Well here’s something special! (via this twitter post) The image below (online here) is fairly familiar. It shows the “serpent column” in Constantinople, as it was in the 16th century before the heads broke off. The column is still there, in the Hippodrome. It is, in fact, the ancient Greek monument commemorating the battle of Marathon, where the Greek cities defeated the Persians. On it are inscribed the names of all the cities that sent soldiers. But this is not what makes this site special.
Kassel 4° Ms. hist. 31 (Türkisches Manierenbuch / A Book of Turkish Customs), image 33 / f15r
The whole manuscript is there! It’s on folio 15r, which is the 33rd image in the manuscript. The manuscript itself is a 16th century collection of illustrations of Turks in costume, with a few other things like this. Such collections of pictures exist at other libraries too.
The interface is actually useful, at least on PC. You get thumbnails, you get IIIF, you get proper references. It’s really rather marvellous. Universität Kassel have excelled! The platform is something called “Orka”, and frankly this is very nice.
The breadcrumbs at the top make it easy to find the collection, select the Latin manuscripts, display a list of shelfmarks. Whoever designed this actually talked to people who use these sites.
There are some 474 Latin manuscripts dated before 1500, which is very respectable. And, blessedly, you can display 100 mss at a time, in various orders.
It’s tremendously useful. It’s now time to note that the Kassel manuscripts are online, and may be accessible and usable.
A couple of days ago I wrote to the British Library manuscripts department to enquire about the two manuscripts that contain versions of the medieval Latin “Life” of St Botulf. Yesterday I received a really quite helpful reply.
Cotton MS Tiberius D III is a Special Access (Select) manuscript, so I’m afraid it’s not permitted to take photographs of that. However, there is a surrogate microfilm, Microfilm 2492, which you could take photos of for personal reference use.
Cotton MS Tiberius E I has been divided into two volumes, and it looks like the “Life” of St Botulf [Botulph] is now in Volume 2, at ff.14v-15v:
Cotton MS Tiberius E I/2 John Tynemouth, Sanctilogium Angliae, Walliae, Scotiae et Hiberniae
ff. 1r: Sts Petroc (Bibliotheca Hagiogrphica Latina 6640), continued from the previous volume; ff. 1r–3v: Boniface (BHL 1406); ff. 3v–4v: Gudwal (BHL 3690); ff. 4v–6v: Robert of Newminster (BHL 7269); ff. 6v–7v: William of York (BHL 8910); ff. 7v–10r: Columba (BHL 1891); ff. 10r–11v: Ivo (BHL 4624); ff. 11v–13v: Margaret of Scotland, with marginal genealogies (BHL 5326); ff. 13v–14v: Odulphus (BHL 6321); ff. 14v–15v: Botulph (BHL 1429); ff. 15v–19r: Alban; … …
Decoration: Each life opens with an initial, either red with blue pen-work or blue with red pen-work. Small initials in blue and red throughout. A parchment codex. 2nd half of the 14th century Latin
There are no access restrictions for this, so you can take photos from the original manuscript.
The “select” manuscripts at the British Library are those which require special permission to access. In this case, I suspect that damage from the fire is the reason. I’ve written to check.
The first manuscript is a copy of the full text, which is the one that I need, unfortunately. The other is an abbreviated “Life”, which I will work on later. But I may as well get what I need now.
Looking at the British Library website, this says that imaging services, i.e. “photography” are unavailable. This is the legacy of the cyber-attack in October 2023. The attack must have been very impressive indeed, if it not only destroyed all the IT, and took all the manuscripts offline forever, but also ensured that the library staff were unable to use cameras even a year and a half later, or even hire a reprographics bureau. Very strong stuff.
But on the positive side it does mean that I can get some perfectly usable photographs with my smartphone with no fuss. Let us hope the microfilm is readable.
So it seems that I shall have to make a visit to London town. The journey from here is long and expensive – it’s probably easier and cheaper to get a budget flight from Milan than to travel in by train – but what must be will be. I’ve not been down for many years. I prefer the countryside!
It’s now more than forty years since I went down to London one Sunday afternoon, in order to start my working career on the Monday. I booked into a cheap hotel in Bloomsbury, where the doorman looked down his nose at this nervous lad with his rucksack. It rained that evening, and I walked down to Denmark Street, and I looked into the window of Forbidden Planet, the Sci-Fi bookshop that used to be there. London on a Sunday night can be very dark. But there was a recession on, and I knew that I was lucky to have got a job at all. It’s funny how some memories remain with you.
Anyway, I shall have to discover how the trains work these days, and the underground. It will probably be in a couple of weeks. Meanwhile there is plenty of material to work with.
Gray’s Inn is located in central London near the law courts. It is one of the four “inns of court” to which all barristers and judges must belong. The inns of court are medieval, but I know nothing much about them.
Gray’s Inn Library contains a collection of 24 medieval manuscripts. Horwood, the author of the catalogue from 1869, does not know where they came from, and I have been unable to locate any recent scholarship on the manuscripts. But the suggestion is that they were donated by members over the centuries. Some of these did come from monastic institutions.
Gray’s Inn MS 3 is a collection of saints’s lives. From the Legendiers Latins website, I learned that it contains a copy of Folcard’s “Life” of St Botulf (BHL 1428), on folios 136r-137r. This is a copy of the full text, but without either the rather nervous dedicatory letter to Wakelin, bishop of Winchester, nor the “translatio” of Botulf’s relics from Iken to wherever. The Horwood catalogue from 1869 gives only a very brief entry, which tells us nothing about the origins of the manuscript. It suggests that the manuscript is 11th century, which seems a bit early to me.
