A Sixth-Century Fragment of the Letters of Pliny the Younger Part 8

THE TEXT OF THE MORGAN FRAGMENT

by

E. K. RAND

THE MORGAN FRAGMENT AND ALDUS'S ANCIENT CODEX PARISINUS.[1]

[Sidenote: _The Codex Parisinus_]

Aldus Manutius, in the preface to his edition of Pliny's _Letters_, printed at Venice in 1508, expresses his grat.i.tude to Aloisio Mocenigo, Venetian amba.s.sador in Paris, for bringing to Italy an exceptionally fine ma.n.u.script of the _Letters_; the book had been found not long before at or near Paris by the architect Fra Giocondo of Verona. The _editio princeps_, 1471, was based on a family of ma.n.u.scripts that omitted Book VIII, called Book IX Book VIII, and did not contain Book X, the correspondence between Pliny and Trajan. Subsequent editions had only in part made good these deficiencies. More than a half of Book X, containing the letters numbered 41-121 in editions of our day, was published by Avantius in 1502 from a copy of the Paris ma.n.u.script made by Petrus Leander.[2] Aldus himself, two years before printing his edition, had received from Fra Giocondo a copy of the entire ma.n.u.script, with six other volumes, some of them printed editions which Giocondo had collated with ma.n.u.scripts. Aldus, addressing Mocenigo, thus describes his acquisition:

"Deinde Iucundo Veronensi Viro singulari ingenio, ac bonarum literarum studiosissimo, quod et easdem Secundi epistolas ab eo ipso exemplari a se descriptas in Gallia diligenter ut facit omnia, et s.e.x alia uolumina epistolarum partim manu scripta, partim impressa quidem, sed c.u.m antiquis collata exemplaribus, ad me ipse sua sponte, quae ipsius est ergo studiosos omneis beneuolentia, adportauerit, idque biennio ante, quam tu ipsum mihi exemplar publicandum tradidisses."

[Footnote 1: I would acknowledge most gratefully the help given me in the preparation of this part of our discussion by Professor E.T.

Merrill, of the University of Chicago. Professor Merrill, whose edition of the _Letters_ of Pliny has long been in the hands of Teubner, placed at my disposal his proof-sheets for the part covered in the Morgan fragment, his preliminary _apparatus criticus_ for the entire text of the _Letters_, and a card-catalogue of the readings of _B_ and _F_. He patiently answered numerous questions and subjected the first draft of my argument to a searching criticism which saved me from errors in fact and in expression. But Professor Merrill should not be held responsible for errors that remain or for my estimate of the Morgan fragment.]

[Footnote 2: On Petrus Leander, see Merrill in _Cla.s.sical Philology_ V (1910), pp. 451 f.]

So now the ancient ma.n.u.script itself had come. Aldus emphasizes its value in supplying the defects of previous editions. The _Letters_ will now include, he declares:

"multae non ante impressae. Tum Graeca correcta, et suis locis rest.i.tuta, atque retectis adulterinis, uera reposita. Item fragmentatae epistolae, integrae factae. In medio etiam epistolae libri octaui de c.l.i.tumno fonte non solum uertici calx additus, et calci uertex, sed decem quoque epistolae interpositae, ac ex Nono libro Octauus factus, et ex Octauo Nonus, Idque beneficio exemplaris correctissimi, & mirae, ac uenerandae Vetustatis."

The presence of such a ma.n.u.script, "most correct, and of a marvellous and venerable antiquity," stimulates the imagination: Aldus thinks that now even the lost Decades of Livy may appear again:

"Solebam superioribus Annis Aloisi Vir Clariss. c.u.m aut T. Liuii Decades, quae non extare creduntur, aut Sall.u.s.tii, aut Trogi historiae, aut quemuis alium ex antiquis autoribus inuentum esse audiebam, nugas dicere, ac fabulas. Sed ex quo tu ex Gallia has Plinii epistolas in Italia reportasti, in membrana scriptas, atque adeo diuersis a nostris characteribus, ut nisi quis diu a.s.suerit, non queat legere, coepi sperare mirum in modum, fore aetate nostra, ut plurimi ex bonis autoribus, quos non extare credimus, inueniantur."

There was something unusual in the character of the script that made it hard to read; its ancient appearance even suggested to Aldus a date as early as that of Pliny himself.

