E. A. Lowe

“ Among the oldest manuscripts of the library, in fact the oldest, is a hitherto unnoticed fragment of great significance not only to palaeographers, but to all students of the classics. It consists of six leaves of an early sixth-century manuscript of the Letters of the younger Pliny. This new witness to the text, older by three centuries than the oldest codex heretofore used by any modern editor, has reappeared in this unexpected quarter, after centuries of wandering and hiding. The fragment was bought by the late J. Pierpont Morgan in Rome, in December 1910, from the art dealer Imbert ”

“ It is highly improbable that a forger could devise this method of giving his forgery the appearance of antiquity, and even if he attempted it, it is safe to say that the present effect would not be produced in the time that elapsed before the book was sold to Mr. Morgan.
But let us assume, for the sake of argument, that the Morgan fragment is a modern forgery. We are then constrained to credit the forger not only with a knowledge of palaeography which is simply faultless, but, as will be shown in the second part, with a minute acquaintance with the criticism and the history of the text. ”

“ There is nothing in the evidence presented by Π and B that drives us to assume the presence of two such codices. There is nothing in this evidence that does not fit the simpler supposition that BF descend directly from Π. The burden of proof would appear to rest on those who assert the contrary. Π, therefore, if the ancestor of B, contained at least as much as we find today in B. Some ancestor of B had all ten books. Aldus, whose text is closely related to BF, got all ten books from a very ancient manuscript that came down from Paris. ”

“ One group is manifestly the older: in orthography, punctuation, and abbreviation it bears close resemblance to inscriptions of the classical or Roman period. The other group is as manifestly composed of the more recent manuscripts: this may be inferred from the corrupt or barbarous spelling, from the use of abbreviations unfamiliar in the classical period but very common in the Middle Ages, or from the presence of punctuation, which the oldest manuscripts invariably lack. The manuscripts of the first group show letters that are simple and unadorned and words unseparated from each other. ”

“ Our simpler stemma indicates the presence of one rather than more than one such manuscript in the vicinity of Paris in the ninth or the tenth century and again in the fifteenth. This line of argument, which presents not a mathematically absolute demonstration but at least a highly probable concatenation of facts and deductions, warrants the assumption, to be used at any rate as a working hypothesis, that Π is a fragment of the lost Parisinus which contained all the books of Pliny’s Letters. ”

“ Authenticity of the six leaves The sudden appearance in America of a portion of a very ancient classical manuscript unknown to modern editors may easily arouse suspicion in the minds of some scholars. Our experience with the “Anonymus Cortesianus” has taught us to be wary,20 and it is natural to demand proof establishing the genuineness of the new fragment.21 As to the six leaves of the Morgan Pliny, it may be said unhesitatingly that no one with experience of ancient Latin manuscripts could entertain any doubt as to their genuineness. ”

“ But Catanaeus has been proved a liar.5 He had no ancient manuscript 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 assume him innocent of mendacity or naïve ignorance. He speaks in earnest; his words ring true. We must be prepared for the possibility that his ancient manuscript was really ancient. ”

“ We are more than ever disposed to attribute not to BF but to what has now become the younger branch of the tradition, Class II, the tendency to interpolate explanatory glosses. The changed attitude towards the BF branch has naturally resulted in a gradual transformation of the text. We have seen in the portion included in Π that of the eleven readings which Keil regarded as errors of the F branch, three are accepted by Kukula and five by Merrill.70
Since Class I has thus appreciated in value, we should expect that Aldus’s stock would also take an upward turn. ”

“ 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 manuscript 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. ”

“ With this clue in our possession it can be demonstrated that the manuscript began with the first book of the Letters. We start with the fact that not all the 47 folios (or 94 pages) which preceded our six leaves were devoted to the text of the Letters. For, from the contents of our six leaves we know that each book must have been preceded by an index of addresses and first lines. The indices for Books I and II, if arranged in general like that of Book III, must have occupied four pages.3 We also learn from our fragment that space must be allowed for a colophon at the end of each book. ”

“ So it is France that has saved this, the oldest extant witness of Pliny’s Letters, 22 for modern times. To mediaeval France we are, in fact, indebted for the preservation of more than one ancient classical manuscript. The oldest manuscript of the third decade of Livy was at Corbie in Charlemagne’s time, when it was loaned to Tours and a copy of it made there. Both copy and original have come down to us. Sallust’s Histories were saved (though not in complete form) for our generation by the Abbey of Fleury. ”

“ Failing that, we can at least point out that all the data accessible comport with the hypothesis that the Morgan fragment was a part of this very codex. We have set our hypothesis running a lengthy gauntlet of facts, and none has tripped it yet. We have also seen that Π is most intimately connected with manuscripts BF of Class I, and indeed seems to be a part of the very manuscript whence they are descended. Finally, a careful comparison of Aldus’s text 63 with Π shows him, for this much of the Letters at least, to be a scrupulous and conscientious editor. ”

“ But I do not mean to present here a final estimate of Budaeus; for that, I hope, we may look to Professor Merrill. Nor do I particularly blame Budaeus for not constructing a new text from the wealth of material disclosed in the Parisinus. His interests lay elsewhere; suos quoique mos. What I mean to say, and to say with some conviction, is that for the portion of text included in our fragment, the evidence of that fragment, coupled with that of B and F, shows that as a witness to the ancient manuscript Aldus is overwhelmingly superior to either Budaeus or any of the ancient editors. ”

