Translator's Preface
VOLUME VII, containing Books XXVI and XXVII, covers the years 211 to 207 B.C., thus including as its principal moments Hannibal at the gates of Rome, the fall of Capua, the successes of Scipio in Spain, Fabius 'recovery of Tarentum, Marcellus' inglorious end in an ambuscade, Hasdrubal's descent into Italy, his defeat and death at the Metaurus.Again, as in Vol. VI, the editor is under unlimited obligations to the Oxford text of Conway and Johnson, Vol. IV, 1934, but indebted in varying degrees to many earlier editors—a goodly company. All citations of the Puteanus in the critical notes have been verified in the well-known facsimile. Beginning with Book XXVI our textual resources are largely increased by the store of recorded readings of another famous MS. which no longer survives, and these are often to be preferred to those of the Puteanus. Particular care has been taken to indicate passages where a gap in P—whose scribe yawned all too frequently—is filled from the lost Spirensis; also where it was the latter who nodded, while P shows no omission. The capital importance of this double tradition for books XXVI-XXX has led the editor, with Conway and Johnson, to stress the readings of Aldus and Froben, as having had access to MS. material no longer directly available. In view of our limited space citation of recent editors has been necessarily restricted.
To the publishers of the Cambridge Ancient History we are grateful for permission to use with alterations five maps from its Vols. VIII and IX. The map of Latium and Campania follows in the main that of Heinrich Kiepert in Vol. X, part 2, of the C.I.L. That of New Carthage is drawn in part from an Admiralty chart, in part from H. H. Scullard's Scipio Africanus in the Second Punic War, p. 290, Cambridge, 1930. The latter's map was based chiefly on that of Canovas in Estudios geograficos-historicos de Cartagena, 1905, a local work which could not be found in this country. Used by Scullard, and to be consulted by the reader, is also the map of J. L. Strachan- Davidson in his Selections from Polybius, Oxford, 1888. The map of Tarentum in Vol. VI has been revised to show the Appian Way in its latest extension, also the large area occupied by tombs, but inside the walls. Adding to space covered by the necropolis the area occupied by villas and gardens, we find hardly one-third left for the city proper. Thus Tarentum resembled Syracuse in having fortified a much larger area than that required by the city itself (cf. Vol. VI, p. 505).
