Tag: Chapter titles

Gregory of Nyssa on chapter titles

Posted on by Roger Pearse

In his work De hominis opificio (On the making of man), in the praefatio, Gregory alludes explicitly to a list of chapter titles for the work:

…and for clearness’ sake I think it well to set forth to you the discourse by chapters, that you may be able briefly to know the force of the several arguments of the whole work.[1]

The Greek text of Migne does not print any chapter titles, but the English translators embedded them following this sentence.

The word rendered “chapters” is, of course, kephalaia.  Here at least we see that Gregory is familiar with the idea of a work which may be summarised in this way. 

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  1. [1]PG 44, col. 128B.  English translation from the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers series, which then inserts a translation of the chapter headings which do not appear at this position in the Greek text of Migne.↩

Ancient texts with “indices”

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A little while ago a kind correspondent sent me a partial list of ancient works where the manuscripts contain “indices”, or “tables of contents” of the chapters or subjects covered in the book or books. 

I had meant to go and investigate each of these, but my work life is eating all my time at the moment.  However the list is well worth publishing as it is (i.e. before I mislay it!):

Pline l’Ancien, Naturalis Historia livre I. C’est l’exemple le plus célèbre. L’auteur est évidemment Pline.

Valerius Maximus, Facta et dicta memorabilia, édition Briscoe, 2 vols., Teubner Stuttgart et Leipzig, 1998. Je ne sais pas si la récente édition de la Loeb contient les indices. Les éditions plus anciennes ne comportent pas les indices.

Hygin, Fabulae (ed. Schmidt sur Google)

Jérôme, De Viris Inlustribus et Gennadius, De Viris Inlustribus (ed. Richardson et Gebhardt, Texte und untersuchungen 14, 1896). Sur Google.

Florus, Epitomae Libri II, ed. Rossbach, Teubner 1896 (sur Google), ou édition de la collection Loeb.

Cassius Dio, Histoire Romaine, édition Boissevain, tomes 1-3 (sur Archiv.org). Les indices sont conservés pour les livres 37-59 et 80 (à vérifier dans le détail). Ils sont aussi dans l’édition de la Loeb.

Eusèbe de Césarée, Histoire ecclésiastique

Eusèbe de Césarée, Vie de Constantin

John of Nikiu, traduction anglaise Charles, 1916 (site Roger Pearse)

Fréchulf (orthographe très variable) de Lisieux, Historiae (début du 9e siècle), édition Allen, Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Mediaevalis CLXIX et CLXIX A, Brepols 2002. N’est évidemment pas sur Internet. L’édition de la Patrologie de Migne (PL 106) ne contient pas les indices. Le meilleur manuscrit, de Saint-Gall, contemporain de l’auteur, contient les indices et se trouve sur Internet. Les indices sont sûrement de l’auteur.

Orose, Adversus paganos. Les éditions de Zangemeister, CSEL 1882 et Teubner 1889 (toutes les deux sur Archiv.org) donnent des indices différents.

Cassiodore, Variae, édition Mommsen, Monumenta Germaniae Historica

Cassiodore, Institutiones, édition Sir Roger Mynors

Cassiodore, Historia ecclesiastica, édition Hanslik 1952. Absente sur Internet …

Isidore de Séville, Etymologiae, ed. Lindsay, Oxford, OCT 1911 (2 volumes). A consulter par exemple sur le site de la « Bibliotheca Augustana ».

Grégoire de Tours, Historia Francorum (Monumenta Germaniae Historica)

Frédégaire, Chronique (Monumenta Germaniae Historica). Plusieurs indices.

I hope to investigate each of these, bit by bit.

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve had an email with some material extracted from Matthieu Cassin’s thesis about Gregory of Nyssa, with the pages discussing the chapter titles in the manuscripts.  I’ve not had a chance to read it yet, but it looks fascinating.  Dr Cassin has done some real work here, and I will discuss it further.

Also I found myself thinking about Mithras today.  Readers will remember that between 2009 and the end of 2010 I revised the Wikipedia Mithras article, to produce something reliable, only to have the work hijacked by a troll.  The troll deleted all references to me — the author of most of it! — and changed it to “prove” that Mithras preceded Jesus, etc; and he has sat on it, dog-in-the-manger, ever since.  But in a way he did me a favour, since I was beginning to contribute far too much time to Wikipedia.

