"Only two years after Aldus Manutius had published the editio princeps of Pindar's odes in Venice in 1513 in his well-known series of octavos, a new edition was offered to the public but this time in Rome, where Zacharias Kallierges issued an edition in quarto containing the Greek scholia also. Despite the fact that more than twenty complete editions in Greek were printed within a century, it was the 1515 edition, also known as the editio Romana, that became the vulgate text for three hundred years due to its great merits ... [I]t has variant readings that cannot be found in any of the more than 200 manuscripts of the four books of epinician odes ... that are known today ... For two hundred years scholars and editors alike have been debating the manuscript background of the editio Romana and its pros and cons. What none of them has been aware of is that in contrast to what they assumed, they have not always been discussing the same book: the text of the Romana is in a state of flux."--Preface, p. xiii.