A Sixth-Century Fragment of the Letters of Pliny the Younger Part 9

We next note that the fragment came to the Pierpont Morgan Library from Aldus's country, where, as Dr. Lowe has amply shown, it was written; how it came into the possession of the Marquis Taccone would be interesting to know. But, like the Parisinus, the book to which our fragment belonged had not stayed in Italy always. It had made a trip to France--and was resting there in the fifteenth century, as is proved by the French note of that period on fol. 51r. We may say "the book" and not merely "the present six leaves," for the fragment begins with fol.

48, and the foliation is of the fifteenth century. The last page of our fragment is bright and clear, showing no signs of wear, as it would if no more had followed it;[16] I will postpone the question of what probably did follow. Moreover, if the _probatio pennae_ on fol. 53r is Carolingian,[17] it would appear that the book had been in France at the beginning as well as at the end of the Middle Ages. Thus our ma.n.u.script may well have been one of those brought up from Italy by the emissaries of Charlemagne or their successors during the revival of learning in the eighth and ninth centuries. The outer history of our book, then, and the character of its script, comport with what we know of Aldus's Parisinus.

[Footnote 16: See Dr. Lowe's remarks, pp. 3-6 above.]

[Footnote 17: See above, p. 21, and below, p. 53.]

[Sidenote: _The text closely related to that of Aldus_]

But we must now subject our fragment to internal tests. If Aldus used the entire ma.n.u.script of which this is a part, his text must show a general conformity to that of the fragment. An examination of the appended collation will establish this fact beyond a doubt. The references are to Keil's critical edition of 1870, but the readings are verified from Merrill's apparatus. I will designate the fragment as _?_, using _P_ for Aldus's Parisinus and _a_ for his edition.

{Transcriber's Note: In the following paragraph, letters originally printed in roman (non-italic) type are capitalized for clarity.}

We may begin by excluding two probable misprints in Aldus, 64, 1 _contuRbernium_ and 65, 17 _subEuertas_. Then there are various spellings in which Aldus adheres to the fashion of his day, as _s.e.xcenties_, _miLLies_, _miLLia_, _teNtarunt_, _cauSSas_, _auToritas_, _quaNquam_, _sYderum_, _hYeme_, _cOEna_, _oCium_, _hospiCii_, _negoCiis_, _solaTium_, _adUlescet_, _eXoluit_, _THuscos_; there are other spellings which modern editors might not disdain, _i.e._, _aerarII_ and _iLl.u.s.tri_, and some that they have accepted, namely _aPPonitur_, _eXistat_, _iMpleturus_, _iMplorantes_, _oBtulissem_, _balInei_, _Caret_ (not _Karet_), _Caritas_ (not _Karitas_).[18]

[Footnote 18: The spellings _Karet_ and _Karitas_, whether Pliny's or not, are a sign of antiquity. In the first century A.D., as we see from Velius Longus (p. 53, 12 K) and Quintilian (I, 7, 10), certain old-timers clung to the use of _k_ for _c_ when the vowel _a_ followed. By the fourth century, theorists of the opposite tendency proposed the abandonment of _k_ and _q_ as superfluous letters, since their functions were performed by _c_. Donatus (p.

368, 7 K) and Diomedes, too, according to Keil (p. 423, 11), still believed in the rule of _ka_ for _ca_, but these rigid critics had pa.s.sed away in the time of Servius, who, in his commentary on Donatus (p. 422, 35 K), remarks _k vero et q aliter nos utimur, aliter usi sunt maiores nostri. Namque illi, quotiensc.u.mque a sequebatur, k praeponebant in omni parte orationis, ut Kaput et similia; nos vero non usurpamus k litteram nisi in Kalendarum nomine scribendo._ See also Cledonius (p. 28, 5K); W. Brambach, _Latein.