Yesterday I sent an email of enquiry. Later the same day, I was astonished and delighted to receive a reply, containing a PDF with colour photographs of the relevant pages. Very efficient indeed! I am very grateful to the Honourable Society of Gray’s Inn.
Here’s a bit of folio 136r. It shows the “explicit” from the previous text – the passiones of SS. Cyriacus and Jullita – and then in red the “incipit vita sancti botulfi abbatis quae celebratur xv kalend. Julii.” – “the start of the life of St. Botulf the abbot, which is celebrated on 15th day before the kalends of July.” That’s the 17th June in our calendar.
The images are perfectly clear and readable. I have started to process the manuscript into my collation of all the manuscripts, which is in a Word document. You can see in the image above that, as I am the proud owner of a copy of Adobe Acrobat Pro – albeit in the elderly version 9 – I have added “sticky notes” to the PDFs, in order to indicate where the start of each chapter is. This habit assists you markedly in finding passages in the text when you are trying to compare manuscripts. You learn by doing.
My initial impression is that the variants in this copy feel a bit unsound. These are later tweaks to the text. But we will see.
One very interesting feature appears in the names of kings. The scribe has written them, not as “Adelmundus”, which is what every other manuscript has, but as “Aethelmundus”, complete with ligature “æ” and “thorn” – æþelmundus:
I have never seen this in a Latin manuscript. Is this an antiquarian at work, perhaps? I really ought to dig out some paleography materials and try to work out the date of the bookhand. Maybe later.
The Bollandist fathers in Belgium have maintained a wonderful database of the medieval manuscripts containing copies of material about the saints, especially their “Lives” and this has been fed into the new Legendiers Latins website. But the information is not comprehensive. For instance, for St Botulf, it does not contain any mention of British Library manuscript Cotton Tiberius D. iii.
I don’t know much about the Cotton manuscripts. As so often with major manuscript libraries, the “Cotton” collection is so called because it was assembled by an individual, whose manuscripts came into the British Library in a bunch. In this case the donor was Sir Robert Cotton, or rather his grandson, and the circumstances may be read at Wikipedia here.
Cotton divided his manuscripts into groups, which he named after Roman emperors. Apparently each group was in a particular book case, with the bust of the emperor on the top. So the shelfmark tells us that this manusccript could be found in the “Tiberius” bookcase shelf D, number 3.
Unfortunately the Cotton manuscripts were all damaged in a fire in the 18th century. Some were preserved intact; others burned to a crisp; and everything in between. Scholars still needed to be able to consult the remains, so ingenious solutions were found such as this:
Entry 53 is our text, and tells us that it contains the letter “ad Walchelmum episcopum”, i.e. the dedicatory letter to Wakelin, bishop of Winchester. There’s no folio numbers, but Hardy’s “Descriptive catalogue of materials” tells us that it’s folios 223v-225v, and 13th century.
The truth is that looking at the Smith catalogue is an overwhelming experience for anyone interested in the history of our people. This is a vast collection of material, all of it of the highest importance for English history. Cotton even owned a Magna Carta! He collected all this stuff from the ruined monasteries. It’s one thing to read words about how important the collection was for historical purposes. It’s quite another to read through the list of saints – all English or British – and realise that this is the raw stuff of medieval England.
This leads us to the next question – what survives of BL Cotton Tiberius D. iii?
I don’t know the answer. I do know that back in 1901 when Horstmann issued a new edition of the Nova Legenda Anglie of Capgrave, originally printed in the 15th century by Wynkyn de Worde, he collated the “Life” of St Botulf with the Cotton manuscript. There are variants in the footnotes! So it must be readable to at least some extent?
I do have a readers’ card for the British Library manuscripts department. Sadly it is no longer valid since the cyber-attack a few years ago. The BL website informs me that I would have to get a new letter of introduction from an academic in order to get another. Curiously I must get a fresh one every time I renewed the readers’ card (!). Getting a new letter of introduction is awkward for an independent researcher like myself. Indeed I don’t quite know whom I would ask. I don’t really want the journey anyway.
I will pop an email over and see if there is another way!
I started with a list of manuscripts of the “Life of St Botulf” by Folcard. Some I had already in PDF form, others I could find online. For others in English libraries, I have ventured to write to the institution and ask for help. This has been very generously forthcoming.
One of the manuscripts is at Cambridge, St John’s College, MS 209, or H.6, as I gather it is now known. The college has a very nice catalogue for it online here. I wrote a few days ago asking for help. Yesterday, so very quickly, I received a very kind reply from Adam Crothers, the PhD helping out with the special collections. He enclosed a PDF of the relevant pages! The images are in a very clear high-resolution greyscale scan!
By permission of the Master and Fellows of St John’s College, Cambridge.
This scan was plainly professionally photographed. It is ideal to work with. It calls to you to do so, to start editing, transcribing, collating! The beautifully clear writing is almost an education in paleography itself, as you work through the text and note the abbreviations. Note the “eius” = “ei9”, four lines from the bottom. Underneath it, “ad gloriam”, abbreviated. Or “cecum” (blind), at the start of the last but one.
The manuscript is 12th century, written only a few decades after the composition of the text. It was donated to the college in modern times, but the catalogue tells me that at the top of folio 1 are the (erased) words:
liber ecclesie diui Benedicti de Ramsey
book of the church of St Benedict of Ramsey
So this book came from Ramsey Abbey, only a dozen miles from Thorney Abbey, where Folcard composed the text.
