Tag: Manuscripts

Galen’s preface to Hippocrates “On the workshop/laboratory of a doctor” in English

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Andrew Eastbourne has come through, and a .doc file of this text (De officina medici) arrived today and can be downloaded from here: Galen_-_Preface.   I have also uploaded it to the Fathers site here.  I’m placing this in the public domain — do whatever you like with it (except stick your own copyright notice on it!)

It is most interesting as a guide to the transmission of texts in ancient times, so I will do my best to post it here.

He entitled a medical [work], “Pertaining to the Surgery” (κατ’ ἰητρεῖον).[1]  But it would have been better for it to be entitled, “On the Things Pertaining to the Surgery” (περὶ τῶν κατ’ ἰητρεῖον), as some give the title for the [works] of Diocles, Philotimus, and Mantius.  For while these men wrote on the same subject, in each book, in the greatest number [of copies] the title lacks the preposition (περί) and the article (τῶν)—they are entitled, simply, “Pertaining to the Surgery”—in a few [copies], however, [it is given] with the preposition and the article:  “On the Things Pertaining to the Surgery.”  But whereas these men’s books give quite copious theoretical instruction, Hippocrates’ [book], after the catalogue of the things that are the components of surgery overall, gives a full explanation of bandaging, since the man considered it proper to practice this first.  And indeed, the practice of this can be pursued most especially with pieces of wood sculpted into human form, or if [this is] not [possible], on the bodies of children at least.

This much the book itself required me to say, before my interpretations of individual points; now, however, I will go through what is not required by the book, but by those who, in copying [2] them, readily received the writings of the ancients in whatever [form] they themselves wished.[3]  For some eagerly attempted to find 300-year-old copies of even very old books,[4] preserving some in papyrus scrolls, others on sheets of papyrus, others on parchment, like the [texts] that are with us in Pergamum.[5]

Therefore, I decided to examine all these things in the [commentaries of the] earliest interpreters, so that on the basis of the majority and the most trustworthy I might discover the authentic writings.  And the result turned out to surpass my expectations.  For I discovered that they nearly all agreed with each other—the treatises and the commentaries of the interpreters—such that I was struck with bewilderment at the audacity of those who have recently written commentaries or have made their own edition of all the books of Hippocrates, among whom are Dioscorides and his associates, and Artemidorus, called Capito, and his associates,[6] who made many innovations in the ancient writings.

It seemed to me that the account of the commentaries would be [too] long, if I mentioned all the writings, and so I imagined that it was better to write [about] the older ones only, adding to them some few others—those that show but little alteration—and of these, primarily those which have been acknowledged by the earlier commentators on the book.  There are four of them:  two, who wrote commentaries on all the books of Hippocrates—Zeuxis and Heraclides; and then Bacchius and Asclepiades, [whose comments], not on all [the books of Hippocrates, are] hard to understand.[7]

And now, enough of these matters.  By way of recovering the pleasure of a clearer exordium, I will speak briefly, as though I had not said anything already.  Hippocrates’ book, entitled “Pertaining to the Surgery,” contains at the outset a preamble to the whole art [of medicine], as I shall demonstrate a little later, and for this reason some have reasonably considered it proper to read it first of all, promising lessons very similar to what some later gave in the works they entitled “Introductions.”  And next in sequence after the common preamble, he teaches (regarding what can be effected in the surgery) the most useful things for those who are beginning to learn the medical art.  It will become plain to you that [all] this is the case as you apply your mind carefully to the explanations of the expressions themselves. 