But the reason that I dedicated so much time to looking up and verifying and quoting so much material about Mithras was to dispose of the many myths that circulate online.  That reason is still valid, and it seems to me that it would be sensible to write a few pages about Mithras, using secondary sources of a reliable kind, in order to provide a useful resource to those who need it. 

The obvious thing to do would be to start with the last reliable version — nothing the troll did was of any value –, and remove whichever bits I have not written or validated myself, and then build on that.  

There would be a main page, consisting of short sections, each with a link to a page on that specific subject.  Each sentence in the short sections would be referenced; probably to a reference on the specific page, rather than on the main page.

It would be important to have a professional look to the pages.  I’m not sure how best to achieve that, short of hiring someone (which, of course, is an option).  Some nice graphics would be nice, if I knew a decent graphics designer who could draw…

Ideally the pages would be editable online; but at the moment I couldn’t spare the time for online editing anyway.  I don’t really want to install MediaWiki, so we may have to sacrifice that, and just fall back on some kind of HTML editing.

The object, as always, would be to allow a reader to access the subject, not to push a narrative or my opinions (indeed I have none on Mithras, except that I don’t want to see disinformation circulating).

As part of this, my policy is always to have references that quote the source in extenso, and to link to the online text where possible.  In this way the reader can verify for himself whether or not the reference is fair or accurate.  I did this, after I discovered that most of the references in the Wikipedia Mithras article, before I worked on it, were in fact bogus.  Quote and link makes that problem disappear, and I would continue it.

Naturally I would want to link closely to primary materials.  It would be right to do something about inscriptions and images, if one could.

A page on Mithra, the Persian deity whose name was probably borrowed by the unknown founder of the Mithras cult, would probably be useful.

A guestbook in which comments and feedback could be added would probably be useful also.

Ah, but when will I get the *time*!!!!

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Chapter divisions in Gregory of Nyssa’s “Contra Eunomium”

Posted on by Roger Pearse

There is a paper on the web by Matthieu Cassin, discussing the context of the three books of the Contra Eunomium of Gregory of Nyssa.[1]  In the middle of it (p.112) he discussed the divisions in the text, as it has been transmitted.  It’s fascinating stuff.

Besides the division of Book III, the different manuscripts present a list of titles for the different chapters (κεφάλαια). A large number of manuscripts indicate the chapters of Book I in the margins, proposing converging positions for them.(16) Furthermore, it is acknowledged that the chapters of Book I are by Gregory himself,(17) and I have shown that their position goes back at least to the sixth century. If this is accurate, it would be a very valuable testimony to the way Gregory understood his own text. However, the chapters of the other books are obviously not by the same hand.

(16) Matthieu Cassin, L’écriture de la polémique à la fin du IVe siècle: Grégoire de Nysse, Contre Eunome III (Thèse de doctorat, Université Paris IV – Sorbonne, 2009), vol. I, 135–7.
(17) See J. A. Röder, Gregor von Nyssa, Contra Eunomium I, 1–146, eingeleitet, übersetzt und kommentiert (Patrologia 2; Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1993), 73–4.

This is interesting, and I wish I could see the references!  For if so, this is evidence of 4th century authorial chapter titles.  The thesis does not seem to be online; while no-one on earth could access the Röder volume unless they live near a research library.

I will write to Dr Cassin and see if I can get a peek at his pages 135-7!

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  1. [1]Matthieu Cassin«Text and context : the importance of scholarly reading. Gregory of Nyssa, Contra Eunomium», dans S. Douglas, M. Ludlow (éd.), Reading the Church Fathers, Londres, 2011, p. 109-131 et 161-165.↩

Images of 5th century letter titles in Pliny the Younger

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The Lowe and Rand publication[1] of the Morgan fragment of the 5th century Saint-Victor manuscript of the letters of Pliny the Younger has, by great good fortune, images of the transition between books 2 and 3.  These include a contents list for book 3, consisting of the recipients, followed by the opening words.

Let’s have a look.  Note that you can click on each image for a larger view.

Here’s the end of the first folio of the Morgan fragment — folio 48r, as it was, of the whole manuscript, as the folio number written in a 15th century Italian hand indicates.

