Tag: Manuscripts

A system of invisible punctuation in papyri and medieval Greek codices

Posted on by Roger Pearse

How faithfully do medieval Greek manuscripts reproduce their ancient ancestors?  It’s a question that all of us ask ourselves, from time to time, and it can be hard to answer other than subjectively.  In some cases, however, we can compare ancient papyrus copies with much later medieval versions.  The accuracy can be uncanny.

Origen’s Contra Celsum is known to us from Vaticanus gr. 386 (=A), of the 13th century, plus some extracts in the Philocalia, an anthology of Origen’s thought by Basil of Caesarea and Gregory Nazianzen (=P).  A century ago there was a bitter argument among philologists as to which preserved the text better.  The GCS editor, Kotschau, believed that A was to be preferred, while his critics preferred P.  Which was right?

In 1941 a bunch of papyrus codices were discovered by Egyptian workmen in a gallery in the ancient quarries of Tura.  At the time thoughts were on Rommel and the Afrikakorps, and the workmen stole the lot, broke them up and sold them to dealers.  Among them was a papyrus codex of long extracts from books 1 and 2 of Contra Celsum, made by a learned monk who clearly had before him a complete text.  In the papyrus these are followed by extracts from Origen’s Commentary on Romans, and his Homilies on 1 Samuel.  The papyrus can be dated by paleography to the early 7th century.

This meant that the texts could now be compared with an ancient copy of the text.  Quickly it became clear that the papyrus was from a related but not identical family to A.

Now I would like to share with you a passage in the truly excellent volume by Jean Scherer which published the text of the Contra Celsum extracts.1  I will add a comment or two at the end.  As we pick up the discussion, Scherer is talking about the presence of mysterious blanks or gaps between letters in the otherwise continuously written text.  Note that the papyrus has no word division.  

Clearer still: on pages 30-34 and 56-59, the copyist reproduces in full some long passages of Contra Celsum without selection or omission: however, there are many blanks.

These remarks may appear futile, and we ourselves have been inclined to impute these variations to the whim of the copyist, until the day when we examined the Vaticanus gr. 386, which as we said earlier (p.6) belongs to the same family as our papyrus.  Here — a detail which P. Koetschau signalled in a rapid note in his description — the “blanks”, longer or shorter, are an important element of a system of punctuation in use in this manuscript.  They mark the articulations of the thought, separating and distinguishing the different steps in the argumentation.  Short gaps play a role analogous to that which is observed in the Dialektos.  And if one compares, from this point of view, the manuscript and the papyrus, we can say that, if the manuscript has blanks sometimes which do not appear in the papyrus, nevertheless all the blanks in the papyrus which do not mark an interruption are found in the manuscript. 

Sometimes the correspondance is so perfect as to be uncanny.  Thus in p.33, l.20, before μεμνημαι δε (which introduces a new development) the blank, in the papyrus, is extra long.  In the Vaticanus ms. it is is also extra long. 

Such coincidences cannot be accidental.  They show that, in both the Cairo papyrus and the Vatican manuscript, the use of blanks is not down to the initiative of the copyists.  These have done no more than follow their model here, or, better, beyond their model, the archetype, and beyond that, the editio princeps of the library of Caesarea.2 

This peculiarity is transmitted intact down to the 13th century.  But it was fragile all the same: the second copyist 3 of the Vaticanus did not retain it, and in the ms. Parisinus suppl. gr. 616, which is a careful copy of the Vaticanus gr. 386, the blanks have disappeared.

Thus the variations of the papyrus explain themselves quite naturally.  To separate the extracts, the copyist on his own initiative started by using a double oblique stroke //.  But, under the influence of his model, he gradually started using the blanks, which in the complete text before him had the purpose of separating the parts of the discourse.  And finally he used only blanks, for economy of effort, because it was easier to copy the text mechanically than to substitute systematically one sign for another.

Finally let us note that in the extracts of the Commentary on the letter to the Romans we find numerous blanks and no “//” sign.  This is a clear indication that these extracts were copied, by the same scribe, after the extracts of Contra Celsum.

This is quite something, and also new to me.  I wonder how many editors would have recognised that these apparently random gaps in the text had a meaning, and would have tracked them down into the medieval copy?  Not many, I would guess.

But if this was a normal way to write a 7th century papyrus copy of a literary work, I do wonder what other texts, unrecognised, may have contained it.  It looks like a fingerprint feature to me — a way to detect relationships between manuscripts and papyri.  If so, perhaps editors and those working with papyri should be on the lookout for it.