From: Claudii Galeni Opera Omnia, tom. XVIII pars II, ed. D. Carolus Gottlob Kühn, Lipsiae (1830), p. 629-632. Title: ΤΟ ΙΠΠΟΚΡΑΤΟΥΣ ΚΑΤ̕ΙΗΤΡΕΙΟΝ ΒΙΒΛΙΟΝ ΚΑΙ ΓΑΛΗΝΟΥ ΕΙΣ ΑΥΤΟ ΥΠΟΜΝΗΜΑ Α.  The title of the Latin translation is:  Hippocratis De Medici Officina liber et Galeni in eum Commentarius I; Galeni praefatio. [Note by R.P.]
[1] “Surgery” here appears to refer to the physical set-up for a doctor’s operations, not the practice of surgery to which the English term most frequently refers.
[2] The Greek term, μεταγράφοντες, carries the implication that they changed them in the process of copying.
[3] Here Birt, Das antike Buchwesen, p. 503, suggests emending the odd ἢ (“or” [?]) to οἳ, yielding the following meaning for the sentence:  “…but by the copyists, who readily took…”
[4] In the Greek, it is the copying rather than the composition that is explicitly described as “300-years old,” since the participle γεγραμμένα—lit., “having been written”—is in the accusative case, whereas the books are in the genitive.
[5] Kuhn’s text (τὰδὲἐνδιαφόροιςφιλύραις, ὥσπερτὰπαρ’ ἡμῖνἐνΠεργάμῳ:  “others on various / excellent [sheets of paper made from] the under-bark of the lime tree, like the texts that are with us in Pergamum”) is problematic.  Although this under-bark is attested as being used for writing (Herodian 1.17.1; Cassius Dio 72.8.4), it has no connection with Pergamum.  Birt, Das antike Buchwesen, p. 503, cites Cobet’s emendation (ἐνδιφθέραις) with approval—I have adopted it here; Birt also mentions Marquardt’s suggestion (ἐνδιφθερίναιςφιλύραις:  “on [sheets of] parchment ‘bark'”).
[6] The phrasing here—”Dioscorides and his associates” (Gk. οἱπερὶΔιοσκορίδην)—is frequently used in Greek as a circumlocution for the simple “Dioscorides.”
[7] Gk. δυσλόγιστα; this can mean, literally, “hard to calculate” or “bad at calculating” and hence, either obscurity or shoddy commentating is the point.  

 

UPDATE: Andrew Eastbourne writes to remind me that “duties” of a doctor would be “officiis”, and to say that “officina” is workshop/laboratory.

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Notes on the Laus Pisonis

Posted on by Roger Pearse

My copy of Texts and Transmissions is still lying beside my computer with a bookmark at the page on the manuscripts of Juvenal.  But over the page is a short entry on a Latin text previously unknown to me.  This is an anonymous Latin panegyric known as the Laus Pisonis (Praise of Piso).  Fortunately I find the text and a translation already present at Bill Thayer’s site, Lacus Curtius, here.

The work survived to the renaissance in a single manuscript, which in 1527 was found at the South German abbey of Lorsch.  The text was published by Johannes Sichard in that year at Basle (by Froben?), which is fortunate for the Lorsch codex has since disappeared.  Lorsch was founded in the middle of the Dark Ages, and was sacked, like the other abbeys of Southern Germany, during the Thirty Years War.  The manuscripts of Lorsch, such as survived, were taken to Heidelberg.  The collection of manuscripts at Heidelberg ended up in the Vatican collection, as the “Palatine” manuscripts.  But like the two volume Tertullian, listed in a medieval catalogue, the collection of minor Latin poets which contained the Laus Pisonis did not make it. 

Anyone wishing to edit the text is therefore dependent upon the fidelity of Schard’s edition.  This is not an enviable fate.  Even so good an editor as Beatus Rhenanus, who printed the editio princeps of Tertullian at Basle in 1521, was quite willing to simply mark up the manuscript for the printer and send it to the monkeys of the press to be typeset in the new moveable type.   Quite a number of errors could creep in, from such a hands-off policy.  Rhenanus did just this, in 1520, with the only manuscript of Velleius Paterculus (since lost).  But in that case, once sample sheets had been printed, errors were noticed — and one of Rhenanus’ associates recalled the manuscript from the printer, and collated it against the print.  The collation was then itself added to the edition.

The process also led to the loss of manuscripts.  A careless editor might well feel that the parchment manuscript, by now considerably defaced, was of no further interest, now that he had a nice new clean copy.  It is a lamentable fact that quite a few unique manuscripts survived the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages, only to be chopped up for parchment once printed.  However we happen to know that the manuscript of Velleius survived this treatment and existed as late as the 18th century.  Similarly the manuscripts of Tertullian used by Rhenanus did not perish at that point; one, indeed, survives today among Rhenanus’ papers in the little town of Selestat in Alsace.  But we can only speculate whether the only manuscript of the Laus Pisonis perished in 1527, cut up to line baking dishes, or suffered some other fate somewhat later.

Fortunately a second source is available, in the form of a 12th century anthology of texts, the Florilegium Gallicum.  This contains 75% of the Laus Pisonis, and so can be used to correct the text.