Orthog._ 1868, pp. 210 ff.; W.M. Lindsay, _The Latin Language_, 1894, pp. 6 f. There would thus be no temptation for a scribe at the end of the fifth century or the beginning of the sixth to adopt _ka_ for _ca_ as a habit. The writer of our fragment was copying faithfully from his original a spelling that he apparently would not have used himself. There are various other cases of _ca_ in our text (_e.g._, _calceos_, III, i, 4; _canere_, 11), but there we find the usual spelling. On traces of _ka_ in the Bellovacensis, see below, p. 57. I should not be surprised if Pliny himself employed the spelling _ka_, which was gradually modified in the successive copies of his work; it may be, however, that our ma.n.u.script represents a text which had pa.s.sed through the hand of some archaeologizing scholar of a later age, like Donatus. At any rate, this feature of our fragment is an indication of genuineness and of antiquity.]

A study of our collation will also show some forty cases of correction in _?_ by either the scribe himself or a second and possibly a third ancient hand. Here Aldus, if he read the pages of our fragment and read them with care, might have seen warrant for following either the original text or the emended form, as he preferred. The most important cases are: 61, 14 sera] _?a_ SERUA _?_ 61, 21 considit] _?_ CONSIDET _?a_ The original reading of _?_ is clearly CONSIDIT.

The second I has been altered to a capital E, which of course is not the proper form for uncial. 62, 5 residit] _?_ residet _a_ Here _?_ is not corrected, but Aldus may have thought that the preceding case of CONSIDET (_m. 2_) supported what he supposed the better form _residet_.

63, 11 posset] _a_ POSSIT (in _posset m. 1_?) _?_ Again the corrected E is capital, not uncial, but Aldus would have had no hesitation in adopting the reading of the second hand. 64, 2 modica vel etiam] _a_ MODICA EST ETIAM (_corr. m. 2_) _?_ 64, 28 excurrissem accepto, ut praefectus aerari, commeatu] _a_ Here _?_ omitted _accepto ut praefectus aerari_,--evidently a line of the ma.n.u.script that he was copying, for there are no similar endings to account otherwise for the omission. 66, 2 dissentientis] _a_ _ex_ DISSITIENTIS _m. 1_ (?) _?_.

There are also a few careless errors of the first hand, uncorrected, in _?_, which Aldus himself might easily have corrected or have found the right reading already in the early editions. 62, 23 conteror quorum] _a_ CONTEROR QUI HORUM _? B F_ 63, 28 si] _a_ SIBI _?_ 64, 24 conproba.s.se] COMPROUa.s.sE _?_.

In view of these certain errors of the first hand of _?_, most of them corrected but a few not, Aldus may have felt justified in abiding by one of the early editions in the following three cases, where _?_ might well have seemed to him wrong; in one of them (64,3) modern editors agree with him: 62, 20 aurium oculorum vigor] ? aurium oculorumque uigor _a_ 64, 3 proferenda] _a_ CONFERANDA ? 65, 11 et alii] ? etiam alii _a_.

There is only one case of possible emendation to note: 64, 29 questuri]

? quaesturi _MVa_ Aldus's reading, as I learn from Professor Merrill, is in the anonymous edition ascribed to Roscius (Venice, 1492?), but not in any of the editions cited by Keil. This may be a conscious emendation, but it is just as possibly an error of hearing made by either Aldus or his compositor in repeating the word to himself as he wrote or set up the pa.s.sage. Once in the text, _quaesturi_ gives no offense, and is not corrected by Aldus in his edition of 1518. An apparently more certain effort at emendation is reported by Keil on 62, 13, where Aldus is said to differ from all the ma.n.u.scripts and the editions in reading _agere_ for _facere_. So he does in his second edition; but here he has _facere_ with everybody else. The changes in the second edition are few and are largely confined to the correction of obvious misprints. There is no point in subst.i.tuting _agere_ for _facere_. I should attribute this innovation to a careless compositor, who tried to memorize too large a bit of text, rather than to an emending editor. At all events, it has no bearing on our immediate concern.

The striking similarity, therefore, between Aldus's text and that of our fragment confirms our surmise that the latter may be a part of that ancient ma.n.u.script which he professes to have used in his edition.

