The continuous manuscripts of Pliny’s Natural history, one of the longest and most influential classical works to have survived, number over 120, some 70 of them produced in 15th-century Italy. Made by full collation of selected passages in every witness and by codicological study where necessary, this is the first attempt not only to determine the authorities for the text but also to show how the tradition developed from the Carolingian revival to the Renaissance. Included are editions of both the Suetonian Vita and the Brevis adnotatio de duobus Pliniis of Giovanni de Matociis. A profile is offered of Ioannes Camers, who compiled the first substantial index, and due credit given to the pioneering work of Detlef Detlefsen (1833-1911) and articles published from 1979 to 2014 by Hermann Walter.
Some problems that arise over the three concepts named in the title are discussed with the help of passages drawn from classical Latin works.
in memory of Eric Handley Dicaeopolis brushes the informer aside and closes his deal with the starving Megarian: ΔΙ. … λαβὲ ταυτὶ τὰ σκόροδα καὶ τοὺς ἅλαςκαὶ χαῖρε πόλλ’. ΜΕ. ἀλλ’ ἁμὶν οὐκ ἐπιχώριον.ΔΙ. πολυπραγμοσύνη νῦν ἐς κεϕαλὴν τράποιτ’ ἐμοί. 833 Even before Douglas Olson's thorough study of the tradition in his commentary on Acharnians (Oxford, 2002) it was clear that the oldest manuscript, R, has as much weight as the agreement of the others that editors report. In 833 it reads πολυπραγμοσύνη, the others –σύνης. A scholion runs λείπει (δὲ) τὸ ἕνεκα, (ἵνα ᾖ) ἕνεκα τῆς πολυπραγμοσύνης (‘because of is not expressed, [to make it] because of the meddling’), plainly written for a text that had –σύνης, which is also the lemma in one manuscript; the lemma in the other that has one is –σύνῃσιν. It has not been shown, however, either that this scholion is ancient or that its agreement with all the manuscripts but R overrides the testimony of R. As regards attestation, therefore, the tradition offers two readings of equal weight, or three if –σύνῃσιν is taken to be a relic of a text different from the one that prompted the scholion.
This is a speech delivered by invitation at the Cattolica on November 28th 2013 in the commemorative seminar 'Nei centenario della 'nascita di Giuseppe Billanovich (1913-2000)'. It appears here with footnotes but no other changes. The closing pages concern the transmission of the Livian Periochae.
A full account is given of the unusual disorder in the text of Cicero's speeches on ff. 124-239 of Madrid Bibl. Nac. 10119. The origin of the manuscript is then discussed together with its closest relatives and the history of its text.
quicquid cupido mihi saepe locutus firmasti cunctum teneris expone papyris.10
In 1453, Francesco Griffolini, already known for Latin translations of Greek works, borrowed from the new Vatican Library four Greek manuscripts: of Thucydides, Demosthenes, Heliodorus, and Lucian. The official who recorded the loan entered the third as 'Eliodorus' history of matters in Ethiopia'. Whether Griffolini would have expected a Thucydidean history or just a story, he did not translate Heliodorus, and no other reader is known before Politian, who read far enough into Charicleia and Theagenes to meet the giraffe (10.27). Few scholars of the day would have been capable of shedding light from so recondite a quarter, and in so timely a translation, on the creature that had crowds agape when the sultan of Egypt sent Lorenzo de' Medici one as a present in 1487. Politian's reading also took in Longus and Xenophon of Ephesus, but from Longus' 'Story of shepherds in four very stylish books' he cites only the garb of Philetas, particularly his sandals (2.3.1), and from Xenophon, 'no less appealing' than his Athenian namesake, he translates a passage early in the work, the procession to the temple of Artemis (1.2.2-5). He brings the passages to bear on problems in Catullus and Martial. The manuscript in which he read them is immediately identifiable, because no other of Xenophon has survived from his day and it had been in Florence, to which it owes its symbol F in modern editions, since at least 1425. In a sequence interrupted only by a snippet opportunistically fitted into a blank space at the end of Achilles Tatius, it includes Longus, Achilles Tatius up to 4.4, Chariton and Xenophon. Some manuscripts of Greek novels had been in Italy longer, and indeed some of these may have been written in Greek-speaking Calabria.
After a postscript on two manuscripts of Lucretius discussed in earlier articles, opinions are offered on the hands that wrote or annotated various manuscripts and printed editions and on the material that they used. Reasons are also given for identifying the lost Memmianus with Q and against crediting Nicolaus Heinsius with the invention of the apparatus criticus.
(L.) Cadili, (D.) Daintree, (M.) Geymonat (edd.) Scholia Bernensia in Vergilii Bucolica et Georgica. Vol. II Fasc. 1. In Georgica Commentarii (Prooemium/Liber I 1–42), moderante M. Geymonat. Praefatus est, textum edidit, adnotationibus, indicibus et appendice instruxit L. Cadili. (Lexis Research Tools, Serie in 4°, 5.) Pp. xxii + 160. Amsterdam: Adolf M. Hakkert, 2003. Paper. ISBN: 90-256-1185-0. - Volume 56 Issue 2
Identificación de tres manuscritos en inventarios medievales, uno de ellos en documentos aragoneses, y otro como parte de un manuscrito del que se creía, erróneamente, que había perdido bifolia iluminados por Gasparo Romano. Propuesta acerca de su manuscrito y estudio de otros manuscritos documentados en España entre los ss. XIII y XVII.
