ADMONITION TO THE FOLLOWING OPUSCULUM
(Jo. Christ. WOLF, *Anecdota Græca sacra et profana*, vol. II, Hamburg 1722, in-8°.)
The dialogue which is imagined to have taken place between Gregory of Nyssa and his sister Macrina regarding *The Soul and the Resurrection*, occasioned by the death of Basil the Great, has always seemed to me worthy of reading, on account of the diligence and learning that the excellent Father brought to the treatment of this subject. I perceived, however, that the entire discourse had been very poorly received and handled in several places in both Parisian editions, and especially in the former. In order to make this manifest, I decided to present the whole of it with the original Latin version and my own notes; thereafter, I considered that I had done enough if I merely indicated the variants.
Moreover, these very variants are presented by me from two different manuscripts, which are of good quality and, for the most part—at least in those [readings] which are of some importance—are in agreement with one another. One of them is an ornament to the distinguished library which the illustrious Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach, a most deserving senator of the Republic of Frankfurt am Main and today a preeminent patron of letters, does not keep so much for himself as he bids to be for common use among the learned. It was written in the fourteenth century on paper and follows the quarto format, as it is described by the most learned J. Heinrich Mai in the *Bibliotheca Uffenbachiana*, manuscript part II, page 425. This disputation begins on folio 157 of that manuscript and runs up to page 257. And here (as you have the words of the distinguished Mai) variants of the readings have been added to the margins, recognizing the original hand and pen of the calligrapher. At the end of the disputation, namely on folio 251b, there occur A *parasēmeiōseis*—certain scholia—on this very treatise. Some of these scholia began to be placed alongside the text, but soon, when the space of the margin could not contain everything, they were relegated to this last place. Finally, a little later it is noted that the scholia are more recent than the codex itself and were added late.
Indeed, this copy was collated with the published text by the illustrious Steinhelius, resident minister of the most serene King of Poland in the city of Frankfurt am Main, who was moved by the entreaties of the celebrated Uffenbach; he performed this task with the singular knowledge of these and all kinds of letters, and with the skill in which he excels, diligently and successfully—a rare example indeed in our age, and for that reason altogether worthy of being recorded for posterity. For my part, I offer my decent and dutiful thanks to him for this devotion to the advancement of letters, as much in my own name as in the name of the public, for such an incomparable man.
The other manuscript came to me through the kindness of the Rev. Zacharias Hasselmann, a most diligent and skillful minister of the Divine Word among the Oldenburgers in Wagria, who liberally made a copy available to me. In my judgment, it is of the same age and format as the former, written on paper both diligently and neatly, and possessing this special feature: since this discourse takes the form of a disputation, the speeches of the interlocutors are distinguished from one another by the names of the disputants, Gregory and Macrina, being written in red ink. This fact clarifies the sequence of the context from time to time most excellently, as will be evident even from the specimen that I myself have provided. B