"Est enim uolumen ipsum non solum correctissimum, sed etiam ita antiquum, ut putem scriptum Plinii temporibus."

This is enthusiastic language. In the days of Italian humanism, a scholar might call almost any book a _codex pervetustus_ if it supplied new readings for his edition and its script seemed unusual.

As Professor Merrill remarks:[3]

"The extreme age that Aldus was disposed to attribute to the ma.n.u.script will, of course, occasion no wonder in the minds of those who are familiar with the vague notions on such matters that prevailed among scholars before the study of palaeography had been developed into somewhat of a science. The ma.n.u.script may have been written in one of the so-called 'national' hands, Lombardic, Visigothic, or Merovingian. But if it were in a 'Gothic' hand of the twelfth or thirteenth centuries, it might have appeared sufficiently grotesque and illegible to a reader accustomed for the most part to the exceedingly clear Italian book hands of the fifteenth century."

[Footnote 3: _C.P._ II (1907), pp. 134 f.]

In a later article Professor Merrill well adds that even the uncial script would have seemed difficult and alien to one accustomed to the current fifteenth-century style.[4] A contemporary and rival editor, Catanaeus, disputed Aldus's claims. In his second edition of the _Letters_ (1518), he professed to have used a very ancient book that came down from Germany and declared that the Paris ma.n.u.script had no right to the antiquity which Aldus had imputed to it. But Catanaeus has been proved a liar.[5] He had no ancient ma.n.u.script from Germany, and abused Aldus mainly to conceal his cribbings from that scholar's edition; we may discount his opinion of the age of the Parisinus. Until Aldus, an eminent scholar and honest publisher,[6] is proved guilty, we should a.s.sume him innocent of mendacity or nave ignorance. He speaks in earnest; his words ring true. We must be prepared for the possibility that his ancient ma.n.u.script was really ancient.

[Footnote 4: _C.P._ X (1915), pp. 18 f.]

[Footnote 5: By Merrill, _C.P._ V (1910), pp. 455 ff.]

[Footnote 6: Sandys, _A History of Cla.s.sical Studies_ II (1908), pp. 99 ff.]

Since Aldus's time the Parisinus has disappeared. To quote Merrill again:[7]

"This wonderful ma.n.u.script, like so many others, appears to have vanished from earth. Early editors saw no especial reason for preserving what was to them but copy for their own better printed texts. Possibly some leaves of it may be lying hid in old bindings; possibly they went to cover preserve-jars, or tennis-racquets; possibly into some final dust-heap. At any rate the ma.n.u.script is gone; the copy by Iucundus is gone; the copy of the correspondence with Trajan that Avantius owed to Petrus Leander is gone; if others had any other copies of Book X, in whole or in part, they are gone too."

[Footnote 7: _C.P._ II, p. 135.]

[Sidenote: _The Bodleian volume_]

In 1708 Thomas Hearne, the antiquary, bought at auction a peculiar volume of Pliny's _Letters_. It consisted of Beroaldus's edition of the nine books (1498), the portions of Book X published by Avantius in 1502, and, on inserted leaves, the missing letters of Books VIII and X.[8] The printed portions, moreover, were provided with over five hundred variant readings and lemmata in a different hand from that which appeared on the inserted leaves; the hand that added the variants also wrote in the margin the sixteenth letter of Book IX, which is not in the edition of Beroaldus. Hearne recognized the importance of this supplementary matter, for he copied the variants into his own edition of the _Letters_ (1703), intending, apparently, to use them in a larger edition which he is said to have published in 1709; he also lent the book to Jean Ma.s.son, who refers to it in his _Plinii Vita_. Upon Hearne's death, this valuable volume was acquired by the Bodleian Library in Oxford, but lay unnoticed until Mr. E.G. Hardy, in 1888,[9] examined it and, after a comparison of the readings, p.r.o.nounced it the very copy from which Aldus had printed his edition in 1508. External proof of this highly exciting surmise seemed to appear in a ma.n.u.script note on the last page of the edition of Avantius, written in the hand that had inserted the variants and supplements throughout the volume:[10]

"hae plinii iunioris epistolae ex uetustissimo exemplari parisiensi et rest.i.tutae et emendatae sunt opera et industria ioannis iucundi prestantissimi architecti hominis imprimis antiquarii."