Whatever his procedure may have been, he has produced a text that differs from ? only in certain spellings, in the correction, with the help of existing editions, of three obvious errors of ? and of three of its readings that to Aldus might well have seemed erroneous, in two misprints, and in one reading which is possibly an emendation but which may just as well be another misprint. Thus the internal evidence of the text offers no contradiction of what the script and the history of the ma.n.u.script have suggested. I can not claim to have established an irrefutable conclusion, but the signs all point in one direction. I see enough evidence to warrant a working hypothesis, which we may use circ.u.mspectly as a clue, submit to further tests, and abandon in case these tests yield evidence with which it can not be reconciled.

[Sidenote: _Editorial methods of Aldus_]

Further, if we are justified in our a.s.sumption that Aldus used the ma.n.u.script of which ? is a part, the fragment is instructive as to his editorial methods. If he proceeded elsewhere as carefully as here, he certainly did not perform his task with the high-handedness of the traditional humanistic editor; rather, he treated his ancient witness with respect, and abandoned it only when confronted with what seemed its obvious mistakes. I will revert to this matter at a later stage of the argument.

RELATION OF THE MORGAN FRAGMENT TO THE OTHER Ma.n.u.sCRIPTS OF THE LETTERS.

But, it will be asked, how do we know that Aldus used ? rather than some other ma.n.u.script that had a very similar text and that happened to have gone through the same travels? To answer this question we must examine the relation of ? to the other extant ma.n.u.scripts in the light of what is known of the transmission of Pliny's _Letters_ in the Middle Ages. A convenient summary is given by Merrill on the basis of his abundant researches.[19]

[Footnote 19: _C.P._ X (1915), pp. 8 ff. A cla.s.sified list of the ma.n.u.scripts of the _Letters_ is given by Miss Dora Johnson in _C.P._ VII (1912), pp. 66 ff.]

[Sidenote: _Cla.s.ses of the ma.n.u.scripts_]

Ma.n.u.scripts of the _Letters_ may be divided into three cla.s.ses, distinguished by the number of books that each contains.

Cla.s.s I, the ten-book family, consists of _B_ (Bellovacensis or Riccardia.n.u.s), now Ashburnhamensis, R 98 in the Laurentian Library in Florence, its former home, whence it had been diverted on an interesting pilgrimage by the noted book-thief Libri. This ma.n.u.script is attributed to the tenth century by Merrill, and by Chatelain in his description of the book. But Chatelain labels his facsimile page "_Saec._ IX."[20] The latter seems the more probable date. The free use of a flat-topped _a_, along with the general appearance of the script, reminds me of the style in vogue at Fleury and its environs about the middle of the ninth century. A good specimen is accessible in a codex of St. Hilary on the Psalms (Vatica.n.u.s Reginensis 95), written at Micy between 846 and 859, of which a page is reproduced by Ehrle and Liebaert.[21] _F_ (Florentinus), the other important representative of this cla.s.s, is also in the Laurentian Library (S. Marco 284). The date a.s.signed to it seems also too late. It is apparently as early as the tenth century, and also has some of the characteristics of the script of Fleury; it is French work, at any rate. Keil's suggestion[22] that it may be the book mentioned as _liber epistolarum Gaii Plinii_ in a tenth-century catalogue of the ma.n.u.scripts at Lorsch may be perfectly correct; though not written at Lorsch, it might have been presented to the monastery by that time.[23] These two ma.n.u.scripts agree in containing, by the first hand, only Books I-V, vi (_F_ having all and _B_ only a part of the sixth letter). However, as the initial t.i.tle in _B_ is PLINI SECUNDI EPISTULARUM LIBRI DECEM, we may infer that some ancestor, if not the immediate ancestor, of _B_ and _F_ had all ten books.

