CERTAIN SOURCES OF CORRUPTION IN LATIN

MANUSCRIPTS:

A STUDY BASED UPON TWO MANUSCRIPTS OF LIVY: CODEX PUTEANUS (FIFTH CENTURY), AND ITS COPY CODEX REGINENSIS 762 (NINTH CENTURY) 1

I. INTRODUCTION

THE tendency of Latin textual criticism has in late years been more and more in the direction of a conservative adherence to the authority of manuscripts, wherever possible. This may be seen in the gradually diminishing number of emendations and conjectures in the critical apparatus of recent editions of the Latin texts. Scholars now hesitate much longer about marking a word or an expression as corrupt merely because it is unusual. Confidence in all but very late manuscripts is on the increase. Recent years have seen the reinstatement of not a few manuscript readings whose place had long been taken by conjectures. A knowledge of palaeography is more and more becoming an essential factor in textual criticism, and, except in the case of texts which depend wholly upon manuscripts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries,

1 This dissertation, being the fruit of studies begun when the writer was a member of the American School of Classical Studies in Rome, was first published in the American Journal of Archaeology, Second Series, Vol. VII (1903). In its present form it has been reprinted, with the consent of the Editors, from the original plates of the Journal, but occasional alterations have been made in the plates, with a view to bringing the reprints more nearly into conformity with the general plan of a dissertation. It has still been necessary, however, to retain some of the features peculiar to the exigencies of periodical form.

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one of the chief tests of an emendation is coming to be, – Is it capable of palaeographical explanation?

This tendency to place textual criticism more nearly upon a palaeographical basis has not been accompanied by a corresponding change in the character of the illustrative material used in books and manuals upon the subject. The collections of examples now placed before the student are not without their value, but they fail along the lines in which textual criticism has made the greatest advance. These examples consist for the most part in (1) a comparison of the corrupt reading of a manuscript with a conjectured emendation of a scholar, or (2) in a comparison of the readings of two or more manuscripts of the same author, of which the relationship is generally uncertain, or at least remote. Illustrations chosen according to either method are often misleading to the student, even granting that, in the first method, the scholar's conjecture is what the author actually wrote. A great many corruptions to be found in manuscripts of all periods are no longer in their initial stages, but are the complex result of several distinct processes of growth. The student, with nothing before him but what the author is supposed to have written and the corrupt reading of, let us say, a thirteenth century manuscript, may be dealing only with a corruption in a late stage. All the earlier steps are missing, and certainty with regard to them is out of the question. Such an illustration has little value for him, leading as it does to no conclusion which is surely right, and possibly to one which is wholly wrong. Likewise, neither of these methods keeps clearly before the student the character of the errors common to certain styles of writing and certain periods of time. Both of them are lacking in palaeographical

details.

To be of the greatest practical value, illustrations of corruptions should fulfil the following conditions: (1) the two extremes which are compared should not be too widely separated; (2) neither of them should be based upon conjecture; (3) each illustration should present but a single stage in the

at a time; (4) the cause of the error should be reasonably certain; (5) each example should keep distinctly before the student the periods of time and the palaeographical conditions involved. Material for illustrations which would answer all these conditions is not entirely wanting, though little use has heretofore been made of it. It is to be found in a class of neglected manuscripts whose readings have no place in the critical apparatus of the text editions, namely, direct copies of originals which are still extant. The circumstance which renders such copies useless for the constitution of the text of a given author makes them of the greatest value in throwing light upon the history of the texts in general. By comparing such a copy with its original it is possible, as it were, to look over the shoulder of the mediaeval scribe as he sits at his task. One may follow his hand and eye as he copies letter by letter and word by word. The difficulties with which he has to contend either in the script or the text of his original are clearly revealed. It is possible to see exactly how he performed his work, whether faithfully or carelessly, whether he has adhered closely to his text or altered freely, and, when he has made errors, how and why they came to be made. The extent to which the text suffered in his hands is thus made clear in every detail. Illustrations taken from the readings of two such manuscripts, original and copy, would enable the student to draw his own conclusions with full data before him, of the script of the original, the date of each manuscript, the conditions under which the copy was made, and the knowledge that, in the case of corruptions, he is dealing with but a single stage. By this method it is possible to see exactly what, in the copying of a given manuscript, actually happened, and then to turn the information to account in considering the texts of other manuscripts produced under the same conditions, the originals of which are now lost.

the style

Examples chosen by this method are as nearly as possible upon a palaeographical basis, and offer the student definite

illustration. The comparison of a single pair of representative manuscripts and the errors arising from a single process of transcription would serve to give him a clear idea of the tendency to corruption at a given period. A study of the errors exhibited in four such sets of copies and originals, each set representing a distinct phase of the history of Latin texts, would give him a more definite conception of the whole field than he can possibly get from the more or less random examples of the manuals. For instance, a ninth century copy of an original of the fourth or fifth century, an eleventh century copy of an original of the ninth, a thirteenth century copy of an original of the eleventh, and a fourteenth or fifteenth century copy of an original of the thirteenth, would serve respectively to illustrate the tendencies of the periods which they represent, and collectively the entire history of Latin texts in so far as extant manuscripts make this possible.

