A Note on the Text of Holland's Pliny

The text is entered from the 1601 edition. Spelling, punctuation and orthography in general are follow that text, with a few exceptions, most necessitated by the exigencies of HTML:

1. Long esses have been standardized. It breaks my heart, but no standardly available font has them, at least in any position accessible to HTML.

2. Abbreviations using a macron or tilde (e.g., "cõplete" for "complete") have been expanded (using square brackets [] or curly brackets {}) when they involve letters other than "o". There is no (HTML) equivalent for e-tilde, a-tilde, m-tilde, and so on.

3. W's in this edition are usually set as "vv"/"VV". Initial "u" is usually set as "v", and internal "v" as "u", although by no means consistently (so that we find both "vniuersall" and "universall" within a few lines of one another). I have changed them to conform with present-day practice, partly to shorten typing and proofing time and partly to facilitate searches.

4. Greek, as often on this site, is set in the font Mounce or in SPIonic. (I'm slowly phasing out Mounce, which has run into some distribution problems.) If you have the fonts Mounce and SPIonic on your system, or if your browser can handle "Dynamic Fonts" (that is, if your browser is Netscape 4 or higher, but not the horrendous Netscape 6), these words will display properly. A work-around that allows Internet Explorer to display dynamic fonts is available only for Windows, at the Bitstream site, www.bitstream.com, but I'm too lazy to institute it on this site. (Other fonts are also used here and there on this site, some of them not freely available; I would urge you to consider enabling dynamic fonts if it is possible.) Mounce is available out there somewhere, but keeps moving, so I no longer provide a link. A search on a good engine should find it for you.

If this isn't in Mounce, something is awry. And this should be in SPIonic.

5. Holland's marginal notes have been moved to the end of each book. Except in the epistle, where all the notes have been numbered, these marginal notes are indicated in the text by glyphs (for instance, *). Their referrents, asterisks if anything in the original, have sometimes been moved to conform with modern expectations (that is, from the beginning to, more or less, the end of the item they refer to). Marginal notes that have no referrent in the text have been supplied with one; when I reach three of a particular glyph, I move on to the next one, in the order asterisk, dagger, paragraph mark, double dagger: . Clicking on the note's number in the notes will bring you back to the text. My notes are numbered.1

6. A very few corrections are made to the text, as when, for instance, pieces of words are missing. Because Holland uses brackets himself for various notes and expansions, I have set these corrections in red. The original errata have been incorporated into the text, although sometimes that leads to odd inconsistencies: for instance, the *word "chaume" is corrected on its first appearance to "chaune", but left on subsequent appearances. A few other errors (as when part of a word is reduplicated at line breaks) are corrected and noted in the footnotes.

7. Margins. I now use style sheets to control margins, paragraphs, and so on. This means that you must have a style-sheet-enabled browser (and you must have the style sheets turned on in your preferences or settings or whatever your system may call them) if you care about how the page displays. I formerly duplicated instructions, so that most browsers would display pages more or less correctly. I no longer do this consistently. I realize as well that different browsers implement styles in different ways, but over that I have no control. I preview my pages in Netscape, and check them in Internet Explorer as well; if there is a conflict, I choose the version that looks best in Netscape.

8. The original page numbers are indicated in the HTML as links: <a name="page1">word</a> means that "word" is the first word of page one. This means that, if you know that page x is in chapter y (a piece of knowledge handily available on the index page), you may find it by a URL of the form "penelope.uchicago.edu/holland/plinyy.html#pagex". For the fussy, page breaks that occur in the middles of words are indicated as comments in the HTML, thus: <a name="page14">painters</a> <!-- -ters --> means that the first word on page 14 is " -ters " (and [probably] the last word on page 13 is "pain- "). The standard modern section numbers are usually indicated in the texts (I didn't at first, so I'm catching up as I go), as, for instance, <a name="S1">word</a>, where "word" is the first word of Section 1. So, for instance Pliny VII.vii(vii).43 is at http://penelope.uchicago.edu/holland/pliny7.html#43.

9. Holland uses the chapter numbers of the editions of his day, of course: they may, or they may not, correspond to the Latin text in front of you. It depends on whether the editors have seen fit to put in all three of the major numbering systems. If they have, the old chapter numbers are most likely in small roman numerals, possibly in parentheses, at the beginnings of chapters, or out in the margin. It is silly (and useless) to complain to me that the chapters do not coincide with your numbering. If you're sufficiently aware to notice the problem, you are probably sufficiently aware to track down its cause, even in the absence of ill-tempered notes from me. If you're using Holland as a crib, by the way, I'd advise great caution, as his translation ocasionally dilates upon certain subjects, amusingly but sometimes unwarrantably, and his numbers are a morass of problems. All this besides his use of the standard editions of his day, which are not (to repeat tediously) at all necessarily the same readings as those of, say, Mayhoff.

10. This brings up the final note, on catchwords: they are noted when they differ from the word that actually occurs on the next page, or in other special circumstances.

 


NOTES

* This is the first note.

This marginal note would be the fourth such note.

3. This is a note I added to the text.