ABSTRACT
The job of the editor of an ancient work is to try to print, as far as possible, what the author wrote. The stages of establishing this are three:1 recensio, establishing what the texts in our possession say (in the terms that critics use, establishing what the “tradition”—the technical term is paradosis-is); examinatio, examining the paradosis to decide whether or not it is likely to preserve the author’s actual words; and since no manuscript is without errors, the final stage is emendatio, proposing what the author may originally have written that was corrupted into what we have received.