So nothing special: “Exp(licit) liber II | Inc(ipit) Lib(er) III.” — “Book 2 ends | Book 3 begins”, plus the usual “feliciter”.  Over the page we find on the verso this:


The lines are alternate black and red ink.  (I do apologise for the wretched quality).  And the next page is similar (you can see the folio number, 49, top right):

This ends with a line of marks, and then on the verso the text begins:

“C.Plinius Calusio Suo Salutem. Nescio nullum …”  Note how the words of the text are not separated in this 5th century manuscript, and the the first two words of the text are as in the table of contents.  And also notice … how the full name of the recipient, Calusius Rufus, is NOT given in the title in the text, which simply says “C. Pliny to his (dear) Calusius, greeting”.

Likewise the beginning of the next letter is also in the Morgan fragment, on folio 61:

Ignore the 15th century scribblings at the top, and note the folio number.  Here it reads “C. Plinius Maximo suo salutem.”  This is the next addressee; Vibius Maximus, as we learn from the index and nowhere else.

The same is true of the next three letters, also present in these few folios, which I will spare you here.  The index of addressees gives two names in every case; the actual superscriptio to the letter gives one.

The presence of extra information in the titles means that these cannot be scribal work; they must come down from Pliny himself, unless we propose to imagine some intermediate person locating this information and adding it, which seems unlikely and unnecessary.

The Lowe and Rand publication, bless  them, also gives the chapter titles in the only other manuscript that has them.  Here they are:

Note that the addressee of the first letter is as it is in the 5th century ms., but the first two words have been moved to the right, to save space.

The titles continue onto the next folio, and then, once again, the superscription of the letter only has the one name, “Calusius”.

Curiously yesterday I discovered a 15th century manuscript of Pliny at the Bibliotheque Nationale site in Paris, shelfmark Ms. Latin 8557.  Let’s have a look at the same point in that:

 There are no titles in this, and the first letter simply refers to “Calusius”.

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  1. [1]E.A. Lowe and E.K. Rand, A Sixth-Century Fragment of the Letters of Pliny the Younger: A Study of Six Leaves of an Uncial Manuscript Preserved in the Pierpont Morgan Library New York, Washington (1922).  Online here.↩

From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’m going through the mill at work at the moment, which makes life rather heavy, and engagement with hobbies impossible.  To add to the fun, I have only a slow mobile broadband connection on my laptop in the evenings, which makes the necessary task of collecting and responding to my email a slow and painful one.  This leaves little at the end of the day.

But this evening I was able to download E. A. Lowe and E. K. Rand, A sixth century fragment of the letters of Pliny the Younger, from my inbox, to which a kind correspondant had sent it, and I have been reading it with much interest.  The plates do not merely reproduce the 12 leaves of the 5th century manuscript of Pliny; they also reproduce the corresponding portion of manuscripts B and F, which derive from it.  This naturally includes the table of contents in B (F omits these).

I will blog about these in due course.  But the book is well worth reading for the painstaking way in which the authors address all the concerns about authenticity, date and so forth.  Inevitably it is rather technical, but if you find manuscripts interesting, it’s a godsend.

I have yet to discover quite why this item is not on Google books.  Apparently it is on the Hathi website, in low-resolution form, where it may be downloaded one page at a time.  My correspondant kindly did this evil task, and then zipped the files up into a PDF — thank you!

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Indexes in manuscripts of Pliny the Younger’s letters

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Six folios survive of a 5th century manuscript of the Letters of Pliny the Younger.  They are in New York, in the Pierpont Morgan collection, where they have the shelfmark M.462.[1]  They contain letters from Book 2, Letter XX, line 13, to Book 3, Letter V, line 10.  But I learn that they also contain “one of the indices (to Book 3) which are a special feature of the Ten-Book tradition” of the letters of Pliny.[2] 

The Letters of Pliny reached us by a complicated process.  Originally possessing ten books, copies of this kind began to be cut down during the middle ages into a collection of 100 letters.  Another family also existed, which contained only nine books, and circulated in various more or less complete forms.

The ancient manuscript of the ten-book family was still complete in the 15th century, when it belonged to the library of Saint-Victor in Paris.  It is mentioned in the 1514 catalogue of that library, which was made by Claude de Grandrue,[3] and published in 1983.[4]  At what date thereafter it was dismembered, we cannot now say.

This detail, about the “indices” is mentioned only in passing.  But to those of us interested in chapter titles and tables of contents in ancient books, this is most interesting. 

So where may these “indices” be found?  Clearly in the Morgan manuscript there is one.  I have emailed Robert Parks, Director of Library and Museum Services there, and asked if the ms. could be digitised and placed online.  It will be interesting to see what he says.  They have some images from books of hours and similar online, but those are more pretty than useful.

