In the past, when faced with a substantial manuscript transmission, philologists often tried to reduce it to a couple of witnesses, if not to a single codex optimus, which was often the oldest available manuscript. Such an outdated and now rightly frowned upon practice had some advantages: the scholar charged with editing the text could avoid tiresome collations and focus instead on ameliorating the text on the basis of literary and linguistic virtuosity. The text of the rhetorical works by Dionysius of Halicarnassus enjoyed a similar fate: up to the present day, the reference edition of this body of texts (published by Hermann Usener and Ludwig Radermacher in two volumes in 1904 and 1929) rests upon a handful of manuscripts selected at the end of the nineteenth century.
Usener knew what he was doing, as subsequent inquiries into the transmission of the text have shown, including the book under review; his overall reconstruction of the transmission of the corpus has not been invalidated by later scholarship. Most of the later manuscripts (copied in the 14th and 15th centuries) derived from a still surviving 10th century parchment codex, the well-known Parisinus gr. 1741 (P), a rhetorical miscellany that compiles works dedicated to what we would now refer to as “literary criticism.”
Alessandra Palla’s book, a revised version of her doctoral dissertation, offers a fresh and thorough investigation of the manuscript transmission of the Second Epistle to Ammaeus, a short letter (18 pages in Usener’s edition) addressed to a certain Ammaeus (the recipient of another epistolary treatise by Dionysius) on the style of the historian Thucydides. Palla challenges the principles of previous editions and announces her own critical edition of the text, based on her work with the manuscripts.
Palla opens her study with an overview of the transmission of the Dionysian rhetorical corpus as a whole. She offers a concise yet comprehensive presentation of the independent witnesses of the three main groups of treatises. The first group is represented solely by the Parisinus 1741 and its apographs, which includes the pseudo-Dionysian Ars rhetorica, the Second Epistle to Ammaeus, the De Compositione Verborum and the short De Imitatione). The second group depends on the Laurentianus 59, 15 (10th-11th century), which includes the De compositione verborum and the essays dedicated to the Attic Orators (Lysias, Isocrates, Isaeus, and Dinarchus). The third group is made up of a handful of later manuscripts from the late 15th to early 16th century transmitting the treatises on the Attic Orators followed by the Epistle to Pompeius Geminus and the On the Character of Thucydides. Besides appearing in Parisinus 1741, the Second Epistle to Ammaeus also enjoyed a parallel transmission alongside the text of Thucydides itself, serving, alongside Marcellinus’ Life of Thucydides, as an introduction to the historical work.
The presentation of the manuscripts is followed by a discussion of the main printed editions of the corpus, from the editio princeps of single treatises (the first being De Isocrate, printed as introduction to the twenty-one speeches in Milan in 1493) to the Budé edition of the whole corpus, published in four volumes by G. Ajuac between 1978 and 1992 (largely dependent on the edition by Usener and Radermacher).
Some minor points:
– p. 23 n. 53. Discussing the possible identification of a manuscript borrowed by Janus Lascaris in 1492, Palla rules out the Laur. 59.15, since it does not transmit Dionysius’ De Imitatione, a text mentioned in the loan-registry. This is correct, but one should note that no surviving manuscript transmits the treatise in its original form (see p. 18 of Palla’s book); it is therefore very unlikely that a single codex preserving that text arrived in Florence in the late 15th century and then disappeared, leaving no traces behind. A simple mistake in the registry (De imitatione instead of De compositione [verborum]) seems more likely. Palla seems to give credit to a remark by Ulrich von Wilamowitz, who thought it was worth looking for the borrowed book “in Messina or in Spain,” where Lascaris’ collection would have ended up. This is a blunder: Wilamowitz was thinking of Constantine rather than of Janus Lascaris.
– p. 31. The manuscript Pal. gr. 58 is said to contain annotations by the two readers of Pal. gr. 66, based on a paper of mine. When I first noticed this, in 2016, I was unable to name the two scribes. Later, in 2020, I was able to identify one of them as Giovanni Calfurnio, a professor in Padua. Palla is aware of this (see p. 81), but she should have updated both references. This is not the only case where the reader can see the different levels of bibliographical updating, some dating back to the original dissertation, others added later, and not always well coordinated with the main discussion.
Chapters II–IV form the core of the book: II serves as introduction to III and IV, followed by a list of the 54 manuscripts transmitting the Epistle, divided into two families: the first depending on P (Parisinus 1741) and the second on the “Thucydidean” (depending on the now lost hyparchetype Θ). These manuscripts are described in the following chapters according to their textual affiliation.
Chapter III deals with the rhetorical corpus transmitted by the Parisinus, a manuscript annotated by the Italian humanist Francesco da Lucca (scribe of the Laur. 58.22, a copy of P) and later in the possession of the Byzantine scholar Theodorus Gaza.
Almost all of the copies of P date to the 15th century, with one exception: the Marc. gr. 508 (Vt), which transmits the Epistle in a codicological unit that can be dated to the early 14th century. The only copy of Vt, the Cambridge MS, Trinity College O.2.12, should also be dated to the 14th century (second quarter?) in its Dionysian unit (ff. 21r and ff.; Palla attributes this part of the manuscript to the 15th century).[1] As Palla points out, the spread of the text of P is due largely to Cardinal Bessarion, who had it copied by two of his favourite scribes in the Marc. gr. 429 (Vs), the ancestor of most manuscripts pertaining to this part of the Stemma codicum, including the model of the Editio princeps published by Aldus in 1508.
