The Last Poems of Ovid | Page 2

aware of the edition and would be able to make use of it. I therefore decided to publish two short articles drawn from the edition. These articles were intended to make generally available two textual conjectures which I considered likely to be correct. But the articles were also intended to make future editors aware that I had worked on the text of Ovid, so that they would seek out my unpublished edition.
The first article ("An Intrusive Gloss in Ovid _Ex Ponto_ 4.13") appeared in _Phoenix_ (vol. 40, p. 322) in 1986: it reported the restoration of IV xiii 45 discussed at page 408 of the commentary. _Phoenix_ is published by the Classical Association of Canada, and since my own training in the classical languages had taken place almost entirely in Canada, it seemed appropriate that my first publication should be in a Canadian journal.
To my surprise and pleasure, my short article attracted a critique by Professor Allan Kershaw ("_Ex Ponto_ 4.13: A Reply", _Phoenix_, vol. 42, p. 176), followed by a learned defense of my conjecture by Professor James Butrica ("Taking Enemies for Chains: Ovid _Ex Ponto_ 4.13.45 Again", _Phoenix_, vol. 43, pp. 258-59).
Four years later, I published a second article ("A Palaeographical Corruption in Ovid, _Ex Ponto_ 4.6"), which appeared in the May 1990 issue of the _Classical Quarterly_ (pp. 283-84). This article reported the restoration of IV vi 38 discussed at pages 240-41 of the commentary. I selected the _Classical Quarterly_ because of its prominence within the world of classical scholarship, and in particular because of its close association with the modern history of Latin textual criticism: it was in the _Classical Quarterly_ that many of the learned articles of A. E. Housman first appeared.
My hope had been that these two articles would serve as a signpost that would lead editors to my edition. The publication of J. A. Richmond's Teubner edition of the _Ex Ponto_ in 1990 proved that this plan was inadequate. Professor Richmond had indeed discovered the existence of my edition: it received a prominent and flattering mention at the end of his preface. However, he stated that he received the microfilm of the edition too late for use in his edition!
In his review of Richmond's Teubner edition in the _Classical Review_ (n.s. 42, 2 [1992], pp. 305-06), Professor James Butrica highlighted a number of proposed emendations from my edition.
It had become clear there was considerable outside interest in the work that I had done, and that simply having a copy of an unpublished edition on deposit at the National Library of Canada was not a sufficient means of making the edition available to the public, so over the years that followed I gave some consideration to how I might publish the edition so that it would be conveniently available to students of Latin poetry.
Early in 2006, I was working as a volunteer proofreader for the Project Gutenberg digital library: I noticed that the Project Gutenberg library included some public domain classical editions comparable in scope to my own. Prompted by this, I decided that I would publish my edition online in order to make it instantly accessible free of charge to anyone wishing to use it. This seemed in every way preferable to seeking out a university press, going through the time-consuming process of seeking the necessary grants to subsidize publication, in order to produce a printed book so expensive that no student and not many libraries could afford to purchase a copy.
Nature of this edition
In essence, this is a corrected version of the original typescript. Typing errors have been corrected, and minor errors have been set right.
All statements made and conjectures proposed should be considered to have been made in 1985.
The HTML and Text versions of this edition
This digital edition is being made available in two versions.
The _HTML version_ takes advantage of the Unicode character set to present Greek passages using the Greek alphabet, and to present certain other special characters, such as the macron. It also offers hyperlinks from the table of contents and from the indices to the relevant sections of the edition.
Popular and useful as HTML is, it does not offer the universality of ASCII text. Essentially every computer can display plain ASCII text correctly. The _Text version_ is presented so that the edition can be read on any computer, large or small, new or old. However, this portability comes at a price. The ISO 8859-1 ASCII character set does not include the Greek alphabet, nor does it include certain special characters which form part of this edition.
Therefore, the Text version of this edition presents Greek passages transliterated into the Latin alphabet. Similarly, in the textual apparatus any capital letter occurring in the report of a manuscript should be considered to be that letter in lower case, with a macron