Classical and Medieval Latin

I've read a lot of disparaging comments about Medieval Latin lately -- "the average Dark Age scribe" this and "the average Dark Age scribe" that -- and instead of replying directly to one of these stern Ciceronians in some such snarky manner as: "Jeepers, you sure know a lot about Dark Age scribes! Could you cut and paste some especially bad examples of their bad Latin so that we may all together jeer at their ineptitude and utter disregard of vowel quantity?" I thought it might be better to express myself here, to my, hopefully somewhat better-disposed usual readership, and just to mention a few very basic things. 

 

First of all, although it's hard to imagine that any Latinists do not already know this, it may be helpful to remind ourselves that almost every single bit of the Classical Latin corpus which has survived to our time, survived because Medieval monks copied it. Medieval students were taught Latin, not just with the Vulgate (not that that would have been so terrible. Jerome could write), but also with Cicero and Caesar and Vergil, and with all of the other Classical authors. As hard as it seems to be for some to grasp, the Classical authors were copied in order to be taught. Classical Latin rotting on Medieval shelves was the exception, not the rule.

Secondly, something which seems quite obvious to me, but perhaps only because I've brooded upon the subject unusually long: the corpus of Classical Latin is very small. A few million words written by a few hundred authors. The amount of Medieval Latin preserved today is many times greater. The mediocre Classical authors have disappeared, the everyday Medieval schlubs have not. If we're going to compare Classical Latin with Medieval, we should compare like with like: the best Classical authors with the best Medieval authors. Livy with Matthew Paris. Ovid with Alcuin. Cicero with Abelard. But Paris, Alcuin and Abelard, of course, tend not to be read by those who insist that only ancient Latin is Latin at all, let along being the only Latin worth knowing about with the possible exception of a few Renaissance  Italian Ciceronians.

As far the average Medieval scribe is concerned, there is very little average ancient Latin left with which he could be compared: some scraps of papyrus from Oxyrhynchus, some graffiti on the walls of Vesuvius, some of the humbler of the ancient Latin inscriptions. Nothing which is conventionally counted in the Classical corpus.

I do hesitate to point this out, I feel I'm being a bit rude, but I feel I have little choice: those who disparage Medieval typically have not just read very little of it, and what little they have read, they have treated very unfairly by condemning it because it is different in style than Cicero. Very few people judge contemporary English, I believe, by firmly insisting that if it doesn't sound just exactly like Shakespeare, it's crap. It's also quite rare, I believe, to insist that that which is called 17th-, 18th-, 19th-, 20th or 21st-century English is not English at all, if it does not very closely resemble Shakespeare, and nevermind that Pope, Fielding, Wordsworth, Joyce and I had all read Shakespeare.

That would be to ignore the fact, if one had ever learned it all, that languages change.

I don't delude myself that I'm going to change the mind of a single Ciceronian, anti-Medievalist Latinist. And I certainly don't dispute that Classical Latin is wonderful and offers more than an entire career's worth of scope for study -- any more than any of those Medieval scribes would have disputed it, who copied it, and are the only reason we still have it. 

But perhaps I've given a smile to a Medieval Latinist or two, who, like me, grows a bit weary now and then of the way their field is denigrated by some.

Ammianus

Ammianus Marcellinus, ca 330-395, was a Roman soldier and historian. The 31 books of his Res Gestae originally covered Roman history in the period from AD 96 to 378. The first 13 books have been lost. Books 14-31 cover the period from 353 to 378. Some have speculated that originally there were an additional 5 books, 32-36.

Most of the surviving part of Ammianus' history describes Rome's armies defending the Empire's borders in great battles from Gaul to Persia. The passages describing the city of Rome portray it mostly as decadent and declining. The last surviving book, book 31, describes the Huns (before the birth of Attila) besieging Constantinople -- unsuccessfully. But with hindsight, the tone of the entire history is quite ominous. I cannot honestly say how much this is due to my knowing, as Ammianus did not know, that the city of Roman, and the western half of the Empire, was within a century of collapsing.

Ammianus saw himself as continuing the work of Tacitus, who wrote a history of Rome from the death of the Emperor Augustus, AD 14, to the death of the Emperor Domition in 96. Tacitus had seen himself as continuing the work of Livy, who wrote a history from the legendary beginnings of Rome until the time of Augustus. However, great portions of the work of all three authors have disappeared, so that we can no longer read this history of Rome in one continual sweep, from the end of the Trojan war until near the end of the Western Empire, as it was intended to be read. That could be done for probably only a couple of centuries, as it seems that it was in the late sixth century AD that large parts of these histories, along with much of the rest of Classical Latin literature, began to disappear, whether from the destruction of wars, or from indifference on the part of readers, or the decisions of scribes to copy this text and therefore not that one, or from the disdain of Christians for "pagan" accounts of history, or what have you.

Today, the text of Ammianus derives from the fragments of a 9th-century manuscript, M, another 9th-century manuscript, V, which has been shown to have been copied from M, and 14 manuscripts of the 15th century, all of which have been shown to be copies of V.

Few if any readers would place Ammianus in the same class as Livy and Tacitus as a writer. Livy and Tacitus are justly celebrated as great prose stylists. Latin was not Ammianus' first language, and it is therefore not surprising that his work is rarely praised on purely stylistic grounds. As a recorder of historical events, however, some have held him in very high esteem. For example, Edward Gibbon, who in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, when he reaches the point in his own narrative where Amminaus' history ends, says of him:

"It is not without the most sincere regret that I must now take leave of an accurate and faithful guide, who has composed the history of his own times without indulging the prejudices and passions which usually affect the mind of a contemporary."

Not everyone would agree with Gibbon that Ammianus is unusually unprejudiced, and, let's not dance around the issue, atheists tend to praise him more highly than Christians. Ammianus was not a Christian; seems to have put little stock into religion of any kind; served in the army under the Emperor Julian, who was the only non-Christian Emperor after Constantine the Great and has often been seen as a great monster by Christians and a great hero by atheists; has mostly high praise for Julian, but criticizes what he sees as the fanaticism in Julian's promotion of "pagan" (that is: traditional Roman polytheistic) religion. In short: however prejudiced Ammianus may have been, let's not pretend that the evaluation of Ammianus has been without religious prejudice. I won't pretend that I haven't been drawn to Ammianus to a great degree because of his non-Christian standpoint.

11 of the remaining 18 books of Ammianus' history are devoted to the exploits of the non-Christian Emperor Julian. Julian is often referred to, often sarcastically, as Ammaianus' hero. I think it's fair to say that Ammianus sees Julian as a hero, although I don't think that the sarcasm is necessary -- or effective, either, if you're trying to look like a serious critic of Ammianus and his view of history. As far as whether Gibbon was correct when he characterized Ammianus as unusually unprejudiced -- I think that would be much easier to judge if we could read the missing 13 books of his history, which cover the period between Ad 96 and 353. If Julian were praised in those 13 books, during the discussion of events centuries before his own birth, then I would find the accusations of prejudice more credible.

Searching for Lost Ancient Latin Texts

A great many Classical ancient Latin texts went missing in the middle of the Dark Ages; that is: until the late sixth or early seventh centuries, we have evidence that people still read them, and then we have no more evidence that they were familiar to anyone later than that, and they are still missing. So we need to scour the Dark Ages to learn more about how and when and where the texts disappeared from our present-day view. We must learn all we can about these Dark Age people who mention, or, in more fortunate cases, quote the now-missing texts. If the lost ancient texts are mentioned or quoted in letters, as is very often the case, we must learn all we can about the people to whom the letters were addressed.

Encyclopaediac works (that's our word for them today) written in the ancient world and Dark Ages are tresure-troves of these mentions and quotes: works by Flavius Maximus, Gellius, Octavian, Servius, Isidore. We must know these encyclopaediac works thoroughly for clues about what happened to those texts, when and where and how they went missing, to gain clues about where and how we might find then again.

It's assumed that many Classical Latin texts were lost in Dark Age wars, when Germanic tribes and Huns invaded the late Western Roman Empire and carved it up into empires of their own, Visigoth and Ostrogoth and Frankish and Lombard realms. We must know all we can about those wars, in order to imagine as exactly as possible what happened to those lost texts -- were they hidden from the invaders and their fire? Where would they be hidden? Are some of them still in those hiding places, having been lost track of by those who hid them?

We must shake off a prejudice toward thinking of these Germanic conquerors as illiterate; literacy rates may have decreased compared to those of the Roman Empire, but much scholarship was supported by Dark Age Goths and other tribes. They did not completely despise scholarship, far from it. Benedict, Cassidorius, Isidore, justly celebrated as preservers as ancient Latin literature, as bright lights in the darkness, they all thrived under the rule of these "barbarian" tribes.

