Preservers of Texts and Destroyers of Manuscripts

On p 124 of the second edition (1974) of Scribes & Scholars. A Guide to the Transmission of Greek & Latin Literature, LD Reynolds and NG Wilson state what I had begun to strongly suspect after I had begun, roused to indignation by Stephen Greenblatt, to study the career of Poggio Bracciolini: after pages of praise for Poggio and his fellow 15th-century Italian humanists for their many discoveries of ancient Latin texts, Reynolds and Wilson add:

"The humanists also had a capacity for losing manuscripts. Once they had carefully copied a text, they were liable to have little interest in the manuscript which had preserved it."

Would we have more Classical Latin manuscripts written before the 15th century if Poggio had gone into another line of work -- say, painting? It's probably impossible to say. We value manuscripts, especially old manuscripts, much more highly today, and, all other things being equal, we tend to value them more the older they are. It causes us great pain, in case after case, reading about the discoveries of the humanists, to read that familiar description of a manuscript discovered by Poggio or one of his colleagues: "now lost." "deperditus"

Reynolds and Wilson go on, ibid:

"In the sixteenth century the situation was worse; many fine codices went along the one-way road to the printing press."

That is to say: a Classical Latin text was printed, and the manuscript or manuscripts which had been used to make the printed version were lost. In some cases, the printed editions are all that is left of the texts.

Obviously, this unfortunate process wasn't universal, or else we would have no manuscripts of the Latin Classics today. Angelo Poliziano, another 15th-century humanist, sounds much more modern than many of his time in his emphasis upon preserving and consulting old manuscripts, the older the better (Reynolds and Wilson, 127-129. They even say that the way Poliziano valued age in manuscripts was "too sweeping"). Poliziano was neither the first to recognize the value of old manuscripts; nor did his emphatic defense of their value change the practices of Classical scholars all at once. He planted the seed of the idea, as did others before and after him. Gradually it took root.

There are a great many 15th-century manuscripts of the Latin Classics still existing today, probably many more than those produced in any other century. Is this because there was an explosion of interest in these ancient texts, or because the idea was gradually taking hold that it was good to preserve manuscripts, or simply because the 15th century is the most recent one before printed books replaced manuscripts? I'm sure that all three factors played a role; I'm not going to guess how much of a role was played by each.

Like the 15th century, the 9th is represented by far more Classical Latin manuscripts than any previous century. Charlemagne saw to that with his immense program of revival of education. The total number of Latin manuscripts made before the 9th century, not just Classical but also Christian, mostly Christian, all noted in the Codices Latini Antiquiores,

the great work of EA Lowe and his followers after his death, comes to about 2000. In the 9th century alone there are far many more manuscripts than 2000. How many, exactly? We don't know, because there are so many that so far no-one has found it worth the tremendous effort of seeking them all out and listing them all. Suddenly, in the 9th century, Latin manuscripts are no longer nearly as rare. Counting just 9th-century Classical manuscripts, do we currently possess 2000 of them? I don't know. I don't know whether anyone knows for sure. Might well be.

And yet, all of the 9th-century Classical manuscripts are copies of older manuscripts. And, just like in the 15th-century, the processes of discovery and preservation were partly also processes of destruction: once those older manuscripts had been copied in the 9th century, many of them tended to be lost. The difference is that we don't know nearly as many of the details of these 9th-century losses, because we have far fewer letters and other items which would inform us from the 9th century, than from the 15th. We have, however, recovered some of those pre-9th-century manuscripts which were written over or made into book covers.

The 15th and 16th centuries was the great age of re-discovery of the Latin Classics. It was a river, and what has been re-discovered since then has been a trickle. But however many more Classical texts may still be discovered, there remains very much to do in investigating the processes of textual transmission. Between greater historical understanding, continued technological progress and the blessed dogged persistence of humanity, I remain optimistic that great discoveries of Classical Latin are still to come.

Yes, That is a Very Great Amount of Augustinian Manuscripts

Recently I read a reference to the "literally myriad" manuscripts of the works of Augustine of Hippo.

At first I mistakenly thought that Aristitle's manuscripts were being described as literally myriad. I looked up the word myriad, learned that it literally means ten thousand, wondered how someone knew for sure that there were that many manuscripts of Aristotle, did some research and learned some interesting things about the transmission of Aristotle, but without any indication that anyone had ever actually attempted to count up all the Aristotelian manuscripts, before realizing that the reference to myriad manuscripts had been to Augustine.

It proved to be much easier to find out how someone could, with great assurance, state that there are over 10,000 manuscripts of Augustine. I will go that one better, and state that there are over 15,000. I can do this because of a series of publications known as Die handschriftlichen Überlieferungen der Werke des Heiligen Augustinus.

That's German for The Manuscripts of the Works of Saint Augustine. (I could be snarky and translate "handschriftlichen Überlieferungen" exactly, as "manual transmissions," instead of accurately as "manuscripts," but I won't.) Beginning in 1969, the Austrian Academy of Sciences began publishing these volumes, and there are now at least 14 volumes, each volume devoted to the Augustinian manuscripts in a particular region of the world, and they have listed over 15,000 of them, and I gather that they are not done yet.

They are doing this because Augustine wrote a great many works, including letters, sermons and what we today would call books, and theologians, historians of early Christianity and other interested in Augustine would like to find as many of them as they can. Die handschriftliche Überlieferung der Werke des Heiligen Augustinus is the latest and most thorough attempt to account for all of the Augustinian manuscripts, and it has indeed led to the discovery of missing works, and I gather that it is assumed that more manuscripts will certainly be found, and hoped that currently-missing works will be found among them.

This is certainly thrilling for those who are passionately interested in Augustine. For those less passionate about him and his writings, these volumes help to understand why such exhaustive lists aren't made for every ancient author: the great majority of the entries say "s XV," "fifteenth century," or "s XIV," "fourteenth century," and "cart," "paper." It's rather monotonous. The chances of, oh, say, for instance, a palimpsest of a missing text by Livy lurking under the top text one of the recent manuscripts on paper are much less than with older manuscripts on parchment. And that's only one of very many reasons why, generally speaking, manuscripts become much more interesting when they are older.

Back when I had thought that I read that there are more than 10,000 manuscripts of Aristotle, I learned that there are a tremendous number of manuscripts of Latin translations of Aristotle, so tremendous that it seems possible, if manuscripts of translations are counted in the grand total, that the manuscripts of Aristotle may, in fact, be myriad.

Well, an inspection of some of the volumes of Die handschriftliche Überlieferung der Werke des Heiligen Augustinus seem to indicate that it is, in fact, conventional to count such translations among the number of the manuscripts of an author.

And now I'm also wondering whether there has been any serious attempt to list all of the manuscripts of the Bible. Seek and perhaps I shall find. I'm guessing that the most which may have been done is to attempt to list all of the Bible texts from one particular century in one particular language. But that is, I cannot stress this enough, only a guess. Like my guess that the total number of Biblical manuscripts, if ever it were known, would dwarf the number of Augustinian manuscripts.

Classical Studies and Reception Theory

I'm not sure how well I understand various literary theories. It may be that I am far below average when it comes to my ability to grasp them. I do, after all, officially have a mental disability, and this may be one example of it.

On the other hand, it may be that I understand literary theories better than almost anyone, and that above all, I understand how stupid and sad they all are, and how thoroughly there is no there there. Or it may be that my aptitude in understanding literary theories is about average.

It may be by far the most prudent to assume that the first of these possibilities is the case, that I have an unusually hard time distinguishing my discourse analysis from my post-modernism, and that therefore I should proceed very carefully. (I must apologize, and clarify in advance: I have not promised that I will proceed carefully, just acknowledged that I should.) For example, when I say that reception theory, extremely popular in the past several decades in Classical Studies (and perhaps in the academic study of literature more generally, I don't know), seems to me to consist of the study of the tradition of the Classics, which was a part of Classical Studies long before anyone called anything reception theory, plus a lot of pretentious malarkey, I ought to hasten to underscore that that's how it it seems to me, and that a lot of people with much more cred than I have gone on at great length about how it's actually a whole lot more than that,



and that I am the source of the malarkey here. Far be it from me to rule out, categorically, that my writing consists primarily of malarkey.