The poem itself praises a young Calpurnius Piso, one of a number of that name.   The references to Maecenas suggest a date in the mid- to late-first century.

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A thought on the end of Juvenal

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The 16th and last satire breaks off mid-flow.  The ending is lost, therefore, or perhaps was not written.

Ancient books were written on rolls.  One modern author theorized that the end of a text ought to be safer than the start, because it should be inside the rolled up scroll.  He seems to think that a roll would normally be stored ready to read.

But it seems to me, in my ignorance, that the reverse is the case.  The average ancient reader would get to the end of his reading, and find his roll almost fully rolled-up.   It is possible, of course, that some readers would then unwind the whole roll and roll it back up the correct way.  But human nature being what it is, surely most of the time the reader will just pop the roll back in its cylindrical case.  A reader who takes up a roll to read and finds it is back-to-front has an incentive to rewind it.  A reader who wants his lunch has none.

I suggest, therefore, that as a rule most rolls were stored with the end hanging out.  This would explain quite simply why so many ancient texts are mutilated at the end, without requirement for the hypothesis that they were written in codex form.

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The manuscripts of Juvenal

Posted on by Roger Pearse

L. D. Reynolds, Texts and Transmissions: A survey of the Latin classics, Oxford 1983, is the first port of call for any enquiry into the transmission of any of the Latin classics.  On p.200-3 is the article by R. J. Tarrant on Juvenal.

Juvenal went through a period of obscurity after his own times.  Not cited by Donatus, or Jerome, he is referenced more than 70 times in the commentaries on Virgil by Servius.  Some of the manuscripts include subscriptions which suggest Servius may have been connected to their rediscovery: ms. K, for instance, contains Lego ego Niceus apud M. Serbium Romae et emendavi — I, Nicaeus, read this at the house of M. Servius in Rome and corrected it, and ms. L a version of the same.

More than 500 manuscripts later than the 9th century exist.  Unfortunately, by the 4th century, a considerable number of spurious lines  had already found their way into many copies of the text.  Difficult language was sometimes replaced by simpler expressions.  The vast majority of the medieval manuscripts derive from such corrupted copies.

As a rule we tend to find that medieval manuscripts go back to a single Dark Ages exemplar, or perhaps a few.  In the case of Juvenal, however, we can clearly see that two ancient families of manuscripts both gave rise to medieval children.  For in addition to the majority, we have a few manuscripts which preserve a more correct and less interpolated text, although the text itself is often rather more corrupt than in the interpolated copies.

The better mss. are:

  • P:   Montpellier H 125, first quarter of the 9th century, from Lorsch (online here).  Once owned by Pierre Pithou, who used it for his edition of 1585.  The Pithoeanus is the best and most important manuscript of Juvenal.  It also contains Persius.
  • Arou.:  Aarau, Stadtarchiv I, Nr. 0. The fragmenta Arouiensia.  These are five leaves from a destroyed manuscript of the 10th century, written in Germany, and broken up to use in bindings.  They are now in the Stadtarchiv in Aarau  (website here) An enquiry by email to them got the reply: “Das Juvenal-Fragment befindet sich im Stadtarchiv Aarau, I Nr. 0, vgl.: Katalog der mittelalterlichen Handschriften des Klosters Wettingen ; Katalog der mittelalterlichen Handschriften in Aarau, Laufenburg, Lenzburg, Rheinfelden und Zofingen, S. 195f.”.  It also contains scholia, which are important for several reasons.  Firstly each scholion is introduced by a quotation of a few words from the text.  These headwords or lemmata are themselves valuable for the authentic text.  Secondly the scholion itself sometimes reflects a different version of those same words, showing that the two were put together at different times.
  • Sang.:  St. Gall ms. 870, second quarter of the 9th century.  This is a florilegium — an anthology — which contains 280 lines of Juvenal.  Pp.40-326 contain the ancient scholia.
  • R:  Paris latin. 8072, from the end of the 10th century, probably French, containing long sections of the text.
  • V:  Vienna 107, end of the 9th century, containing book 1, line 1 – book 2, l.59 and book 3.107-5.96.

P, Arou. and Sang. are very closely related.  The first two are almost identical, with the text even laid out in the same manner on the page.  R and V are less reliable, and V has been much influenced by the other family.