“ Certain errors of the scribe who wrote the additional pages in the Bodleian book warrant the surmise that he was copying not the Parisinus itself, but some copy of it. Thus in 227, 14 (see plate XVII b) we find him writing Tamen for tum, Budaeus correcting this error in the margin. A scribe is of course capable of anything, but with an uncial tum to start from, tamen is not a natural mistake to commit; it would rather appear that the scribe falsely resolved a minuscule abbreviation. ”

“ The number of abbreviations increases considerably during the eighth century. Previously the only symbols found in calligraphic majuscule manuscripts are the “Nomina Sacra” (deus, dominus, Iesus, Christus, spiritus, sanctus) , which constantly occur in Christian literature, and such suspensions as are met with in our fragment. A familiar exception is the manuscript of Gaius, preserved in the Chapter library of Verona, MS. xv (13) . This is full of abbreviations not found in contemporary manuscripts containing purely literary or religious texts. ”

“ And the palaeographer knows that any scratch or scribbling, any probatio pennae or casual entry, may become important in tracing the wanderings of a manuscript.
In the six leaves that have been saved of our Morgan manuscript we have two entries. One is of a neutral character and does not take us further, but the other is very clear and tells an unequivocal story.
The unimportant entry occurs in the lower margin of folio 53r. The words “uir erat in terra,” which are apparently the beginning of the book of Job, are written in Carolingian characters of the ninth century. ”

“ Still, it is not fair to call the Parisinus Aldus’s only manuscript. We know that he had other material in the six volumes of manuscripts and collated editions sent him by Giocondo, as well as the latter’s copy of P. There could hardly have been in this number a source superior to the Parisinus, but Giocondo may have added here and there his own or others’ conjectures, which Aldus adopted unwisely, but at least not solely on his own authority; the most 65 apparent case of interpolation (224, 8) Keil thought might have been a conjecture of Giocondo’s. ”

“ Nowadays, however, editors hesitate to accept an unsupported reading of Aldus as that of the Parisinus, since they believe that he abounds in those very conjectures of which Catanaeus felt the lack. The attitude of the expert best qualified to judge is still one of suspicion towards Aldus. In his most recent article,72 Professor Merrill declares that Keil’s remarks73 on the procedure of Aldus in the part of Book X already edited by Avantius, Beroaldus, and Catanaeus might safely have been extended to cover the work of Aldus on the entire body of the Letters. ”

“ The student of manuscripts knows that a law of evolution is observable in writing as in other aspects of human endeavor. The process of evolution is from the less to the more complex, from the less to the more differentiated, from the simple to the more ornate form. ”

“ Mr. Hardy removed the obstacle by assuming 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.
40 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 ”

“ As for the text, he generally finds Beroaldus good enough. He corrects misprints, makes a conjecture now and then, or adopts one of Catanaeus, and, besides supplementing the missing portions with transcripts made for him from the Parisinus, inserts numerous variants, some of which indubitably come from that manuscript.66 In the present section, occupying 251 lines in Π, there is only one reading of the Parisinus—a false reading, it happens—that seems to Budaeus worth recording. Compared with what Aldus gleaned from Π, Budaeus’s extracts are insignificant. ”

“ P had the spelling Karitas consistently, P1 altered it to the usual form, and B reproduced the corrections in P1, failing to take them all, unless, as may well be, P1 had failed to correct all the cases.
Thus the evidence contained in the portion of BF outside the text of Π corroborates our working hypothesis deduced from the fragment itself. We have found nothing yet to overthrow our surmise that a bit of the ancient Parisinus is veritably in the city of New York. ”

“ What is true of the is true of other curved strokes. The strokes are often very short, mere touches of pen to parchment, like brush work. Often they are unconnected, thus giving a mere suggestion of the form. The attack or fore-stroke as well as the finishing stroke is a very fine, oblique hair-line.30
3. Absence of long ascending or descending strokes. The letters lie virtually between two lines (instead of between four as in later uncials) , the upper and lower shafts of letters like projecting but slightly beyond the head and base lines. ”

“ Paul in Carinthia agrees with our fragment. Most of the oldest manuscripts, however, have the colophon in the same type of writing as the text.
8. This is also the case in the Paris manuscript of Livy of the fifth century, in the Codex Bezae of the Gospels (published in facsimile by the University of Cambridge in 1899) , in the Pliny palimpsest of St. Paul in Carinthia, and in many other manuscripts of the oldest type.
9. The strokes over the two consecutive i’s on fol. 53v, l. 23, were made by a hand that can hardly be older than the thirteenth century. ”

“ All efforts to identify Jehan de Sannemeres, keeper of the seal of the provosté of Meaux, and François Beloy, sworn clerk in behalf of the King, have so far proved fruitless.33
Conclusion Our manuscript, then, was written in Italy about the year 500. It is quite possible that it had crossed the Alps by the ninth century or even before. It is certain that by the fifteenth century it had found asylum in France. When and under what circumstances it got back to Italy will be shown by Professor Rand in the pages that follow. ”

“ The collection is also admirably representative of the development of script throughout the Middle Ages. It comprises specimens of the uncial hand, the half-uncial, the Merovingian minuscule of the Luxeuil type, the script of the famous school of Tours, the St. Gall type, the Irish and Visigothic hands, and the Beneventan and Anglo-Saxon scripts. ”