If I understand it correctly, the study of Classical Literature can be seen figuratively as movement in two opposite directions: the editor of a Classical text uses the evidence, mostly manuscripts of the primary text, to approach, as nearly as he or she can, the text as the author intended it. In the case of an ancient text which survives in a great number of manuscripts, one of the tasks of the editor is to eliminate from consideration those manuscripts which do not contribute to the establishment of the text. For example, if it is proven that an entire group of manuscripts derive entirely from another existing manuscript, than that entire group may be of very little or no interest to the editor in his capacity as editor. The study of that text's tradition, on the other hand, starts with the author and travels in the opposite figurative direction, studying the ways in which the author's text has reached readers directly via manuscripts and printed edition, and indirectly via translations, and other literary works which imitate or otherwise make reference to the first one, and also in other media such as visual art, music, movies and what have you. No matter how many manuscripts of one text there may be, it's somewhat harder to say that any of them are of no interest whatsoever in studying the text's tradition. Not to mention printed editions and translations, which may be of interest in editing a text as well, but primarily in cases where the other manuscripts are missing or have gaps or mistakes which cannot otherwise be remedied.

It seems to me that both of these directions, if you will, are perfectly natural ways of studying Classical literature. (Ah. I might as well mention now, in case I forget to later, that reception theory has greatly increased the number of texts which are considered to belong to the Classical canon -- mostly by including works composed at later dates.) Traditionally, more weight was given by Classical scholars to the editing of text, and the constant effort to improve upon previous editions. Editing texts was the dog, and study of the transmission was the tail.

Reception theory says that studying the transmission of the texts is the proper focus of literary study, the dog itself, with textual editing being relegated to the role of the tail. Except that reception theory goes farther, and claims that there is nothing of significance to be studied before that interaction of text and reader: the reception.

Except that they go farther, and seem to be, in some instances, quite hostile to the editors. And here, if not sooner, is where reception theory begins to seem like malarkey to me, because if the text with which the reader interacts is not rigorously defined in some way, such as, oh, for instance, its relationship to the text which the author wrote -- not the only way in which a text can be defined, to be sure, but a valid example! -- then we're no longer talking about the text at all, but anything and everything, which is to say: we're talking about nothing.

It may be that before reception theory, the editors went too far in dismissing the effect of the text which they constantly strove to improve. It seems to me that both editing and study the transmission are perfectly natural things to do, and that there's no need to choose between one or the other, or to decide which one is the dog and which the mere tail. I'm more temperamentally inclined toward studying the transmission in all of its sometimes vast variety. But I'm convinced that both directions, inward toward one imagined original text and outward into all of its sometimes far-flung effects and permutations, are essential parts of studying Classical literature.

I suppose it's much easier for me to say the latter than it is for academics, who have to argue over syllabi and degree requirements and so forth.

Still: Reception theory often presents itself, in so many words, as a "provocation" to more traditional approached to Classical Studies. Maybe there was a great deal lacking in earlier approaches to the Classics, which called for a radical break.

Maybe. Still, it is very easy to provoke, and to have provoked, to have upset someone, is far from a guarantee that one has said anything of any worth. The latter is not necessarily so easy.

I don't know very many of the players involved. I worry that reception theory may be discounting the worth of scholarly editing, which would be disastrous if reception theory proves to be more than a passing fad. But perhaps I misunderstand completely, and the provocation of which reception theory seems so proud is a provocation of which it should be proud: for example, if it's a challenge to entrenched tendencies of sexism and racism and other forms of bigotry within Classical Studies.

Manuscripts

I derive great joy from learning about numbers of extant Classical manuscripts. I don't know why. It doesn't bother me that I don't know why. Perhaps it goes back no further than my figuring out, perhaps as recently as 2010, that certain fundamentalist Christians had made widely-repeated, spectacularly-inaccurate assertions about the numbers of manuscripts of some Classical authors, claiming that there were only 20 manuscripts of Livy, 10 of Caesar and similar nonsense.

A few months ago, I found what I had thought was a mention, somewhere in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review, that the manuscripts of Aristotle are literally myriad. I looked up myriad in the OED and discovered that its literal meaning is 10,000.

My memory is not perfect, and for that and other reasons, I should write these sorts of things down more often when I come across them. I realized that what I had seen might not have been what I remembered it to have been. Finally, yesterday, I found it again: the assertion that the manuscripts of Augustine are literally myriad. Augustine. Not Aristotle. Score one for the Christians.

In the process of looking for the reference to Aristotle which was actually a reference to Augustine, I learned a lot of interesting things about Aristotelian manuscripts. Such as that there are very large numbers of manuscripts of Latin translations of his works.

Whether the number of manuscripts of translations of an author's works are conventionally counted in the number of manuscripts of that author -- that I don't know. If it turns out that, between Latin and Arabic and other languages, there actually are myriad manuscripts of translations of Aristotle, would one conventionally say that there are myriad manuscripts of Aristotle? Or would one count only the Greek manuscripts?

Also several months ago, I sent a email to a distinguished scholar, asking him whether he could round out some areas of my knowledge of the Oxyrhynchus papyri project: Are any of the papyri still in the boxes Grenfell and Hunt put them into between 1897 and 1904? Are we approaching the state of things where all that is left are tiny little pieces of papyrus? Questions like that.

He hasn't gotten back to me. That hurts my feelings, but it's entirely his prerogative, of course. Finally today I sent an email to the general guestions-and-suggestions-etc address of the Oxyrhynchus project, which is perhaps where I should've inquired to begin with.

Also a few months ago, I found a reference to a list of manuscripts of Livy compiled by Virginia Brown. I have since learned that Ms Brown compiled all sorts of information about manuscripts which I would find quite interesting. Just today I noticed a remark by Prof Winterbottom in Texts and Transmission, ed LD Reynolds, pp 35-36: "Virgina Brown has listed seventy-five manuscripts [of Caesar --SB] later than the ninth century, and suggested tentative groupings." In the case of the Livy manuscripts, someone in the FB group Classics International kindly gave me a link to the Pontifical publication containing Ms Brown's list -- but, as has so often happened to me, once I've found the website of some sort of Classical catalog or database or publication, I had no idea how to navigate it.

It seems to me that all of these difficulties and many more which I've had are the sort which could be easily handled if I were a Classics student, rubbing elbows with other Classics students and with Classics professors: Say, do you know how to navigate this website? The answer could be: Yes, you just do this and that; or: No, but there's a hard copy of the volume on the shelf right behind you.

I don't think I'll be re-entering grad school. (I'm 56 years old and just as autistic as I ever was. [That's an autism joke, because an autistic person is born autistic and remains so his or her entire life.]) But today I feel slightly more inclined to do so than I have for a while.

Just in case anyone is politely suppressing the urge to ask whether I've ever actually examined any Classical manuscripts -- yes I have, both via photocopies and actually up close in person. But I've spent much more time studying numbers of manuscripts.

[PS, 21 Feb 2018: Speaking of numbers of manuscripts: today I received an inter-library loan copy of M L West's Studies in the Text and Transmission of the Iliad. Some of you may already be familiar with the following figures. They came as quite a surprise to me. On p 86, West says that around the turn of the 20th century, Ludwich cited 33 papyri of the Iliad, that Munro and Allen listed 103 in 1920, Allen raised that number to 122 in 1931, Collart listed 372 in 1948, Pack listed 464 in 1965, in 1990 Sutton said that there were 703, and West says that in his edition of 1998-2000, he made use of 1543, 850 of which were then-unpublished Oxyrhynchus papyri in Oxford's Ashmolean Museum. West writes of Homeric papyri: "They will continue to accumulate. There is no end to them." On pp 88-129, West catalogues 1569 papyri. By the term "papryi," West refers to all ancient manuscripts, whether written on papyrus or some other material. On p 139, West doubts that a thorough catalog of the Medieval manuscripts of the Iliad will ever be written. (Because there are simply too many items to be considered? I don't know. West doesn't elaborate.)

