[Footnote 33: No mention of either of these is to be found in Dom Toussaints du Plessis' _Histoire de l'église de Meaux_. For documents with similar opening formulas, see ibid. vol. ii (Paris 1731), pp. 191, 258, 269, 273.]
Our manuscript, then, was written in Italy about the year 500. It is quite possible that it had crossed the Alps by the ninth century or even before. It is certain that by the fifteenth century it had found asylum in France. When and under what circumstances it got back to Italy will be shown by Professor Rand in the pages that follow.
So it is France that has saved this, the oldest extant witness of Pliny's _Letters_, for modern times. To mediaeval France we are, in fact, indebted for the preservation of more than one ancient classical manuscript. The oldest manuscript of the third decade of Livy was at Corbie in Charlemagne's time, when it was loaned to Tours and a copy of it made there. Both copy and original have come down to us. Sallust's _Histories_ were saved (though not in complete form) for our generation by the Abbey of Fleury. The famous Schedae Vergilianae, in square capitals, as well as the Codex Romanus of Virgil, in rustic capitals, belonged to the monastery of St. Denis. Lyons preserved the _Codex Theodosianus_. It was again some French centre that rescued Pomponius Mela from destruction. The oldest fragments of Ovid's _Pontica_, the oldest fragments of the first decade of Livy, the oldest manuscript of Pliny's _Natural History_--all palimpsests--were in some French centre in the Middle Ages, as may be seen from the indisputably eighth-century French writing which covers the ancient texts. The student of Latin literature knows that the manuscript tradition of Lucretius, Suetonius, Cæsar, Catullus, Tibullus, and Propertius--to mention only the greatest names--shows that we are indebted primarily to Gallia Christiana for the preservation of these authors.
{ Transcriber's Note: Characters that could not be fully displayed are "unpacked" and shown within braces: { .T}. Superscript letters are shown as in mathematical notation: ^{ L} The twelve-page transcription retains the page and line breaks of the original text, representing the manuscript itself. In a few places the authors used V in place of U. This appears to be an error, but has not been changed.}