VII GREEK PALAEOGRAPHY AND TEXTUAL CRITICISM THE Palaeographical Society (series ii., parts x. and xi., 1926) gives us by way of a change three Greek documents from the archives of the Doria-Pamfili family at Rome, relating to the monastery of S. Elia di Carbone in the Basilicata, namely a grant to the abbey from a Norman lady (A.D. 1080), a charter from Boamund, grandson of Robert Guiscard (A.D. 1124), and a charter from Roger II. of Sicily (A.D. 1132). These are part of about two hundred documents now in the Doria palace: nearly all are dated from about A.D. 1000 to 1200. They are an important addition to the collections of Trinchera, Cusa and Spada. It is understood that Miss Gertrude Robinson, who has been working on these papers for some years, will before long publish them. Their interest is manifold, palaeographical, philological, topographical and historical. The present writer, who has read them in facsimile, finds the palaeographical results somewhat negative: in particular (1) the hand is the general Greek hand, and has no local character. There are no Basilian abbreviations: (2) it would appear that the notarial hand developed more slowly than the book hand. Many of the twelfth-century documents, had they not been dated, one would have put earlier. Miss Robinson did not set the Editors a very hard task. In some of these documents the rough hand, the Norman-Greek jargon and the extraordinary itacisms are almost impenetrable. I have noticed a few misprints in the transcription : Plate 158 1. 5 read ïepéŵv, 1. 13 read oùv (not Σvv) and 1. 15 ovvopoι not Σúvopo; 1. 16 in the lacuna after πόρου one might supply μάνδαλον or μύλου from 1. 20 ; 1. 30 read ἐναντιουμενον, 1. 33 read παρὸν ἐγγράφον. Plate 159 1. 2 read πρίγκιπος, 1. 38 καταβαλέτωσαν, 1. 45 Taλaß (both taus are clear). Plate 160 1. 4 potéρτoußiokińpdov: the superscribed syllable seems more likely to be Bi than ï, for Robert Guiscard is often disguised in Greek as Viscardo, Phiscardo, etc.; 1. 8 read åжокρоúσаøðαi. Roe 7 (A.D. 1278–9) is uninteresting. We have enough testes pessimae scripturae, and the learned editors might recognise the existence of many beautiful undated minuscule hands. In the number before this (parts viii., ix., 1924) they give us a useful plain hand of A.D. IIII from Arundel MS. 529, and a Renaissance hand of A.D. 1437 from Add. MS. 17473. The latter one would think might be identified. In the Miscellanea Francesco Ehrle, vol. iv., 22 sqq., the writer published for the first time a facsimile of three Greek hands, the Aristotle Urbino 35 by Gregory (part of Arethas' library), a theological MS., Vallicelliana D. 43 (s. X.) in a highly abbreviated hand strongly resembling the Basilian hand of this period, and a specimen of the writing of Giorgio Valla of Piacenza (Estense III E. 11). These facsimiles were unfortunately much reduced. Publishers and printers cannot too clearly realise that the value of a facsimile of writing depends on grandezza naturale." Mr. Walter Ashburner, lately appointed Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford, has produced in a limited edition of 26 copies a facsimile of the oldest copy of the Nicomachean Ethics and Magna Moralia, known as Kb. This book, one of the treasures of the Laurentian Library at Florence, is a good specimen of the hand of the end of the ninth century, a period from which so many philosophical MSS. date. The hand is firm and angular, leaning somewhat to the left. The book has undergone correction at readers' hands, but the marginalia, with the exception of the usual comments ὡραῖον and onμeiwoai, and a few diagrams, are in a much later hand. The plates have been well executed. 1 The most important work which I have to review is the first instalment of the catalogue of the Greek MSS. in the Vatican series proper. The smaller collections (Palatini, Urbinates, Pio II., Queen of Sweden) the reader is probably aware have long been catalogued in print, but the Vaticani graeci proper, which amount to more than 2,000 volumes, were inaccessible save in the written register. The first part of the printed catalogue' is now before the world, and no more valuable present can be offered to the philological public. This first volume contains none but profane authors; we are told in the preface that MSS. 330-900 are ecclesiastical, and therefore it was thought convenient to publish the first 329 together. Within this series the MSS. are arranged according to subject; Cardinal Mai started the whole collection with Plato, to make room for whom he displaced the original No. 1; Plato apart, we find (1) Nos. 2–22 lexica and grammars, (2) 23-63 poets, (3) 64-121 orators, rhetoricians and other prose writers, (4) 122-224 historians, geographers and scientific writers, (5) 225–329 philosophy, medicine and other science, neoplatonics. The arrangement followed the usual cursus of Byzantine education. The abundant indices enable the reader to distinguish the quality of the collection. There are no dated MSS. older than 1063; the most abundant century is the fourteenth, but there are a considerable number of specimens of the classic period of Greek minuscule, ss. IX.