West passed away in 2015, his edition of the Odyssey was published in 2017, and De Gruyter's website says that it consults 500 papyri, 250 of them unpublished.]

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.

Yes, That is a Very Great Amount of Aristotelian Manuscripts [PS: No, actually, it is not.]

Someone who struck me as authoritative -- I do not remember who -- wrote -- I do not remember where. I should write these sorts of things down more often. It may have been in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review, which I read often and recommend heartily -- that the manuscripts of Aristotle are literally myriad. I then consulted the Oxford English Dictionary, and saw that "myriad" literally means "10,000."

[PS, 19 February 2018: My memory was faulty here. I finally tracked down the mention of literally myriad manuscripts. It was a reference to manuscripts, not of Aristotle, but of Augustine. Nevermind.]

Attempting to verify that there really are as many as 10,000 manuscripts of the works of Aristotle, I found that, as of the writing of the article on Aristotle in the 1972 Encyclopaedia Britannica, there were 47 surviving philosophical works attributed to Aristotle, and that he actually wrote many more. Not from the encyclopaedia, I learned that these 47 works were often copied individually, as opposed to huge volumes each containing many of the works. I learned that several of these works survive in Latin translations in several hundred manuscripts each (Aristotle wrote in Greek, and was very popular among Medieval scholars of Western Europe who could read Latin but not Greek.). If several hundred Latin copies is typical for each of those 47 works, then perhaps there really are over 10,000 manuscripts of Aristotle surviving in our time, and the vast majority of them are Latin translations. (Several hundred X 47 = more than 10,000.) I'm assuming that untranslated Greek manuscripts of Aristotle are not nearly so numerous, but perhaps I'm wrong about that.

I have absolutely no ideas how many manuscripts of Aristotle in Arabic translation have survived to our day, or in other languages, for that matter.

Some time ago, I read in Rackham's Loeb edition and translation of Aristotle's Politics



that the manuscripts of that work "are not very good nor very old. The oldest evidence for the text is a translation in barbarous Latin by a Dominican monk of the thirteenth century, William of Moerbeke[...]The five best extant Greek copies are of the fifteenth century[...]" That was the first time that I had read anything about the transmission of Aristotle's texts. And so I mistakenly assumed that there were not many manuscripts of anything written by Aristotle. It turns out that Moerbeke is one of the Latin translators of Aristotle who has been copied into hundreds of surviving manuscripts, per work, having translated other works by Aristorle besides the Politics, and that not everyone has shared Rackham's low opinion of his Latin prose.

So, is Aristotle in 2nd place among ancient authors, behind only the Bible, in terms of numbers of surviving manuscripts? I don't know. One reason I don't know is because the experts on ancient Greek and Latin literature themselves don't know how many surviving manuscripts there are of the authors in which they specialize. And the reason they often don't know is because they don't much care. How can this be? Well, you see, the most important aspect of their jobs is get a version of those ancient texts as close as possible to what the ancient authors originally wrote. And for the purpose of determining those texts, the great majority of the manuscripts can be dismissed, if it has been determined that they are all copies, or copies of copies, or copies of copies of copies, etc, of some other surviving manuscripts. There is often a very great difference between the number of manuscripts which scholars use to determine the text, and all of the surviving manuscripts of that text. Oh, so there are X number of manuscript copies of Moerbeke's translation of the Politics? Hey, that's great. But because I have the actual copy which Moerbeke made (or high-res photos of that copy), I don't need all those hundreds of others. Is how those scholars will often react, if they see their job as editing the text.

There are other reasons for looking at all of the other copies. For example, someone has to determine where they came from, whether manuscript J was a copy of a copy of manuscript R, or what exactly. Or maybe Professor Y thinks that Professor X made a mistake when he or she said that J was a copy of a copy of manuscript R, and wants to check for him- or herself.

Another reason is if we want to get a general idea of how popular that ancient author was in a certain time and place. We can only get a very general idea of this, because we know that a lot of manuscripts have disappeared, and we don't know how many. Just because there are hundreds of manuscripts today of Ovid, and none at all of Pompeius Trogus, doesn't mean that Ovid was read by more people in the 2nd century AD than Trogus. But the great number of 12th-century manuscripts of Ovid (compared to surviving 12th-century manuscripts in general), combined with other things such as frequent mentions of him by 12th-century writers, mean that we're probably pretty safe in saying that Ovid was widely-read in the 12th century. Probably.

It seems to me that typically, there are more 15th-century manuscripts of a given Classical Latin author than manuscripts of any other one century, and sometimes more than all the other centuries put together. It seems that way. But I don't know for sure, because I only have those century-by-century numbers in the case of a few Classical Latin authors. Maybe they're pretty typical of the rest, maybe they're not. After the 15th century, the numbers of manuscripts of Classical Latin authors drops away to almost nothing, because of the invention of the printing press. One notable exception to that is the text of the 1st-century novel Satyricon by Petronius,



the inspiration for Fellini's film of the same name, liked by Fellini fans, less well-liked by Classicists who feel that Fellini missed much of Petronius' message. The text of Satyricon has been patched together like Frankenstein's monster from various manuscripts each containing just a part of the whole. 4 of those manuscripts were written in the late 16th century, and just recently, Maria Salanitro has found what she believes are still more parts of the novel, contained in a 17th-century manuscript.

How much of the preponderance of 15th-century manuscripts -- assuming I'm correct in assuming it exists -- is due to an actual rise in the reading of ancient Latin Classics in the 15th-century, and how much is due to people being suddently much more careful to preserve manuscripts? I have no idea.

It was nice of Martin Wohlrab to list and comment on all 147 of the manuscripts of Plato which he could find, late in the 19th century, and it was also nice of the University of California to re-print his list



in the 21st century. Did Wohlrab include manuscripts of Latin translations of Plato (or translations into still other languages) in his list? I'm going to have to examine this list a little more closely and get back to you on that one. Were there ever very many manuscripts of Latin translations of Plato? Hey, that's another really swell question. I know that Latin translations of Plato were made after the invention of printing.

Are the numbers of manuscripts of Cicero or Vergil comparable to those of Aristotle? Another thing I really wish I knew.

Why do I care so much about it? Am I about to help these professors in their task of sorting out which manuscripts derive from which, by the process they call collation? No. Am I interested in the numbers of readers these authors have had? To be honest: only slightly. I think I care about these numbers of manuscripts because autism. (It would also be great if I could demonstrate that there are more manuscripts of one Classical author or another than of the Bible, but I suspect that the Bible-thumpers out there who're saying that there are only 20 manuscripts of Livy [There are hundreds. How many hundreds? I wish I knew. Hey, there might be thousands for all I know.], and so forth, have also drastically under-counted the total number of Biblical manuscripts.)

The Carolingian Revival Of Classical Latin Literature

I became something resembling in some ways an historian because over and over, I've read books on historical subjects, and I'm full of questions on the historical subject at hand which the book at hand does not address, let alone answer.

A wonderful exception to this rule is Texts and Transmission: A Survey of the Latin Classics, edited by LD Reynolds, which consists of 134 entries by 14 authors including Reynolds, MD Reeve, RJ Tarrant and M Winterbottom, each entry succinctly describing what was known, in the early 1980's when the volume was prepared, about the manuscripts and editions of each of 134 Classical Latin authors and anonymous Classical Latin texts. "Classical" means pre-Christian poems, fiction, history, philosophy, rhetoric and technical and scientific writing. In the case of Latin, Classical means things written for the most part between the 3rd century BC, when the earliest Latin poems, plays and historical writings which have survived were written, and the fifth century AD, when Christians came to dominate not just the governments of Latin-speaking Western Europe, but its literature as well. Reynolds admits that not everyone will agree completely about which authors and texts belong to Classical Latin. However, few if any experts would add or subtract more than a half-dozen authors and texts to or from Reynold's list.