The remaining manuscripts — hundreds of them — are hard to classify.  No stemma can be constructed because cross-contamination is so general, and even geographical groupings are pretty blurred.  This will not surprise any manuscript enthusiast.  For heavy lumps of wood and parchment, manuscripts travel about just as much as rock groups on tour, or so it seems sometimes.

Finally there are some fragments of ancient books containing Juvenal.  Two pages of a 6th century volume exist in ms. Vatican lat. 5750, with scholia, and also a portion of Persius.  More pages from a different 6th century book exist in Milan in ms. Ambrosianus Cimelio 3.  Finally a parchment leaf from Antinoe, ca. 500 AD, contains 49 lines of book 7.  None of these fragments agrees consistently with either of the medieval groups, unfortunately.

By the last decade of the 4th century, Juvenal had been equipped with a substantial commentary, which is the source for our scholia vetera (there are also Carolingian scholia), found in the three mss. P, Arou. and Sang.  Mommsen discussed the date of the commentary in his Gesammelte Schriften 7 (1909), p.509-11: Zeitalter des Scholiasten Juvenals.  The scholia must post-date 352-3, since there is a reference in the scholion on Juvenal book 10, l.24 to a praefectus urbis named Cerealis.  But much of the material must be older, or so the footnote says.  It can hardly date later than the abolition of paganism — the scholiast shows little knowledge of Christianity, and resorts to quoting Tacitus.  It is difficult to believe that the compulsory state religion could be unknown in the 5th century, and indeed the writer says that the gods are still worshipped.  The festival of the Matronalia is a state festival, as it still is shown in the Chronography of 354, but not in that of 449.  Likewise the term used for the silver coinage is not the silliqua of the 5th century, but the older terms argenteolus or nummus.

Mommsen concludes  that the commentary was composed ca. 400 AD, and that later, as is usual with ancient commentaries, it was pillaged for the materials to create the scholia in the margins of the new-fangled codex-style books.

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Translations of ancient Greek literature into Middle Persian

Posted on by Roger Pearse

In 529 AD the emperor Justinian closed the Academy in Athens.  The remaining heirs of Plato chose to travel to the court of the Sassanid Persian King of Kings in order to continue  their studies there.  Finding conditions among the barbarians uncongenial, in time they returned. 

But it raises the question of why we never hear of translations of Greek literature into Persian.  The Persian empire was a potent adjacent power throughout the Greek classical period, and revived in the 3rd century and continued down to the Moslem conquest in the 7th century. 

I never read L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars (3rd) without learning something.  On page 256 I learn that a few texts are indeed extant in translations into Pehlevi. 

Wilson lists four texts: the novel about Alexander the Great known as ps.Callisthenes; the Geoponica; and two astrological texts, the handbook of Vettius Valens which we have discussed before, plus Teucer of Babylon’s Paranatellonta, which is a new text to me.

Wilson references “Studies presented to E. G. Browne, 1922” (in his usual casual fashion), which turns out to be A Volume of Oriental Studies Presented to Edward G. Browne on his 60th birthday (7 February 1922), and thankfully online at Archive.org.  The specific article is that by C. A. Nallino, which turns out to be on p.345-363 and entitled Tracce di opere greche giunte agli Arabi per trafila Pehlevica.  Unless my eyes deceive me, this is about texts which ended up in Arabic via Persian, rather than about Greek texts in general.  The article merely discusses these four texts, and the evidence for them.

It would seem, therefore, that there might be more, were one to look.

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Islamic mss now online

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’m not sure whether it is relevant or useful to any readers of this blog, but I saw an email saying that the Islamic manuscripts at the University of Michigan are now pretty much all online here.

It’s all happening, people — the manuscripts are coming online, slowly.  The dam is bursting, and we will all be able to hunt through the primary sources in the oldest extant copies without leaving our desks!

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What is Bombycin?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I mentioned that one of the manuscripts of Photius’ Lexicon was written on ‘bombycin’, and a commenter has asked what this is.   It’s Arabic paper, used widely in Byzantium from the 9th century onwards until superceded by western methods of paper manufacture.

One of the key references is J. Irigoin, Les premiers manuscrits grecs écrits sur papiers et le problème du bombycin, Scriptorium 4 (1950), 194-202; and this was reprinted in Dieter Harlfinger’s Griechische Kodikologie, p. 132.  And I happen to own a copy of Harlfinger.  Here is a quick translation of the opening portion of his article:

Ever since Bernard de Montfaucon, textbooks on Greek paleography have distinguished two types of paper used in manuscripts; bombycin paper, of oriental origin, and western paper.

