Studies in the Transmission of Latin Texts: Volume I: Quintus Curtius Rufus and Dictys Cretensis

534 Pages·2020·36.723 MB·English

by  S. P. Oakley

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Studies in the Transmission of Latin Texts

Studies in
the Transmission
of Latin Texts
Volume I
Quintus Curtius Rufus and Dictys Cretensis
S. P. OAKLEY
1
1
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For Michael Reeve

Preface
As a young man I had no confidence in my ability to acquire palaeographical
skills and therefore had hardly looked in a scholarly manner at a Latin manu-
script before the mid-1990s, by which time I was in my mid-thirties. Engaged
then in writing a commentary on Livy, books VI–X, I decided that I could post-
pone no longer examining the older manuscripts of Livy’s first decade, and the
study of these manuscripts led in turn to a study of the whole tradition. The
ex peri ence of working with the later manuscripts was revelatory: after many years
of labouring on subjects on which a large bibliography had accumulated, for
which most of the evidence had been well known for several centuries, and about
which many of the questions most worth asking had been long since asked (and
sometimes answered), I found an opportunity to assess primary evidence, much
of which had never been studied at all and which had accumulated a relatively
small bibliography. I decided that I wished to do more work in this field, at first
alongside finishing my commentary on Livy and then as the primary focus of my
research.
The result has been full studies, started in the 1990s and now nearly complete,
of the manuscript and early printed traditions of several texts: Cicero’s Pro Roscio
Amerino and Pro Murena, Quintus Curtius Rufus’ Historia Alexandri Magni,
Vitruvius’ De Architectura, Septimius’ translation of the spoof history of the
Trojan War of ‘Dictys Cretensis’ (henceforth I shall omit the quotation marks),
Cato’s and Varro’s treatises on agriculture, and Porphyrio’s commentary on
Horace, begun more or less in that order but worked on simultaneously. To these
I have added more recently a study of Priscian’s translation of Dionysius’
Periegesis. Just over a decade ago I developed an interest in the transmission of
patristic texts and plan to complement my work on classical texts with studies of
various texts in the Cyprianic corpus, of a large family of manuscripts of Leo’s
sermons, and of Ambrose’s De fide. I have managed to see in either the original or
in reproduction all, or virtually all, the manuscripts and incunables of these authors
of whose existence I am aware. Other texts or authors on whom I have worked
over the last decade are Caesar, Catullus, Cicero’s Philippics, ‘Dares’, and Solinus.
Working on manuscripts of several authors simultaneously allows one to
acquire a knowledge of the subject deeper than that which would be acquired if
limited to just one author, and it is economical with the time and expense that it
takes to travel to foreign libraries. Nevertheless, I should now admit that it has
greatly complicated the logistics of getting the results of my researches into the
public domain, especially when they have taken longer to write up and needed
viii Preface
many more words than I had once imagined. I publish in this first volume the
studies of the manuscripts of Curtius and Dictys; in a second volume those of
writers who may be described in a very loose and broad sense as technical
(Vitruvius, Cato and Varro, Porphyrio, and Priscian); and in a third those of the
patristic writers. The third volume will conclude with synthetic chapters, in which
I discuss how the evidence from the MSS that I have studied may be used in mak-
ing general propositions about the transmission of ancient Latin texts. The two
speeches of Cicero mentioned above have constituted the greatest challenge, since
correction and contamination in early lost copies makes genealogical investiga-
tion difficult, and for them many of my conclusions are more uncertain and ten-
tative than those reached in the other studies. These speeches serve as a reminder
that the success of genealogical investigation of manuscripts depends upon the
nature of the surviving material. Although I have a long study of the manuscripts
of these speeches in very advanced draft, I have not yet decided how best to pub-
lish it. Nor have I yet decided how best to publish the material on other texts that
I have been accumulating; I draw attention to my interest in them here in case I
can provide information that is helpful to other scholars.
I am frequently asked why I have studied such a disparate array of authors, and
the answer is that I was attracted not so much by the style or content of the texts
as by problems in their transmission. From Texts and transmission I learnt that
there were problems in the upper reaches of the stemma of Pro Roscio Amerino
and Pro Murena that needed resolution; that the manuscripts of Curtius were a