1. Jean Scherer, Extraits des Livres I et II du Contre Celse d’Origène, d’après le papyrus no. 88747 du Musée du Caire, IFAO 18, Cairo, 1956.  See p.12-13.
2. A note in the papyrus indicates that the text was revised by Pamphilus at Caesarea.
3.  The Vaticanus gr. 386 was written by two copyists, who took turns.  The first was both  more elegant and more accurate than the second.

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The Leimonos Monastery manuscripts — online in PDF form!

Posted on by Roger Pearse

This is very, very exciting!  A Greek monastery at Leimonos, on the island of Lesbos, has put 108 of its manuscript collection online!  And … better yet … it has done so in PDF form.  You can download the things, which is what we all want to do.  To access it, go to its Digital Library and click on ‘manuscripts’ and then on ‘Patristic’. 

This is wonderful!  I am so excited!  It makes the fussy, over-complicated, under-usuable projects of places like the British Library look sick.  I guarantee that the Leimonos manuscripts will get studied more than any other manuscripts in history, over the next few years!  Because access is all.  If you’re teaching people about mss, what are you going to use?  You’ll use the Leimonos mss.

I saw the announcement at Evangelical Textual Criticism, where they list some of the bible manuscripts online.  But of course we’re interested in much more exciting things!  And if you click on “more…” under each ms., you get a catalogue of contents for each volume.

The patristic manuscripts include homilies by Chrysostom, Basil the Great, Gregory Nazianzen, Ephraem the Syrian, the Ladder of John Climacus, and much more.  There’s a catena on psalms 1-71, for instance.

The various manuscripts include the Physica of Aristotle, Barlaam and Joasaph, and Cyril of Alexandria’s Lexicon.

The most interesting part of this is the miscellaneous manuscripts, which could contain anything.  You’d never order a microfilm of one of these — but now you can browse, have a hunt, see what you can find.  Treasures are bound to be discovered!

Nor is the library just manuscripts.  There are the archives, and there are PDF’s of early printed books.

Magic!

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How the text of Nonius Marcellus reaches us

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The 4th century Latin dictionary by Nonius Marcellus is our main source for the fragments of lost Latin literature from the Roman republic — works like Accius, the satirist Lucillius, Varro’s Menippean Satires, the Tragedies of Ennius, Sissena and the Historiae of Sallust.  The format of the work is a word, a definition, and then one or more quotations to show the usage of the word.

The work was in 20 books, as was traditional for works of grammar.  But the books are of very uneven length.  In the three volume Teubner edition by W. M. Lindsay from 1903 — still the standard, I believe — volume 1 contains books 1-3; volume 2 contains only book 4, which is vast, and volume 3 contains books 5-20.  Book 20 is just a single sheet.   The manuscripts reveal that the work was split into these chunks for transmission also.

Three forms of the text have reached us. 

The first contains what is known as the ‘pure’ text.  This is pretty much untampered with, although subject to the usual perils of transmission.  Copying a dictionary composed of short quotes and spotting errors in it is quite a challenge if your Latin is not that good, and Angelo Mai, when he printed the first edition of the text of Cicero’s previously lost De re publica in 1822, described the text as A vertice, ut aiunt, usque ad extremum unguem ulcus est — as ulcerated from top to toe.

The second form of the text is known as the ‘doctored’ text.  In some places this is actually more faithful to the original than the corrupted ‘pure’ text.  But mostly it has been edited.  Some scholar of the Carolingian period revised the text to produce a more readable version, in the interests of those trying to learn Latin.  This was a very successful revision, and copies of this version out-number the pure text.

The third form is the ‘extract’ version.  The word and definition is included, but the quotations have been omitted in most cases.  The result is a glossary, doubtless intended for handier use in monasteries.

All three versions derive from a single archetype, in which a leaf from book 4 had fallen out, and been replaced for safe-keeping immediately after the first leaf of book 1.  The transmission is also rather mix-and-match: a single manuscript may use the first form for books 1-3, and the doctored text for book 4.

All the manuscripts are 9th century or later, and all of them, for all three versions, seem to be connected to Tours and the Loire valley in France.  In particular the literary activity of Lupus of Ferrieres there in the 9th century seems to be pivotal.