This manuscript does not just include the text of the “Life”. It also includes a copy of the dedicatory letter (“prologus”) by the author to Wakelin, the Norman bishop of Winchester after the conquest. This is not common in the manuscripts of the “Life.”
The presence of this letter is very welcome: it was undoubtedly part of the author’s manuscript, and so this suggests that the text has been less tampered with than in most manuscripts. I have already collated it, and I think that there were only two unique variants, both obviously scribal mistakes. In general it gives exactly the text which I suspect Folcard wrote.
MS H.6 then follows the “Life” with another Botulf item: a “translatio”, an account of the transfer of the bones of St. Botulf from Iken to … well, wherever they ended up. It begins with “Coenobium Thornense…”, another reference to Thorney Abbey. This “translatio” includes a reference to the “Life”, and the author uses very very similar vocabulary. I’ve spent a bit of time today transcribing this into a Word document, but I’ve only done about 20% of it.
I am very grateful to Adam and St John’s College for the chance to work with this very fine manuscript.
In the electronic version of the Bollandist preface to the “Life” of St Botulf or Botolph, we find the following words about manuscripts used:
Eamdem Vitam olim Ioannes Capgravius, omisso Prologo redactam in compendium, Legendæ suæ inseruerat: & ejus partem potiorem jam pridem habebamus ex duplici Ms. altero Canonicorum Regularium Rubeæ-vallis prope Bruxellas, cujus ecgraphum curaverat Rosweidus: altero Coloniensi, unde aliud Bollando transmiserat Grothusius etiam noster.
The same Life was inserted into his Legenda by John Capgrave, omitting the prologue, and reduced to a compendium: and we had long had the more important part of it from two manuscripts, one of the Canons Regular of Rubeæ-vallis near Brussels, of which made a copy: the other from Cologne, from which another was transmitted by our own Grothusius to Bolland.
Here is the printed version:
In fact I was quite unable to find out where this might be, until a kind commenter came to my assistance. I thought that a quick post with the varying names of this place might help others, googling hopelessly.
The Latin name of the place is “Rubea Vallis”. So this refers to the canons regular of “Rubra Vallis”, the “Red Valley.” But I have also seen “Rubra Vallis.” There is another place of this name in Picardy in France, so it is correctly qualified as “proper Bruxellas”, “the one near Brussels”.
In literature in French the place seems to be known usually as “Rouge-Cloître.” But “Rougeval” is also used sometimes – i.e. “red valley” -, again qualified with “Brussels” to distinguish from Rougeval in France.
In Dutch the place seems to be known usually as “Rooklooster,” although the Wikipedia article also gives “Roodklooster” or even “Rood klooster”.
In German the place seems to be referred to as “Rookloster” – no doubt under the influence of German “Klöster”. Thus we see “Rookloster bei Brüssel” here. This spelling also makes its way into articles in other languages.
This was an Augustinian Priory near Brussels, which was closed in 1782 by the reforming Austrian Emperor Joseph II. The manuscripts ended up in the Austrian National Library, but with a few bumps along the way.
In fact there is a fascinating website about Rooklooster and its manuscripts: The Rooklooster Register unveiled. From this I learn the following:
Rooklooster boasted an important library and an active scriptorium as a result of the many authors, copiists, miniaturists and binders that worked in the priory.
And:
When emperor Joseph II, ruler of the Austrian Netherlands, decreed the suppression of the monasteries of most contemplative monastic orders in 1783-1874, the Rooklooster Register and many other manuscripts ended up in the Chambre Héraldique (“Heraldic Chamber”) of Brussels.
When French revolutionaries occupied the Netherlands in 1792/94, the chairman of the Chambre Héraldique, Ch. J. Beydaels de Zittaert (†1811), took the codices of his society with him as he roamed around the Northern Netherlands and Germany. After his peregrination, he eventually offered them to emperor Franz I of Austria in 1803. Parts of the manuscripts ended up in the so-called Familien-Fideikommiss-Bibliothek, the personal library of the emperor.
Being a bibliophile himself, the emperor believed he had a right to the book collection. After Franz’ death in 1835, the manuscripts remained in the possession of the imperial family.
The Rooklooster Register was kept in the library as reference number 9373. A year after the Imperial and Royal Court Library of Vienna was transformed into the National Library in 1920, the manuscripts formed a Series nova, in which the Rooklooster Register was given the book number 12694.
So the first place to look for a Rooklooster manuscript is in Austria. But …. this last bit of the article holds a trap for the unwary. The shelfmark for these manuscripts is NOT “12345”, or “Ser. n. 12345” but “SN12345”. If you don’t know this, you will search manuscripta.at in vain.
Once downloaded, it is worrying to find that it has only 239 pages. For the Legendiers Latins entry says that Botulf is on “ff.960r-961r”. Luckily there is a table of contents at the front, with the saints in alphabetical order:
So what do these numbers refer to? Well, it looks as if there are two sets of folio numbers. At the top of PDF page 25, folio 21r, is the numbering “928”. Clearly this manuscript has been rebound. And in due course, on folio 63r (page 67 in the PDF) we find the Vita Sancti Botulfi.
Sadly the microfilm is not going to do my eyes any good. But… we got there!
Six days ago, the “TürkiyeToday” website published a story revealing that lost works by the ancient mathematician, Apollonius of Perge, had been found in an Arabic manuscript in Leiden by Prof. Jan Pieter Hogendijk. The story has since reached other outlets, including the Jerusalem Post.
This story would be very exciting, if it was true. But after some investigation, I find that it’s complete nonsense. The “lost works” have been known for centuries.