subject ripe for investigation; that it was desirable to know whether there were
more β manuscripts of Vitruvius that were uneliminable witnesses to the text;
that Enoch of Ascoli’s place in the transmission of Porphyrio needed clarification
(and Dictys offered another tradition about which the same could be said); and
that work remained to be done on the manuscripts of Cato and Varro. My interest
in patristic manuscripts began when Lucy Grig, then a colleague at the University
of Reading, asked me a question about the translation of a passage in Pontius’
Vita Cypriani. To answer it I needed to discover something about the manuscript
tradition of that work, and the realization that its end must have been re dis-
covered only in the fifteenth-century led to work on the Cyprianic corpus. My
identification of the so-called ‘Puccini’ scribe as the writer of a manuscript of Leo
made me look at other manuscripts of Leo and see that much more could and
should be said about the transmission of his sermons. My experience with Livy
had taught me that the Italian manuscripts of the fifteenth century are more easily
localized than those of many others and that the hands of many of their scribes
can be identified; they constitute a particularly profitable field of study, and it is
no accident that most of the manuscript traditions that I have studied are domin-
ated by Italian products of this time.
For many classicists the only reason to study manuscripts is if one is planning
to edit a text, and I am often asked whether I plan to edit any of these texts. My
Preface ix
standard answer is that, quite apart from whether one plans to edit a text, the
study of a work’s transmission and textual tradition is an intellectual activity valid
in its own right; but should I be blessed with a very long life I should enjoy the
challenge of editing the above-mentioned speeches of Cicero and Dictys.
The main outlines of the story of how ancient Latin texts were transmitted
from Antiquity to the age of printing has been long known and it is unlikely that
they will be much changed by subsequent study, but there is an enormous amount
of detailed work that needs to be done. Some parts of the subject may perhaps be
compared to the mapping of a mountain range in the early days of cartography:
the existence and general shape of the range were known but a detailed account of
all the contours had yet to be recorded. Stemmata and discussion of the interrela-
tionships of manuscripts are brought to life when they can be related to evidence
for transmission other than the readings of the manuscripts themselves. In gen-
eral, the most striking results of this fusion of historical and textual evidence
come in those traditions which had a slender transmission through the Middle
Ages. Among the authors whom I have studied Porphyrio has the narrowest
transmission, and the historical evidence relates to the stemma in a most satisfy-
ing way. In a broad tradition such as that of several works in the Ciceronian cor-
pus (e.g. Ad Herennium and De Officiis), Sallust, Horace, Virgil, Valerius
Maximus, Lucan, Juvenal, or those of many of the works of Ambrose, Jerome, and
Augustine, it generally is of less interest to establish in which strain a medieval or
Renaissance luminary read the text. Yet in any tradition there are likely to be local
details that historical evidence can illuminate: in this volume we shall see the
effect that Petrarch’s manuscript had on the medium-sized tradition of Curtius, in
a later volume how the end of Pontius’ Vita Cypriani was rediscovered in
Pomposa. A full and minute stemmatic analysis of the broad traditions just men-
tioned would doubtless yield much interesting detail of this kind and would pro-
vide much evidence to support generalizations about the transmission of texts;
but the labour involved would be enormous, and since the new evidence acquired
that would be useful for editing is likely to be slight, these are not tasks that clas-
sicists have yet wished to undertake. The largest tradition that I have studied is
that of the Cyprianic Corpus, but even for this the number of manuscripts that I
shall classify is only around 200.
A scholar ideally equipped for the tasks that I have set myself would be trained
as a classicist and a textual critic of classical texts but would have also a wide
knowledge of medieval and Renaissance culture—literary, religious, artistic, and
scribal. I fall short of my ideal in all these areas, and a very long way short in my
knowledge of medieval and Renaissance culture. Nevertheless, as will be clear
from the preceding paragraph, I subscribe strongly to the view that manuscripts
need to be studied as the products of their times and not (as they too often are) as
just quasi-algebraic pieces on a stemma, and wherever possible I have tried to
relate the manuscripts that I study to the geography, history, and artistic