The pure text is represented by the following manuscripts:

  • L – Leiden, Voss. Lat. F. 73, dated to the start of the 9th century, from Tours.
  • F – Florence, Lauren. 48.1, 9th century, corrected and annotated by Lupus of Ferrieres.
  • H – British Library, Harley 2719, 9-10th century.  Contains glosses in Breton, so was written in or near Britanny, not far from the Loire. Online.
  • E – Escorial M.III.14, mid-late 9th century, from Auxerre.  The book was at St. Peter’s Ghent during the 11th century.
  • Gen. – Geneva lat.84, 9th century, from Fulda in Germany, with which Lupus had connections.
  • B – Berne 83, 9th century, written at Reims in the time of Hincmar.
  • Cant. – Cambridge University Library Mm.5.22, end of the 9th century, from Bourges.
  • P – Paris lat. 7667, 10th century, from Fleury.

L contains all three sections of the text, and is a fine and carefully written book made at Tours in the early years of the 9th century, probably while Alcuin was still abbot of St. Martins there.  For books 1-3 it is the ancestor of all the other surviving manuscripts above.  It incorporates corrections from the doctored and extract families.

The corrections to F are interesting.  F3 contains readings and supplements known from no other source, and clearly right.  It must be inferred that this corrector had access to another old manuscript — perhaps the archetype of all the manuscripts itself, or a copy taken before the rot had set in.

For book 4, things change.  Book 4 of E is descended from book 4 of L, but the best manuscript of this book is Gen. which is NOT descended from book 4 in L, but from some common ancestor.  And Gen. was undoubtedly written at Fulda in Lower Germany.  There were links between Tours and Fulda, as we can see from the transmission of Apicius and Suetonius, and again we think of Lupus of Ferrieres, whose strong links with Fulda explain why a German manuscript appears in what is otherwise a bunch of manuscripts all written in one area of France.  Some of the notes may even be in his hand.  We can be reasonably certain that this book was brought from Fulda to the Loire area.  Book 4 in B is a cousin of Gen., written rather badly, and the other manuscripts are descended from Gen.

The chunk comprising books 5-20 is different again, with these books in L descended from the archetype, while H, P and E are all cousins of L via one or more now lost intermediaries.

The ‘doctored’ text does not tell us much more about how the text moved around in the Dark Ages.  The only complete representative of the whole family is G, Wolfenbuttel Gud.lat. 96.  This was written, yes, at Tours between 800-850.

The ‘extract’ family exists in a bunch of manuscripts, and, once again, they are all connected with Tours, Reims, and Auxerre.

Nonius, then, was popular during the 9th century.  But he is a difficult author, and after this period he was not copied.  Only two medieval book catalogues (St. Vincent, Metz, s. XI, and St.Amand, s.XII) mention a copy.  The text did not circulate widely again until the 15th century.

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A medieval catalogue of classical books at the abbey of Arras

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Opening my copy of G. Becker’s Catalogi bibliothecarum antiqui to a random page, I find myself looking at the following entry (p.254):

126. Monasterium S. Vedasti Atrebatense = Arras. saec. XII.

Libri philosophice artis et auctores beati Vedasti hi sunt: 1. 2. duo Virgilii. – 3.4. duo Lucani. – 5. unus Oratius. – 6. Priscianus unus. – 7-9. Boetii III. – 10. Boetius in periermeniis Aristotelis. – 11. commentum in ysagogis Porfirii. – 12. item commentum periermeniarum Aristotelis de Greco in Latinum translatum. – 13. dialectica Augustini et decem predicamenta et Arator in uno volumine. – 14. item alius Arator et Prosper in uno volumine. – 15. liber rethoricorum Tulii Ciceronis, decem predicamenta Aristotelis in uno volumine. – 16. item decem predicamenta Arist. et commentum Boecii super ea. – 17. topica Tullii Ciceronis libri III. – 18. liber Euricii, liber Probi per versus, Boetius de musica, Aurelianus de laude musice discipline, versus Hubaldi ad Carolum imperatorem, Macrobius de sumnio Scipionis, divisio mathematice, Sedulius et Iuvencus in uno volumine. – 19. Terentius. – 20. ciclus Dionisii. – 21. glosarius et maior Donatus. – 22. somnium Scipionis. – 23. passionalis medicinalis libri IV. – 24. calculatio Albini. – 25. excerptum de metrica arte. – 26. item alius de eadem arte. Libri divini hi sunt: 27. Augustinus…

And it continues with a long list of libri divini, up to number 167.   Twenty-six non-patristic or biblical texts.

