Virgil's works are regarded as being the best preserved of any Latin author's. However, the earliest extant mss. were produced at least 400 years after the originals, and tell us very little about the history of the texts in the generation following the death of the greatest Roman poet.

Otto Zwierlein demonstrates the existence of a complete edition produced around 2025 AD which, in addition to Virgil's works extended by textual insertions also included the alleged poems from his youth which we can now read in the Appendix Vergiliana. Previously the same editor had obviously taken care of Ovid. Zwierlein identifies him with Iulius Montanus, a figure from the world of declamation in the early Imperial Age, who is referred to as an elegiac and epic poet in one of the Epistulae ex Ponto.

The present volume affords an insight into ancient Virgil criticism and the editorial practice of classical antiquity, and summarizes the findings of a critical commentary on the whole of Virgil's work and exemplary selections from all of Ovid's work (including the relevant appendices) which removes the later alterations from the time of Tiberius and thus attempts to restore the original text as far as possible.