David Ganz kindly drew my attention to the fact that the Montpellier H25 manuscript of Juvenal (Lorsch, 9th century), our best witness for the old scholia on Juvenal, is now online here. If we go to the start of the Juvenal portion of the manuscript, here, we see this:
In the middle of the page is the text of Juvenal, starting here with the first satire; and in the margin is the commentary. Although the manuscript is 9th century, the comments are thought to be 4th century.
The Wessner edition of the scholia[1] begins like this:
Each comment or “scholion” consists of a word or two from the text – jargon alert: this is called the “lemma” – followed by whatever the comment is.
Wessner prints the lemma in italics, understandably. So it is really interesting to see what the 9th century scribe actually put on the page! I have highlighted those lemmas that I can see with a red box. There are also scholia to the right of the text of Juvenal, such as the one on “Cordi”.
The first scholion, a comment on the very first words, consists of a little biography of Juvenal. The others are much shorter.
I wonder to what extent this manuscript is laid out in the same way as a late 4th century original? Probably very similarly. Perhaps the brevity of most scholia relates to the limited space available?
- [1]Paul Wessner, Scholia in Iuvenalem Vetustiora, Teubner (1931).↩