There’s a 1903 edition online at Google Books here (and is it me, or is Google Books making it harder and harder to find the PDF that we all want to download, in order to promote its crappy commercial ebook reader?)  This doesn’t give the indices, no siree.  Hey, they’re only present in a 5th century copy!  This casual negligence towards the manuscript data is infuriating!

Where can they be?

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  1. [1]The catalogue is here, which tells us these are “6 leaves (1 column, 27 lines), bound : vellum ; 287 x 180 mm”; “The original manuscript was in France at least by ca. 1380 (dated with reference to the inscription on folio 51); owned by the Abbey of Saint Victor Library in Paris up to 1505 (foliated by the librarian Claude de Grandrue and listed as missing/stolen in the 1514 catalogue); discovered around 1500 at the Saint Victor Library by the Dominican Fra Giovanni Giocondo of Verona, who initially transcribed some of the letters and sent them to Aldus Manutius in Venice, and later borrowed or simply removed the manuscript from the abbey in 1505 and perhaps sold it to Aloise Mocenigo, the Venetian ambassador in Paris, who took it to Venice and lent it to Aldus Manutius; by the 18th century the manuscript had been fragmented and the surviving 6 leaves were purchased by Marchese Francesco Taccone of Naples (1763-1818); sold by his heirs to Tammaro de Marinis in 1910; purchased by J. Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913) from De Marinis through Alexandre Imbert but shipped by Quaritch, in 1910.”  Publication: A sixth-century fragment of the letters of Pliny the Younger / E.A. Lowe and E.K. Rand. Washington : Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1922.↩
  2. [2]L. D. Reynolds (ed.), Texts and Transmissions, 1983, p.317.↩
  3. [3]Reynolds, p.317, n.5: “Where it was foliated and described by the librarian Claude de Grandrue.”↩
  4. [4]Les manuscrits de l’Abbaye de Saint-Victor : catalogue établi sur la base du répertoire de Claude de Grandrue (1514) / Gilbert Ouy. Turnhout, Belgium : Brepols, 1999, v. I p. 30-31, v. Ii p. 630, and Le catalogue de la bibliothèque de l’abbaye de Saint-Victor de Paris de Claude de Grandrue, 1514 ; introduction par Gilbert OUY ; texte et index établis par Veronika GERZ-VON BUREN, en collaboration avec Raymonde HUBSCHMID et Catherine REGNIER… ; Paris : Editions du C.N.R.S., 1983 ; in-8°, Lxii-734 pages.↩

Would it really be so difficult to determine how chapter divisions are marked in all surviving ancient books?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The question of chapter divisions and headings in ancient literary and technical texts is a long term interest of mine, as anyone who chooses to look may discover by clicking on the tag at the end of this post.  We find, in later medieval texts, that these ancient texts are often divided, not merely into books, but also into chapters, with chapter headings.  It does not seem well known or classified, just how often we find this.  Chapter divisions and titles are a cinderella subject, largely ignored or treating in passing.

In my last post, I looked at what chapter divisions and titles there were in a renaissance manuscript of Pliny the Elder’s Natural History.  The NH is an interesting work to investigate, for this subject, since the author states in the preface that book 1 of the work is a list of capituli.  So we do know that these items existed in the autograph, whereas we generally have no such certainty in other works. 

Capituli, or “subject headings”, are perhaps just a list of topics covered, in the order in which they appear in the text.  There is no necessity to suppose that the text was formally divided into “chapters”, in the manner of a modern work –indeed some of the capituli refer to no more than a handful of lines of text, before the next capitulum appears in the margin, so we might better say “sections” — and we can see that in the Pliny ms. it is not. 

So while the English word “chapter” perhaps derives from the Latin capitulum — or does it?  Do we know this, and if so, how? — the term is perhaps one that is rather different.  Perhaps we need a word study of the appearance of the English word, and how it was originally used, and how it came to mean what it means today.  Is it used to translate capitulum in medieval English texts?  There is clearly a research project here.

Likewise we ought to locate all uses of the term capituli in ancient literature — and likewise the Greek kephalaia — and from this determine its meaning or meanings, and any change that they underwent during the ancient and medieval period.  This might begin with an electronic search, and it really should not take more than a couple of weeks to do.

But finally … we need to look at ancient books themselves, and see just what is in the margins, or gathered at the start of books, or whatever.  Do we have chapter titles marked?  Are they  numbered?  Are there collections of them at the start of the book, in a multi-book history?  Or is it a case that the early mss just have a list of topics at the start of each book, and that these are mirrored in the body of the work, gradually, by subsequent readers and copyists?  Which works have these elements?

