles in the Journal of Hellenic Studies (vols. xv. sqq.) by T. W. Allen. To the same scholar and to the