We may now return to Aldus and imagine, if we can, his method of critical procedure. Finding his agreement with _Π_ so close, even in what editors before and after him have regarded as errors, I am disposed to think that he studied his Parisinus with care and followed its authority respectfully. Finding that his seemingly extravagant statements about the antiquity of his book are essentially true, I am disposed to put more confidence in Aldus than editors have granted him thus far. I should suppose that, working in the most convenient way, he turned over to his compositor, not a fresh copy of _P_, but the pages of some edition corrected from _P_--which Aldus surely tells us that he used--and from whatever other sources he consulted. It may be beyond our powers to discover the precise edition that he thus employed. It does not at first thought seem likely that he would select the Princeps, which does not include the eighth book at all, and contains errors that later were weeded out. In the portion of text included in _Π_, _P_ has thirty-two readings which Aldus avoids. In most of these cases _p_ commits an error, sometimes a ridiculous error, like _offam_ for _officia_ (62, 25); the manuscript on which _p_ was based apparently made free use of abbreviations. Keil’s damning estimate of _r_[50] is amply borne out in this section of the text; Aldus differs from _r_ in sixty-five cases, most of these being errors in _r_. He agrees with _ς_ in all but twenty-six readings.[51] Aldus would have had fewest changes to make, then, if his basic text was ς. This is apparently the view of Keil,[52] who would agree at any rate that Aldus made special use of the ς editions and who also declares that _p_ is the _fundamentum_ of _r_ as _r_ is of the edition of Pomponius Laetus.[53] [Footnote 50: See the introduction to his edition, p. xviii.] [Footnote 51: See below, pp. 60 ff.] [Footnote 52: _Op. cit._, p. xxv: illis potissimum Aldum usum esse vidi.] [Footnote 53: _Op. cit._, pp. xviii, xx.] It would certainly be natural for Aldus to start with his immediate predecessors, as they had started with theirs. The matter ought to be cleared up, if possible, for in order to determine what Aldus found in _P_ we must know whether he took some text as a point of departure and, if so, what that text was. But the task should be undertaken by some one to whom the early editions are accessible. Keil’s report of them, intentionally incomplete,[54] is sufficient, he declares,[55] “_ad fidem Aldinae editionis constituendam_,” but, as I have found by comparing our photographs of the edition of Beroaldus in the present section, Keil has not collated minutely or accurately enough to encourage us to undertake, on the basis of his apparatus, an elaborate study of Aldus’s relation to the editions preceding his own. [Footnote 54: _Op. cit._, p. 2: Ex ς pauca adscripta sunt.] [Footnote 55: _Op. cit._, p. xxxii.]