The Siglia in an Edition of an Ancient Latin or Greek Text

In the volumes of ancient Greek and Latin texts published in the series Oxford Classical Texts, also known as scriptorum classicorum bibliotheca oxoniensis, and in what is known as the Teubner series, or bibliotheca scriptorum graecorum et romanorum teubneriana, and in many other similar series of publications from other publishers as well, customarily, after the preface by the editor and just before the ancient text itself, there is a section, perhaps half a page, perhaps several pages long, entitled "SIGLA," which is Latin for "KEY" [PS, 15 February 2020: OOPS! "SIGLA" actually means "ABBREVIATIONS," which makes even more sense] ,

or something similar to "SIGLA."

In this key are listed the manuscripts (and sometimes other sources such as earlier editions) which were discussed in the preface, upon which the editor has based the present text, and which are referred to in the writing at the bottom of each page of the text which is known as the critical apparatus, and which shows which sources the text has been based on, as well as differing readings -- called variants -- which are to be found in other manuscripts, editions etc.

Let's take for example the key to volume 1 of W M Lindsay's edition of Isidore's Etmology in the Oxford Classical Texts, first published in 1911, reprinted some time later, ISBN 0-19-814619-1. The key, entitled "SIGLA CODICUM" in this edition, lists the manuscripts Lindsay used. The first item on the list is:

"A = Ambrosianus L 99 sup., saec. viii"

What this means is that the manuscript referred to as A in the critical apparatus has the library card number of of L 99 sup. in the Ambrosian Library of Milan, and that it was made in the 8th century. Any reader who has paid any attention at all to these keys is used to seeing dates for the manuscripts listed in the keys, from saec. V, 5th century, to saec. XV, 15th century, and, in a very few cases, dates earlier than the 5th century or later than than 15th. Or the date may be given more exactly, if it is known more exactly: early 10th century. Late 12th century. 1320's. Sometimes the exact year is known. On the other hand, the editor might end an entry in the key with something like saec. IX vel X, which means 9th or 10th century, or saec. XI?, which means possibly 11th century, but the editor isn't sure.

Then there are rare volumes, the actual subject of this post, such as Robert Maxwell Ogilvie's 1974 edition of volume I, books I-V, of Livy, published 1974 in Oxford Classical Texts, or Otto Seel's 1985 Teubner edition of Justinus. In these volumes, the keys do not mention dates for the manuscripts at all. For example, the second item in Ogilvie's "CONSPECTUS SIGLORUM" on p xxiv is

"V = Codex Veronensis rescriptus"

which means "V refers to the palimpsest of Verona."

And the first item in Seel's "SIGLA" is

"A = Cod. Parisinus, olim Puteanus"

Which means "A refers to the Paris manuscript, formerly known as the DuPuy manuscript."

No information about the dates of the manuscripts.

Now, the dates of the manuscripts are given in the prefaces of these volumes, just as they are in every other volume from Oxford Classical Texts and Teubner. So, by referring to Ogilvie's preface, I can see that V was written in the 5th century, overwritten witten with Saint Gregory's Moralibus in the 8th century, and discovered by Blum, who published his finding in the Rheinischer Merkur in 1828. Likewise, Seel informs the reader of his preface that A is a 9th-century manuscript.

It's just that putting that information in the key, in the sigla, like everybody else does, is much more convenient for anyone looking for that specific information. Which is why, I presume, that specific information has been put in the key by almost everyone for centuries now.

Recent and Contemporary Latin Prose

Over the course of the past 30-odd years, I have taught myself a small amount of Latin. In 1989 I received a Bachelor of Arts degree with a double major in German and English and a minor in French, and I studied more German in graduate school, without obtaining any graduate degree.

Otherwise, all of my language acquisition has occurred outside of classrooms. My method of learning Latin may be unusual -- I don't actually know whether it is -- and perhaps it is not to be recommended: I have read little bits of Latin textbooks, but really not very much at all. Almost all of my attempt to learn Latin has consisted of looking at Latin texts, in editions by Teubner and Oxford Classical Texts and the Rolls Series and MGH, and Loeb, and some editions from the 19th century and earlier from publishers like Weidmann -- just looking at the texts and trying to read them, and occasionally going to a dictionary or textbook for help. And then looking at the Latin texts again, over and over, until I begin to understand them somewhat better. And then looking at them some more.