Behind the strange spellings are some familiar names.  Two volumes of Vergil; two of Lucan.  “Oratius” I did not know but must be Horace, while Priscian is a grammar.  Three volumes of Boethius follow, then another on Aristotle.  Number 11 is a commentary on the Isagogue of Porphyry, followed by a commentary on the Peri Hermenias or De interpretatione which the cataloguer seems to realise is a translation from Greek into Latin.  Cicero is then well represented; and there are two copies of the Dream of Scipio, quoted by Macrobius and thereby preserved from Cicero’s De republica.

It’s not always clear which text is meant.  The monkish cataloguer had no list of works at his disposal, which he could consult in cases of uncertainty.  All he could do was read the rubrics at the head of each book and transcribe the sometimes corrupted entries. 

It’s an interesting game, to look at these entries and try to puzzle out what they mean.   I commend it to everyone.

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Galen’s preface to Hippocrates “On the workshop/laboratory of a doctor” in English

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Andrew Eastbourne has come through, and a .doc file of this text (De officina medici) arrived today and can be downloaded from here: Galen_-_Preface.   I have also uploaded it to the Fathers site here.  I’m placing this in the public domain — do whatever you like with it (except stick your own copyright notice on it!)

It is most interesting as a guide to the transmission of texts in ancient times, so I will do my best to post it here.

He entitled a medical [work], “Pertaining to the Surgery” (κατ’ ἰητρεῖον).[1]  But it would have been better for it to be entitled, “On the Things Pertaining to the Surgery” (περὶ τῶν κατ’ ἰητρεῖον), as some give the title for the [works] of Diocles, Philotimus, and Mantius.  For while these men wrote on the same subject, in each book, in the greatest number [of copies] the title lacks the preposition (περί) and the article (τῶν)—they are entitled, simply, “Pertaining to the Surgery”—in a few [copies], however, [it is given] with the preposition and the article:  “On the Things Pertaining to the Surgery.”  But whereas these men’s books give quite copious theoretical instruction, Hippocrates’ [book], after the catalogue of the things that are the components of surgery overall, gives a full explanation of bandaging, since the man considered it proper to practice this first.  And indeed, the practice of this can be pursued most especially with pieces of wood sculpted into human form, or if [this is] not [possible], on the bodies of children at least.

This much the book itself required me to say, before my interpretations of individual points; now, however, I will go through what is not required by the book, but by those who, in copying [2] them, readily received the writings of the ancients in whatever [form] they themselves wished.[3]  For some eagerly attempted to find 300-year-old copies of even very old books,[4] preserving some in papyrus scrolls, others on sheets of papyrus, others on parchment, like the [texts] that are with us in Pergamum.[5]

Therefore, I decided to examine all these things in the [commentaries of the] earliest interpreters, so that on the basis of the majority and the most trustworthy I might discover the authentic writings.  And the result turned out to surpass my expectations.  For I discovered that they nearly all agreed with each other—the treatises and the commentaries of the interpreters—such that I was struck with bewilderment at the audacity of those who have recently written commentaries or have made their own edition of all the books of Hippocrates, among whom are Dioscorides and his associates, and Artemidorus, called Capito, and his associates,[6] who made many innovations in the ancient writings.

It seemed to me that the account of the commentaries would be [too] long, if I mentioned all the writings, and so I imagined that it was better to write [about] the older ones only, adding to them some few others—those that show but little alteration—and of these, primarily those which have been acknowledged by the earlier commentators on the book.  There are four of them:  two, who wrote commentaries on all the books of Hippocrates—Zeuxis and Heraclides; and then Bacchius and Asclepiades, [whose comments], not on all [the books of Hippocrates, are] hard to understand.[7]

And now, enough of these matters.  By way of recovering the pleasure of a clearer exordium, I will speak briefly, as though I had not said anything already.  Hippocrates’ book, entitled “Pertaining to the Surgery,” contains at the outset a preamble to the whole art [of medicine], as I shall demonstrate a little later, and for this reason some have reasonably considered it proper to read it first of all, promising lessons very similar to what some later gave in the works they entitled “Introductions.”  And next in sequence after the common preamble, he teaches (regarding what can be effected in the surgery) the most useful things for those who are beginning to learn the medical art.  It will become plain to you that [all] this is the case as you apply your mind carefully to the explanations of the expressions themselves. 