[Footnote 20: _Pal. des Cla.s.s. Lat._ pl. CXLIII. See our plates XIII and XIV. At least as early as the thirteenth century, the ma.n.u.script was at Beauvais. The ancient press-mark _S. Petri Beluacensis_, in writing perhaps of the twelfth century, may still be discerned on the recto of the first folio. See Merrill, _C.P._ X, p. 16. If the book was written at Beauvais, as Chatelain thinks (_Journal des Savants_, 1900, p. 48), then something like what I call the mid-century style of Fleury was also cultivated, possibly a bit later, in the north. The Beauvais Horace, Leidensis lat. 28 _saec._ IX (Chatelain, pl. LXXVIII), shows a certain similarity in the script to that of _B_. If both were done at Beauvais, the Horace would seem to be the later book. It belongs, we may observe, to a group of ma.n.u.scripts of which a Floriacensis (Paris lat. 7971) is a conspicuous member. To settle the case of _B_, we need a study of all the books of Beauvais. For this, a valuable preliminary survey is given by Omont in _Mem. de l'Acad. des Ins. et Belles Lettres_ XL (1914), pp. 1 ff.]

[Footnote 21: _Specimina Cod. Lat. Vatic._ 1912, pl. 30. See also H.M. Bannister, _Paleografia Musicale Vaticana_ 1913, p. 30, No.

109.]

[Footnote 22: See the preface to his edition, p. xi.]

[Footnote 23: For the script of _F_, see plates XV and XVI. Bern.

136, _s._ XIII (Merrill, _C.P._ X, p. 18) is a copy of _F_.]

In Cla.s.s II the leading ma.n.u.script is another Laurentian codex (Mediceus XLVII 36), which contains Books I-IX, xxvi, 8. It was written in the ninth century, at Corvey, whence it was brought to Rome at the beginning of the sixteenth century. It is part of a volume that also once contained our only ma.n.u.script of the first part of the _Annals_ of Tacitus.[24] The other chief ma.n.u.script of this cla.s.s is _V_ (Vatica.n.u.s Latinus 3864), which has Books I-IV. The script has been variously estimated. I am inclined to the opinion that the book was written somewhere near Tours, perhaps Fleury, in the earlier part of the ninth century.[25] If Ullman is right in seeing a reference to Pliny's _Letters_ in a notice in a mediaeval catalogue of Corbie,[26] it may be that the codex is a Corbeiensis. But it is also possible that a volume of the _Letters_ at Corbie was twice copied, once at Corvey (_M_) and once in the neighborhood of Tours (_V_). At any rate, with the help of _V_, we may reach farther back than Corvey and Germany for the origin of this cla.s.s. There are likewise two fragmentary texts, both of brief extent, Monacensis 14641 (olim Emmeramensis) _saec._ IX, and Leidensis Vossia.n.u.s 98 _saec._ IX, the latter partly in Tironian notes. Merrill regards these as bearing "testimony to the existence of the nine-book text in the same geographical region," namely Germany.[27] There they are to-day, in Germany and Holland, but where they were written is another affair. The Munich fragment is part of a composite volume of which it occupies only a page or two. The script is continental, and may well be that of Regensburg, but it shows marked traces of insular influence, English rather than Irish in character. The work immediately preceding the fragment is in an insular hand, of the kind practised at various continental monasteries, such as Fulda; there are certain notes in the usual continental hand. Evidently the ma.n.u.script deserves consideration in the history of the struggle between the insular and the continental hands in Germany.[28] The script of the Leyden fragment, on the other hand, so far as I can judge from a photograph, looks very much like the mid-century Fleury variety with which I have a.s.sociated the Bellovacensis; there can hardly be doubt, at any rate, that De Vries is correct in a.s.signing it to France, where Voss obtained so many of his ma.n.u.scripts.[29] Except, therefore, for _M_ and the Munich fragment, there is no evidence furnished by the chief ma.n.u.scripts which connects the tradition of the _Letters_ with Germany. The insular clue afforded by the latter book deserves further attention, but I can not follow it here. The question of the Parisinus aside, _B_ and _F_ of Cla.s.s I and _V_ of Cla.s.s II are sure signs that the propagation of the text started from one or more centres--Fleury and Corbie seem the most probable--in France.