Let’s start with the story as it appears online now:
Lost works of ancient mathematician Apollonius of Anatolia found in rare Arabic manuscript
By Koray Erdogan Feb 5, 2025
Scientists have uncovered two lost books by Apollonius, the renowned mathematician from Anatolia, in an Arabic manuscript housed at the Leiden University Libraries in the Netherlands. This extraordinary find sheds new light on the preservation and transmission of ancient Anatolian knowledge during the Islamic Golden Age.
Apollonius (262 B.C.–190 B.C.) (Apollonius of Perge) is celebrated for his groundbreaking work in geometry, particularly in his book The Conics of Apollonius. This work, which introduces the concepts of hyperbolas, ellipses, and parabolas, was one of the most influential in ancient Anatolian mathematics. However, only four of the original eight books of “The Conics” were available to European scholars during the Renaissance.
The missing books—five and seven—are now found preserved in an 11th-century Arabic manuscript, a translation that had been lost to history.
The manuscripts, which were acquired by Dutch orientalist and mathematician Jacob Golius during his travels to the Middle East in the 17th century, form part of a vast collection of nearly 200 manuscripts that he brought back to Leiden University.
Golius’s acquisition of these texts not only enriched Western scientific scholarship but also played a crucial role in the rediscovery of lost ancient works.
The newly revealed Arabic translation of Apollonius’s lost books is accompanied by detailed illustrations and exquisite Arabic calligraphy. The Dutch mathematician and historian of science, Jan Pieter Hogendijk, emphasized the importance of these manuscripts as symbols of the intellectual achievements of Islamic scientists, noting their precision and artistic quality. “These manuscripts are a testament to the mental discipline and focus of their creators,” Hogendijk stated.
The story the rest of the story is padding, although it refers to a recent volume published in Leiden, “Prophets, Poets and Scholars” as if it was the source.
In fact the news story does not make sense. Apollonius of Perge did indeed write a textbook on geometry called the “Conics”, in 8 books. Only the first four books are preserved in Greek. Books 5 to 7 are indeed preserved only in an Arabic translation.
But this Arabic translation has been known for centuries. None other than Edmund Halley, of Halley’s Comet, published an edition of the Arabic text of these books with Latin translation. A modern edition and English translation appeared in 1990 by Gerald Toomer:
Apollonius of Perga; Toomer, Gerald J. (1990). Conics, books V to VII: the Arabic translation of the lost Greek original in the version of the Banū Mūsā. Series: Sources in the History of Mathematics and Physical Sciences. Vol. 9. New York: Springer (1990). DOI:10.1007/978-1-4613-8985-9. ISBN 978-1-4613-8987-3.
In the preface to the Toomer volume, indeed, on p.viii, we read:
I wish to acknowledge a particular debt of gratitude to my former colleague, J.P. Hogendijk. He read the whole book in draft form, corrected a number of errors, made several suggestions for improvement, and offered some original contributions, which I have gladly incorporated. I need hardly say that all remaining imperfections are solely my responsibility.
Today I have communicated with Prof. Hogendijk. I learn that he was unaware of the news reports, despite some of them claiming to have an email interview with him. The Prophets, Poets and Scholars publication from Leiden does indeed exist, and he has a paper in it. This he lists on his home page here as item 89. Here’s the bibliographical detail. But he kindly sent me a copy of the paper, and this makes no such claims.
Jan P. Hogendijk, Jacobus Golius and his Arabic manuscripts on the exact sciences, pp. 114-123 in Arnoud Vrolijk, Kasper van Ommen, Karin Scheper and Tijmen Baarda, eds., Prophets, Poets and Scholars: The Collections of the Middle Eastern Library of Leiden University , Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2024. ISBN 9789087284077 (print); 9789400604520 (ePDF), https://doi.org//10.24415/9789087284077
So… the news story is pure rubbish. One feels for Prof. Hogendijk, to whom all this nonsense is being attributed.
* * * *
Ancient Greek mathematical texts are today a field of limited interest, perhaps. In 17th century Europe, on the other hand, they were of real interest to contemporary mathematicians, trying to solve the same problems.
But reading the preface of the 1990 Toomer book reveals some quite fascinating details of the process whereby the text actually came to light. Here are some abbreviated extracts from p. xxi onwards.
Since it was known from Apollonius’ introduction to Book I of the Conics that they were originally in eight books, there was considerable interest in 17th-century Europe in recovering the missing Books V-VIII. As we have seen (p. xviii) Books V-VII were extant in Arabic, both in the original translation made by Thabit for the Banu Musa, and in various reworkings. The study of Arabic was beginning to expand in Europe in the later 16th century, and underwent a real flowering in the 17th. Furthermore a manuscript of one of the Arabic versions of the Conics had reached Italy in 1578, and others came to northern Europe from 1629 on. Yet nothing of significance for the later books3 was published until 1661, and no translation of the version closest to Apollonius’ original, that of the Banu Musa, appeared until 1710…..