For the last three of these four periods there is no lack of illustrative material of the nature indicated. A search in the libraries would probably disclose an abundance of neglected copies of extant manuscripts. The first of these periods, which is in many respects the most important, is represented, so far as I am aware, only by the single pair of manuscripts which form the subject of the present article. These are (1) the famous codex Puteanus (National Library, Paris, 5730), of the fifth century, which contains the third decade of Livy's history, and (2) a ninth century copy of it now in the Vatican library, and catalogued as Reginensis 762.

That the significance of these two manuscripts may be properly understood, let me first point out some of the characteristics of the period to which they belong, and the representative nature of the manuscripts themselves. The epoch from the fifth century to the ninth is one which is unique in the history of the texts of the Classical Latin authors. It is marked by a period of almost total inactivity in the multiplication of copies of their works, and is followed by one of unparalleled activity. Almost all of our extant manuscripts of these writers that

are earlier in date than the very end of the eighth century are the capital and uncial manuscripts of the fourth, fifth, and the beginning of the sixth centuries. The interval from the middle of the sixth century to the closing years of the eighth is represented by very few existing manuscripts of any but the Church writers. This fact would seem to indicate that, while there was no lack of activity in the reproduction of the writings of the Christian fathers, the copying of the works of the pagan Latin writers was almost totally arrested for over two centuries. The active production of copies of the works of the pagan writers begins anew with the revival of learning under Charlemagne. To this new and wonderful activity, which arose with the closing years of the eighth century and continued through the tenth, we are indebted for the preservation of a large proportion of our Latin texts.2 The task of copying was

1 of the authors who wrote before the official victory of Christianity the following works are, to the best of my knowledge, the only ones which have been preserved in manuscripts surely belonging to this period: the Agrimensores, s. VI-VII; Apuleius (?), de Herbarum Medicaminibus, s. VI-VII; Ovid, ex Ponto (fragment), s. VI-VII; the Pandects, s. VI-VII; Probus (?), Catholica, S. VI-VII, VII-VIII, VIII-IX; excerpts from Pliny and Apicius, s. VII-VIII; Censorinus, s. VII; Lactantius, s. VII; Sacerdos, s. VII-VIII; Commodianus, Carmen Apologeticum, s. VIII; Notae Tironis et Senecae, s. VIII; the Anthology of the Codex Salmasianus, s. VII-VIII. Of these, Commodianus and Lactantius were Christian writers; Probus, Censorinus, and Sacerdos were writers on Grammar; the works of the Agrimensores, the above-mentioned work on Materia Medica ascribed to Apuleius, the excerpts from Pliny and Apicius, the Pandects, and the Notae Tironis et Senecae were all of a technical or semi-tech nical nature. It would seem probable, then, that with few exceptions such manuscripts only were copied in the seventh and eighth centuries as, from the nature of their subject-matter, did not conflict with the doctrines of the Church. 2 The oldest manuscripts of a large proportion of the extant literature from Plautus to the official victory of Christianity are of the ninth and tenth centuries. The following is a list of the works of which the text is based upon manuscripts of this period (viz., the ninth and tenth centuries, and the last decade of the eighth): Plautus (the Codex Vetus for portions not contained in the Ambrosian palimpsest); Lucretius; Catullus, c. 62; Caesar; Sallust; Rhetorica ad Herennium; the following works of Cicero: Pro Fonteio, pro Flacco, post reditum in senatu, post red. ad Quirites, de domo sua, de haruspicum responsis, pro Sestio, in Vatinium, pro Caelio, de provinciis consularibus, pro Balbo, in Pisonem, pro Marcello, Philippics, Rhetorica, de Oratore, Brutus, Orator, Part. Orat., Topica, ad Familiares, de Legibus, Paradoxa, Academica Priora, Tusc. Disp., de Natura Deorum, Cato Maior, de Divinatione, de Fato,