Cookery and Dining in Imperial Rome

the New York manuscripts, then already mutilated and wanting books IX and X. Six hundred years before the arrival of Poggio the Fulda book was no longer complete. Already in the ninth century its title page had been damaged which is proven by the title page of the Vatican copy which reads: ___ INCP API CÆ That's all! The New York copy, it has been noted, has no title page. This book commences in the middle of the list of chapters; the first part of them and the title page are gone. We recall that the New York manuscript was originally bound up with another manuscript, also in the Phillipps library at Cheltenham. The missing page or pages were probably lost in separating the two manuscripts. It is possible that Enoche carried with him to Italy one of the ancient copies, very likely the present New York copy, then already without a title. At any rate, not more than twenty-five years after his book hunting expedition we find both copies in Italy. It is strange, furthermore, that neither of these two ancient copies were used by the fifteenth century copyists to make the various copies distributed by them, but that an inferior copy of the Vatican Ms. became the _vulgata_--the progenitor of this series of medieval copies. One must bear in mind how assiduously medieval scribes copied everything that appeared to be of any importance to them, and how each new copy by virtue of human fallibility or self-sufficiency must have suffered in the making, and it is only by very careful comparison of the various manuscripts that the original text may be rehabilitated. This, to a large extent, Vollmer and Giarratano have accomplished. Vollmer, too, rejects the idea invented by the humanists, that Apicius had a collaborator, editor or commentator in the person of C{oe}lius or Cælius. This name, so Vollmer claims, has been added to the book by medieval scholars without any reason except conjecture for such action. They have been misled by the mutilated title: Api... Cæ...; Vollmer reconstructs this title as follows: API[cii artis magiri- (or)