Among the oriental manuscripts which were given in 1578 by Ignatius Ni’matallah (“Neama”, “Nehama”), Patriarch of Antioch, to Cardinal Ferdinando dei Medici, later Grand-Duke of Tuscany, and founder of the Medicean printing-press in Rome, the first Arabic press, was a compendium of the Conics by Abu’l-Fath Mahmud al-Isfahani. Its importance was recognized by the man in charge of the press, Giambattista Raimondi, who intended to publish an edition, but had still not done so when he died in 1614. At that date there is some talk in the correspondence of Galileo about publishing the work, but then interest lapsed until 1645…
In the meantime two other Arabic manuscripts of the Conics had been brought to Europe. In 1629 Jacobus Golius returned to Leiden from a prolonged visit to the east, bringing back a large number of manuscripts in Arabic, Persian and other languages. Among them was the splendid codex of Apollonius’ Conics, in the version commissioned by the Banu Musa, which is now in the Bodleian Library ..[ms. “O”] .. This was given to him by his countryman David Leleu de Wilhem “for the public good.” Knowledge of the existence of this manuscript (or rather of the apograph which had been made from it of Books V-VII) was rapidly disseminated by the catalogue of the manuscripts deposited by Golius in the Leiden library which the enterprising Gassendi had printed at Paris in 1630. Golius promised to publish the recovered books, and seemed ideally qualified to do so, since he was both an accomplished Arabist and a competent mathematician (shortly after his return from the east he was appointed to the Professorships of Arabic and Mathematics at Leiden).
However, not only did he fail to publish the lost Apollonius himself, but he manreuvred adrOitly and successfully to prevent anyone else doing it for the rest of his life lhe died in 1667), jealously guarding access to his manuscript and the partial copies of it which existed at Leiden, and actively deterring others who were inclined to try their hand, for instance by claiming that he alone could read the difficult script of the manuscript (which is in fact extremely legible). In the years 1644-1646 he was apprehensive that the English mathematician John Pell would anticipate him by publishing Books V-VII from the manuscript of Ravius (on which see below), but seems to have dissuaded him by pretending that he was about to produce his own version. Golius might be excused for not publishing the Apollonius himself on the grounds that he was not idle during these years, being engaged on, amongst other things, his great Lexicon Arabico-Latinum (Leiden, 1653). But his dog-in-the-manger attitude towards the efforts of others to get access to the work, or to publish alternative versions, caused increasing frustration and disgust throughout Europe and among his own countrymen, which can be traced through the decades of the 1630’s and 1640’s in the Mersenne correspondence. …
When Golius died in 1667 his valuable collection of manuscripts, including the Apollonius (see p. xxii) went not to the University of Leiden, but to his personal heirs. Negotiations between them and Cambridge University for the sale of the manuscripts as a lot fell through, and they remained, inaccessible, in the hands of the heirs for nearly 30 years. However, Golius was no longer in a position to restrict access to the partial copies of the Conics which he had handed over to the Leiden library, …
In 1696 Golius’ heirs finally decided to auction his manuscripts. Bernard persuaded Narcissus Marsh (then Archbishop of Dublin), a great patron of scholarship and interested in orientalia, to give him carte blanche to buy at the auction. Although ilt he traveled to Leiden for the sale in October 1696, and bought for Marsh a large number of interesting mss., including the famous Apollonius. But he never recovered from the effects of the winter voyage, dying at Oxford shortly after his return, on Jan. 12, 1697, aged 58, with most of his ambitious plans, including his edition of the Conics, uncompleted. However, the manuscript was now where it would be made available to the man who was to do the most for Apollonius in modern times, Edmond Halley.
Halley’s great edition of Apollonius’ Conics was published at Oxford in 1710. It was the editio princeps of the Greek text, and is until the present publication the only translation of Books V-VII based on the original Arabic version (that supervised by the Banu Musa): all later translations of these books derive from Halley’s Latin version. …
The manuscript of Golius is now in the Bodleian, where it is MS Marsh 667, and is online! It was written in 1070AD in Azerbaijan, but was in Aleppo by 1627, where it was acquired by Leleu de Wilhelm, for Golius, as indicated by a note in the volume.
While the news story is nonsense, let us hope that it draws attention to the possibilities of real discoveries, waiting to be found in Arabic translation. Maybe someone will be inspired to work more on these collections! That would be a nice outcome.
In November 2022 a Colorado classical scholar, Yvona Trnka-Amrhein, was sent a digital photograph of a papyrus containing 98 lines of text, and measuring 10.5 inches square, by Basem Gehad, an Egyptian archaeologist with the ministry of tourism and antiquities. The papyrus came from Philadelphia, and the two scholars had been working together also at Hermopolis Magna.
Investigation of the find using the TLG quickly revealed that the material was Greek tragedy: 22 of the lines proved to be a slightly different version of material from two plays by Euripides, the Polyidus and the Ino. The rest was new, and probably from the same source.
There is a little more information here. Unfortunately there is no photograph of the papyrus, or other details of the find. Let us hope that this swiftly becomes available.
It’s out there, people. There is more of the literature of antiquity just sitting there, awaiting discovery. Rather good news, all the same.
Chapter 15 of Bede’s De ratione temporum, written in 723 AD, is headed “De mensibus Anglorum” – About the Months of the English – and contains fascinating details of the Old English months. Most famous of these is April, known as Eosturmonath in Anglosaxon, and derived from an otherwise unknown goddess Eostre, which is the origin of our English-only word “Easter.” Easter is called passover (pasch) in most languages, however, which seems to surprise many. I have written about this passage before here.
Yesterday I learned via Twitter that a manuscript of this work has newly appeared online. This one is in Berlin, in the Staats Bibliothek, and has the shelfmark “Ms. Phill. 1832.” I think it must be 9th century. That shelfmark tells us that this is one of the vast and improbable collection amassed by the bibliomaniac Phillips at Cheltenham, some of which were bought at auction by the Germans.
I don’t tend to think of German manuscripts when I think of online manuscripts. But this is really a very fine example of how to place a manuscript online. Here’s the link to the page. And you can download the whole thing as a PDF, at various resolutions. Interestingly the online image zooms in to a higher resolution still, which is very helpful for marginal notes. in fact the online browser is rather good. You can maximise the image full-screen too. It’s all fairly obvious and intuitive.