Texts and Transmission is chock-full of things I wanted to know. Particularly wonderful and informative is Reynolds' Introduction to the volume on pages xiii through xliii, an extremely succinct summing up of the entire subject of the transmission of Classical Latin texts. On pages xvii through xxxii, Reynolds writes a much better summary of the Carolingian Renaissance than I ever will.

The Carolingian Renaissance is the renewed study of the Latin Classics done with the support of Charlemagne and his heirs in the 9th and 10th centuries AD. In the midst of Reynolds' description of this renewal, on page xxviii, is a list of 68 Classical authors and anonymous texts, just over half of the total of 134 discussed in the entire book. For each of these 68 authors or texts, there are one or more 9th-century manuscripts known to scholars today.

The Dark Ages is the era from the fall of the Western Roman Empire in AD 476 until the rise of Charlemagne, who was crowned Emperor in Rome by the Pope in AD 800. It's called "dark" in part because the written records of that time are quite sparse. This scarcity of written records in turn makes it possible to speculate about just exactly how bad or good things were in the Dark Ages. And hey, what a coincidence: historians who are Christians have tended, by and large, to portray the era as having been much more pleasant and productive and learned and so forth, than historians who are not Christians. Almost everyone on all sides is biased.

But if we're only talking about the survival of and interest in classical Latin literature, then there is no doubt that "dark" is a fitting adjective. There are dozens of surviving Classical Latin manuscripts made before the Dark Ages. From the 7th century, the middle of the Dark Ages, there is 1, a manuscript of Lucan. C Hosius, whose edition of the 2nd-century Roman author Aulus Gellius appeared in 1903, described one manuscript of Gellius as "s vii(?)," meaning he was guessing it was from the 7th century. In Texts and Transmission, PK Marshall describes the same manuscript as 4th-century, with no ?.

Of course, the numbers of manuscripts surviving today from a certain century are not the same as the total numbers of manuscripts made in that century. Manuscripts have been thrown away, used to make covers for other books, burned in furnaces for warmth, destroyed in wars. As recently as the Renaissance, writers described many manuscripts which are gone today. In the meantime, the efforts to preserve them have become more energetic. We don't know how many Classical Latin manuscripts were made altogether in the 7th century, or the 9th. But the fact that we can locate exactly 1 from 7th century (or just possibly 2, but probably 1), and manuscripts for 68 different authors and texts from the 9th, is a very strong indication that some things changed in the 9th century, and that a lot of things were rescued in the 9th century which were on the verge of disappearing altogether. It also fits with what contemporaries wrote about Charlemagne and his activities, how he built schools everywhere and whatnot, and also with what we know about powerful Dark Age figures such as Pope Gregory the Great, and their disdain for non-Christian literature.

(Today, we have hundreds of 7th-century Latin manuscripts from the Bible and other Christian texts, and dozens of 7th-century Latin texts having to do with law, medicine, grammar and surveying.)

Manuscripts Of Ancient Texts: Quantity & Quality

Beginning in this Wrong Monkey blog post and then in several others, I've had some things to say about how many manuscripts there are of this or that ancient text -- manuscripts of the Bible, for example, or of ab urbe condita, Livy's history of Rome. I wrote that first post back in 2009 because I'd seen some figures which I suspected, rightly, as it turned out, were way off.

And all along I've realized that the number of manuscripts, by itself, is far from a comprehensive statement about how well the text has survived from ancient times down to our own time. So why have I become so fascinated with learning numbers of this or that sort of manuscript? Maybe because I'm autistic and have an autistic relationship to numbers. However, it has occurred to me that I may have been misleading my readers by giving them such numbers without other information which is very important to understanding the significance of those numbers.

For one thing, sometimes one manuscript of a text is much more significant than many other manuscripts of parts of that text, simply by virtue of length. I was thinking for example of the 4th-century Codex Sinaiticus, which contains the Greek New Testament plus about half of the Greek Old Testament. Still, it's counted as one Biblical manuscript, since it all originally belonged to one copy of the Bible between one set of covers. Over the centuries, many Biblical manuscripts have been made which never contained the entire Bible: some contained the Old Testament, some contained the New Testament, some contained only the Old Testament Book of Psalms, some contained only the four canonical Net Testament Gospels, some contained some other book or a few other books, still others contained just passages from this book and that. Yet, each one is counted as one Biblical manuscript, because each one originally was one bookmaking project, 1 volume which stood alone. When we say "a manuscript of an ancient text," we are referring to a manuscript which contains the entire text, or a tiny fragment of the text, or anything in between.

Actually, the Codex Sinaiticus was not discovered all at once, but in several pieces. But those pieces are all counted together as one manuscript, because originally they were all one huge volume. If any pieces of the rest of that original volume are found, they plus what we now have will still be counted as just 1 manuscript.

When the Codex Sinaiticus was discovered in the 19th century, it was by far the oldest manuscript of any part of the Bible then known. Since its discovery, more Biblical manuscripts have been found which are as old and in some cases even older. But many of these manuscripts are just scraps of papyrus or parchment with only a few words on them. Sometimes it the writing is so brief and faint that it has only been with difficulty that someone has determined that it contains a text from the Bible. But that little scrap, if it can't be shown to have originally been part of the same book as some other little scrap, is counted as 1 manuscript. The Codex Sinaiticus, containing most of the Bible; a 12th-century Psalter (a volume containing just the Psalms is called a Psalter); and a little 4th-century piece of papyrus containing about a dozen words from the Bible: each one is counted as one Biblical manuscript.

But if two or more such little scraps can be shown to have originally been part of the same manuscript, then, just the same as with the pages of the Codex Sinaiticus found separately, those little scraps will now be counted together as 1 manuscript. The same way, if it is proven that a book containing the Psalms and another containing the Gospels were originally made as 1 book, then what used to be counted as 2 manuscripts is now counted as 1. The same way if different pieces of parchment or some other material with writing on them are demonstrated to have originally all been parts of a one-volume Bible.

Another consideration, when we talk about Biblical manuscripts, is that not everyone agrees what is or isn't a part of the Bible. From ancient times down to the present, different groups have included different books in the Bible. And then in the past couple of centuries, manuscripts of books which were rejected by those who eventually became the dominant churches and have been missing since ancient times have been found by archaeologists and others: the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Judas, the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, etc.

Now let's move from the Bible to ab urbe condita, the history of Rome written in the first century BC by Livy. In the case of the Bible, many manuscripts contain an entire Bible, both Old and New Testament, and the Codex Sinaiticus and some other very old manuscripts contain most of it. Of the 142 books of the ab urbe condita, all of the manuscripts currently known, all put together, add up to 35 of those 142 books, books 1-10 and 21-45, plus a couple pages from book 91 and a couple of sentences from book 11. And as far as I know, no single manuscript contains more than 10 books. So, although the total number of manuscripts of Livy is impressively large, the number of manuscripts which contain ALL of his work is 0 -- as compared to however many manuscripts contain the entire Bible, dozens or hundreds or however many it may be.

Another thing: often the greatest specialists in a certain ancient text not only don't know the total number of manuscripts of that text, or even a close guess about how many there are -- oftentimes they don't particularly care how many there are. And they're being more sensible about this than I am, with my hunger to know exactly how many known manuscripts there are of Caesar's Gallic War or Lucan's Civil War. Why? Because every single manuscript doesn't always matter that much when it comes to editing the texts: coming up with the most accurate possible version of the text along with a reasonable number of guesses about variations, given in the footnotes. And editing texts is what a lot of these experts do all day long every day, while I flutter around the fringes of their profession being a weirdo.