Until the end of the 19th century, it was believed that bombycin paper was made with cotton, which neatly distinguished it from western paper which was made from old rags (hence the name, rag paper) made of linen.  Around 1885, the work of Briquet, at Geneva, and of Wiesner and Karabacek at Vienna has shown that “cotton paper” is a myth; oriental paper was made with linen fibres, and bombycin is a linen paper just like western paper.  The only difference between the two papers is the choice of product used to hold it together; starch in the east, and gelatine in the west.

Paleographers have all the same continued to use the adjective bombycinus to designate manuscripts written on paper of oriental origin, in opposition to chartacei, written on paper made in the west.  All the same, the distinction between the two papers is far from simple and recent catalogues of Greek mss. label as chartaceus all manuscripts on paper, without giving any indication of the origin of the material.

As a general rule, paleographers state that bombycin is of a more or less obvious brown colour.  It is thick and opaque, often fluffy at the edges of the leaves; it is this which gives it sometimes the appearance of blotting paper, and it happens sometimes that the bombycin disintegrates at the surface, which is very unfortunate for the text written on it.  Western paper is less obviously coloured, thinner and better glued together, and on holding up to the light the marks left by the manufacturing process, the mesh, and eventually the watermark.  The latter appears sporadically in the last 20 years of the 13th century, and generally from the 14th century on.

This rule appears clear and certain.  In fact it is not so clear, and it often  happens that one hesitates as to whether thick paper does or does not show the marks of the process, and in cases of doubt it tends to be called bombycin.

My work has made it possible for me to study a certain number of Greek mss.  I have examined with care those which are said to be written on bombycin, and this has led me to the following conclusion: many of the manuscripts listed as bombycins in the most recent publications show watermarks and are thus written on western paper.  I shall limit myself to three series of examples.

Irigoin then goes on to detail his work, and to draw up more precise guidelines for identifying bombycin.  After studying more than 200 Greek paper manuscripts written before 1300, he felt able to state with confidence which was which.  The blotting paper effect was unusual rather than characteristic, for instance.  He also looked at Arabic manuscripts, which used paper from the 9th century onwards.  There he found that most used the same kind of paper, suggesting that they were written in the Near East, in the region from where the Byzantine empire imported its paper at that period.

He also points out that paper sizes were different in the orient and in the west.  The oldest manuscript he could find written on western paper was from 1255 A.D.    He also mentions the first known Greek ms. written on paper — Ms. Vatican. gr. 2200, written at Damascus ca. 800 A.D., in an archaising cursive, and suggests that it was a one-off.  The next known ms. is Vatican gr. 504, from 1105, written partly on paper and partly on parchment.  But literary references indicate that paper was being used by the middle of the 11th century.  Western paper, imported from Italy, starts to appear in Byzantium in the middle of the 13th century.  In the 14th century, and especially after 1340, paper replaces parchment almost entirely.  Oriental paper declined in quality during the first years of the 14th century, and disappears.  It is used rarely after 1350, and hardly ever after 1380.  Political and economic factors prevented the Byzantines from trading to the east, and the Turkish threat forced them to look west.  Irigoin adds:

In conclusion, a manuscript written on oriental paper must be placed between the middle of the 11th century and 1380.

and finishes by listing technical details.

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The manuscripts of Caesar’s works

Posted on by Roger Pearse

An email reached me this evening, asking what are the earliest manuscripts of the works of Julius Caesar.  I thought my reply might be of general interest. I obtained the following details from L.D.Reynolds, Texts and Transmissions, pp.35-6, written by Michael Winterbottom.

The extant mss fall into two families.  The alpha family contains only the Bellum Gallicum, and is notable for allusions in colophons to late antique ‘correctores’.  The beta family contains the whole collection of works.  Where the two overlap, the readings are often rather different.

Alpha family

There are 6 early witnesses to the alpha family.  Two derive from a common lost ancestor: these are:

  • Amsterdam 73, 2nd quarter of the 9th century, written at Fleury (=A)
  • Paris lat. 5056, 11-12th century, written at Moissac (=Q)

The remaining four derive from another now lost ms: 

  • Paris lat. 5763, 1st quarter of the 9th century, French, later at Fleury (=B)
  • Vatican lat. 3864, 3rd quarter of the 9th century, written at Corbie (=M)
  • Florence, Laur. Ashb. 33, 10th century, possibly French (=S)
  • British Library Additional 10084, 11-12th century, probably from Gembloux (=L)

Some 75 mss later than the 9th century have been listed by Virginia Brown, who has classified them into groupings tentatively.