In fact I’m rather impressed by the “Digitalisierte Sammlungen der Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin.” You go to the home page, and you can switch it into English very nicely. The search box actually works. I tried entering “Beda”, and got stuff; and then some very nice tabs on the right to restrict the results to manuscripts, and how many. I tried again with “Vita Sanctorum” and likewise got good things. I tried looking for the Life of St Nicholas that I knew was there, and found it. I tried a partial shelfmark, and found it. Really very good! What I cannot see, tho, is any way to browse the collection. It ought to have a list of collections (fonds), and a list by shelfmark of the mss within each. In the way that the Wiglaf site does. Another marvel – every page shows a yellow “feedback” tab on the right, so I’ve written and suggested it!
I’ve already downloaded a copy, and added a bookmark to the page that I want in case I need to come back to this later. It’s folio 27r. Here’s the start of the chapter:
Berlin MS Phill. 1832, fol. 27r: beginning of chapter 15 of Bede, de ratione temporum
On the next page we find the famous passage about Eostre:
Berlin MS Phill. 1832, fol. 27r: end of chapter 15 of Bede, de ratione temporum, with mention of Eosturmonath
Interestingly someone has written “April” over “Eusturmonath.” As a reminder:
Eosturmonath, qui nunc paschalis mensis interpretatur, quondam a dea illorum quae Eostre vocabatur, et cui in illo festa celebrabant, nomen habuit, a cujus nomine nunc paschale tempus cognominant, consueto antiquae observationis vocabulo gaudia novae solemnitalis vocantes.
Eosturmonath has a name which is now translated ‘‘Paschal month’’, and which was once called after a goddess of theirs named Eostre, in whose honour feasts were celebrated in that month. Now they designate that Paschal season by its name, calling the joys of the new rite by the time-honoured name of the old observance. (Faith Wallis translation with correction as here).
Note also that the name of the goddess is “Eostre.” It is curious how often and how pompously it is given as “Ēostre” online, when no source adds any such marker.
It’s still simply wonderful to see these things appear online!
Plato’s works have reached us in medieval handwritten copies, the earliest written around 900 AD. The dialogues are arranged into nine groups of four dialogues, or “tetralogies.”[1] These give us the works in complete form, from direct copying down the centuries. But there are also surviving fragments of ancient copies on papyrus, found in rubbish dumps in Egypt where the climate is dry, which sometimes give a better reading in this passage or that, where the text has become corrupt in the centuries. Plato also is quoted at great length by other ancient authors, and sometimes these also have readings to contribute. Finally there are ancient translations of Plato into other languages.
The witnesses to the direct tradition, the medieval manuscript copies, are very numerous; more so than for any of the Greek classics other than Homer. One article suggests at least 250 manuscripts survive[2]; and a search of the Pinakes database gave 439.[3] Most are merely copies of other manuscripts, so it is important to identify the primary manuscripts.
The 19th century study of the transmission of the text proved to be unsound, and the whole task had to be started again just before WW1. In 1959 Dodds could write that critical work on the text is still in its early stages, and that, for the first 7 tetralogies, nobody could say how many of the manuscripts were primary – based on no other manuscript – or how they related to each other, or to the secondary manuscripts. And why? Because scholars lacked accurate collations of the manuscripts. Indeed the collations that were available proved to be full of errors.[4]
For the text of individual dialogues additional manuscripts are important, but these are the main ones for the tradition as a whole.
B – Oxford, Bodleian, E. D. Clarke 39 (= “Clarkianus”). The oldest extant witness. Written in 895 AD by “John the Calligrapher” for Arethas of Caesarea, according to a subscriptio. It contains the first 6 tetralogies, and never contained more. It was probably the first volume of a two-volume Plato. It was discovered in 1801, lying on the floor of the monastery of St John the Apostle on Patmos, and Clark purchased it. By looking at medieval catalogues of the monastery library, it seems that the monastery acquired it sometime between 1201 and 1355, and it remained largely unknown thereafter. It’s not clear that any other manuscript derives from it. B is online here: https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/f57d074b-cff1-4172-8236-797c7b8f0403/
The top of the first page of B – Bodleian MS E. D. Clarke 39, folio 1r.
A – Paris, BNF graecus 1807. Ca. 900 AD. Today contains only the 8th and 9th tetralogies, and the Spuria. Probably the second volume of a two-volume set. Not online. Online here.
T – Venice, Marcianus Append. Class. 4. 1. Copy of A. Written by Ephraim Monachus ca. 950.[6] It contains the first 7 tetralogies and part of the 8th, although this may be copied from elsewhere. At the end of the 7th tetralogy is a note indicated the “end of volume 1”; again it must be descended from a two volume medieval Plato. Probably copied from A when it was complete. B and T have some links, possibly because an ancestor of one was corrected from the other. T is online here: https://www.internetculturale.it/jmms/iccuviewer/iccu.jsp?id=oai%3A193.206.197.121%3A18%3AVE0049%3ACSTOR.241.10700&mode=all&teca=marciana
W – Vienna suppl. phil. gr. 7. 12th century? Contains tetralogies 1-3, and then the dialogues of 4 to 7 in a jumbled order. It is independent of B and T. It was probably acquired in Greece or Sicily in the 14th century by Nerio Acciaiauoli, passed in 1478 to the Certose near Florence, and in 1725 to Vienna. W is online here: https://digital.onb.ac.at/RepViewer/viewer.faces?doc=DTL_6393878&order=1&view=SINGLE
D – Venetus 185 (Coll. 576). 12th century. Once belonged to Bessarion. Seems to be independent of A. For the first 4 tetralogies is closely related to B, but not derived from it.[7]
B, A/T, D, W form a family of closely related manuscripts. Manuscript F is from a very different family.
