This volume contains the papers of the colloquium "Protohistory of the Text," which took place on 28 and 29 November 2013 at the Universitat de Barcelona. Each paper is devoted to the transmission of a major classical Latin text. The contributors are distinguished scholars from around the world such as Paolo Fedeli, Peter Kruschwitz, Marc Mayer, Stephen Oakley, Oronzo Pecere, Antonio Ramirez de Verger and Richard Tarrant. They discuss texts ranging from the comedies of Plautus and Terence through the writings of Cicero, Livy and Virgil to the "Historia Augusta." Their papers review existing scholarship and offer new insights into the transmission of these texts and especially into their protohistory, the phase of their history that precedes the earliest surviving manuscripts."