We do not know for certain how much ancient literature was lost by the violence of Dark Age wars. We do know that many ancient manuscripts were re-used in the Dark and Middle Ages, the Classical works scraped off and Christian works written where they had been. We know this because we have found the Classical works on those ancient pieces of papyrus, we have found ways in which we can still read then even though they were scraped away so long ago. We can read the indentations left by the ancient pens, they're called palimpsests. We have found many of these ancient Latin palimpsests, we must find the rest!

This is not the only way in which ancient parchment was re-used; it was also made into a material called cartonnage, which resembles cardboard in appearance and hardness, and was used to make book covers and to wrap mummies. By methods which are far over my head, modern wizards have recovered many of the ancient texts preserved in these pieces of cartonnage. We must find the rest.

Vast amounts of of previously-lost ancient Greek texts are being re-discovered in ancient pieces of papyrus, and occasionally of parchment or other materials, in the Mideast, mostly in Egypt. Now and then among these bits and pieces, amongst vast amounts of ancient Greek, an ancient object written in some other language is found. We Latinists get lucky now and then this way.

Medieval Western European archives are full of records written in Latin; Medievalists are hurrying to preserve and record as much of it as they can, and are worried that much of the material, written on parchment, will rot away before they can get to it. They want more students to become Medievalists! Among these Latin records of the business of Medieval communities, here and there, now and then, all sort of others written artifacts turn up.

Ancient inscriptions keep being found. Most of them are not what we would call literature; rather, they are things like brief memorials on tombstones, and brief boasts of long-forgotten statesmen. But now and then they contain more.

And there are public libraries and private collections which contain manuscripts which have been very, very carefully searched through in some cases, and less thoroughly in others.

Please tell me what I've missed and what other places we can look for lost ancient Latin texts!

Wish List of New Discoveries of Ancient Texts

There's nothing at all realistic about this post. It's pure wishful thinking.

Trogus was highly regarded as an historian by his Augustan contemporaries, and yet, except for an epitome and a table of contacts, his work has disappeared. Why did the work of an esteemed historian vanish? Some say that's the wrong question, and perhaps they're right. They say the real question is,how did any ancient literature survive at all, all the way down to our own time?

As regular readers of my blog know, and as others can see by clicking here, I wish the missing books of Livy would be discovered. He wrote his history of Rome in 142 books, 35 survive, plus a few additional odds and ends. Livy's reputation as an historian has often risen and sunk. I believe it's risen recently, as some archaeological finds support his versions of various events. But Livy is still avidly read even by those who put no stock in him as an historian, because he's a good writer, who tells stories in a very engaging manner.

Texts by Livy as well as by many other ancient Latin authors disappeared in the late 6th century. It would be great if we found out that some people of that time had hidden collections of ancient Latin, just as, a fewer centuries earlier, some Gnostics and other Christian heretics had hidden their favorites texts, and if we were to stumble across some of those collections of the ancient Latins, as we've recently stumbled across some of those collections of early Christian writings. Other than stumbling across them, how can we find such collections of Latin texts mentioned and quoted until the late sixth century, and then no more? (How long was Petronius' Satyricon, all together?) You might as well ask me how exactly to go into a forest and find a unicorn.

Time has not been kind to ancient Phoenician manuscripts. We possess very little Phoenician literature today. On p 588 of The East Face of Helicon, Martin L. West fantasizes about coming across a corpus of ancient Phoenician the size of the Old Testament. Why stop there? Imagine a mighty chest, longer than a small canoe and fat as a keg, so well-built by the best and proudest of Phoenician Carthage's craftsmen that it preserved almost immaculately the hoard of the choicest Phoenician literature on papyrus and parchment with which it was stuffed to the brim, then to be hidden from the Roman fires, hidden until our own time... I mean, it'd be nice to get the other side of the story of that conflict, wouldn't it? Round things out a bit, it might. Not to mention the many centuries' worth of an entire civilization's poetry, history, science...

I don't wish so intensely for more and more and still more finds of ancient papyri of the Bible and other Early Christian texts, but that's okay, there are many others fervently wishing that in my stead. It would be nice to have the entire collected works of the Classical Greek tragedians, and more than just fragments of the pre-Socratics, and every lecture Aristotle ever delivered.

I don't know enough yet about the Hittites, Babylonians, Assyrians or ancient Persions to even know what more to wish for from them. And as far as the rest of the world, let me put it this way: my first introduction to Lao Tzu and the Tao is about a week old. I'm reeling from that. (In a good way. A very good way.) I'd never, ever before seriously asked myself: can I learn to read Chinese? Anyway, to return to the theme of this post: I don't know enough about any ancient literature other than Latin and Greek to know of any lost writings to specifically long for. The Vedas? I don't know much more than the name. When did the Japanese begin writing? Beats me.

Please feel free to mention your own wishes.

Ancient References to the Lost Books of Livy

Livy, born 53 BC, died AD 17, wrote a history of Rome in 142 books. (These books were shorter than what we generally think of as books. Think books of the Bible instead. Back then, the term referred to the amount of writing which fit into a scroll.)

Of those 142 books, 35 have survived to our day: books 1-10 and 21-45. But we know a lot about what was written in the other 107 books: there is an anonymous 4th-century abridgment of 140 of the 142 books (136 & 137 are missing) referred to as the periochae of Livy. Altogether the periochae are about as long as one of Livy's books. Another anonymous abridgment, of books 37-40 (still extant in the entire form) and 48-55 (lost) was found at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt, and published in volume IV of the Oxyrhynchus Papryri in 1904. In addition, Julius Obsequens, who probably lived in the 3rd century AD, compiled a book of prodigies, or, as we might say, of wonders -- droughts, storms, ecplipses, swarms of bees, unexplained things seen in the sky, etc -- taken from Livy's history.

Also, the works of history written by Aurelius Victor, Florus and Eutropius consist to a great degree of abridgments of Livy.

In addition, there are fragments of Livy: a 1000-word passage from book 91 found in a 5th century palimpsest of a manuscript in the Vatican library in the 18th century; a piece of parchment containing a few words from book 11, written in the 5th century, found in the Fayum in Egypt in the 1980's.

Quintus Aurelius Symmachus, in a famous letter from AD 401, says that his household is busily editing the whole of Livy's work.

And then there are the fragments which are the subject of this post: quotes from or other references to the lost books of Livy in the works of other authors, from the 1st to the 6th century AD. I have been able to identify the following references. Perhaps there are more. Perhaps some of these are spurious. In addition to these, I have found numerous references to the lost books in scholia (notes written inn the margins of manuscripts), for which I have as yet been able to determine neither an author not a date.

Servius, in the commentary on Vergil he wrote in the 4th century, refers to Livy's books 12, 13, 16, 19, 94, 99, 116, and 6 times to book 136.

Priscian, a 6th-century grammarian, refers to books 14, 17, 56, 112 (twice), and to 113, 118 and 136.

Censorius, a 3rd-century grammarian, refers to books 19 and 49.

Plutarch, in works written in Greek which cover some of the same ground as Livy, refers to books 77, 98 (twice), 111 and 116.

Valerius Maximus refers to book 18.

Augustine of Hippo refers to books 77 and 78.

Frontinus (c30-104) in his book on military strategy, refers to books 91 and 97.

Bishop Agrocius of Sens (5th cent) refers to book 102.

Josephus refers to book 102 in Antiquities of the Jews.

Serenus Sammonicus (d 212), in his book Res reconditae, refers to book 103.

Tacitus refers to book 105.

Jordanus (active mid-6th century) refers to book 105.)

Orosius (375 -- after 418) refers twice to book 109.

Appian refers to book 114.

Jerome refers to book 114.

Seneca refers to book 116 and 3 times to book 136.

Pliny the Elder refers twice to book 136.

Pope Gelasius refers to book 136 in AD 496.

Nonius Marcellus, writing in the 4th or 5th century, refers twice to book 136.

Quintilian refers twice to book 136.

The number of late citations by authors with connections to Africa is striking. (Pope Gelasius, for example, was a Berber.)

Gregory the Great and Classical Latin

A number of years ago, when I was even more obviously a layman when it comes to Classical Studies than I am now, I and a prominent Classical scholar exchanged a number of emails. He very generously took the time to answer various questions I had about the transmission of Classical Latin literature. He answered every one of my emails thoroughly and with amazing promptness. I am even more amazed now by his generosity towards me than I was at the time, because now I know somewhat more about the enormous amount of work this man has done in finding, reading, editing and commenting upon manuscripts of ancient Latin. He wasn't just sitting around with nothing to do when I, a nobody, contacted him.

