both of morality and of judgement. The editor could either gather
together all the epigrams that were not obscene, or he could choose
only the best. He took in fact both ways: he preserved everything of
Catullus and Martial except the cheapest odds and ends and filthiest
obscenities, and he applied strict standards of judgement to the rest
so that, unless an epigram had literary merit or contained something
worth knowing, he felt there was no reason to burden the book with it.

Nevertheless, some middling epigrams found entrance into the
anthology--he confesses the fact so the reader will not look for
excellence without flaw. The reasons were, first, that the complete
perfection he was looking for is seldom or never attained. Hence, if
he had admitted only those epigrams in which there was nothing to
censure, the task would not have been one of selecting some but rather
of rejecting almost all. Again, in epigrams dealing with memorable
events or in praise of famous men, sometimes he looked to the profit
of the work rather than to its polish, as in Ausonius' quatrains on
the Caesars. Finally, he will not deny that chance has played its part
against his will. As a judge after a series of severe sentences will
give a lighter one to a man no less guilty than the others, so after
rejecting a great number of epigrams by some writer a sense of pity
arose and a distaste with severity of judgement; then if anything that
seemed pointed turned up, though no better than what was rejected, he
could not bear to see it discarded. This has occasionally happened,
but hardly ever without a warning note to the reader.

He admits that some, perhaps quite excellent, epigrams have escaped
him, either because he never read them or because he was at the moment
of reading less attentive. But the paucity or lack of selections from
a given writer should not be taken as an indication of ignorance or
indiligence in that case. Rather, he confidently professes to have
exerted the greatest patience and industry--patience, since so many
were so bad. His hope was by his trouble to free others from so much
trouble. With this in mind he read countless authors of different ages
and countries, a total of around 50,000 epigrams, from most of which
nothing at all was worth excerpting. There is no point in
memorializing the names of the bad, except to note in passing that he
found hardly anything so inept as the _Delitiae_, as they call them,
of the German p