[Footnote 24: Cod. Med. LXVIII, 1. See Rostagno in the preface to his edition of this ma.n.u.script in the Leyden series, and for the Pliny, Chatelain, _Pal. des Cla.s.s. Lat._, pl. CXLV. Keil (edition, p. vi), followed by Kukula (edition, p. iv), incorrectly a.s.signs the ma.n.u.script to the tenth century. The latest treatment is by Paul Lehmann in his "Corveyer Studien," in _Abhandl. der Bayer. Akad. der Wiss. Philos.-philol. u. hist. Kla.s.se_, x.x.x, 5 (1919), p. 38. He a.s.signs it to the middle or the last half of the ninth century.]

[Footnote 25: Chatelain calls the page of Pliny that he reproduces (pl. CXLIV) tenth century, but attributes the Sall.u.s.t portion of the ma.n.u.script, although this seems of a piece with the style of the Pliny, to the ninth; see pl. LIV. Hauler, who has given the most complete account of the ma.n.u.script, thinks it "_saec._ IX/X"

(_Wiener Studien_ XVII (1895), p. 124). He shows, as others had done before him, the close a.s.sociation of the book with Bernensis 357, and of that codex with Fleury.]

[Footnote 26: See Merrill _C.P._ X, p. 23. The catalogue (G. Becker, _Catalogi bibliothecarum antiqui_, p. 282) was prepared about 1200, and is of Corbie, not as Merrill has it, Corvey. Chatelain (on plate LIV) regards the book as "provenant du monastere de Corbie." At my request, Mr. H.J. Leon, Sheldon Fellow of Harvard University, recently examined the ma.n.u.script, and neither he nor Monsignore Mercati, the Prefect of the Vatican Library, could discover any note or library-mark to indicate that the book is a Corbeiensis. In a recent article, _Philol. Quart._ I (1922), pp. 17 ff.), Professor Ullman is inclined, after a careful a.n.a.lysis of the evidence, to a.s.sign the ma.n.u.script to Corbie, but allows for the possibility that it was written in Tours or the neighborhood and thence sent to Corbie.]

[Footnote 27: _C.P._ X, p. 23.]

[Footnote 28: See Paul Lehmann, "Aufgaben und Anregungen der lateinischen Philologie des Mittelalters," in _Sitzungsberichte der Bayer. Akad. der Wiss. Philos.-philol. u. hist. Kla.s.se_, 1918, 8, pp. 14 ff. I am indebted to Professor Lehmann for the facts on the basis of which I have made the statement above. To quote his exact words, the contents of the ma.n.u.script are as follows: "Fol. 1-31v Briefe des Hierononymus u. Gregorius Magnus + fol. 46v-47v, Briefe des Plinius an Tacitus u. Albinus, in kontinentaler, wohl Regensburger Minuskel etwa der Mitte des 9ten Jahrhunderts, _unter starken insularen (angelsachsischen) Einfluss_ in Buchstabenformen, Abkurzungen, etc. Fol. 32r _saec._ IX _ex_ _vel_ X _in._ fol.

32v-46r in der Hauptsache _direkt insular_ mit historischen Notizen in festlandischer Style. Fol. 48v-128 Ambrosius _saec._ X _in_."]

[Footnote 29: _Commentatiuncula de C. Plinii Caecilii Secundi epistularum fragmento Vossiano notis tironianis descripto_ (in _Exercitationes Palaeog. in Bibl. Univ. Lugduno-Bat._, 1890). De Vries ascribes the fragment to the ninth century and is sure that the writing is French (p. 12). His reproduction, though not photographic, gives an essentially correct idea of the script.

The text of the fragment is inferior to that of _MV_, with which ma.n.u.scripts it is undoubtedly a.s.sociated. In one error it agrees with _V_ against _M_. Chatelain (_Introduction a la Lecture des Notes Tironiennes_, 1900), though citing De Vries's publication in his bibliography (p. xv), does not discuss the character of the notes in this fragment. I must leave it for experts in tachygraphy to decide whether the style of the Tironian notes is that of the school of Orleans.]