From: Claudii Galeni Opera Omnia, tom. XVIII pars II, ed. D. Carolus Gottlob Kühn, Lipsiae (1830), p. 629-632. Title: ΤΟ ΙΠΠΟΚΡΑΤΟΥΣ ΚΑΤ̕ΙΗΤΡΕΙΟΝ ΒΙΒΛΙΟΝ ΚΑΙ ΓΑΛΗΝΟΥ ΕΙΣ ΑΥΤΟ ΥΠΟΜΝΗΜΑ Α.  The title of the Latin translation is:  Hippocratis De Medici Officina liber et Galeni in eum Commentarius I; Galeni praefatio. [Note by R.P.]
[1] “Surgery” here appears to refer to the physical set-up for a doctor’s operations, not the practice of surgery to which the English term most frequently refers.
[2] The Greek term, μεταγράφοντες, carries the implication that they changed them in the process of copying.
[3] Here Birt, Das antike Buchwesen, p. 503, suggests emending the odd ἢ (“or” [?]) to οἳ, yielding the following meaning for the sentence:  “…but by the copyists, who readily took…”
[4] In the Greek, it is the copying rather than the composition that is explicitly described as “300-years old,” since the participle γεγραμμένα—lit., “having been written”—is in the accusative case, whereas the books are in the genitive.
[5] Kuhn’s text (τὰδὲἐνδιαφόροιςφιλύραις, ὥσπερτὰπαρ’ ἡμῖνἐνΠεργάμῳ:  “others on various / excellent [sheets of paper made from] the under-bark of the lime tree, like the texts that are with us in Pergamum”) is problematic.  Although this under-bark is attested as being used for writing (Herodian 1.17.1; Cassius Dio 72.8.4), it has no connection with Pergamum.  Birt, Das antike Buchwesen, p. 503, cites Cobet’s emendation (ἐνδιφθέραις) with approval—I have adopted it here; Birt also mentions Marquardt’s suggestion (ἐνδιφθερίναιςφιλύραις:  “on [sheets of] parchment ‘bark'”).
[6] The phrasing here—”Dioscorides and his associates” (Gk. οἱπερὶΔιοσκορίδην)—is frequently used in Greek as a circumlocution for the simple “Dioscorides.”
[7] Gk. δυσλόγιστα; this can mean, literally, “hard to calculate” or “bad at calculating” and hence, either obscurity or shoddy commentating is the point.  

 

UPDATE: Andrew Eastbourne writes to remind me that “duties” of a doctor would be “officiis”, and to say that “officina” is workshop/laboratory.

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Notes on the Laus Pisonis

Posted on by Roger Pearse

My copy of Texts and Transmissions is still lying beside my computer with a bookmark at the page on the manuscripts of Juvenal.  But over the page is a short entry on a Latin text previously unknown to me.  This is an anonymous Latin panegyric known as the Laus Pisonis (Praise of Piso).  Fortunately I find the text and a translation already present at Bill Thayer’s site, Lacus Curtius, here.

The work survived to the renaissance in a single manuscript, which in 1527 was found at the South German abbey of Lorsch.  The text was published by Johannes Sichard in that year at Basle (by Froben?), which is fortunate for the Lorsch codex has since disappeared.  Lorsch was founded in the middle of the Dark Ages, and was sacked, like the other abbeys of Southern Germany, during the Thirty Years War.  The manuscripts of Lorsch, such as survived, were taken to Heidelberg.  The collection of manuscripts at Heidelberg ended up in the Vatican collection, as the “Palatine” manuscripts.  But like the two volume Tertullian, listed in a medieval catalogue, the collection of minor Latin poets which contained the Laus Pisonis did not make it. 

Anyone wishing to edit the text is therefore dependent upon the fidelity of Schard’s edition.  This is not an enviable fate.  Even so good an editor as Beatus Rhenanus, who printed the editio princeps of Tertullian at Basle in 1521, was quite willing to simply mark up the manuscript for the printer and send it to the monkeys of the press to be typeset in the new moveable type.   Quite a number of errors could creep in, from such a hands-off policy.  Rhenanus did just this, in 1520, with the only manuscript of Velleius Paterculus (since lost).  But in that case, once sample sheets had been printed, errors were noticed — and one of Rhenanus’ associates recalled the manuscript from the printer, and collated it against the print.  The collation was then itself added to the edition.