[Footnote 8: See plate XVII, which shows the insertion in Book VIII.]

[Footnote 9: _Journal of Philology_ XVII (1888), pp. 95 ff., and in the introduction to his edition of the _Tenth Book_ (1889), pp. 75 ff.]

[Footnote 10: See Merrill _C.P._ II, p. 136.]

What more natural to conclude than that here is the very copy that Aldus prepared from the ancient ma.n.u.script and the collations and transcripts sent him by Fra Giocondo? One fact blocks this attractive conjecture: though there are many agreements between the readings of the emended Bodleian book and those of Aldus, there are also many disagreements.

Mr. Hardy removed the obstacle by a.s.suming that Aldus made changes in the proof; but the changes are numerous; they are not too numerous for a scholar who can mark up his galleys free of cost, but they are decidedly too numerous if the scholar is also his own printer.

Merrill, in a brilliant and searching article,[11] entirely demolishes Hardy's argument. Unlike most destructive critics, he replaces the exploded theory by still more interesting fact. For the rediscovery of the Bodleian book and a proper appreciation of its value, students of Pliny's text must always be grateful to Hardy; we now know, however, that the volume was never owned by Aldus. The scholar who put its parts together and added the variants with his own hand was the famous h.e.l.lenist Guillaume Bude (Budaeus). The parts on the supplementary leaves were done by some copyist who imitated the general effect of the type used in the book itself; Budaeus added his notes on these inserted leaves in the same way as elsewhere. It had been shown before by Keil[12] that Budaeus must have used the readings of the Parisinus; indeed, it is from his own statement in _Annotationes in Pandectas_ that we learn of the discovery of the ancient ma.n.u.script by Giocondo:[13]

"Verum haec epistola et aliae non paucae in codicibus impressis non leguntur: nos integrum ferme Plinium habemus: primum apud parrhisios repertum opera Iucundi sacerdotis: hominis antiquarii Architectique famigerati."

[Footnote 11: _C.P._ II, pp. 129 ff.]

[Footnote 12: In his edition, pp. xxiii f.]

[Footnote 13: _C.P._ II, p. 152.]

The wording here is much like that in the note at the end of the Bodleian book. After establishing his case convincingly from the readings followed by Budaeus in his quotations from the _Letters_, Merrill eventually was able to compare the handwriting with the acknowledged script of Budaeus and to find that the two are identical.[14] The Bodleian book, then, is not Aldus's copy for the printer. It is Budaeus's own collation from the Parisinus. Whether he examined the ma.n.u.script directly or used a copy made by Giocondo is doubtful; the note at the end of the Bodleian volume seems to favor the latter possibility. Budaeus does not by any means give a complete collation, but what he does give const.i.tutes, in Merrill's opinion, our best authority for any part of the lost Parisinus.[15]

[Footnote 14: _C.P._ V, p. 466.]

[Footnote 15: _C.P._ II, p. 156.]

[Sidenote: _The Morgan fragment possibly a part of the lost Parisinus_]

Perhaps we may now say the Bodleian volume _has been hitherto_ our best authority. For a fragment of the ancient book, if my conjecture is right, is now, after various journeys, reposing in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City.

[Sidenote: _The script_]

First of all, we are impressed with the script. It is an uncial of about the year 500 A.D.--certainly _venerandae vetustatis_. If Aldus had this same uncial codex at his disposal, we can understand his delight and pardon his slight exaggeration, for it is only slight. The essential truth of his statement remains: he had found a book of a different cla.s.s from that of the ordinary ma.n.u.script--indeed _diversis a nostris characteribus_. Instead of thinking him arrant knave or fool enough to bring down "antiquity" to the thirteenth century, we might charitably push back his definition of "_nostri characteres_" to include anything in minuscules; script "not our own" would be the majuscule hands in vogue before the Middle Ages. That is a position palaeographically defensible, seeing that the humanistic script is a lineal descendant of the Caroline variety. Furthermore, an uncial hand, though clear and regular as in our fragment, is harder to read than a glance at a page of it promises. This is due to the writing of words continuously. It takes practice, as Aldus says, to decipher such a script quickly and accurately. Moreover, the flesh sides of the leaves are faded.

[Sidenote: _Provenience and contents_]