Chapter IV deals with the Thucydidean branch of the stemma codicum. This section opens with a description of a single parchment leaf containing a fragment of the Epistle (less than 4 pages in total, corresponding to pp. 423,1-422,16 and 423,8-425,1 in Usener’s edition), preserved in the State Archives of Modena (Mu). The existence of this witness had long been known, but Palla was the first to seriously consider it. This fragment sparked Palla’s interest in this branch of the stemma, which Usener considered a later and retouched version of the text of P. The dating of this fragment (late 10th /early 11th century), as already argued by Palla in a paper published in 2016, requires us to reconsider the chronology of this textual recension and its actual value in editing Dionysius’ Epistle. Palla (p. 95) admits that the connection of this fragment to the Membranae Mutinenses of Thucydides’ Histories, preserved in the same folder, is not clear. However, it is tempting to think that these relics once belonged to the same Thucydidean manuscript, thus proving the early circulation of Dionysus’ Epistle alongside the work of the ancient historian.
It is difficult to provide a detailed description of the information contained in these two main chapters. Palla discusses all relevant passages while providing brief descriptions of each manuscript. She focuses principally on the scribes and provenance, and occasionally offers her own contributions. For example, she is able to identify the handwriting of the Venetian humanist Raffaele Regio in Gud. gr. 14 (p. 75).
Palla does not focus on codicology and paleography, which is understandable given the large number of manuscripts she had to consider. It is puzzling, however, that, while she lists the content of each manuscript, she pays little attention to the material aspects of the transmission of the text. No first-hand information on crucial features such as watermarks, quire-composition, or bindings is provided, and Palla often relies on existing literature or digital reproductions. This is surprising since the author states that she was able to examine almost all of the manuscripts described in her book in situ (p. 11).
The discussion of certain passages could be enriched with reference to a couple of recent papers.
– p. 81. On the Anonymus Harvardianus see now the paper by L. Orlandi in Italia Medioevale e Umanistica 6, 2022, pp. 281–315, where the mystery of his identity is finally resolved: he is now to be identified as Alessandro Bondino, a medical doctor and associate of Aldus.
– pp. 126–7. On Par. gr. 2755 Palla should have quoted D. Speranzi, “La scrittura di Aldo e il suo ultimo carattere greco (con uno sconosciuto esemplare di tipografia),” in N. Vacalebre (ed.), Five Centuries Later. Aldus Manutius: Culture, Typography and Philology, Florence 2018, pp. 29–60, who identifies the hand of Aldus in the pinax added to the manuscript and corrects the attributions listed in the Repertorium (and adopted by Palla).[2]
The present reviewer may offer a small addition to this section: based on the online digitization, the scribe of ff. 1-8 of the Kassel 2° Ms. hist. 3, described by Palla at p. 141, can now be identified with Demetrius Xanthopoulos.
Palla always thoughtfully constructs the stemmatical argumentation, and her demonstrations are convincing. At times, however, one might wonder whether it is necessary to postulate so many lost intermediaries: this is the case for the offspring of Wa (Vindob. Phil. gr. 60), which can be surely placed in Padua, at the end of the 15th century. Wa itself was in the library of a Paduan scholar by the end of the century; Vi (Pal. gr. 66) was in the hands of Giovanni Calfurnio, a professor in Padua, who annotated it; Ra (Angel. gr. 54) was signed and dated in Padua by Bartolomeo Comparini in 1493, while Va (Vat. gr. 1405) was copied, again in Padua, by Scipio Forteguerri, in the same year, in the house of the young aristocrat Giovanni Battista Brenta, a student of Calfurnio. Pa (Par. gr. 1656) can be ascribed to the library of Niccolò Leonico Tomeo, a close friend and associate of Calfurnio, and, finally, manuscript Na (Neap. II E 4) was copied by the Paduan humanist Augusto Valdo. Based on this evidence, one would assume that Vi, the copy owned by Calfurnio, played a decisive role in spreading the text among his pupils. The omission of a single line of Wa in manuscript Vi described at p. 83 (see also the plates at p. 192) seems to point to a direct derivation of the latter from the former. It is unfortunate that the wealth of information on manuscripts and scribes that Palla has compiled in her footnotes is rarely integrated fully into the textual discussion. The inclusion of a historical background would have made the reconstructions based on variants more complete.
The final chapter (V) focuses on the higher levels of the stemma, namely on the relationship between branch Θ and P, and on the reconstructed archetype Ω. As anticipated, Palla, following Nicklin and Schenkl, builds a strong argument in favour of the independence of the two branches of the stemma: in some places at least, Θ seems to preserve the correct text against P, and it is most unlikely that this could be due a Byzantine conjectural recension of the work.
In the final pages of her work, Palla describes a set of errors shared by both branches of the manuscript transmission, pointing to the existence of a common archetype. The results of the investigation are then summarised in a complete stemma codicum printed on p. [163]. The new edition of the text will be based on 15 independent witnesses (P, and 14 manuscripts of the Θ branch), some of which will be probably reduced to their common hyparchetype (Palla postulates at least four significant hyparchetypes for branch Θ), eliminating their respective lectiones singulares.
Alessandra Palla’s painstaking textual research is commendable, and we should expect her forthcoming critical edition to be the definitive one, at least as far as the recensio is concerned.
Notes
[1] https://mss-cat.trin.cam.ac.uk/Manuscript/O.2.12/UV#?c=0&m=0&s=0&cv=54&r=0&xywh=1949%2C1355%2C4377%2C2948
[2] Palla has recently published a paper on the same Parisian manuscript: “Zur Zusammenstellung der Handschriften der ‚Epistula ad Ammaeum II‘ des Dionysios von Halikarnass: Ein ungewöhnlicher Fall” Frühmittelalterliche Studien, vol. 57, no. 1, 2023, pp. 237-249 https://doi.org/10.1515/fmst-2023-0013.