One of my questions I posed to this scholar concerned the authority of the suggestion by Oxford professor Albert C Clark, in his 1921 paper "The Reappearance of the Texts of the Classics," that Gregory the Great, Pope from 590 to 604, had "burnt all manuscripts of Livy which he could find." My correspondent said that he was aware of Prof Clark's assertion and flatly rejected it as being an anecdote without any evidence, and added that he was an atheist, so he wasn't grinding an ax. Which surprised me a little, since I hadn't written a word about Christian belief or atheism or ax-grinding. It surprises me a little less now, since in the intervening years I have experienced a tremendous amount of ax-grinding on the part of apologists and atheists on the subject of how, how much and why Classical Latin declined during the Dark Ages. (By "Dark Ages" I -- and many others -- mean the period between the fall of the Roman Empire in the late fifth century AD, and the rise of Charlemagne's Empire around AD 800.)

The earliest reference I have yet been able to find to Gregory's deliberate destruction of manuscripts of Livy was written by William of Malmesbury, over 500 years after Gregory's death. [PS, 29 Mar 2018: Perhaps eventually I will learn not to trust my memory, but to check and be certain before claiming that So-and-so wrote such-and-such. It seems that William wrote no such thing, and that his contemporary, John of Salisbury, wrote that Gregory burned some pagan books, but with no mention of Livy. See the comments below. My apologies. The search continues for where Prof Clark may have gotten the idea that Gregory burned manuscripts of Livy.] I don't find that length of time, in and of itself, to be a convincing reason to reject William's report: Gregory was a tremendously powerful figure, tremendously well-respected all over the Catholic world long after his death, certainly still in William's time, and it would have been dangerous to publicly say scandalous things about him, but that doesn't mean that things could not have been privately, and accurately, said. More convincing evidence against the burning than those 500 years, it seems to me, is how expensive parchment was in the Dark Ages, and how widespread the practice of palimpsesting: the earlier pagan text was scraped off of the parchment, and a Christian text written in its place. The pagan text was just as thoroughly gone as if it had been burned, or so the palimpsester would've thought at the time. But they were wrong. Since the late 18th century, with the aid of various modern technologies, we have been able to recover some of those palimpsested pagan texts, reading them just from the indentations they left behind.

2 of the 8 manuscripts of Livy written before Gregory's time which are known to still exist survive only as palimpsests. One of these, now preserved as Biblioteca Capitolare XL (38) in Verona,

was overwritten with a text by Gregory. This can be shrugged off as a hilarious coincidence -- but should it be?

The fact is that many Classical Latin texts, including the approximately 3/4 of Livy's huge long history of Rome which we don't have today, began to disappear in the late 6th century. How do we know this? Because those Classical texts were quoted up until the late 6th century, and then not later, ever -- unless they miraculously appeared later, like the other palimpsest of Livy, Palatinus Lat. 24 in the Vatican Library, which was found, in the late 18th century, to contain a palimpsest of a 1000-word-long passage from book 91 of Livy, a passage which no-one had seen in a very, very long time.

Okay, so a lot of ancient Latin literature went missing during the same time that Gregory was rising toward the Papacy -- should we therefore assume that it went missing because of Gregory?

Yes! We shouldn't paint Christians of the period with a broad brush. It is known that some of them supported the preservation of Classical literature and that some of them did not. It is known that Gregory did not -- and that he was by far the most powerful man of his time in Catholic Christendom, the entire area where Latin was the primary written language. He is only one of 3 Popes to have been called "the Great," and I'll bet most of you can't name either of the other 2. It was he who came up with the 7 Deadly Sins. He thought volcanoes were Hell overflowing because it was so full of damned souls, and that the End was Near. He was sainted immediately after his death by popular acclaim. When a man had that much influence and disapproved of the Latin Classics, it's no more than common sense to assume that he had a lot to do with the way that they disappeared en masse on his watch, and to ask that the burden of prove be placed on those attempting to demonstrate that he did not.

Apologists will snort and laugh at my claim that Gregory caused much of the literary legacy of ancient Rome to disappear. They will accuse me of painting with a broad brush, despite my having said that some Dark Age Christians helped to preserve Classical Latin. Benedict of Nursia and Cassiodorus are 2 great examples. They themselves, the apologists, will paint with a broad brush, such as when they claim that every time that non-Christians waged war in the Dark Ages, it meant the wholesale destruction of written material including the Classics, and that every time Christians of the same period waged war, it did not.

As in every case of historical controversy, I advise those who really want to know to turn to the primary sources.

I'm angry, angry at Gregory, and I'm not bothering to try to hide it. Does this mean that I'm grinding an ax, or that I'm considering things which would make any reasonable person angry?

How Many Manuscripts of Livy Are There? About 473

This was so much easier than counting up the manuscripts of Vergil, which I don't seem to be anywhere close to finished doing.

Actually, Marielle de Franchis counted them up for me, in Chapter 1, "Livian Manuscript Tradition," of the Blackwell Companion to Livy, which was published in 2015, and a copy of which arrived for me via inter-library loan today.



Franchis mentions on p 5 "all the manuscripts of the First Decade (about 200) available today." 1 manuscript of a fragment of the Second Decade was found at Oxyrhynchus. On p 9, Franchis writes that "More than 170 manuscripts that transmitted the Third Decade between the fifth and the fifteenth cantury are still extant." On p 14, she tells us that the Forth Decade "has survived in about 100 manuscripts." There is 1 manuscript of the Fifth Decade containing books 41-45, and 1 containing a fragment of the Tenth Decade.

200 + 1 +170 + 100 + 1 + 1 = 473. The number is more likely to rise than to fall. By how much? I don't know.

I have admitted on this blog that I hope that many more missing parts of Livy's text will be discovered, and that I am aware that such hopes often make people chuckle who are much more learned on the subject of Livy than I. How much more learned? Well, for example, I have read Professor Michael Reeve's article "The Vetus Carnotensis of Livy Unmasked," in Studies in Latin Literature and its Tradition in Honour of C. O. Brink, ed Diggle, Hall & Jocelyn (1989), which Reeve wrote in my native language, English, read it several times, with the greatest interest, and I still am very far from comprehending its content.



So understand that my opinions on such matters, when they are not supported by citations of professionals, are decidedly amateur. My opinion that study of 6th-century Europe made lead to great discoveries of currently-missing parts of Livy's text? Amateur. I wouldn't be at all surprised if it would make the experts chuckle.

I think that they would be somewhat less inclined to chuckle (It doesn't hurt my feelings when they chuckle. Really, it doesn't) when I say that the number of manuscripts of Livy will rise from about 473, although the manuscripts added to the list will mostly (Here they may chuckle again, because I said "mostly" in stead of "all." It's okay) contain text currently known.

Faithful readers of this blog may have noticed that I've written a lot about the transmission of Livy's text, and almost nothing about the text itself. They may be thinking, "Heck, Steve -- what's so great about Livy anyhow?!" I may eventually write some answers to that question. I really do think that Livy is great: a wonderful writer who tells exciting stories, and occasionally underrated as an historian -- but even those who have called him worthless as an historian have agreed that he gives you a great read.

I Thought I Was Picking Up S P Oakley's Commentary On Livy Books VI-X

I thought that was what I had ordered via inter-library loan. However, what I picked up from the local branch of the public library was Volume I of that commentary,



published in 1997, containing an introduction to all 5 books, VI-X, and Oakley's commentary on book VI. I had assumed that Oakley's commentary on all 5 books, VI-X, would be contained in one, medium sized, volume. The Preface to volume I begins with Oakley saying that volume II, covering books VII-VIII, was already in the press (it appeared in 1999), and that volume III would cover books IX-X. Actually, volume III, published in 2007, covered book IX, and there was a volume IV, published in 2009, for book X.

The volume before us, volume I, is not medium-sized, it is large, over 800 pages. Over 300 of those pages contain the introduction to all 5 books, VI-X, and less than 350 contain the actual commentary to book VI, which is proceeded by 50 pages of historical introduction to book VI (distinct from those 300 pages of general introduction to books VI-X) and followed by appendices, a bibliography and indices.

I know that my habit of posting about books which I have just gotten and haven't read yet must be maddening to some of my readers, who expect a review of an entire book which I have already read. In my defense I will just say that there are critics who are paid, quite handsomely paid in some cases, to deliver reviews of books which they have read, and who publish things which pretend to be such reviews, but they haven't actually read the books yet, and, quite unlike me, probably never will.

You want me to provide evidence for this bold and slanderous statement? This book,



an heroic act of public service, is an excellent place to start collecting that evidence. (And yes, I've read it cover to cover.)