In the case of recent editions from Teubner and Oxford Classical Texts, in which the editors' prefaces have been in Latin in every case I've seen except one -- in such cases, often I'm much more familiar with the modern prefaces than with the actual ancient texts, which are after all the ostensible point of such endeavors. The modern editors often write in a much more accessible style.

Let me assure my readers that I am in no way accusing these editors of writing Latin in an unsophisticated way. On the contrary, an accessible writing style can the sign of the very greatest skill: look at Bellow in English, for example, or late Sartre in French, transmitting great depths of thought with exceptional clarity. A complex writing style, one which is a little more difficult to read, can also convey deep thinking, but it does not always do so: right now I'm thinking of great 18th century writers in English who wrote grand, long, convoluted sentences -- often because they had read a lot of Classical Latin -- writers such as Berkeley, Hume and Gibbon, and also of other 18th century English writers who wrote long, convoluted sentences which are not grand at all, and who are far too numerous for it to be necessary for me to name any of them.

Right now I'm struggling, not for the first time, with de aquaeductu urbis Romae by Frontinus.

It's not the first time that I've turned the pages of this text, in the 1998 Teubner edition by Kunderewicz, and yet, I could tell you much more about Kunderewicz' preface than about Frontinus' text. At first I had thought to copy here the first sentence of Kunderewicz's preface and of Frontinus' text, but on the copyright page of this edition is an exceptionally long and emphatic warning against using any part of its contents -- and I could hardly claim to be ignorant of this warning's contents just because it's written in German -- and so I will just give you word counts: the first sentence of Frontinus is 75 words long, and then first sentence of Kunderewicz is 12 words long.

I coincidentally also happen to have a copy of the 1990 Teubner edition of stratrgrmata by Frontinus, edited, by R I Ireland. The first sentence of Ireland's preface is 104 words long. It's a wonderful sentence, and I have nothing to say against Ireland as a Latin prose stylist, but, as a whole, I think Kunderewicz's style is closer to the contemporary norm. And I think that is a good thing. I take it as a sign of an authentic and living contemporary Latin (at least as far as writing is concerned). Most of those writing today in Latin do not seem to be trying to imitate the ancient authors whom they edit. (There may be many others writing in Latin today who are doing things other than editing ancient Latin and Greek authors, but I am not aware of the existence of many.)

In the Italian Renaissance, very many of the most prominent Latin authors, who were writing all sorts of things besides prefaces to editions of ancient authors, strove quite consciously to imitate Cicero's writing style in prose and Vergil's in verse -- two very bad ideas, in my opinion, which inadvertently did more to kill the Latin language than to vivify it.

Contemporary Latinists, as far as I can tell, rather than imitating the ancients, seem to be closer to sharing the attitude of Angelo Poliziano, one of the the relatively few non-Ciceronians among the Italian Renaissance authors, who said:

"Non exprimis, aliquis inquit, Ciceronem. Quid tum? Non enim sum Cicero; me tamen, ut opinor, exprimo." ("Some say I don't write like Cicero. So what? I'm not Cicero. But, I believe, I do write like myself.")

That's the only way to write, as far as I'm concerned. Here's to the living Latin language.

My Memory Isn't Immaculate, But It's Fun

I'm pretty sure that somewhere on this blog I have mistakenly attributed the saying "ars longa vita brevis" or "ars longa vita brevis est" (Latin for "art is long and life is short") to Horace. Probably more than once. I'm going to have to find those misattributions and correct them. After thorough research today, and much research before today, I am ready to admit, once and for all, that Horace, one of my favorite writers, never wrote "ars longa vita brevis," one of my favorite sayings, and that Seneca, one of my least favorite writers, did, translating "Ὁ βίος βραχύς, ἡ δὲ τέχνη μακρή" by Hippocrates.