F – Vienna suppl. phil. gr. 39. 13th century. It contains the dialogues from tetralogy VI.3 (Gorgias) to IX.1 (Minos). From a different family to B, A/T and W. Its readings often agree with the quotations in Stobaeus and Eusebius, whether the reading is authentic or corrupt. Some of its errors are explicable if the scribe copied directly from a manuscript written in an uncial hand, i.e. an ancient manuscript, with no word division and limited punctuation. This is confirmed by the papyri which demonstrate that the F text-type goes back at least to the second century AD. This is unique among the mss of Plato. Dodds estimates from the probably dimensions of the exemplar that it may have been a “cheap papyrus code which was manufactured in quantity in and after the third century A.D.” and represents “the ‘commercial’ texts which circulated among the reading public rather than the more scholarly editions,” complete with vulgarisations.
The tradition of the ninth and final tetralogy is somewhat different from the others, and manuscripts of it are less common. All the manuscripts, including the 11th century Armenian translation of its first two dialogues (Minos and the Laws), derive from a manuscript equipped with variants, reproduced rather faithfully. This may be an ancient manuscript, or more likely a Byzantine transliteration of the 9th century.
The Papyri
No ancient copies of any work of Plato have reached us. But small fragments of such copies do survive: little scraps of papyrus found in the ancient rubbish dumps of deserted cities in Egypt. The Papyri.info database lists 95 papyrus fragments, although this is a mere handful compared to the number of papyri of Homer. The oldest four fragments date from the first part of the 3rd century BC: a scrap of the Phaedo, Laches, Sophist, and an epistle. But the vast majority date to the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD, including a long section of the Symposium (P.Oxy. 843, 2nd c.), and the numerous and long fragments of the Phaedrus.
Pasquali wrote, “There was much discussion about the value of those papyri [the 3rd c. BC Phaedo and Laches] immediately after their discovery: now the general opinion is clear. They provide an apparently careless text: there are frequent spelling errors and negligent mistakes, such as arbitrary and impossible shifts of words, none of which is surprising in private copies; nor do they lack small lacunae. All this matters very little if a solid foundation can be glimpsed through the damaged surface. And for the most part they are like this: the Laches papyrus contains only 189d -192a, yet it greatly improves our text.”
The Indirect Tradition
The text of Plato is quoted in a number of ancient authors. These quotations are extensive; between a quarter and a half of some dialogues are quoted. The most important source is Stobaeus Anthology, and then Eusebius Praeparatio Evangelica. Other authors quoting more than a page of the Greek text are Iamblichus, Galen, Theodoret, Theon Smyrnaeus, Clement, Justin Martyr, John Philoponus, and Athenaeus. [8] The quotations are of the greatest value for the transmission of the text. In some cases they preserve the correct reading where the entire direct tradition has been corrupted.[9]
Commentaries on Plato
Another witness to the text is ancient commentaries, in which that text is quoted and discussed. The oldest commentaries on Plato are lost, but a great number of neoplatonist commentaries survive from the 5th century AD, including works by Hermias, Proclus, Olympiodorus and Damascius, together with a 6th century fragment of a commentary on the Parmenides preserved in a palimpsest from Bobbio. The commentaries are often little more than student notes, but each note is often preceded by a lemma, i.e. a word or extract from Plato. While in theory these might have been modified themselves from later copies of the text, it has been shown that the lemmata in Proclus’ Commentary on the Timaeus must be as Proclus saw them, because his comments rely upon them being as they are.
There is also a papyrus of the 2nd century AD containing a commentary on a long stretch of the Theatetus. The work was probably composed not long before.
Scholia
Further remains of ancient commentaries survive in the scholia in the margins of manuscripts of the BWT family. There are two sets. The first were entered in B by the hand of Arethas of Caesarea, the “Arethae scholia”. These are most abundant for the Gorgias and the Theatetus. The other set of scholia were added later to B in another hand, and also appear in T, and often in W. These have been called “scholia vetera,” although there is no evidence that they are earlier than the others. Neither set is very useful for textual questions, except occasionally.
Versions
Plato wrote in Greek, but in antiquity and later translations were made into other languages.
Cicero made a Latin translation of the Timaeus, and elsewhere in his works he quotes and translates many other passages of Plato, often at some length. In the 4th century AD Chalcidius translated into Latin the first part of the Timaeus and commented upon it. He dedicated it to a certain “Osius” who may have been bishop Hosius of Cordova. This translation passed into medieval Latin libraries, and influenced Dante. Both translations are preserved in manuscripts of the 9th century and later.[10]
Translations from Greek were made into Coptic, Middle Persian and Armenian. A fragment of a Coptic translation of the Republic 588b1-589b3 is preserved in codex VI of the Nag Hammadi library of Gnostic texts. The translation is of very poor quality, and initally went unrecognised. Agathias (Hist. II 29, 1-2) tells us that some Greek works were translated into Middle Persian for Chosroes I, and that he was especially interested in Plato and Aristotle, so probably Plato was among them. In Armenian translation the Timaeus, Euthyphro, Apology, Minos, and 12 books of the Laws have been preserved in a manuscript in the Mechitarist monastery in Venice. A translation of the Phaedo is lost. The translations may be the work of a Magister Gregorius (ca. 990-ca.1058), although others have argued for a 6th century date for the translation of the Timaeus. The translation is very literal, and seems to be based on a older text of the A-family.
