it shows, clearer than light, [the extent of his] faculty, and how many virtues are called principal, and what are the genera of virtue and vice that proceed from them; and at the same time, in what manner joy, sadness, laughter, tears, and sleep are constituted. For what is there, most excellent prelate, that you ought more deservedly to note and consider, in common with all students, than this matter? After the Creator, the Word, had determined, from the creation of the intellectual, visible, and material world, to bring forth an animal (by which a proof of greater wisdom, and a storehouse of generosity and goodness concerning natures, might be made known), He created man, establishing him upon the earth as a second world, as it were, great in small. This one, I say, He created, another angel, an adorative, rational [being], an arbiter of visible nature, but an expert in intellectual mysteries, a king of earthly things, and one who is ruled by higher powers: suitable for earth and heaven, temporal and immortal, visible and intelligible, midway between the exalted and the humble; who is the same, both spirit and flesh. And he is the same, who is in charge of power here, yet is to migrate elsewhere, and at the end of the mystery, pointing toward God, becomes divine. For you will perceive that Meletius himself, in this work, has expressed the nature and structure of this animal, and you will be able to clearly grasp from this that there is nothing in the entire nature of things more excellent than man, especially that one whom many recognize as being endowed with counsel, probity, humanity, innocence, religion, and greatness of spirit, in all things.
CRAMER'S NOTICE TO THE READER
In the third volume of the *Anecdota [Oxoniensia]* we are now publishing, for the first time in Greek, the short work of the iatro-sophist Meletius, *On the Constitution of Man*, which has hitherto been circulated only through the Latin version of Nicolaus Petreius of Corfu, printed at Venice in the year 1552. We present the text according to the authority of three Bodleian codices: Baroccianus 131 (A), Roe 14 (B), and 15 (C); of which the Baroccianus is by far superior in antiquity and quality. I judge that this was written at the beginning of the fourteenth century. The other two are much more recent. And that the Baroccianus was indeed the exemplar from which Petreius made his version is suspected by the very learned Lud. Bachmann in his *Quaestio de Meletio Graece inedito ejusque Latino interprete Nic. Petreio* (a), p. 4; but although Bachmann has judged most excellently concerning Meletius and his codices, he has not arrived at the truth in this conjecture; for it appears even from this that Petreius did not use the Baroccianus codex, because the latter is far fuller in the part of the work that treats of the soul. Sometimes, however, Petreius brings forth citations which are missing in our codex, as, for example, p. 136 (col. 1278 in our edit.), these words of Callimachus: *Go, women's gentleness, on the path where destructive pains do not tread.*
Since, however, the Baroccianus certainly surpasses all the codices, if you except the Parisian ones, which I have not inspected, I have not doubted that its authority is to be held preferable everywhere, except where it clearly had to be corrected from the others, of which B obtains the second place. This codex seems to me to correspond with the Viennese one, which Bachmann also marked as B (p. 5). And it will perhaps be the same codex of which Fabricius speaks (supra col. 1137): "In another Imperial Library codex, chapter 35, it occurs five times as large." But we now present this ten times as large as it is in the Baroccianus. As for Meletius's treatise, it seems to be the work of a pious and learned man, compiled from various sources, now for the most part lost. But it is rich in etymologies, which he seems to have drawn from Socrates and Soranus. It is therefore no wonder that it has very many things in common with the *Etymologicum Magnum*, to the correction of which it sometimes serves.
(a) Rostock. 1833. 4.
NOTICE OF THE NEW EDITOR
In this our edition, we have accurately applied the variety of readings of the Parisian codex of excellent quality, no. 2299 (P), which V. D. Car. Daremberg kindly communicated to us; we have corrected Cramer's text here and there; we have accommodated the version of Nic. Petreius, where it seemed necessary, to the new text; and finally, we have taken care to transcribe and now publish for the first time the fragment *Anecdoton on the Elements* (col. 1283) from the same Parisian codex.