I know -- I'm pretty sure, that is. One theme of this post is the unreliability of my memory -- I'm pretty sure that the first time I encountered this thought, it was expressed neither in Greek nor in Latin, but in English, by Joseph Conrad: "Art is long and life is short, and success is very far off." I'm fairly sure that I did not read it where Conrad left it, in the Preface to a novella of his whose title is today completely politically incorrect. I'm pretty sure I first came upon it when some other writer quoted it -- Hunter S Thompson? I don't know. (Did Thompson ever refer to himself as an artist? Seems a bit unlike him, come to think of it. Maybe he quoted Conrad to emphasize how far from art he considered his work to be? I dunno.)

Until today it puzzled me greatly how I could have come to believe that Horace wrote "ars longa vita brevis," believe it so strongly that I thought I had remembered reading those 4 words in my copy of Horace's works, a middling-thick Oxford Classical Texts copy, old enough that the pages of the text are unnumbered. Don't ask me why, but until a few decades ago many of the volumes of the Oxford Classical Texts didn't have page numbers for the text. My copy of Horace, printed in 1957, has Roman numerals, i through x, for the prefaces and siglia, and then no page numbers for the text. My OCT copy of Lucretius, also printed in 1957, has no page numbers whatsoever.

My OCT copy of Grenfell and Hunt's Hellenica oxyrhychia cum Theopompi et cratippi fragmentis is so old that it has no date following the title page -- and so old that its cover is orange, not blue, making the mimicry of Teubner that much more obvious. I'm guessing it was printed about 1910, a year after the date of the preface. It has Roman numerals for the prefatory material and no numerals for the pages. (Those Roman numerals which look like page numbers are just keeping track of the numbered books of Theopomus.)

(Many editions of Plato have standardized page numbers and subdivisions of pages -- based on what, I don't know -- so that one page may be numbered 315c, and the next 316b, or what have you. It's a whole big thing that happens. Seems these standardized page numbers for Plato may have been some of the earliest text page numbers in the OCT. I have 2 volumes of Plato from the OCT, one printed in 1958 and the other in 1961. Both have these standardized page numbers for the texts and no Roman numerals for the prefatory pages.)

To this day, most of the volumes of the OCT and the Teubner Classics have no tables of contents. Why? They go to such extraordinary lengths of exacting editing and thorough critical apparatus, provide detailed bibliographies and exhaustive indices -- but a table of contents telling you what page various parts of the volume begins on, somehow that would just be too much trouble.

I think I got my copy of Horace in the early 1990's, which would have made it one of the first volumes in Latin which I owned, at a time when I was just beginning to learn Latin. Wherever I came across "ars longa vita brevis," my recognition that Conrad had anglicized it was probably one of the first instances of my recognizing such quotes from the Classics and from the Bible which positively pepper the works of authors who wrote back in the good old days when the Classics and the KJV were more widely read.

And as far as how I became so strongly convinced that I had read "ars longa vita brevis" in my copy of Horace, one of the very first volumes of Latin I ever owned -- it may be that I saw the word "ars" in the phrase "ars longa vita brevis" over the front door of a yuppie bar in Columbus, Ohio, and at about the same time in the title of Horace's work "ars poetica," and confused the phrase with the title because "ars" was one of the very first Latin words I learned. Or it may be that I read a misattribution of the phrase by someone, or several people, who had confused the motto and the title in a very similar way. Or it may have been a combination of those things.

Recently I covered the cover of my copy of Horace, and my OCT copy of Lucretius -- I think the Lucretius was the very first volume of Latin I ever obtained, and the Horace the second, both roughly a quarter-century ago -- in scotch tape. Now they both are much more readable for me, because the covers are no longer unpleasant to touch. Just because of the tape. It's a big deal. It's a huge deal.

In conclusion: you gotta believe me, the Classics, ancient Greek and Latin, are waycool, and if you're not neck-deep in this stuff, you're missing out, I'm telling you. I will try to clean up the misattributions to Horace in the blog, I promise.