Some researchers have suggested that Hunain ibn Ishaq translated the Republic into Arabic.[11] Several Arabic authors tell us that the Timaeus and other dialogues were translated into Arabic in the 9-10th century. Knowledge of Plato in medieval Arabic authors seems to derive from summaries made in Arabic or translated into Arabic.[12]
Dodd’s stemma for the Gorgias.
Analysis of the Medieval Manuscripts
The medieval manuscripts share certain characteristics. All of them derive from the collection of tetralogies known in antiquity, and other orders of the text are all secondary. They also share some obvious, and mostly unfixable, corruptions: doubled readings, rare interpolations, even rarer lacunae. It is clear that they all derive from a common ancestor.
But how old was this common ancestor? It must predate the invention of minuscule bookhand ca. 900, because none of the shared errors arise from misreading a minuscule bookhand.
The 2nd century AD commentary on the Theatetus shares two obvious corruptions with the medieval manuscripts. These corruptions must be earlier than the 2nd century. But the commentary also has a better reading than the medieval manuscripts in at least five places. In general the lemmas in the commentary agree much more with manuscript W than with B and T. All of this suggests that the common ancestor of the medieval manuscripts, and the 2nd century commentary, must be earlier still, and divided into two branches before the 2nd century AD; one the ancestor of the medieval codices, the other of the text in the commentary.
The roughly contemporary papyri of the Phaedrus confirm this. P.Oxy.1017 has a number of readings superior to the medieval mss, just as the commentary does. It also contains marginal and interlinear variants in a second hand, which cannot be conjectures to improve the text because in fact they do the opposite. The papyrus differs from the medieval text in 29 places, but in 8 of these places, the medieval reading is given in the marginal variants. This means that our medieval text, and also its errors, already existed in the 2-3rd century AD. P.Oxy.1017 tends to agree more with T than B. In fact P.Oxy. 1016 has similar features, but it also has readings found in inferior medieval manuscripts. So does P.Oxy. 2102 (2nd c.).
From this we can conclude that the medieval tradition has its origins in an ancient exemplar, and that many of the divergences found in the medieval codices are also ancient. Some of the manuscripts seem to continue an ancient family of the text, and presumably derive from a different uncial exemplar to the others. This is certainly true for the text of the Timaeus in F, which also shares errors with Plutarch, Galen, Eusebius, Proclus, Stobaeus and Chalcidius. The same is true for the text of the Republic and the Gorgias.
Date of collection and ordering
At what date did the works of Plato come into the form of a collection of tetralogies, in which they now are? Most likely during the early Hellenistic period. Pasquali argues that the collection contains an authentic but unfinished dialogue, the Critias; a dialogue only complete in its externals, the Laws, and, as an appendix to the Laws, it contains a work by Plato’s secretary, Philip of Opuntus under Plato’s name. This must mean that the collection itself dates back to a circle that had Plato’s work at its disposal and that felt obliged to continue it, i.e. the Academy. It cannot have been compiled by Plato’s immediate successors, who would have known very well what he wrote, because it contains a lot of spuria. So it must have been compiled at least a few generations after his death. One of the spurious dialogues, the Alcibiades II, seems Hellenistic rather than Attic. So perhaps the collection dates to the Academy of Arcesilas and Lacydes, of the first half of the 3rd century BC, at which date corruptions and interpolations may already have crept in.
What about the ordering? Diogenes Laertius tells us (III, 61) that “some, including Aristophanes the Grammarian” of Byzantium (fl. ca. 200 BC) classified the dialogues into groups of three; comprising only 15 dialogues, followed by an unordered mass of single dialogues. He also explains at length (III, 65-6) the use of critical signs in ancient copies of Plato, some of which signs have been preserved in medieval copies. But Diogenes Laertius also tells us (III, 56) that it was Thrasyllus the court astrologer of Tiberius who divided the dialogues into tetralogies, which seems far too late. Albinus ca. 150 AD in his introduction to the works of Plato (6) tells us that an otherwise unknown Dercyllides also arranged them thus.[13] The issues are discussed by Philip.[14] Pasquali declines to decide which came first, and is inclined to believe that both arrangements reflect only a bibliographical list, rather than the arrangement of any physical copies.
[1] How they reached us is summarised in quite a lot of detail in some twenty pages of G. Pasquali, Storia della tradizione e critica del testo, 2nd ed., Firenze (1934, repr. 1988), pp. 247-269, from which most of the following material is taken. Useful list of the tetralogies at Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_manuscripts_of_Plato%27s_dialogues↩
[2]R. Brumbaugh, R. Wells, “Completing Yale’s Plato Microfilm Project”, in: Yale University Library Gazette 64 (1989), 73-5. JSTOR: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40858970 ↩
[3]Query for author: Plato philosophus, exported the results to CSV, imported this into Microsoft Access as a table “Pinakes”, renamed the first 5 columns, and ran an SQL query: “SELECT country, town, library, collection, shelfmark FROM pinakes AS query GROUP BY country, town, library, collection, shelfmark;”↩
[4]E.R. Dodds, Gorgias: A revised text, OUP (1959), p.34.↩
[13]Albinus, Eisagogue c. 6, online in English as “The introduction of Albinus to the Dialogues of Plato” here, p.315: https://archive.org/details/WorksOfPlatoV6.↩
[14]J. A. Philip, “The Platonic Corpus”, Phoenix 24 (1970), 296-308. JSTOR: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1087736 ↩