I'm sure that the dry tone of this post so far has not adequately conveyed it, but I am excited to have before me this vol I of Oakley's commentary. I'm especially looking forward to an exhaustive discussion of the manuscripts of books VI-X, which covers well over half of those 300 pages of general introduction. (I quote from p 153: "There are at least 195 mss of L's first decade.") (Livy's "first decade" is books 1-10, i to X, of the 142 books of his history of Rome.) (Of those 195, "twenty-four predate the thirteenth century." ibid.) To those who share my inclinations, I know I don't have to explain this excitement. To those who don't, I don't know how to explain it. Maybe some lay readers of my blog have gradually come to share my interest in manuscripts of ancient Latin texts, if they've read many or all of my numerous posts on the subject. Maybe not. (The bibliography cites 8 items by Billanovich and 11 by Reeve! Yay!)

It's amazing to me how recent it was that such commentaries held no interest for me, even though I was very interested in Livy. It was simple ignorance: I had no idea, really, what such commentaries are.

Livy, Ab Urbe Condita 2.45

Consules quoque Romani nihil praeterea aliud quam suas vires, sua arma horrebant; memoria pessimi proximo bello exempli terrebat ne rem committerent eo ubi duae simul acies timendae essent. Itaque castris se tenebant, tam ancipiti periculo aversi: diem tempusque forsitan ipsum leniturum iras sanitatemque animis allaturum. Veiens hostis Etruscique eo magis praepropere agere; lacessere ad pugnam primo obequitando castris provocandoque, postremo ut nihil movebant, qua consules ipsos, qua exercitum increpando: simulationem intestinae discordiae remedium timoris inventum, et consules magis non confidere quam non credere suis militibus; novum seditionis genus, silentium otiumque inter armatos. Ad haec in novitatem generis originisque qua falsa, qua vera iacere. Haec cum sub ipso vallo portisque streperent, haud aegre consules pati; at imperitae multitudini nunc indignatio, nunc pudor pectora versare et ab intestinis avertere malis; nolle inultos hostes, nolle successum non patribus, non consulibus; externa et domestica odia certare in animis. Tandem superant externa; adeo superbe insolenterque hostis eludebat. Frequentes in praetorium conveniunt; poscunt pugnam, postulant ut signum detur. Consules velut deliberabundi capita conferunt, diu conloquuntur. Pugnare cupiebant, sed retro revocanda et abdenda cupiditas erat, ut adversando remorandoque incitato semel militi adderent impetum. Redditur responsum immaturam rem agi; nondum tempus pugnae esse; castris se tenerent. Edicunt inde ut abstineant pugna; si quis iniussu pugnaverit, ut in hostem animadversuros. Ita dimissis, quo minus consules velle credunt, crescit ardor pugnandi. Accendunt insuper hostes ferocius multo, ut statuisse non pugnare consules cognitum est: quippe impune se insultaturos; non credi militi arma; rem ad ultimum seditionis erupturam, finemque venisse Romano imperio. His freti occursant portis, ingerunt probra; aegre abstinent quin castra oppugnent. Enimvero non ultra contumeliam pati Romanus posse; totis castris undique ad consules curritur; non iam sensim, ut ante, per centurionum principes postulant, sed passim omnes clamoribus agunt. Matura res erat; tergiversantur tamen. Fabius deinde ad crescentem tumultum iam metu seditionis collega concedente, cum silentium classico fecisset: "Ego istos, Cn. Manli, posse vincere scio: velle ne scirem, ipsi fecerunt. Itaque certum est non dare signum nisi victores se redituros ex hac pugna iurant. Consulem Romanum miles semel in acie fefellit: deos nunquam fallet." Centurio erat M. Flavoleius, inter primores pugnae flagitator. "Victor" inquit, "M. Fabi, revertar ex acie"; si fallat, Iovem patrem Gradivumque Martem aliosque iratos invocat deos. Idem deinceps omnis exercitus in se quisque iurat. Iuratis datur signum; arma capiunt; eunt in pugnam irarum speique pleni. Nunc iubent Etruscos probra iacere, nunc armati sibi quisque lingua promptum hostem offerri. Omnium illo die, qua plebis, qua patrum, eximia virtus fuit; Fabium nomen maxime enituit; multis civilibus certaminibus infensos plebis animos illa pugna sibi reconciliare statuunt.

An Epitome Of Livy: Oxyrhynchus Papyrus 668, Published In 1904

Beginning in 1897, a huge number of papyri were found in the ancient garbage dumps outside of where the city of Oxyrhynchus, Egypt had stood. Written on these papyri were passages from the Bible, apocryphal Gospels, Classical Greek literature both known to the modern world and hitherto lost, legal and official and business documents and private letters and other things. Over 5000 of these papyri have been published so far, but that's still just a tiny fraction of what was dug up. (Some sources give the total number of Oxyrhynchus papyri at 500,000, some 1 million, so for now I'm just going to stick with "only a tiny fraction have been published so far." I also can't tell you how many papyri, if any, have been excavated after the period between 1897 and 1903, although I want very much to be able to tell you. I'll keep researching.) Volume 1 of The Oxyrhynchus Papyri was published in 1898, and volume 82 was published in 2016, and there are many more volumes still to come.

One of the biggest-selling of those 82 volumes is volume 4, published in 1904.



And by far the biggest reason for the interest in volume 4 are the first 2 papyri in the volume, P. Oxy 654 and 655, which Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt, the Oxford archaeologists who discovered the Oxyrhynchus garbage dumps full of history-changing papyri and who edited volume 4, named "New Sayings of Jesus" and "fragment of a lost Gospel," respectively. In the 1940's a Coptic manuscript found at Nag Hammadi was discovered to have come from the same Greek text as these two papyri and P. Oxy 1, the first papyrus in The Oxyrhynchus Papyri, volume 1, and now all of the text which has been discovered and put together is known collectively as the Gospel of Thomas.

And there truly is no shortage of web pages, websites, books, TV shows and other things devoted to the Gospel of Thomas.

But I came here today to talk about another papyrus in volume 4: P. Oxy 668, an epitome of Livy, books 37-45 and 48-55. This papyrus is transcribed and discussed on pages 90-116, as well as a part of it being shown in a photograph in Plate VI at the back of the volume.

Perhaps some of you are asking: what is an epitome of Livy, books 37-45 and 48-55, and why should I care about it? Livy is the common English name of the Roman historian Titus Livius, who lived from 59 BC to AD 17, and wrote a history of Rome from its mythical beginnings to the end of the reign of the Emperor Augustus in AD 14.

There has been quite a lot of discussion of and controversy over Livy's reliability and worth as an historian. There is general agreement that he wrote very well, that his works are tremendously enjoyable and exciting to read, whether they deliver a high degree of historical value or not. I personally tend to think somewhat more highly of Livy the historian than some others do. But it must be understood that the rules for writing history were much different in ancient Rome than they are today. Much of Livy is what we would refer to as historical fiction rather than history -- when, for example, Livy puts long speeches into the mouths of people when it is clear that, whatever they said, Livy had no word-for-word record of it. Still, I think it's very important to keep in mind that some of what is written and marketed in our modern age as historical fiction -- Lion Feuchtwanger and Gore Vidal come to mind -- contains more solid reliable information about history, and far fewer egregious historical errors, than much which claims to be nonfictional historical writing.

Livy's history, commonly referred to as ab urbe condita, contained 142 books. "Books" here means much the same as the books of the Bible: a piece of writing which would fit onto a scroll. However, only 35 of those 142 books are known to us today -- books 1-10 and 21-45 -- plus a few fragments and condensations. Altogether, the text of those 35 books and the other surviving scraps add up to a text about as long as that of the canonical Bible, Old plus New Testament, since it seems that all 142 books were similar in length, what we have appears to be about 1/4 of the original work.

An epitome is a short condensed version of a text. Books 48-55 in their complete form, covering topics having to do with the Roman Republic in the mid-2nd century BC, such as the third and final Punic War, topics about which we truly do not have an overabundance of information -- Ah say Ah Say, books 48-55 are at large today, which is the biggest reason why Oxyrhynchus Papyrus 668 is such a big deal. A condensation like this misses a lot of the grand writing style of the original, but still contains many priceless bits of information which can be compared with the few other known bits of historical writing about the time and place. But this great historical value is far from the only reason why this manuscript is important. The manuscript was made in the 3rd century, and any manuscript at all which is that old is of great value because of its age alone. And a 3rd-century Latin manuscript even more so than a Greek one, because, since discoveries at Oxyrhynchus and elsewhere, ancient Greek manuscripts are suddenly much less rare than they were 200 years ago. (In Classical Studies 200 years is sudden.) The great majority of the papyri found at Oxyrhynchus are written in Greek. It's always nice for those of us who specialize in Latin, although we too are mightily excited about all of the Greek manuscripts, when a Latin papyrus like this one is found among the Greek ones. Ancient Oxyrhynchus was in a time and place dominated by writing in Greek. It's just about inconceivable that a comparatively huge collection of ancient mostly-Latin manuscripts will ever be found in one place -- inconceivable even by me, and I daydream very recklessly, believe me. Besides Oxyrhynchus, some other, smaller collections of ancient manuscripts have been found in Egypt: for example, at the above-mentioned Nag Hammadi, and also at Fayum. What these Egyptian sites have in common is the Nile, which provided enough water to sustain cities, but was close enough to regions which were arid enough that papyri, and also some pieces of parchment, could be buried in the ground and left there for thousands of years without being rotted away by moisture, or eaten by little crawling things kept alive by the same moisture.

