Where the correction is apparently by the original scribe, _Bac_ indicates the original reading, and _Bpc_ the correction.
The asterisk is used to indicate illegible letters, and the solidus (/) erasures.
When reporting variants, I have tried to indicate the spellings actually found in the manuscripts, but since mediaeval spellings do not in themselves constitute variant readings, they have not usually been reported when the text is not otherwise disturbed. I have been more generous with proper names, but have often excluded confusions of _ae_, _oe_, and _e_, of _i_ and _y_, of _ph_ and _f_, of _c_ and _t_, the doubling of consonants, and the loss or addition of the aspirate.
The apparatus is intended to include a comprehensive listing of all conjectures proposed. When the author of a conjecture is not a previous editor of the poems, I have given a reference either to the publication where the emendation was first proposed, or to the earliest edition I have consulted which reports the emendation. Conjectures of Bentley are from Hedicke's _Studia Bentleiana_. Conjectures of Professor R. J. Tarrant, Professor J. N. Grant, and Professor C. P. Jones were communicated to me by their authors.
The first editions of the works of Ovid were printed in 1471 by Balthesar Azoguidus at Bologna and by Conradus Sweynheym and Arnoldus Pannartz at Rome. The Bologna edition was edited by Franc. Puteolanus, and the Rome edition by J. Andreas de Buxis. Lenz's edition gives numerous readings from both editions; to judge from his reports, their texts of the _Ex Ponto_ were derived from late manuscripts of no great value. The Roman edition, however, contained the elegant correction of _iactate_ to _laxate_ at ix 73.
For my knowledge of other early editions of the _Ex Ponto_ I have relied upon Burman's large variorum edition of the complete works of Ovid, published at Amsterdam in 1727. The edition contains notes of various editors of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, among them Merula, Naugerius, Ciofanus, Fabricius, and Micyllus. Although I have occasionally quoted from these notes, they are in general of surprisingly little use, containing for the most part unlikely variant readings from unnamed manuscripts and explanations of passages not really in need of elucidation.