Why doesn't every single manuscript always matter all that much? Well, for instance, let's take Ammianus Marcellinus, who in the late 4th century AD wrote a history which he may have considered to be a continuation of the history of the 1st-century-AD history of Tacitus, who may have considered his work to be a continuation of Livy's. Ammianus' history was 31 books long; today we have books 14 through 31 on 2 9th-century manuscripts and 14 15th-century manuscripts. However, it has been shown that all 14 of those 15th-century manuscripts come from 1 of the 9th-century manuscripts, that 4 of them are copied directly from it, and that all 10 of the remaining manuscripts are copied directly or indirectly from 1 of those 4. One page from that 9th-century manuscript is now missing, giving the 15th-century manuscripts most of the scholarly value they now have.

Sometimes an ancient text is known to us from only 1 manuscript. Sometimes an ancient text is known to us from no manuscripts at all. How can this be? It happens if early printed copies of the work survive, but all of its manuscripts have gone missing since they were first printed. That has happened a couple of times. Somewhat more common is that manuscripts survive, but an early printed version still contains some passages which are now missing from all known manuscripts.

And let's not forget Phillip Patterson, who recently spent 4 years' worth of his spare time copying out the King James Bible by hand. That means there's at least one more manuscript of the entire Bible than there were before Patterson started, because a text written with a pen on paper is a manuscript.

The numbers of manuscripts of ancient texts such as the Bible and Livy and Marcellinus tend to drop off sharply after the 15th century, because of the spread of printing, but occasionally a more recent manuscript plays a large role in establishing an ancient text.

The Difference Between The Date Of A Text And The Date Of A Manuscript Of That Text

Some of my readers may find it strange that I am devoting a blog post to such things. Some of my readers are academics and other people who are long since thoroughly familiar with everything I'm going to say here. However, some of my readers are in other fields, and only an academic who has not spent a lot of time discussing ancient literature and textual transmission with the general public, and who has not read a lot of stories about new finds of ancient manuscripts in the mainstream media, nor watched a lot of TV shows about those subjects, knows these things, while being unaware of how many people do not know them.

The date of a text is the date when a certain piece of writing was first written. The date of a manuscript of that text is the date when a particular copy of that piece of writing was made. The general public almost never seems to show any significant interest in ancient texts other than the texts of the Bible and other Jewish and Christian writings, and this post is for the general public, so let's explain this with reference to those texts.

The 27 books of the New Testament are far and away the most thoroughly-researched texts in Western civilization. (I don't say they're the most most thoroughly-researched in the world because I don't know enough about texts from other civilizations to say so. For all I know, the scope of knowledge and research of the Vedas, or of the Koran or of Buddhist or Confucian texts, may utterly dwarf that of Biblical studies. I simply don't know.) There are tens of thousands of manuscripts of the New Testament. Many of these manuscripts are from the 5th century or earlier.

There are no original copies of any of the texts of the New Testament. By the way, scholars of ancient literature refer to a original copy as an "autograph." There are no autographs of the New Testament, there are no autographs of the Old Testament, or, as far as I know, of any ancient texts which are referred to as "literary" texts, which means: texts meant for a public audience: not just poems and plays and novels but also works of history and philosophy, and religious works such as the Bible. Scholars refer to all of such works intended for a public audience as "literary," in order to distinguish them from private letters, shopping lists, contracts, instructions from a government official to a subordinate, reports from such subordinates to their superiors, etc. We happen to have autographs of every one of those "non-literary" kinds of ancient writing, mostly in the form of papyri discovered since the late 19th century, a great many of them from the garbage dumps outside the ancient town of Oxyrhynchus, Egypt, where about a million fragments of papyri with writing of some sort or other on them have been found. About 5000 of those fragments from Oxyrhynchus, both literary and non-literary, have been published so far.

So. Anyway. To get back to the main theme of this post: The date of a text, the date when those particular words were first put to writing in that particular order, is different from the age of a manuscript containing that text, and when it come to ancient literary texts, that is: texts meant for a public audience, including religious texts like the Bible, we have no autographs. We have copies made later. The date of a Biblical manuscript is always later than that of the text recorded on that manuscript.

For very many ancient literary texts, we have no manuscripts made within 1000 years of the original text. For ancient Latin, pre-Christian, so-called "pagan" Latin ("pagan" originated as a term of abuse applied to those pre-Christian people by Christian authors in the 4th century and maybe earlier), it is very rare to have any manuscripts older than AD 800, older than the foundation of Charlemagne's Empire. Charlemagne did a tremendous amount to revive education and preserve those "pagan" Latin texts.

In the case of the Bible, until the 19th century, the oldest-known manuscripts for the Greek New Testament were from the 12th century, and the oldest-known manuscripts for the Hebrew Old Testament -- I don't know. Sorry. Pretty sure they were 10th century or more recent, but I don't know.

Then, starting in the 19th century, great discoveries of Biblical manuscripts were made. First, manuscripts from the 4th century were found here and there between Alexandria and Sinai in monasteries and antiquities shops, including the tremendous Codex Sinaiticus, a nearly-complete 4th-century copy of the Greek New Testament along with the Greek translation of the Old Testament known as the Septuagint, discovered by Constantine von Tischendorf in pieces at Saint Catherine's Monastery at Sinai in Egypt beginning in the 1840's and gradually put together over a period of decades, and now in 4 different libraries, but most of it in the British Library.

Beginning in 1896, Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt found the huge piles of pieces of papyri at Oxyrhynchus, which I mentioned above. Most of these pieces of papyri are just little scraps which were discovered and preserved not long before they were going to become dust. So in that respect they're completely different than the nearly-complete Bible contained in the Codex Sinaiticus. However, many of the Oxyrhynchus manuscripts are quite a bit older than the 4th century AD. Some are as old as the 3rd century BC. They contain literary texts as well as the non-literary items described above. And these literary manuscripts include scraps of the New Testament from as early as the 2nd century AD, copies made with decades of when the text was first written, quite possibly within the lifetime of the original authors, something otherwise unheard-of for ancient literary texts.

In the 20th and 21st centuries the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi Library and other very old papyri and parchments containing biblical and apocryphal texts have been found and continue to be found, although so far there has not been another find as huge as that at Oxyrhynchus. In 1979 in Jerusalem two silver scrolls were found containing the Priestly Benediction ("May the Lord bless and keep you..." etc) from the Book of Numbers. The verses were etched into the scrolls before 600 BC.

Have I cleared anything up or just confused you worse? I hope this has helped. Be careful when you're reading news stories or watching TV shows about these sorts of things, because sometimes these stories and shows have mistakes, like saying "4th-century text" when they should say something like "4th-century manuscript of a 2nd-centiry text" or what have you.

So how do people figure out how old the texts are? The same way they figure out how old the manuscripts are: I don't know. That is to say: I know some of the criteria used, such as handwriting styles, which vary quite uniformly over time and place or origin, and things mentioned and not mentioned in the texts, and where the manuscripts are found, and carbon-14 analysis and multi-spectral analysis and many other things. And I know that the experts very often disagree about the date of a certain manuscript or of a certain text, but that usually these disagreements have to do with very small differences in age: a decade or two, or sometimes as much an entire century, in the age of a manuscript 2000 years old or older. But if you hand me a manuscript and need an expert opinion of how old it is, chances are the best I will be able to do is hand it right back and refer you to some actual experts. I do know some experts.

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.

Catalogs of Latin Manuscripts

It can be a bit frustrating, looking for manuscripts. In this instance I'm not talking about undiscovered manuscripts, but manuscripts in libraries which are considered to belong to the public, which are available for examination by scholars, which increasingly are digitalized, with high-resolution photographs of them freely available on the Internet.

But how do you find them? Ugh. There surely must be better ways than what I've been going through. I started off today looking for some list of all known manuscripts of Livy. Professor Michael Reeve very helpfully counted up 154 manuscripts of the Third Decade. Then there's that manuscript of books 41-45, that palimpsest of a passage from book 91, and that scrap of papyrus found with several dozen words from book 11. Great. Now, besides those 157 MSS, where's a list of the MSS of the First Decade and the Fourth Decade? I don't know. Maybe there's some really simple way to find such a list, but I don't know that simple way either. If it exists. Editions of Livy list all of the manuscripts used by the editors, but that's only a few dozen MSS all together, and presumably there are hundreds more MSS of which I am unaware. Presumably. I'm presuming. Because I don't know.