There is no Nile in the middle of a desert where the main written language was Latin, and that is why there could be no Latin Oxyrhynchus laying around waiting to be excavated, full of ancient Latin manuscripts. There could be huge discoveries of ancient Latin manuscripts, but because of climate, as several papyrologists finally managed very patiently to explain to me, those discoveries would have to be of some different nature.

Ancient Manuscripts Of Livy

The Wikipedia articles on Livy and on ab urbe condita (the Latin title of Livy's history) are both, just -- horrible messes. It would be better if they had neither article in any form. They very well illustrate what can go wrong on Wiki, or any reference work where no-one is in charge.

It's possible -- although not bloody likely in my opinion -- that both articles could be completely transformed and in exemplary shape by the time I finished writing this paragraph. And then a half hour later than that they could be worse than ever. Because no-one is in charge.

Just now I googled ancient manuscripts of livy and the search yielded hundreds of thousands of results and no useful ones on the first page. So I googled "ancient manuscripts of livy," which yielded 4 results, 2 from the same book which was written so long ago that the s's look like f's, and was not primarily about Livy and which didn't look particularly interesting. One of the other results was from another pseudo-authority, another one of these Internet sites which claims to have answers but where no one is in charge. I think it may have been About.com.

I remember distinctly reading in the Google result for that page: "There are, I believe, no ancient manuscripts of Livy[...]"

And that's why I'm here. I have no idea how someone who felt justified in answering a question on the topic in a public place could have gotten the idea that there are no ancient manuscripts of Livy.

First of all, let's define the term "ancient." When it comes to manuscripts of Latin literature, anything copied out before AD 500 is considered ancient. 5th century or earlier. And "manuscript" refers to a copy of a text of any length, from a few words to a huge volume of small print.

I am aware of 7 manuscripts of Livy from the 5th century or earlier. I believe that is more than for any other Latin author except Cicero and Vergil -- but I could be wrong. If you need to know for sure, ask an expert -- and that ain't me, and it sure as Hell ain't Wiki or Ask.com. 7 is definitely more ancient manuscripts than there are of Jerome's Vulgate -- and many less than we have either of the Greek New Testament or the Hebrew Old Testament.

These 7 ancient manuscripts of Livy are:

Pap Ox xi 1379, a 4th-century papyrus discovered at Oxyrhynchus containing several dozen words from book 1 of ab urbe condita.

The manuscript called V for short when discussing manuscripts of the first 10 books of Livy: Bibliothecae capitularis Veronensis xl (38), 5th century, containing parts of books 3 and 4.

A 5th-century fragment (for which at the moment I cannot find a standard abbreviation or library catalogue listing) containing about 40 words from book 11, on parchment, not papyrus, found in 1986, in Naqlun, near Fayum, Egypt. The text reads: [------ .e(m) [----- ing]ens [ei era]nt ha[u]t pro[cul G]abiis [u]rbe. cu[m] [Ga]uios nouos exer[cit]us indictus [e]sset ibique centuriati milites essent, cum duob(us)milib(us) pe[ {.} ]ditum profect[u]s in agru(m) suom cons[ul?] and g[-------] ar[------] se[d] reaps[a nega]tam eo [[e]]dicto f[acturum] quoa[d inuissu suo in pr[ovi(n)-] cia maneat, et [si] pergat dicto non parar[e], \[s]e/ [i]n praese(n)tem habiturum imper[i]um. Fabius, [acc]eptus mandatis-----] That is all that we currently have of text of books 11-20.

P, also called Codex Puteanus, or Bibliothecae Nationalis Parisiensis, Lat 5730, 5th century, containing books 21-30 with a few passages missing.

F, also called Fragmenta Placentina, or Bibl Pub Bamb, Class 35a, 5th century, containing parts of books 33-36 and 39.

V, or Codex Vindobonensis, or Bibl Nat Lat 15, 5th century, containing books 41-45 except for a few missing passages. This is currently our only source for books 41-15.

A 5th-century fragment containing about 1000 words from book 91. Currently our only known manuscript of Livy past book 45. I can't find a standard abbreviation or library catalogue info for this fragment. The only place I know where you can read this passage is in Weissenborn's edition of books 41-45 published by Teubner a long time ago. My copy is updated by Mueller and published in 1930. The later Teubner edition of books 41-45 by Briscoe does not contain any fragments of other books.

Some further information: "Codex Vindobonensis" just means "volume from Vienna." Many manuscripts are called Codex Vindobonensis, the one on the list above is meant only when the conversation is about Livy's manuscripts. Same with "Codex Puteanus," which means "volume from Dupuy." Claude Dupuy was a 16th-century Parisian lawyer who assembled a great collection of books, most or all of which are now in the Bibliothèque Nationale, each one called Codex Puteanus, a phrase which distinguishes this Livy manuscript from other Livy manuscripts but is no help in distinguishing the books which once were Claude Dupuy's from one another.

The Historical Jesus And The Absence Of Contemporary Writing About Him

This is to a certain extent a re-hashing of things I've already written in this blog: in this post, for example, which is just a summary of the Cambridge Ancient History, 1st ed, vol X: The Augustan Empire, 44BC -- AD70 4th, corrected printing, 19666, pp 866-876. Perhaps I've done a poor job of explaining this. (Perhaps I've done a magnificent job, and no-one has paid any attention. Yeah. That sounds more like it.) Oh well, once more into the breech:

THERE IS NOTHING STRANGE ABOUT OUR HAVING NO CONTEMPORARY WRITING ABOUT JESUS, BECAUSE WE HAVE ALMOST NO WRITING AT ALL FROM THAT TIME AND PLACE. SORRY ABOUT SHOUTING LIKE THIS, BUT IT'S REALLY CRUCIAL FOR ME TO GET THIS POINT ACROSS.. Contemporary observers may have written a great deal about Jesus, if he existed. It seems to me that if he existed, whatever else he may have been, he probably was pretty interesting.

But that's not the point, because however much was written about him by eyewitnesses, that's exactly how much has gone missing in the meantime. If 5 eyewitness accounts were written about Jesus, then that's how many eyewitness accounts of him have gone missing: 5. If 4,386 eyewitness accounts were written about him, then exactly 4,386 such accounts are now unknown to us.

And there's nothing suspicious about all of those accounts having gone missing, because almost everything written in Galilee and Judea during Jesus' lifetime has gone missing. Almost everything written by anyone about anyone or anything. The only exception I know is the Pilate Stone. Here's the entire text carved into that stone which has not eroded away over 19 centuries:

TIBERIEUM (...) TIUS (...) ECTUS IUDA (...)

And there's nothing at all suspicious about so little written material having survived from that time and place, when you look at how little writing has survived from the entire Roman Empire (see linked blog post above).

Let's take the example of Livy, hands-down the most highly-regarded historian among the ancient Romans. In scarcely any other time and place on Earth has an a historian been so universally well-respected as Livy was by his contemporaries. He wrote a long history of Rome, 4 times longer than the Bible, including both the Old and New Testaments. It covered Rome from the legends of its beginnings up until 9 BC. About 1/4 of that work is now known to us. I and a few other wild-eyed crackpots dream of finding the other 3/4. You know how much of it has been dug up in the past 200 years? This much:

[------ .e(m) [----- ing]ens [ei era]nt ha[u]t pro[cul G]abiis [u]rbe. cu[m] [Ga]uios nouos exer[cit]us indictus [e]sset ibique centuriati milites essent, cum duob(us)milib(us) pe[ {.} ]ditum profect[u]s in agru(m) suom cons[ul?] and g[-------] ar[------] se[d] reaps[a nega]tam eo [[e]]dicto f[acturum] quoa[d inuissu suo in pr[ovi(n)-] cia maneat, et [si] pergat dicto non parar[e], \[s]e/ [i]n praese(n)tem habiturum imper[i]um. Fabius, [acc]eptus mandatis-----]

You're welcome. (The parts in parentheses are guesses where the text -- on parchment in this case -- is hard to read or gone altogether.)