It sounds like a large task.  But is it?  A commenter on my last post pointed out that, in some ways, it is a superficial task.  All we have to do is look through the manuscript at a high level.  And that may not be so hard to do.

For the number of actual ancient books is not that great.  The Codices Latini Antiquiores of E. A. Lowe lists all the fragments of ancient Latin books.  The number of codices which are more or else intact is probably not that great.  I don’t know about Greek mss from antiquity, but surely there is a list somewhere?

Nor does it necessarily involve a lot of travel.  The IRHT in France has a huge collection of microfilms of manuscripts.  Admittedly this is not nearly as good as colour images — and whether a link is in red ink or black might well be important here — but a couple of weeks work at a microfilm reader in Orleans might well answer many of these questions, and provide a base of data from which some solid conclusions might be drawn.  It sounds like a solid piece of work for a PhD thesis, for a student who is prepared to work hard.

I feel tempted myself; but of course I am not an academic, and I don’t have the time.  Sadly, I fear, I don’t have the energy any more either!  But the whole question of chapter divisions, titles, etc, is one that simply needs a pioneer to go into it.  It’s not that hard to do; just that no-one has really attacked it. 

I’ve always thought of the task of working out the history of the chapter titles for endless different literary and technical works was one that would require an army of scholars.  Indeed a great manuscript scholar once wrote to me that it would require scholarly collaboration.

But why not simply examine what is in all the surviving ancient codices, up to the 8th century, and publish details of what is to be found therein?

How long would that really take?

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Chapter titles in Pliny the Elder

Posted on by Roger Pearse

With the new availability online of images of the British Library ms. Harley MS 2676 (Pliny the Elder, Historia naturalis,  Florence, 1465-1467), we can now investigate just how the chapter titles are presented in a manuscript.

Technical note: there seems to be no way to link directly from here to the pages in question.  Ideally I would link the images below direct to the full page, so that readers could scroll around and examine for themselves, but sadly this does not seem to be possible.

In this manuscript, there is first a list of books, with a numeral at the front.  Then there are the chapter titles, gathered by book, but … with no chapter numeral at the front of each title!  Here is a screen grab of folio 2r, where the titles for book 2 (book 1 is a preface) appear, and the numerals do not:

It is unlikely that a humanist copyist would have removed the numerals, so I think we may take it that they were not present in the ancestor copies either.

And how do the titles appear in book 2, in the body of the text?  They appear, naturally, without numerals either, as marginalia.  Here is folio 20v (there seems to be no way to link directly to the page):

But here is the rub: the “titles” are not the same.  In the contents, the first title is “de forma eius” — “concerning its form” — which references the preceding sentence that indicates the book is about the world.  The next title, “de motu”, is the same in both.

Each of these titles has an initial.  But the third title, lower down the page, does not.  There is no paragraph break either: 

 

It is left to the reader to determine where, if anywhere, the break should be.  The paragraph breaks, the initials, do not relate to the chapter titles, then.

But … were the marginal chapter titles even present in earlier manuscripts?  Or were these placed where they are by the humanist copyist?

In book 1, which has no chapter titles, we find what are plainly renaissance glosses, highlighting a mention of Cicero, for instance, written in the column to the side.  Similar notes seem to appear later: on f.22r there is a marginal note “pythagoras”, written as if it was a chapter title.

The answer to this must appear from looking at more, and older, manuscripts.

All the same, we do see that numbering chapter titles in the body of the text was not something that just happened naturally, since these have none.  They seem, indeed, more like “headings”, indicating content, than chapter divisions as we would have them.  And indeed, “capituli” is precisely that … “headings”!

Perhaps we should take the Latin more seriously, and modern habits of book making rather less so.

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Aulus Gellius thought of his own work as being divided into “chapters”

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Book 11, chapter 9 of the Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius is a tale from the lost author Critolaus.  It relates how Demosthenes accepted a bribe not to speak against the Milesians.  Chapter 10 begins as follows:

10.  Quod C. Gracchus in oratione sua historiam supra scriptam Demadi rhetori, non Demostheni, adtribuit; verbaque ipsius C. Gracchi relata.