Seems to me that a list of all known manuscripts of Livy would be a very handy thing, which a lot of Classical scholars would like to have on hand. And maybe a lot of them do. I need to ask some of them about such things.

I know that some MSS of Vergil and Terrence and Plautus are in the Vatican Palatine collection. I know this because editors of those authors listed those MSS. "Vaticanus Palatinus latine," or "Vat. Pal. lat.," lets me know that those manuscripts are in that particular collection.

How did those editors know? I don't know how they knew.

Here's volume 1 of a catalog of the Palatine collection, listing MSS 1 through 921. The entire Latin section of the Palatine collection goes into the thousands. How many thousands? Search me. MSS 872 through 880 in this volume are MSS of Livy. You know how I know that? Because just now, paging through the online Google book I've linked for you there, I just plain stumbled upon MSS 872 through 880. Does the Palatine collection contain more MSS of Livy besides just those 9? I sure wish I knew. Do the other manuscript collections in the Vatican Library contain more MSS of Livy? I'm almost completely certain they do. How many more? I don't have any faint idea. I don't even know how many more collections of Latin manuscripts there are in the Vatican Library besides the Palatine collection.

All I know is that this is no damn way to run a railroad! You call this a martini?! Get off my lawn! You're darn tootin I'm climbing the walls over this! BARKBARKBARKBARKBARK!!! (That was the sound of me going stark barking mad.)

Numbers Of Copies Of Books

It feels like I've always been interested in numbers of books: how many copies there are of a certain title, how many books exist in this language or that, how many copies of a book there used to be which are now missing or have been destroyed.

I can't remember not being interested in such things, but the interest had to begin some time. Perhaps it was in junior high, when I got a Dell paperback copy of Catch-22 with "OVER 8 MILLION COPIES IN PRINT!" on the front or back cover. Not long after that I saw a copy of Catch-22 from a later printing. The cover design was mostly similar, but it was red where the cover of the earlier book had been blue; and along with a few other minor changes it now said "OVER 8 MILLION COPIES SOLD!" I took this to mean that when the earlier copy was printed, 1973 perhaps? that printing took the total to over 8 million, and that a year or two later enough of the earlier printing had been sold to honestly say "SOLD!" on the cover instead of "IN PRINT!" Did the cover designers at Dell really keep track that closely of the numbers of copies in print and sold? Am I giving Dell way too much credit for making sure the covers were accurate? I have no idea. For a while I definitely tried to keep track of Catch-22's sales, and I seem to remember seeing conflicting numbers from various sources, but in retrospect, that's explained at least as easily by journalistic sloppiness as by inaccuracy of reporting of sales figures by Dell.



I began to notice that publishers made great fanfare about sales figures, or the number of copies in a first printing, in some cases, and that in other cases they kept the information confidential.

This confidentiality was very frustrating to me -- don't ask for a rational reason why I needed to be informed about the sales figures for Gore Vidal' or Saul Bellow's books. This post doesn't necessarily have a lot to do with rationality -- so imagine how I felt when I became an undergraduate German major in the late 1980's, and discovered that many German publishers provided precise information about the numbers of copies of any particular edition, in the most convenient place imaginable -- right on the copyright page! What a country!

I'll give you 2 examples: On the copyright page of the 1979 Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag edition of Franz Kafka's Prozeß (The Trial), right above where it sez that this is an unabridged edition, stands: "1032. -- 1051. Tausend: Dezember 1989." This means: before this printing, in December 1989, there were 1,031,000 copies of this edition in print, and now there are 1,051,000. The December, 1989 printing was a run of 20,000 copies. Keep in mind, these are the figures for this 1979 paperback edition only. Who knows how many more paperback and hardcover copies of the Prozeß there are, before you even get to huge commercial considerations such as translations into other languages. If Franz Kafka had still been alive in December 1989, it would've been pretty sweet to be Franz Kafka, even if he was 106 years old.

2nd example: volume 3 of the Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag (commonly referred to as DTV) edition of Heinrich von Kleist's complete works, Dramen, Dritter Teil (Plays, Part Three. The first two lines on the copyright page are "1. Auflage März 1964" and "2. Auflage Februar 1969: 21. bis 30. Tausend." In other words, "1st printing March 1964" and "2nd printing February 1969: 20,001 to 30,000 copies."

Not every single German publisher did this, but it seemed like most of them. I was a kid in a candy store. That's right, I said "did" and "was." Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag and DTV and almost all German publishers stopped putting such information within easy public reach, within a half-dozen years of my discovering those once-wonderful German copyright pages. Now they resemble American copyright pages: sometimes they give the date of the first printing and the most recent printing of that edition, sometimes just the date of the first printing. Apparently American publishers circulated a memo to German publishers: "URGENT! Your practice of giving detailed information about the size of printings has been giving joy to an American citizen, Steven Bollinger. PLEASE CEASE AND DESIST AT ONCE." Or, in the ultra-paranoid version, "[...]giving joy to an autistic American citizen, Steven Bollinger[...]" because American publishers knew I was autistic 15 to 20 years before I found out.

In the rational and non-paranoid version, this had nothing to do with me, and I still don't know why German publishers used to put that info on the copyright pages, and why they stopped. All I know is that if someone writes a book giving an overview of the numbers of books made all over the world, from ancient times to the present -- and that someone might have to be me. I'm not sure that anyone else particularly cares -- the chapter on Germany between 1920 and 1990 will be much, much easier to write than some other chapters.

There may once have been someone with similar interests: Theodor Birt, born 1852 in Hamburg, died 1933 in Marburg, author of Das Antike Buchwesen in Seinem Verhältniss Zur Litteratur,



an investigation of how ancient Greek and Latin books were made and sold.

The numbers of manuscripts of ancient Greek and Latin texts which we have today is a different thing than the numbers of copies of those texts which were in circulation when they were new. Most of the manuscripts we have now were made in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. And their numbers don't even give us complete and precise information about the relative popularity of ancient authors in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, because chance plays a big role in those manuscripts having survived. Nevertheless, if we have hundreds of manuscripts of a particular ancient text, it's not too much of a stretch to think that that text was popular in the Middle Ages.

The thing is, as far as I can tell, the exact numbers of all such manuscripts are not neatly organized and gathered together in any one place of which I know, as you would expect them to be if a lot of Classical scholars were autistic. There is a catalog (with photos) of all known Latin literary manuscripts from before AD 800, the Codices Latini Antiquiores, 14 volumes plus an index, with 18,884 manuscripts of more than 2000 works, according to Wikipedia. [PS, 27 Mar 2018: Don't ever, ever listen to Wikipedia. And when it comes to Classical Studies, listen much, much less than you generally would. There are not 18,884 manuscripts in the Codices Latini Antiquiores, but 1884. Which means they certainly don't cover 2000 works. 200 maybe? I'm just guessing.] The thing is, there are many more manuscripts surviving today which were made after 800, than before. Many times more, I would think. How many times? I couldn't guess. And I can't find any catalog for manuscripts from all eras which is comparable to the Codices Latini Antiquiores. (Also known as the CLA.)



There are thousands of Biblical manuscripts. I wouldn't be surprised if the number of manuscripts of Vergil ran into 4 figures. I am quite surprised at how difficult it has been for me to find so much as an educated guess about how many manuscripts of Vergil there are. Here and there I run across a figure: There are over 650 manuscripts of Terence. More than 400 of Ovid's Metamorphoses. In 1989, Reeve said that Mommsen, Luchs and Dorey had listed 117 manuscripts of the third decade (that is, books 21-30) of Livy. Reeve doesn't say when they made that list, but in 1987 he added 33 more, and then 4 more in 1989, for a total of 154.



Reeve doesn't say how many manuscripts of the other books of Livy there are.