The process also led to the loss of manuscripts.  A careless editor might well feel that the parchment manuscript, by now considerably defaced, was of no further interest, now that he had a nice new clean copy.  It is a lamentable fact that quite a few unique manuscripts survived the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages, only to be chopped up for parchment once printed.  However we happen to know that the manuscript of Velleius survived this treatment and existed as late as the 18th century.  Similarly the manuscripts of Tertullian used by Rhenanus did not perish at that point; one, indeed, survives today among Rhenanus’ papers in the little town of Selestat in Alsace.  But we can only speculate whether the only manuscript of the Laus Pisonis perished in 1527, cut up to line baking dishes, or suffered some other fate somewhat later.

Fortunately a second source is available, in the form of a 12th century anthology of texts, the Florilegium Gallicum.  This contains 75% of the Laus Pisonis, and so can be used to correct the text.

The poem itself praises a young Calpurnius Piso, one of a number of that name.   The references to Maecenas suggest a date in the mid- to late-first century.

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A thought on the end of Juvenal

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The 16th and last satire breaks off mid-flow.  The ending is lost, therefore, or perhaps was not written.

Ancient books were written on rolls.  One modern author theorized that the end of a text ought to be safer than the start, because it should be inside the rolled up scroll.  He seems to think that a roll would normally be stored ready to read.

But it seems to me, in my ignorance, that the reverse is the case.  The average ancient reader would get to the end of his reading, and find his roll almost fully rolled-up.   It is possible, of course, that some readers would then unwind the whole roll and roll it back up the correct way.  But human nature being what it is, surely most of the time the reader will just pop the roll back in its cylindrical case.  A reader who takes up a roll to read and finds it is back-to-front has an incentive to rewind it.  A reader who wants his lunch has none.

I suggest, therefore, that as a rule most rolls were stored with the end hanging out.  This would explain quite simply why so many ancient texts are mutilated at the end, without requirement for the hypothesis that they were written in codex form.

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The manuscripts of Juvenal

Posted on by Roger Pearse

L. D. Reynolds, Texts and Transmissions: A survey of the Latin classics, Oxford 1983, is the first port of call for any enquiry into the transmission of any of the Latin classics.  On p.200-3 is the article by R. J. Tarrant on Juvenal.

Juvenal went through a period of obscurity after his own times.  Not cited by Donatus, or Jerome, he is referenced more than 70 times in the commentaries on Virgil by Servius.  Some of the manuscripts include subscriptions which suggest Servius may have been connected to their rediscovery: ms. K, for instance, contains Lego ego Niceus apud M. Serbium Romae et emendavi — I, Nicaeus, read this at the house of M. Servius in Rome and corrected it, and ms. L a version of the same.

More than 500 manuscripts later than the 9th century exist.  Unfortunately, by the 4th century, a considerable number of spurious lines  had already found their way into many copies of the text.  Difficult language was sometimes replaced by simpler expressions.  The vast majority of the medieval manuscripts derive from such corrupted copies.

As a rule we tend to find that medieval manuscripts go back to a single Dark Ages exemplar, or perhaps a few.  In the case of Juvenal, however, we can clearly see that two ancient families of manuscripts both gave rise to medieval children.  For in addition to the majority, we have a few manuscripts which preserve a more correct and less interpolated text, although the text itself is often rather more corrupt than in the interpolated copies.

The better mss. are:

  • P:   Montpellier H 125, first quarter of the 9th century, from Lorsch (online here).  Once owned by Pierre Pithou, who used it for his edition of 1585.  The Pithoeanus is the best and most important manuscript of Juvenal.  It also contains Persius.
  • Arou.:  Aarau, Stadtarchiv I, Nr. 0. The fragmenta Arouiensia.  These are five leaves from a destroyed manuscript of the 10th century, written in Germany, and broken up to use in bindings.  They are now in the Stadtarchiv in Aarau  (website here) An enquiry by email to them got the reply: “Das Juvenal-Fragment befindet sich im Stadtarchiv Aarau, I Nr. 0, vgl.: Katalog der mittelalterlichen Handschriften des Klosters Wettingen ; Katalog der mittelalterlichen Handschriften in Aarau, Laufenburg, Lenzburg, Rheinfelden und Zofingen, S. 195f.”.  It also contains scholia, which are important for several reasons.  Firstly each scholion is introduced by a quotation of a few words from the text.  These headwords or lemmata are themselves valuable for the authentic text.  Secondly the scholion itself sometimes reflects a different version of those same words, showing that the two were put together at different times.
  • Sang.:  St. Gall ms. 870, second quarter of the 9th century.  This is a florilegium — an anthology — which contains 280 lines of Juvenal.  Pp.40-326 contain the ancient scholia.
  • R:  Paris latin. 8072, from the end of the 10th century, probably French, containing long sections of the text.
  • V:  Vienna 107, end of the 9th century, containing book 1, line 1 – book 2, l.59 and book 3.107-5.96.