How many of the authors of the Roman Empire wrote things which we now don't have? The answer to that is easy: all of them. Every single one. Julius Caesar, Vergil, Ovid, Tacitus, Horace, Plautus -- all of them. In many cases, we have lost everything except their names, mentioned by other authors, but even that much is sometimes very important to our understanding of the history of the Roman Empire, because that's how little we have to work with. (See linked blog post above again.)

That's the state of the remains of the writings of the authors the Romans cared about most. Authors who lived in or close to the city of Rome. They didn't care much about Galilee and Judea, which makes it less suspicious that anything written there during Jesus' lifetime has survived (except the Pilate Stone).

Another thing which makes it much less suspicious still is that the Romans crushed a rebellion in Jerusalem in AD 70 and destroyed the Temple, the center of life for many people in the city, and the center of writing. There probably was quite a bit of interesting written material in Jerusalem in AD 69 which was already gone forever by AD 71.

People talk about the written records of the trial of Jesus. I don't know how many official written records of trials the ancient Romans kept. I do know how many such records we have today -- none. Not just none of Jesus' trial, not just none of any trials in Jerusalem -- none of any ancient Roman trials, period. And that's why it's not suspicious that we don't have any official written records of Jesus' trial. Okay? So can we please finally just move on about that one? (Yeah, I'm acting like people have read this post all the way to the end. I'm a cra-zeee dreamer!) (I must mention again that I used to be one of those people who prattled on about "detailed official Roman records," before I got a clue. I'm sincerely sorry about that. Even back then, some people assumed that I knew what I was talking about.)

IF YOU WANT TO LEARN ABOUT ANCIENT HISTORY, THE CAMBRIDGE ANCIENT HISTORY (1ST EDITION, 12 VOLUMES, OR 2ND EDITION, 14 VOLUMES) IS AN EXCELLENT PLACE TO START!

Numbers Of Manuscripts Of Some Classical Authors

This in no way resembles any sort of comprehensive list of all known Classical manuscripts. I wish such a list had been gathered conveniently between book covers, and I could just refer you to the title and ISBN.

Maybe such a list exists. I haven't found it yet. What I have found is some running totals of the numbers of manuscripts known for this or that author. I've found some of these figures in volumes I've had for a while. They've often been hiding in plain sight in the footnotes, where I only recently thought to look.

In A Companion to Homer, ed by Wace and Stubbings, London: MacMillan, 1962, on p 229, in the footnotes to JA Davison's chapter "The Transmission of the Text," we learn that TW Allen had listed 190 medieval and post-medieval manuscripts of the Iliad in his 1931 edition, including 7 which also include the Odyssey, that Allen had listed 75 manuscripts of the Odyssey in volume V of the Papers of the British School at Rome, including those 7 already mentioned, for a total of 258 medieval and post-medieval manuscripts of Homer. Davison' notes also mention ancient manuscripts of Homer listed in RA Pack, Greek and Latin Litrerary Texts from Graeco-Roman Egypt, published in 1952: 381 manuscripts of the Iliad and 111 for the Odyssey. That adds up to a nice round total of 750 manuscripts of Homer. Davison points out that these figures do not include quotations of Homer in the works of other authors, nor indirect sources.

And remember, this was in 1962. I would imagine that more Homeric manuscripts have come to light since then. How many more? I dunno. Can I provide an example of even one specific discovery made since 1962? Strangely, I cannot. There's a ton of stuff online about Homeric manuscripts in general and Homeric papyri in particular, and from my personal point of view, none of it is user-friendly.



In Die Platonhandschriften Und Ihre Gegenseitigen Beziehungen by Martin Wohlrab, published in 1887 in Leipzig by Teubner, page 643, Wohlrab says that his survey includes 147 manuscripts. (This Teubner volume is a reprint from an academic journal, and begins on page 643.) Also on p 643 Wohlrab said that surely many more manuscripts of Plato would be found. This was before the Oxyrhynchus excavations began. How many papyrii of Plato have been found at Oxyrhynchus? And down the road at Fayum? I dunno. Lots, I would imagine. But Wohlrab was talking about manuscripts laying around in libraries which hadn't yet been catalogued. Was he right, in the 1880, when he predicted that many more manuscripts of Plato would be found in libraries? I dunno. I would guess he was right.



In Texts and Transmission, ed by LD Reynolds, Oxford, 1983, on page xxvii, Reynolds counts up some surviving manuscripts of Sallust: 2 from the 9th century, 4 from the 10th, 33 from the 11th, 58 from the 12th, 39 from the 13th, 46 from the 14th and 330 from the 15th, for a total of 482, and adds in a footnote: "The figures are incomplete, especially for the later period." In addition to these medieval manuscripts of Sallust, there are 4 ancient papyrii. 486, but "the figures are incomplete."

On p 36 of Texts and Transmission, Michael Winterbottom mentions 162 recent and unimportant manuscripts of Caesar. I was unable to find a figure which included both the unimportant and the important manuscripts.

On p 412 of Texts and Transmission, Michael Reeve informs us that we have over 650 manuscripts of Terence and adds, "Published estimates stop at 450. I owe the new figure to Claudia Villa."

On p 394, Reeve mentions "over 160 manuscripts" of Statius' Thebiad. Just of the Thebiad. The total number of manuscripts of Statius is more. How many more? I dunno.



I don't know how many manuscripts there are of Cicero. I don't want to know. I'm not a fan. (There are lots and lots.)

And one more time for Reeve: on p 107 of Studies in Latin Literature and its Tradition: in Honour of C O Brink, Cambridge, 1989, he counts up 154 of the 3rd decade of Livy. That's just for the 3rd decade (books 21-30). The total number of Livy manuscripts is somewhat more. How many more? I dunno.



On p vi of his 2004 Oxford edition of Ovid's Metamorphoses, RJ Tarrant informs us that we have over 400 manuscripts of that poem. How many manuscripts do we have of all of Ovid's works? I dunno. Very many, I would imagine.

Dream Log: Surrounded By People Volunteering To Help Me Find Livy's Lost Books

I dreamed that some friends had invited me to their house. From outside the house looked like one of a row of not-particularly-remarkable single-family houses rowed close together in an urban residential district, with a sidewalk and small lawns in front, but inside it was filled with a surprising number of rather spacious rooms. It was also full of a large number of lively, intelligent people of all ages. This was not a party or some other special occasion; I gathered, on the contrary, that the house was usually full of the resident family's friends.

On a shelf in the living room I found a book which looked like a much-read volume from the 60's, a little worn but still intact. No dust jacket remaining. It was entitled Finding the Lost Books of Livy. I had never seen a book with a title like this, which referred to one of my favorite obsessions. More than merely referring to the search for Livy's lost texts, the title did so in a remarkably optimistic way: not just "looking for" the lost books, but "finding" them. I wondered how the book had been received by the author's colleagues, if he had been a Classicist. Whether they had laughed at him about it, to his face or behind his back.

I soon was quite absorbed in the book, which definitely had not been written for laypeople, with many long citations from Latin and Greek books, with no translations offered, the author obviously having assumed that his audience could read both Latin and Greek.

What with the lively flow of people in and out of the living room, my interest in the book had soon been noticed, and people talked to me and learned that I was especially interested in this book's topic, and soon both children and adults had volunteered to assist me in my search for Livy's lost books. I felt rather on the spot here, and I thought that I was too much of an amateur to lead an entire team on this Quixotic quest, but, as I knew of no pros actively participating in the search, I accepted the role of leader, and did my best to assign sensible tasks to my volunteers.

My leadership of the Livy team led people in the house to seek my leadership in other things as well. For example, although the weather had been conventionally pleasant when I'd arrived at the house, later that day a rainstorm with heavy winds was underway, and people were looking to me for instructions on how best to deal with things like a large, recently-transplanted tree being uprooted and moved away by the wind, its roots still contained in the transplant sack. I stood at the window in the comfort of the interior of the fine house and did my best to rise to the occasion, giving orders which were immediately carried out by all around me. It seemed that I was in charge, for better or worse.

Another Archaeological Find In Israel, Another Round Of Mind-Numbingly Stupid Comments

The dig is at Abel Beth Maacah. The stupidity, as usual when anything old is found in or near Israel, comes not just from fundamentalists shouting Hallelujah! this proves the Bible is accurate, but also from a lot of atheists, and that's what annoys me, because you'd hope the atheists would know better. Well, that is, maybe you'd have some hope if you weren't very familiar with them thar New Atheists, and their propensity to think that a sharp comment about archaeology is something like

"I hope to find that building that spiderman climbed in issue 127."