113 known manuscripts of the third decade -- sometime. Probably some time in the 19th century. Then in the late 20th century that number suddenly grew by over 30%.

I wonder whether anyone has even any rough idea of the ratio of the number of manuscripts of the Latin Classics which we have today, to the total number which were ever made. But before I even start to wonder about that, I have to wonder whether anyone even has a rough idea of the total number of manuscripts of the Latin Classics which we have.

I wonder whether I have a better idea of that number than anyone else, simply because none of the much-better-educated people even cares.

No, surely some of them care at least a little bit.

I need to make up an orderly list of such questions and start going around to Classical scholars and asking them. Who knows, the combination of my obsessions and neurological atypicality may actually yield something of interest or even of practical use to someone someday.

And wouldn't that blow everybody's minds.

The Oldest Surviving Manuscripts Of Certain Classical Latin Authors

The other day I was chatting with a learned chap, but not a Classicist, who repeated several times, obviously rather astounded by the fact, that the earliest known manuscript of Tacitus is from the 9th century. I was somewhat surprised that he was surprised, but, I repeat, he's not a Classicist. And so I thought that a blog post about the oldest known manuscripts of some Classical Latin authors might interest some laypeople. (A manuscript is something written in ink or pencil on parchment, papyrus or paper. The very oldest copies of Latin which we have are inscriptions, carved in stone as early as 700 BC.)



Most of the ancient Latin poets, novelists, historians, letter-writers and others who wrote before Christianity took over, whom we call the Classical Latin authors, are known to us from manuscripts copied out in the 9th century or later. There are some exceptions.

[PS, 20. June 2016: LD Reynolds, Texts and Transmission, ed Reynolds, Oxford, 1983, says that the two oldest-known manuscripts of Latin poetry are a fragment of papyrus containing 9 lines by Gallus copied between 50 and 20 BC, quite possibly during Gallus' own lifetime (c. 70-–26 BC) and excavated at Qasr Ibrim in 1978, the only currently-known manuscript of Gallus, who until then had been known to the modern world only by the high praise of Ovid and other ancient poets; and the anonymous Carmen de bello Actiaco in a papyrus roll discovered at Herculaneum and unrolled in 1805. This manuscript was made sometime between the Battle of Actium in 31 BC and the eruption of Vesuvius AD 79, which buried Herculaneum in ash.]

Vergil, the papyrus fragment CLA VI.833. In the mid-20th century Lowe dated it to the 4th century, but more recently Seider has revised that to an estimate of the 1st or 2nd century.

There are 4th-century manuscripts of Livy (a papyrus), Gellius and Sallust (a papyrus).

The oldest manuscript of Lucan dates from the 4th or 5th century, as does the oldest of Terence.

The oldest manuscripts of Plautus and of the Elder and the Younger Pliny all date from the 5th century.

Authors whose oldest known manuscripts were copied in the 9th century include Valerius Flaccus, Julius Casar, Quintilian, Tacitus, Macrobius, Ovid, Ausonius, Petronius, Horace, Suetonius, Lucretius, Frontinus, Martial and Juvenal. Don't thank me -- thank Charlemagne. He turned this whole bus around.

The oldest known manuscript of Ammianus was made in the 9th or 10th century. The oldest of Tibullus was made in the 10th century, of Propertius, in the 12th or 13th century, and of Catullus, in the 14th century.

In the case of every single one of those authors, more recent manuscripts play a very important role in establishing the text (that is -- in aiding scholars to make their best attempt to guess what the original author actually wrote). [PS: Except in the case of Gallus, of course, because there ARE no known more recent manuscripts.]

All of the ancient papyri mentioned here have been discovered since the late 19th century. That 1st-or-2nd-century papyrus of Vergil is certainly sensational, but because it's a manuscript of Vergil, it's made less of a sensation among classical scholars than a manuscript of comparable age of, say, Catullus would. It's a little scrap of papyrus, and 7 manuscripts copied out before 500 contain most or all of Vergil's work, as does 1 more made before 600 and another made before 800. Likewise, there is quite a lot of the writing of Livy preserved on 5th century manuscripts, so the 4th century papyrus mentioned above, although quite a nice find, has not been earth-shattering to those studying Livy. On the other hand, 4 little scraps of papyrus containing writing by Sallust, copied before 500, have been found. AD 500, not such a dramatically early date for Vergil manuscripts, or even for Livy, a leading runner-up in the Abundance of Ancient Latin Manuscripts Sweepstakes, but all of the manuscripts of Sallust besides those 4 little papyri date from the 9th century and later, so those 4 little scraps of papyri are -- yeah, somewhat earth-shaking, if you're really into Sallust. (And you should be, he writes rings around everybody else I've mentioned except for Horace and Ovid.)

The fans of ancient Greek are having almost all of the fun with the papyri: millions, literally millions of ancient documents on papyrus have been unearthed since the late 19th century, and most of them are in Greek. I'm not sure whether the number of Latin and/or partly-Latin documents found among those millions has yet gone from the hundreds to the thousands. [PS, 18. November 2016: Timothy Renner, in his piece "Papyrology and Ancient Literature," in The Oxford Handbook of Papyrology, 2009, p 289, describing the corpus of Latin papyri found in Egypt (which is where the great majority of papyri have been found), states that there are "about two hundred known items at present."] So, good for the students of Greek, and as for us fans of Latin: papyri continue to be found.

Here's A Book I Like A Lot

It's an example of what I would spend all of my time on if my Stoic sense of duty didn't drag me into conflicts which I enjoy much less, like whether or nor Jeebus really lived. (That's right, I said "my Stoic sense of duty." I feel that I must sometimes leap into the fray for the sake of the intelligent study of history. I don't always go round and round with the historicists and mythicists just for fun.) This is a volume of palaeography:



Specimina Codicum Latinorum Vaticanorum. That's Latin for "examples of Latin manuscripts in the Vatican library." That's not an exact translation but it's what the title of this terrific book by Francis Ehrle and Paul Liebart actually means. It's what the book actually is. Descriptions of 59 pages from 59 different Latin manuscripts, copious references to other descriptions of each one in other books, reproductions of the texts or the beginning of the texts in case where the editors felt the reader might need help deciphering the handwriting, and then photos of them all. Grouped by handwriting styles: Maiuscule. Beneventian. Merovingian. Visigothic. Anglo-Saxon. Carolingian minuscule. Gothic. Humanist. Etc. Etc. Handwriting styles which flourished between the 4th and the 15th centuries. (Stopping at the 15th century because that's when printing started, dontcha know. These manuscripts were mostly or all aimed at a reading public, as opposed to things like private letters and shopping lists.)

I've been studying Latin all on my own for over two decades, and that means I've been doing it all my own way, and that I don't know how the academics tend to go about it. My way has been to read Latin texts in critical editions, and what I've learned doing that has naturally branched out into other interests: for example, the more one studies Latin, the more one's curiosity about Greek will naturally grow.

For another example, the more prefaces to texts one reads mentioning manuscripts in Anglo-Saxon or in Carolingian minuscule or in rustic capitols, etc, etc, the more one's curiosity will grow about those various handwriting styles. For all I know, a typical student of Latin studies these handwriting styles right from the start. I know that a typical professor of Classics will be expected to identify various handwriting styles from various times and lands as a matter of course. It's a part of the job description. It's a big part of making all those critical editions I've been reading.

For me, until I got my hands on a copy of this book a couple of months ago, these handwriting styles were mostly just names in prefaces to texts, mostly ancient texts but also Medieval and later texts. They were like the names of people I'd been exchanging letters with for years, names to which I hadn't been able to attach faces. With a few exceptions: a photograph of a manuscript page in a few of those critical editions, a photo randomly come across on the Internet or in a book of history.

But with Specimina Codicum Latinorum Vaticanorum, I now have a photo album of all of my friends. (So that's what you look like, Visigothic! Much different than I'd pictured you.)