1. Quod in capite superiore a Critolao scriptum esse diximus super Demosthene, id C. Gracchus in oratione, qua legent Aufeiam dissuasit, in Demaden contulit verbis hisce…

10. That Gaius Gracchus in a speech of his applied the story related above to the orator Demades, and not to Demosthenes; and a quotation of Gracchus’ words.

1. The story which in the preceding chapter we said was told by Critolaus about Demosthenes, Gaius Gracchus, in the speech Against the Aufeian Law, applied to Demades in the following words…

At the end of the preface, we find also these words:

25. Capita rerum quae cuique commentario insunt, exposuimus hic universa, ut iam statim declaretur quid quo in libro quaeri invenirique possit.

25. Summaries of the material to be found in each book of my Commentaries I have here placed all together, in order that it may at once be clear what is to be sought and found in every book.

We learn a great deal from this about how a second century author with a collection of miscellaneous material organised it.

Caput is being used somewhat flexibly, but here we see it used both to indicate the summary of the content of a self-contained portion of a book — a chapter title, if you like — and also for that self-contained portion itself.  We might say “passage”, but there seems no special reason not to say “chapter” and “chapter title / summary”.

This tells us that Aulus Gellius himself organised his work into capita — chapters.  Also that he composed these capita — chapter summaries.  We may speculate that a literary slave may have been used to compose these, as Cicero had Tiro do work for him, and Josephus used Greek ammanuenses to give polish to his works.  But there seems no need to suppose this.

On reading the Loeb, I thought at first that we also knew that these capita (chapters) were numbered at some point.   If we look at book 8 in the Loeb, we find under the chapter summaries (capita) in a couple of cases small excerpts from the lost text.  These, of course, have been extracted by editors from quotation by later authors, who must have specified the numeral of the chapter.  So chapter 3 has a fragment. 

3. Quem in modum et quam severe increpuerit audientibus nobis Peregrinus philosophus adulescentem Romanum ex equestri familia, stantem segnem apud se et assidue oscitantem.

Et adsiduo oscitantem vidit, atque illius quidem delicatissimas mentis et corporis halucinationes.

3.  In what terms and how severely the philosopher Peregrinus in my hearing rebuked a young Roman of equestrian rank, who stood before him inattentive and constantly yawning.

. . . and saw him continually yawning and noticed the degenerate dreaminess expressed in his attitude of mind and body.

But what does the actual source say?  Well, the Loeb note on the fragment says:

 This fragment is preserved by Nonius, II, p121, 19, s.v. halucinari.

That’s not very helpful, is it?  I must admit that the over-brevity of Loeb references always annoyed me!  What normal person could follow such a reference?  Even I don’t know who “Nonius” is, and I have a better grasp of ancient literature than almost anyone not professionally active.  Which work, which edition, I wonder, is meant? 

But the  mention of a work at the end suggests a dictionary compiler, and a search brings first the Wikipedia article for Nonius Marcellus, a 4-5th century grammarian, then W.M.Lindsay’s 1901 article, and then Muller’s 1888 edition: vol. 1, and vol.2.  Finally Lindsay’s 1903 Teubner, vol. 1, vol. 2 and vol. 3.  All I have to do now is track down the reference, and even so, it is still nearly impossible.

After two hours struggle, I find that the correct reference is book 2, which is in vol. 1 of Lindsay, in the section under H (which is NOT in alphabetical order), Lindsay p. 175.  At the head of this page are some gnomic numerals “121. 122 M.”  The “page” is therefore a reference to some elderly standard edition.  This reads:

HALVCINARI, aberrare et non consistere atque dissolvi et obstupefieri atque tardari honeste veteres dixerunt, ut est (cf. Gell. VIII, 3): ‘et adsiduo oscitantem vidit atque illius quidem delicatissimas mentis et corporis alucinationes’.

But this gives no textual link to Aulus Gellius.  So my initial impression here was mistaken.  Possibly some of the other fragments will give us more information, but I lack the time to pursue this now.

There is more we could learn, if we knew more about the textual history of this collection of all the capita, immediately following the preface.  Because book 8 of the Attic Nights is lost.  Yet we do have the capita for book 8.  This means that either the collection of all the capita was transmitted at the correct place; or, that the collection of capita circulated independently.

All this is valuable information on the way in which ancient authors worked.  They did have chapters, if they chose.  They did have chapter titles, if they chose.  They did have chapter numbers, if they chose.

So is there really any case for denying the authenticity of any transmitted chapter divisions, numerals, and headings, unless we find multiple different ones in the manuscripts?  If so, what is it? 

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