-XI. Among them may be mentioned Plato No. 1, s. IX.-X., two MS. of scholia minora on the Iliad, Nos. 32, 33, discussed by Schimberg, No. 73 the Excerpta historica ordered by 1 Aristotelis Ethica Nicomachea Magna Moralia codex Laurentianus LXXXI, II, repraesentatus sumptibus Walteri Ashburner in Acad. Oxon. Iurisprudentiae prof. consilio cura ejusdem Walteri Ashburner et I. A. Spranger e coll. Trin. Cantab. arte fratrum Alinari Florentiae MCMXXVII. 2 Codices Vaticani Graeci recognoverunt Iohannes Mercati et Pius Franchi de Cavalieri: tomus I. codices 1-329. Romae 1923 (lire 85). See the notice by P. Maas Byzantinische Zeitschrift 1925. 150. Porphyrogenitus, two MSS. of Libanius (83 and 85), one of the oldest Lucians (90), an equally old Philostratus and Dio Prusaensis (99), Aphthonius and Hermogenes (104, 107), the oldest Polybius (124), one of the older MSS. of Thucydides, Xenophon and Diodorus (126, 129, 130), an old Plutarch's Lives (138), Appian (141), Josephus (148), Eusebius (149), Agathias (151), Theophanes (155), Zosimus (156), Heliodorus (157), the only copy of Theophanes continuatus (167), the admirable Ptolemy Syntaxis (180), Euclid, Aristarchus, etc. (204), Geoponica (215), the fine Pappus edited years ago by Hultsch (218), Aristotle De part. an. (260), Philoponus on Ar. de an. (268), an early Galen (284). That these and the later books are known and have been utilized is the result of the liberality with which successive Popes have opened their treasures and of the soundings of wandering philologers, but it is none the less a satisfaction to turn over a continuous account at one's leisure. A work like this cannot be reviewed. The writer has not seen above twenty of these 329 MSS., and if he found in his notes divergences from this catalogue it would be absurd to mention them. We must hope that Mons. Mercati's voyage through life, of which he speaks in the preface, may be prolonged to the last of the Vaticani greci, and that the ecclesiastical MSS. which follow the present selection may be easier to catalogue. Time was when the active foreigner, on Thursdays, festum agente Vaticana, mounted the stairs which led to the garrets of the ochre-coloured building on the north side of piazza Colonna, for centuries the home of the Chigi family, now the ministry of Foreign Affairs. Here were kept fifty-four MSS., of which the plums were the Dionysius of Halicarnassus of s. X. (No. 51) and the Libanius of s. X.-XI. (No. 35). Later it was reported that the collection was inaccessible, and since 1923 it has been in the Vatican.1 A partial catalogue was made 1 Codices graeci Chisiani et Borgiani recensuit Pius Franchi de' Cavalieri 1927 (lire 65). by Pierleoni in 1907, the present one, the work of the veteran Pio Franchi de' Cavalieri, is of great utility. The collection is choice, and includes several MSS. written in Italy (Nos. 2, 3, 7, 18) an unutilised Nemesius (No. 13), early patristic MSS., and a few late classics. The Borgiani owe their name to Cardinal Stefano Borgia, who dying in 1804 left his collection to Propaganda, where together with other MSS. belonging to the College they resided till 1902. The 26 MSS. do not contain much that is remarkable palaeographically. I may here mention two other collections of late acquired by the Vatican. A short list of the MSS. once in the palazzo Barberini by Monsieur Seymour de Ricci appears in the Revue des Bibliothèques, 1907, 81 sqq.; the so-called codices Rossiani, which after somewhat romantic adventures have returned from Vienna to Rome, are catalogued by Gollob in the Sitzungsberichte der Kais. Akad. der Wiss. in Wien, 164 Band, 3 Abhandlung, 1910, 43 sqq. Yet other catalogues not noticed in my last compte rendu are the Catalogues des manuscrits alchimiques grecs, I Parisini, II Iles brittaniques, of which a severe review is given by A. Heisenberg, Byz. Zeitschrift, 1925, 362, and that of the MSS. of the Laura (Athos) by Sophronios Eustratiades (1924, £5). This volume concludes the cataloguing of the "Ayov "Opos. It contains no less than 1,536 MSS. of more palaeographical than literary value (P. Maas, Byz. Zeitschrift, 1925, 366). "Αγιον Weinberger has followed his article "Schrift" in Pauly, vol. ii., AI, noticed in Year's Work, 1923, 68, by an article "Kurzschrift" in Pauly, vol. xi., where the extant information about Greek and Roman abbreviation is collected. In the third edition of Gercke und Norden, Einleitung in die Altertumswissenschaft 1924, there is an article on Palaeography by Paul Maas. This account contains acute, interesting and even amusing observations. The writer speculates on the obscure origin of minuscule, the reason that led to the adoption of continuous accentuation, thinks that philologers should more |