I'm still not your guy if you need to determine where and when something was hand-written based on the handwriting. Unless you're going to be satisfied with a rough guess within a couple of centuries and within several European nations. Then I might be your guy, based on what I've learned from my cool new book, and from further study (for example, some of the many above-mentioned references to other books) arising naturally from the curiosity which my recently-attained knowledge has aroused.

The book is new TO ME. And my copy is newly-printed. But the book is not newly-published, but a reprint of the 2nd edition of 1932. Perhaps an actual expert on Latin palaeography would smack her forehead in frustration at the very thought of someone getting so excited about an 82-year-old book on the subject, and start exclaiming about advances made in the field since 1932 which render this book useless. But the fact that the original publisher, De Gruyter, is still printing it, I think, gives me some cause to think that it may not yet be hopelessly out of date. The photos are still all in black and white as they were in 1932. That's the only thing I'd like to see changed. Some of the manuscripts are pretty colorful. Bam:

Specimina Codicum Latinorum Vaticanorum is written entirely in Latin, the prefaces, the descriptions of the manuscripts and of course the manuscripts themselves. Actually, some of the manuscripts include a little bit of Greek and Arabic in addition to the Latin.

In 1932, all-Latin books were by no means unusual, not even when the subject was something other than literature. Today even critical edition of ancient texts are appearing more and more often with prefaces in modern vernaculars rather than in Latin. This aggravates me because it seems to be an imitation that Classicists are just giving up and saying, well, people aren't fluent in Latin anymore, are they.

Well, it's your JOB to TEACH them, isn't it, Classicists?

Whatever. Maybe I just don't understand because I'm autistic, the way I miss sarcasm and a lot of other things. Anyway, SOME prefaces are still written in Latin, which gives me hope that SOME people haven't given up yet, and agree with me that there is no good reason to edit and publish a Latin text and then attach a preface to it which is nit in Latin. (Are those people who agree with me about this also all autistic? Surely not ALL of them.)

Anyway. Kitties are nice and gorillas are awesome and I'm not actually a monkey, and I am a genius in some respects even though I'm quite atypical and sarcasm-impaired, and Specimina Codicum Latinorum Vaticanorum is way, way cool.

And MOST of the Oxford Classical Texts and the Bibliotheca Teubneriana are still either all Latin or part Latin and the rest is Greek. So there, 21st century!

Oldest-Known (To Me) Examples Of This and That Sort Of Writing

A story about the oldest-known, recently-discovered Jewish prayer book (9th century) got me thinking about the oldest manuscripts and inscriptions of various types. Manuscripts, writing made with a pen or similar instrument on something like papyrus or parchment or paper, interest me much more than inscriptions, except that inscriptions are much more durable, and provide us with our oldest evidence of writing. The oldest known complete scrolls of the Torah are several centuries newer than this prayer book. It used to be customary to bury such scrolls when they became worn. Very few have survived from before the 15th century.

As far as any Hebrew writing is concerned, the oldest-known example -- please keep in mind that "oldest known" always means "oldest known to me." I'm not being particularly modest here, just particularly careful to be clear and accurate. Keep in mind when anyone talks about the oldest-known this or that that it always means "oldest known to them." Also keep in mind that all of us are estimating about these dates and that bias sometimes is involved in dating. More about that below -- is the Tel Zayit abecedary, a rock upon which the Hebrew alphabet was scratched in the 10th century BC. Tel Zayit, the rock's location, was over 30 miles away from Jerusalem in the 10th century BC, way out in the sticks in those days. This suggests that literacy in Hebrew may have been rather widespread by the 10th century BC.

The oldest hard copy of whole Hebrew words was found on a tiny silver scroll dating from the 7th century BC, upon which was inscribed the Priestly Benediction: "May the LORD bless you and keep you[...]" etc. Then there are the oldest of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which are as old as the 2nd century BC, and some of them alleged by some to be much older, but I suspect unscientific bias in those earlier datings, but I don't really know.

Examples of Greek from the 8th century BC and of Latin from the 7th century have been found. The earliest Greek texts which are still widely read today are those of Hesiod and Homer. Hesiod was writing around 700 BC -- well, it's not certain that he actually wrote. Many of the earliest renowned ancient Greek authors are known to us not by anything they wrote, but by things which others wrote about what they said. Hesiod may well have personally written down much of the writing associated with him. (On the other hand, some of the writing associated with him was clearly added to the corpus of his works centuries after he lived.)

Of course, in the case of Homer, on the other hand, the question of whether or not he actually even existed is quite controversial. Hesiod helps us out here by inserting many references to his life and his surroundings into his writings. Homer doesn't say anything about himself. Whether Homer existed, or whether the songs of the Iliad and the Odyssey were attributed to a blind singer who never was, is extremely controversial. It's generally agreed that if Homer did exist and did come up with those famous tales, he sand them rather than wrote them. When they were first written down is extremely controversial. Probably in the 6th century BC or earlier. There are many linguistic characteristics in the Iliad and the Odyssey which come from long before the 6th century, but the preservation of these archaic details can be explained by singers carefully copying earlier singers as well as by the poems having been written down before the 6th century.

The earliest hard copies we have of any texts by Homer date to the 3rd century BC, and the earliest copies of Hesiod from the 1st century BC, and there are quite a few copies of both authors from those times up until the 6th century AD, but these are fragments, mostly rather tiny fragments of a few words each, found by archaeologists in the Middle East since the 19th century. One welcome exception to the generally fragmentary nature of these old manuscripts is the Bankes Papyrus, made in the 2nd century AD and containing most of the 24th and final book of the Iliad (18 pages in Richmond Lattimore's translation).

Although the oldest traces of any writing in Latin are almost as old as those in Greek, it's later before we encounter any Latin literature which is actually interesting for its own sake as literature, as opposed to very sketchy specimens interesting only to historians and paeleographers. There's a collection of laws from the 5th century, the Twelce Tables, meh. Yes, extremely interesting for the sake of the history of early Rome, and extremely revered by ancient Romans, but as actual reading material, meh. A Roman literature worthy of the name doesn't get underway until the 3rd century BC with Livius Andronicus, who, like the other two great early Roman writers, Plautus and Terence, was actually a Greek writing in his adopted 2nd language of Latin.

Less interesting to me personally than Graeco-Roman literature and much more interesting to the public at large are the questions of when the earliest parts of the New Testament were written, and how old the oldest copies we have are. As with Homer and Hesiod, so with the Bible (and with a lot of other ancient literature) : our oldest copies are recently-discovered papyrus scraps. Experts seem to agree that the scrap known as p52, containing a part of the Gospel of John, dates from the 2nd century AD and is the oldest New Testament papyrus whose date is well-established.

However, is there a 1st-century fragment of Luke set to knock p52 off its position as king of the hill age-wise? Daniel Wallace, who found it, thinks so. Mark Roberts, who wrote this article about it, thinks that Wallace is correct with this 1st-century date. But here we come to considerations of bias: Roberts, whose article mentions a recent debate between Wallace and Bart Ehrman, refers to Ehrman as an "extreme skeptic." That already makes me somewhat skeptical about Roberts' objectivity. As regular readers of this blog know, I've had my disagreements with Ehrman, but I would never call him an extremist. Wallace, whom Roberts praises and refers to as an eminently reliable scholar, has written books with titles like Who’s Afraid of the Holy Spirit? An Investigation into the Ministry of the Spirit of God Today and Dethroning Jesus: Exposing Popular Culture's Quest to Unseat the Biblical Christ. Before I've cracked either one of those books, their titles have already made me suspicious of Wallace's judgment and his agenda. And Roberts has authored tomes with titles like Jesus Revealed: Know Him Better to Love Him Better and No Holds Barred: Wrestling with God in Prayer, which brings us up to about 6 or 7 strikes against this claim of a 1st-century manuscript of Luke. But I have to keep an open mind here. Just because Wallace and Roberts are clearly crazy in some areas, and more than just a little eager to establish a paper trail right back to Jeebus Hisself, doesn't necessarily mean that they don't know squat about ancient manuscripts.

But still.