P, Arou. and Sang. are very closely related.  The first two are almost identical, with the text even laid out in the same manner on the page.  R and V are less reliable, and V has been much influenced by the other family.

The remaining manuscripts — hundreds of them — are hard to classify.  No stemma can be constructed because cross-contamination is so general, and even geographical groupings are pretty blurred.  This will not surprise any manuscript enthusiast.  For heavy lumps of wood and parchment, manuscripts travel about just as much as rock groups on tour, or so it seems sometimes.

Finally there are some fragments of ancient books containing Juvenal.  Two pages of a 6th century volume exist in ms. Vatican lat. 5750, with scholia, and also a portion of Persius.  More pages from a different 6th century book exist in Milan in ms. Ambrosianus Cimelio 3.  Finally a parchment leaf from Antinoe, ca. 500 AD, contains 49 lines of book 7.  None of these fragments agrees consistently with either of the medieval groups, unfortunately.

By the last decade of the 4th century, Juvenal had been equipped with a substantial commentary, which is the source for our scholia vetera (there are also Carolingian scholia), found in the three mss. P, Arou. and Sang.  Mommsen discussed the date of the commentary in his Gesammelte Schriften 7 (1909), p.509-11: Zeitalter des Scholiasten Juvenals.  The scholia must post-date 352-3, since there is a reference in the scholion on Juvenal book 10, l.24 to a praefectus urbis named Cerealis.  But much of the material must be older, or so the footnote says.  It can hardly date later than the abolition of paganism — the scholiast shows little knowledge of Christianity, and resorts to quoting Tacitus.  It is difficult to believe that the compulsory state religion could be unknown in the 5th century, and indeed the writer says that the gods are still worshipped.  The festival of the Matronalia is a state festival, as it still is shown in the Chronography of 354, but not in that of 449.  Likewise the term used for the silver coinage is not the silliqua of the 5th century, but the older terms argenteolus or nummus.

Mommsen concludes  that the commentary was composed ca. 400 AD, and that later, as is usual with ancient commentaries, it was pillaged for the materials to create the scholia in the margins of the new-fangled codex-style books.

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Translations of ancient Greek literature into Middle Persian

Posted on by Roger Pearse

In 529 AD the emperor Justinian closed the Academy in Athens.  The remaining heirs of Plato chose to travel to the court of the Sassanid Persian King of Kings in order to continue  their studies there.  Finding conditions among the barbarians uncongenial, in time they returned. 

But it raises the question of why we never hear of translations of Greek literature into Persian.  The Persian empire was a potent adjacent power throughout the Greek classical period, and revived in the 3rd century and continued down to the Moslem conquest in the 7th century. 

I never read L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars (3rd) without learning something.  On page 256 I learn that a few texts are indeed extant in translations into Pehlevi. 

Wilson lists four texts: the novel about Alexander the Great known as ps.Callisthenes; the Geoponica; and two astrological texts, the handbook of Vettius Valens which we have discussed before, plus Teucer of Babylon’s Paranatellonta, which is a new text to me.

Wilson references “Studies presented to E. G. Browne, 1922” (in his usual casual fashion), which turns out to be A Volume of Oriental Studies Presented to Edward G. Browne on his 60th birthday (7 February 1922), and thankfully online at Archive.org.  The specific article is that by C. A. Nallino, which turns out to be on p.345-363 and entitled Tracce di opere greche giunte agli Arabi per trafila Pehlevica.  Unless my eyes deceive me, this is about texts which ended up in Arabic via Persian, rather than about Greek texts in general.  The article merely discusses these four texts, and the evidence for them.

It would seem, therefore, that there might be more, were one to look.

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Islamic mss now online

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’m not sure whether it is relevant or useful to any readers of this blog, but I saw an email saying that the Islamic manuscripts at the University of Michigan are now pretty much all online here.

It’s all happening, people — the manuscripts are coming online, slowly.  The dam is bursting, and we will all be able to hunt through the primary sources in the oldest extant copies without leaving our desks!

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