Beta family

The Klotz edition of 1950 used 8 mss, although at least 3 of these are now considered to be non-primary.  The five are:

  • Florence, Laur. 68.8, basically 10-11th century, probably Italian, once the property of Niccolo Niccoli (=W)
  • Vatican latinus 3324, 11-12th century, possibly French (=U)
  • Paris lat. 5764, 3rd quarter of the 11th century, French (=T)
  • Vienna 95, 1st quarter of the 12th century, probably from Trier (=V)

and apparently S above is also a member of this family (not sure how that works).  There is no agreement about how all these are related or to be classified.  Virginia Brown classified and eliminated 162 later mss of this family.  (I would imagine, myself, that the majority of these are 15th century, the sort of books being made in quantity in Italy on the eve of the invention of printing).

How the text travelled from the ‘correctores’ of late antiquity to the earliest manuscripts is not clear.  Brown argues that all our manuscripts derive from a single copy in a minuscule book hand.  One factor that must be considered is that the medieval authors who refer to Caesar (mostly French and German) refer only to the Bellum Gallicum.

It would be interesting to know what the “testimonia” are — the quotations of the text in antique authors.  But for that, I’d have to look further!

UPDATE: A search in Google Books on testimonia caesar brought up an edition here with quotations from Caesar’s lost works in Cicero, etc.  It’s an 1813 edition of Caesar’s works, with English notes, by a certain Thomas Clark.

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Syriac manuscript dated 1992 AD

Posted on by Roger Pearse

On Facebook, Adam McCollum of the Hill Monastic Manuscript Library posted an extraordinary snippet which I think deserves wider attention:

Yesterday I came across a Syriac manuscript written in 1992—yes, just 18 years ago—that was copied from an 1184/5 manuscript, i.e. a leap of eight centuries!

It’s a hagiographic ms containing the stories of Jacob of Nisibis, Ephrem, and Awgen. In addition to the 12th c. ms, it was compared (according to the colophon) with a ms. “apparently of the 15th generation of the Lord”.

It was copied at Dayr Al-Za’faran, where it remains, and the older copies were there, it seems, in 1992, but are so no longer.

Finally, believe it or not, the manuscript is written on the empty lines of a Turkish-English-German calendar book!

The ms date is given in the colophon in AD (and the calendar book itself is for 1992), and the date of the early exemplar is also given there as 1496 AG (= 1184/5 AD).

We must never disregard a manuscript simply on account of its age.  Who knows what it may be a copy of?

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All the classical MSS in Florence now online!

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Two posts at the Evangelical Textual Criticism blog here and here — neither makes it quite clear — have made me aware that the Laurentian library in Florence has put online a mass of manuscripts! ETC only refer to Greek New Testament mss, but I discover that in fact it is all the Plutei collection.

This is the core collection of classical manuscripts at the library.  The Biblioteca Medicea-Laurenziana, to give it its formal title, is the library of Lorenzo the Magnificent.  Florence was the home of the renaissance, the base of the rediscovery of the classics, and the great library of Nicolo Nicoli ended up in this collection.  There are treasures to be found there!

The opening words of manuscript M1 of Tacitus

Here are the two main Tacitus manuscripts.  M1 contains Annals 1-6, M2 contains Annals 11-16 plus the Histories.

Tertullian is also here, although the Conventi Soppressi collection is not included, which contains the most important manuscripts.

But a two volume copy of the Cluny Collection of his works is online:

Eusebius on the Psalms, in Greek?  Here.  Cicero, Seneca… they’re here.  In fact if you look at my digest of manuscripts of the Greek classics here, you will find that this collection contains Aelian and half a hundred others.

The search page is here:

http://teca.bmlonline.it/TecaRicerca/index.jsp

Just search for Tacitus, Tertullianus, Eusebius, and see what you get!

This is wonderful, wonderful news.  Suddenly it becomes possible for us all to consult these manuscripts.  Better still, you can download individual pages and do digital enhancement on them, if you need to.

Magic!  Well done the BML!

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