The third cla.s.s comprises ma.n.u.scripts containing eight books, the eighth being omitted and the ninth called the eighth. Representatives of this cla.s.s are all codices of the fifteenth century, though the cla.s.s has a more ancient basis than that, namely a lost ma.n.u.script of Verona. This is best attested by _D_, a Dresden codex, while almost all other ma.n.u.scripts of this cla.s.s descend from a free recension made by Guarino and conflated with _F_; _o_, _u_, and _x_ are the representatives of this recension (_G_) that are reported by Merrill. The relation of this third cla.s.s to the second is exceedingly close; indeed, it may be merely a branch of it.[30]

[Footnote 30: See Merrill's discussion of the different possibilities, _C.P._ X, p. 14.]

[Sidenote: _The early editions_]

As is often the case, the leading ma.n.u.script authorities are only inadequately represented in the early editions. The Editio Princeps (_p_) of 1471 was based on a ma.n.u.script of the Guarino recension. A Roman editor in 1474 added part of Book VIII, putting it at the end and calling it Book IX; he acquired this new material, along with various readings in the other books, from some ma.n.u.script of Cla.s.s II that may have come down from the north. Three editors, called ? by Keil--Pomponius Laetus 1490, Beroaldus 1498, and Catanaeus 1506--took _r_ as a basis; but Laetus had another and a better representative of the same type of text as that from which _r_ had drawn, and he likewise made use of _V_. With the help of these new sources the ? editors polished away a large number of the gross blunders of _p_ and _r_, and added a sometimes unnecessary brilliance of emendation. Avantius's edition of part of Book X in 1502 was appropriated by Beroaldus in the same year and by Catanaeus in 1506; these latter editors had no new sources at their disposal. No wonder that the Parisinus seemed a G.o.dsend to Aldus. The only known ancient ma.n.u.scripts whose readings had been utilized in the editions preceding his own were _F_ and _V_, both incomplete representatives of Cla.s.ses I and II. The ma.n.u.scripts discovered by the Roman editor and Laetus were of great help at the time, but we have no certain evidence of their age. _B_ and _M_ were not accessible.[31] Now, besides the transcript of Giocondo and his other six volumes, whatever these may have been, Aldus had the ancient codex itself with all ten books complete. Everybody admits that the Parisinus, as shown by the readings of Aldus, is clearly a.s.sociated with the ma.n.u.scripts of Cla.s.s I. Its contents corroborate the evidence of the t.i.tle in _B_, which indicates descent from some codex containing ten books.

[Footnote 31: _C.P._ X, p. 20.]

[Sidenote: _? a member of Cla.s.s I_]

Now nothing is plainer than that _?_ is a member of Cla.s.s I, as it agrees with _BF_ in the following errors, or what are regarded by Keil as errors. I consider the text of the _Letters_ and not their superscriptions. 60, 15 duplicia] _MVD_ duplicata _?BFGa_; 61, 12 confusa adhuc] _MV_ adhuc confusa _?BFGa_; 62, 6 doctissime] _MV_ doctissima _?BFDa_ et doctissima _G_; 62, 16 nec adficitur] _MVD_ et adficitur _?BFGa_; 62, 23 quorum] _MVDGa_ qui horum _?BF_; 63, 22 teque et] _MVDG_ teque _?BFa_; 64, 3 proferenda] _Doxa_ conferenda _BFu_ CONFERANDA _?_ (_MV_ lack an extensive pa.s.sage here); 65, 11 alii quidam minores sed tamen numeri] _DG_ alii quidam minores sed tam innumeri _MV_ alii quidem minoris sed tamen numeri _?BFa_; 65, 12 voluntariis accusationibus] _M_ (uoluntaris) _D_ voluntariis _om. V_ accusationibus uoluntariis _?BFGa_; 65, 15 superiore] _MVD_ priore _?BFGa_; 65, 24 iam] _MVDG_ _om._ _?BFa._