Oh. Ha. Haha. Yeah, that really added to the discussion. Sadly, I quoted that Spiderman comment, I didn't make it up, didn't have to.

What is rare and precious in discussions of old things found in or near Israel, and of old religious manuscripts, are comments which are actually about the archaeological discoveries, comments which evince an actual interest in the objects themselves and the light they shed upon history. As opposed to what? As opposed to saying, for the 45,763rd time, something which amounts to: "Fundamentalists are stupid." Which is all that the comment quoted above is saying. Now, I don't disagree with them about fundamentalists, but the thing is, I heard them the first 45,762 times, and I had figured that out about fundamentalists before I ever met them, all on my own, and there's an interesting discovery here, giving the opportunity for an interesting discussion, and it looks like it might be drowned out, as have so many other potentially interesting discussions, by this neverending Itchy & Scratchy show put on by the fundies and them. If only they could actually either learn something about this actual discovery, and talk about that, or shut the fuck up for once, and give those of us who want to discuss archaeology a fucking chance to do so for once in their fucking life.

I don't expect they will.

These discussions aren't really about archaeology, they're about Christian fundamentalists and New Atheists calling each other names. Just lately, geomorphologists have been comparing what Livy and Polybius wrote about the 2nd Punic War with what they've found on the ground in Spain, France and Italy, and they may have actually discovered some ancient battlefields with the help of those ancient authors. Always keep in mind, I'm only a layman, but if I understand what's going on here, then, it seems to me, the possible implications of these finds for archaeology, ancient history, ancient literature and other academic fields are whatcha call huge, potentially big, big stuff for people who are actually interested in archaeology. But it doesn't have anything to do with the Bible, and so most of the idiots yapping back and forth about that find in Abel Beth Maacah, and about the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi library and the Gospel of Jesus' Wife and the Tel Dan Stele and so forth -- or, I should actually say, ostensibly yapping about such things, while actually knowing practically nothing about them -- these people probably will never hear anything about it. Which, from my point of view, in some ways, is actually a good thing.

A Complete Ancient Edition Of Livy Will Probably Not Be Found In The Western Sahara Anytime Soon

Night before last I dreamed that somewhere in Tunesia or Algeria, somewhere around there, a large collection of papyrii had been found, including 14 codices containing all 142 books of Livy, copied out in the 3rd century. (AD.) (That would be 10 books per volume except 12 in the last volume. For the past couple of centuries it seems to have been most common to publish 5 books per volume. Earlier, 10 books per volume wasn't unusual. Lately it seems to be growing more common to publish 2 or 3, or even 1 per volume. I'm not entirely sure, but I believe many of the early printed editions contained ALL of the known books in one volume: 30 up until the 1520's, and then 35. I don't think very many people have any justification in grumbling about any supposed good old days, but classicists might be among those few. The trend toward less and less ancient text per volume affect all the classics, not just Livy. 35 books of Livy is about as many words as the Christian Bible or the collected works of Shakespeare, and you can get those for free or very cheap. Why do those guys have all the fun? Grumble, grumble.)

And so when I woke up I began to think about discoveries of ancient papyrii, and to wonder why I had heard of -- well, not of few major discoveries made west of Egypt, but actually of none.

You see, after Alexander conquered Egypt in the 4th century BC, up until the 7th century AD, Greek was a major written language in the area, and for great periods of time it was the predominant written language. This did not change when the Romans conquered Egypt in the 1st century BC. In Egypt, and in Greece itself and Asia Minor and Judea and Galilee and Syria, Greek was the major written language. As you moved west of Egypt into present-day Libya, Tunesia, Algeria and Morocco, Latin became more common. This had been the territory of the Carthaginians or Phoenicians, and after the Romans wiped them out in the Third Punic War, ending in the mid-2nd century BC, use of their language in those western regions declined very sharply, and Latin prevailed until the Muslim conquests of the 7th century AD. So while Greek is by far the predominant language of the ancient papyrii discovered in Egypt, texts on papyrii recovered in Tunesia or Algeria would be much more likely to be written in Latin.

And my main man Livy wrote in Latin, not Greek. And Livy was so popular in the Roman Empire that even among the papyrii recovered from overwhelmingly Greek-speaking Roman-era Egypt, a few scraps have been passages from Livy or summaries of parts of his work. Imagine how many Latin payrii await excavation in the western Sahara.

Except, no, there aren't. I was dreaming in more ways than one: only a few regions within Egypt, in or near Faiyum, and including Oxyrhynchus, have the climate required to preserve papyrus buried in the ground for thousands of years. Outside of those regions, it's much more likely to rot away and become dirt, unless a freak accident of preservation occurs. Or so it says on the webpage of the Papyrology Collection of the University of Michigan, and I can't think of a good reason to doubt those guys about that, or even a mediocre reason. For just a little while I thought I had a reason: the Dead Sea Scrolls, found hundreds of miles east of Faiyum. But, oops: I had mistakenly assumed that the Dead Sea Scrolls were papyrus. Only a small fraction of them are. They're mostly parchment.

And so it appears that the best chances of finding significant chunks of the lost text of Livy on ancient papyrus remain in Egypt. And those chances don't look great even to a cock-eyed ridiculous optimist like me. but hey, papyrology continues to be a miraculously wonderful thing for people studying ancient Greek, and to a somewhat lesser extent for those studying Coptic, and only to a much, much lesser extent when it comes to ancient Latin. But hey, good for those other guys. I've got nothing against them. On the contrary, they are partly us: our fields overlap. My horrible, horrible disappointment should not rain on their sunny parade.

It was a nice dream for a day or so. 3rd century, that was a very nice detail, I don't know whether there actually are any manuscripts of the major Latin classics which are that old. Probably a half-dozen or so, and probably some of them on papyrii which were discovered in Egypt. There's a 4th-century copy of a passage from book 1 of Livy found at Oxyrhynchus; the text goes something like: regiam uenire pastoribus ad regem impetum facit et a domo Numitoris alia comparata manu adiuuat Remus ita regem obtruncat Numitor inter primum tumultum hostes inuasisse urbem atque adortos regiam dictitans cum pubem Albanam in arcem praesidio armisque obtinendam auocasset postquam iuuenes perpetrata caede pergere ad se gratulantes uidit extemplo aduocato concilio scelera in se fratris originem nepotum ut geniti That's the oldest Livy MS I know of -- but don't take my word for that, because although I'm pretty smart in some areas, one of them is not following the convoluted descriptions of manuscripts delivered by some classicists who also, maddeningly, do not include dates of the MSS on their sigliae, which would compensate greatly for said convolutions. Also, expert opinions about the dates of old manuscripts do change occasionally. Apart from papyrii, I think that the oldest known MSS of Livy are 5th-century. But one more MS might be as old or older as that 4th-century fragment from book 1: many websites repeat the information that around 40 words of the otherwise-missing book 11 are on a piece of papyrus found in Egypt, whose text was published in 1986. But they don't tell you who published the text, or where they published it (I'm 98% sure or so that years ago I held the periodical in question in my hands and gazed upon the transcription), nor how old the copy is estimated to be, nor none of that useful stuff. After extensive googling I telephoned a professional papyrologist and asked for help. I'll stick a PS on here as soon as I know more.

PS, February 1, 2014: Thanks to the very kind help of Monica Tsuneishi, the University of Michigan's Papyrology Collection Manager, I now know more. I was wrong in several respects about that fragment of book 11: it was found in 1986, in Naqlun, near Fayum, Egypt. The text was first published in 1988. It's 5th-century, and it's not papyrus, it's parchment. And it's 2 fragments, two different episodes, on the front and the back of one piece of parchment. And I know now why everybody kept saying it contained "about" 40 words: because the writing is broken up to the point that at several different points there could be fewer long words or more numerous long words. And now I'm more than 99% sure I saw it once before in the Classical Quarterly, New Series, vol 53, no 1 (May 2003), p 248, in the library of the University of Alaska, Anchorage. And it goes something like this: [------ .e(m) [----- ing]ens [ei era]nt ha[u]t pro[cul G]abiis [u]rbe. cu[m] [Ga]uios nouos exer[cit]us indictus [e]sset ibique centuriati milites essent, cum duob(us)milib(us) pe[ {.} ]ditum profect[u]s in agru(m) suom cons[ul?] and g[-------] ar[------] se[d] reaps[a nega]tam eo [[e]]dicto f[acturum] quoa[d inuissu suo in pr[ovi(n)-] cia maneat, et [si] pergat dicto non parar[e], \[s]e/ [i]n praese(n)tem habiturum imper[i]um. Fabius, [acc]eptus mandatis-----]

Get it? Got it? Good. Keep an eye out for the PPS. (Oh yes, there will be more.)

