If, after some time has elapsed, an author decides to modify a text to reflect new compositional ideas, new stylistic ideals, or changed grammatical criteria, the editors will have to distinguish clearly between the different versions A, B, C, etc. That is because, while variants introduced by copists (transmission variants) constitute arbitrary textual layers that need to be identified and removed wherever possible, the editor’s failure to recognize authorial variants, or rather different authorial versions of the same text, results in a hybrid text that does not reflect in the least the plans and intentions of its author.