Claudian

Claudius Claudianus (c 370-c 404) belongs, along with Symmachus, Ausonius and Macrobius, to the last generation of "pagan" men of letters who resisted, in vain, the victory of Christianity in the dissolving western Roman Empire. (I've taken to writing "pagan" in quotation marks more and more often since I discovered that it originally was a disparaging adjective meaning something like "rustic" or "bumpkin," which, agree with them or not, was just about the last thing the four above-listed "pagans" were. Nor is it at all accurate in describing non-Christians of the period generally. Insult people if you must, but please, try to do it with at least some relation to reality.) 

 Born in Alexandria, Claudian abandoned his native language Greek in favor of Latin. Arriving in the West in the early 390's, he quickly made a name for himself with panegyrics, speeches praising powerful men. He soon won a high position at the court of the western Emperor Honorius, where he is assumed to lived until his death. 

The works of Claudius which survive to our time are mostly panegyrics favoring Honorius and Stilicho, who was the commander in chief of the armed forces and the effective ruler of the west in the stead of the feckless Emperor, and their allies, and invectives against their enemies. In addition we have some poems of his on mythological themes. One of the latter, the unfinished Raptus Proserpinae in three books, is by far the most well-known of his works, and won him a wide readership all throughout the Middle Ages. 

All agree that Claudian's verse is elegant and polished to a very high degree. Perhaps his most-praised quality as a poet is the intensity and unreserved expression of hatred and contempt in his invective, which has greatly entertained readers from his own time to ours.

John B Hall, in his 1985 Teubner edition of Claudian, lists 23 previous editions, from 1482 to 1933.

He also lists around 300 manuscripts of Claudian in that same 1985 edition, or, I believe, every single manuscript he was able to study. And he seems to have them all, or at the very least very, very many of them, in the apparatus criticus. This puzzles me. Does Hall completely reject stemmatics?

Stemmatics is the determination of which manuscripts were copied from which others. If it can be proven that manuscript B was copied from manuscript A, then, according to stemmatics, B may be disregard when making an edition of the text, unless A has been damaged and therefore lacks portions of the text which survive in B, or for some other extraordinary reason, such as B containing extremely good conjectures. There are some other ancient Latin authors of whose works hundreds of manuscripts survive, but typically, and editions of their works relies on a couple dozen or less, because of stemmatics.

I'll just cut right to the chase here: I don't know why Hall based his edition on all of the manuscripts. Maybe he doesn't believe that stemmatics is valid. Perhaps he doesn't believe that it can proven that one manuscript was copied from another. I don't know why someone would not believe that. If Hall or someone similarly-minded tried to explain it to me, I don't know whether I would understand. 

I do like big long comprehensive lists of manuscripts though, even if I don't not share the compiler's views on what the list is good for.