PPS, 16 December 2017: Above, I wondered whether there were any manuscripts of Classical Latin literature as old as the 3rd century AD. Since writing this post, I have learned that a fragment of papyrus dated to the 1st century BC, containing the only surviving poetry, 9 lines' worth, of the highly-regarded ancient Roman poet Gallus, was excavated in Egypt in 1978. And also that a copy of the Carmen de bello Actiaco, an otherwise-unknown poem which may or may not be considered "Classical," was unearthed at Herculaneum in 1752 and unrolled in 1805, and must have been made between 31 BC, when the battle of Actium, which it describes, took place, and AD 79, when Vesuvius erupted and buried Herculaneum. And also that the Oxyrhynchus papyrus of Vergil known as P Oxy 1098, originally dated to the 4th century, may actually be as old as the 1st or second century AD. That's what is now known to me, as far as manuscripts made the 3rd century AD or earlier, and containing Latin literature, are concerned. I am not at all certain that there is no more known to anyone. Especially when P Oxy 1098 is only 1 of 17 papyri containing work by Vergil. And, as I say over and over on this blog: ancient manuscripts continue to be discovered. I very much doubt that we've already found 'em all.

Two Manuscripts Of The Third Decade Of Livy (Hannibal Versus Rome)

By "the third decade" I mean books 21-30 of Livy's 142-book history of Rome. The first decade contains books 1-10, which cover the history of Rome from its mythical beginnings up until the early third century BC and the late stages of the Samnite Wars; the second decade, books 11 through 20, continue the story up until just before the Second Punic War. Books 11-20 are missing, except for a scrap of papyrus containing 41 words of book 11, found by archaeologists in Egypt in the 1980's.

The third decade, books 21-30, covers the Second Punic War, Rome's war against Carthage under its brilliant leader Hannibal, who actually came pretty close to conquering Rome, occupying much of Italy for well over 10 years before ha was finally defeated, hunted down and killed and Rome defeated Carthage for the 2nd of 3 times. (The 3rd time, Rome destroyed Carthage.)

It's debated these days just how good an historian Livy really is, how reliable the historical information is we get from him, how careful he is to get all the facts right. But even some of those who most emphatically denigrate him as an historian still praise him highly as an author. Apart from how accurate the tales he tells are as history, they are dramatic, exciting, gripping tales well-told. Livy is a great read. And of the surviving parts of his history, Livy's third decade seems to be the most popular, considered to be the most exciting reading. I would say that it's up there with ancient Rome's most renowned verse. Michael Reeve, a professor of Classics at Cambridge, said, at a colloquium in 1987, of a passage from Livy's book 23, that it "makes me wonder why our pupils spend so much of their time reading verse." ( Studies in Latin literature and its tradition: In honour of C.O. Brink,pp 103-104. )

The third decade seems to have been one of the best-loved parts of Livy's history right from the start, which may have everything to do with why we still have a lot of manuscripts of it. (154 manuscripts of the third decade, according to Reeve, p 107, but that was in the late 1980's, the total may be higher now.) I've come across 2 web pages, each dedicated to one of those manuscripts: this 15th-century manuscript in the University of Glasgow may not be the most important one from the point of view of preserving our closest guesses as to Livy's original text, but it's very nice to look at, with illustrations like this:



Then there's the Codex Puteanus of Livy's second decade, perhaps the single most important manuscript for transmitting the text. (There are many famous Codices Puteani, all named after their former owner Claude Dupuy, so when discussing this one make sure everyone understands that you're referring to the 5th-century Codex Puteanus of Livy's second decade.) This link leads to a page on the website of the Bibliothèque nationale de France where you can click through high-quality color pictures of all 900+ pages of the Codex Puteanus. You have to click for a while to get to the interesting stuff, but don't worry, the actual manuscript really is in there. It starts on Screen 11. That's a 5th-century manuscript, folks. Pay no attention to the BnF website telling you otherwise. The BnF has a tremendous amount of wonderful manuscripts, and they have excellent librarians working there too. It's a magnificent place. But the people who make their website are unfortunately still, in the year Two Thousand and For Crying Out Loud, not geniuses. You have no idea what I went through to get you that link showing you the Codex Puteanus. That codex should be right up on the library's homepage or very near it. Anyway... I found it, eventually, but only because I AM a genius, and wanted very badly to show it to you. Enjoy.

Codex Vindobonensis Bibl Nat Lat 15

-- or in English: the Vienna Codex, Austrian National Library, Latin manuscript #15. (Or in German: Die Wiener-Kodex, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, lateinische Handschrift Nummer 15.) It's the single known source for books 41-45 of Livy. It was written in the 5th century. Notes at the end of the text let us deduce that originally the volume contained books 41-50, and that by the late 8th century it had somehow been split in half, and that this half, books 41-45, had come into the possession of Theodard, who as we know from other sources was the Bishop of Utrecht from 781 to 790. Or possibly Thiatbrat, who worked at the monastery of Utrecht under Theodard, but in all likelyhood it belonged to Theodard. Notes written in the margins in handwriting characteristic of Anglo-Saxon England indicate that the manuscript may have come to Utrecht from England, perhaps one of the books brought to the continent by the famous English scholar Alcuin, when Charlemagne invited him to Aachen help start the Carolingian Rennaissance. Utrecht may very well have been on Alcuin's way to Aachen. If a bigshot like Alcuin were passing through Utrecht it wouldn't have been unusual for him to meet the local bigshot, Bishop Theodard, and for the two of them to have exchanged gifts, such as books. John Brisco, in his 1986 edition of books 41-45, mentions that the 19th-century scholar Michael Gitlbauer brought up the possibility that Alcuin gave the book to Theodard, and that he, Briscoe, also thinks it could have been that way. Gitlbauer and Briscoe are bigshots in Classical Studies, and Briscoe, especially, in not given to wild irresponsible speculation, so if he thinks it's possible, then, well, I've got to consider it as a possibility.

Was it Alcuin who separated the the original volume containing books 41-50 in half, giving the first half to Theodard and taking the other half, books 46-50, with him on to Aachen? Everyone agrees that Codex Vindobonensis Bibl Nat Lat 15 is a particularly bad copy, badly made, full of copying mistakes, the work of a less-than-world-class scribe. Alcuin was a world-class scholar. Did he have another copies of books 41-45, which he preferred to keep as his own?

Nobody knows. As far as I know, nobody has been able to make so much as a responsible guess. And of course, everything in the previous paragraph assumes that Alcuin gave Codex Vindobonensis Bibl Nat Lat 15 to Theodard, which we shouldn't assume. It's a possibility, not a certainty. Also, nobody knows what happened to Codex Vindobonensis Bibl Nat Lat 15 between the 780's and the 1520's, when it was found on a shelf in a monastery in Switzerland. A few years after that it was printed, and many, many editions have been printed since.

Arnold Drachenborch, Renowned Editor Of Livy

I continue to have no luck finding any comprehensive lists of manuscripts of Livy, while continuing to find all sorts of information about editions of and commentaries on Livy, and these of course in turn very often have some information about manuscripts, so I'm getting some of what I wanted, a little bit at a time instead of all at once as I'd like. One thing which has become very clear is the dominant position of one Arnold Drachenborch (1684-1748) among Livy scholars from the time he published his edition of Livy between 1738 and 1746, until at least a half century later. Edition after edition of the mid and late 18th century either sez something to the effect of "ex rec Drachenborchii" or "ex ed Arn Drachenborchii" on its title page, "from the recension of Drachenborch" or "from the edition of Arnold Drachenborch," or if it's not on the title page, a manual or Handbuch of Classical Studies informs you that a particular edition follows Drachenborch -- and screws Drachenborch up, or makes minor improvements on Drachenborch with the aid of manuscripts not available to him, or whatever, as the case may be. For decade after decade, it seems relatively few editions of Livy -- very few, actually -- were not essentially versions of Drachenborch's text. Drachenborch's edition, as it informs us on its title page, quotes remarks on Livy by Valla, Sabellico, Rhenanus, Geleneus, Glareanus, Sigonius, Ursinus, Sanctius, Frederick Grovonius, Fabrus, Valesius, Parisonius, Jakob Gronovius -- and others, besides the learned remarks of Drachenborch his own bad self. Iss a Ding! And for a while, it seems, Drakenborch was -- posthumously -- the Big Kahuna of Livy Studies, although today he's probably not as well known as either (Jacob) Gronovius or our own contemporary John Briscoe, who has just recently published his commentary on books 41-45. It has been well-received, like his earlier volumes on other of Livy's books, but that's about all I can tell you for sure right now, because iss a expensive Ding.