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.

The 6 Most Important Things In Western Civilization

In chronological order:

1. A garbage dump. The garbage dump outside of Oxyrhynchus, which was a city founded in Egypt after Alexander conquered the area in 332 BC and abandoned after the Arabs conquered it in AD 641. For the nearly 1000 years in between, people lived in Oxyrhynchus and threw garbage into big heaps outside of town. This garbage included papyrus with stuff written on it. Most ancient papyrus with stuff written on it has rotted away long ago, but some has survived because it was put into jars as in the cases of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi library, or into coffins with dead people, or, in the case of these garbage heaps at Oxyrhyncchus, because the climate just happened to be just exactly right. A huge amount of papyrus was recovered there in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A little over 5000 pieces, a small fraction of the total, have been edited and published so far, including many copies of existing and previously-lost Classical Greek texts and a few very important for the study of Classical Latin.

2. Pope Gregory the Great. Important in a bad way: on his watch (he was Pope from 590 to 604) much of Classical literature went missing. In the case one Classical author after another, we have records of their being known, such as quotes or other mentions, up until the late 6th century. Did Gregory intentionally destroy all copies of Livy which came into his grasp? I can't prove that he did, but it doesn't matter. He was far and away the most powerful man of his time. He thought that the End was Near, that Hell was full with the souls of sinners and volcanoes were places were Hell was spilling over, and a lot of Classical literature, and competency in the Greek language, disappeared on his watch. Intent or incompetency, who cares? He's guilty, case closed.

3. Petrarch. Perhaps many of you know him as one of the three first great writers in Italian, along with Dante and Boccaccio, and that's fine and all, but nevermind that because Petrarch, in the 14th century, also started the Renaissance. Many people all along, all through the Dark and Middle Ages, had made heroic efforts to preserve the great literature of ancient Greece and Rome -- mention must be made of Cassadorius, who lived around the same time as Gregory and preserved much of the ancient literature Gregory destroyed either by intent or neglect -- but Petrarch is the greatest of them all. Many of the best manuscripts of ancient Latin literature we have today are copies made by Petrarch.

4. The 19th century. There actually seems to have been an increase, in the 19th century , of the number of people who studied the Classics. Many a 19th-century author writing in a vernacular quoted copiously from the Latin Classics, and didn't bother to translate, assuming that his audience was fluent. A few even assumed the same with Greek.

The recovery of texts in palimpsest, begun in the late 18th century, really got rolling in the 19th, with Cardinal Angelo Mai, librarian of the Vatican, leading the way.

I'm sure many of you have heard of the Oxford Classical Texts, begun late in the 19th century. I wonder how many of my non-German readers realize that the Teubner series, begun in the mid-19th century, is what the Oxford Classical Texts want to be when they grow up. The Oxford series is a wonderful thing, but it was begun in conscious imitation of Teubner, and Teubner continues to be the standard, with the largest numbers of titles in print, in volumes of the highest standards of construction.

They really are nice, you should check them out.

5. The Internet. Do you remember how, in the late 20th century, so many people predicted that technology would accelerate the dying-out of the more obscure languages? It has done the opposite. Remember how, in the early days of the Internet, it was predicted that languages not written in Latin letters, such as Greek, Russian, Arabic and Chinese, would be pushed out by technology? They learned how to format those languages, though, didn't they? No change of browser required any longer.

In the case of the Classics, there are wonderful online resources such as the Bryn Mawr Classical Review, the Rheinisches Museum and What's New in Papyrology, to name just a few.

6. The relentless onward march of technology. Like multi-spectral imaging, with which texts on papyri and parchment which had been considered unreadable because of wear and tear, dirt or overwriting suddenly come forth into clear view.

Teubner, Foremost Among Classical Publishers

Before 1851 many publishers had already produced volumes of the Greek and Latin classics, but Teubner, in Leipzig, was the first to dedicate a series entirely to them. The series, called the Bibliotheca Teubneriana or the Bibliotheca Scriptorum Graecorum et Romanorum Teubneriana, started in 1851 and it's still going. People call the series Teubner, although the publisher Teubner is not confined to this series of Classical texts. In fact, the publisher Teubner no longer publishes the Classical series Teubner: in 1999 Teubner sold the Bibliotheca Scriptorum Graecorum et Romanorum Teubneriana to the publisher KG Saur, and in 2006 the publisher De Gruyter acquired Saur. But through all that, and also through a period between the end of WWII and German re-unification when some of the volumes of the Bibliotheca Teubneriana continued to be published in Leipzig while others were published in Stuttgart, the series has remained very much a unified, consistent and continuous thing.

From within a very few years after its beginning until today, the Bibliotheca Scriptorum Graecorum et Romanorum Teubneriana has offfered a greater range of Classical titles than any other publisher. It's probably also maintained the highest reputation for Classical scholarship and quality among publishers. It's true that in the cases of many individual titles, the Osford Classical Texts will offer was is considered by most to be the standard text. And within the past few decades, Loeb and Bude have begun to compete for that prestige, and in some cases one of them have offered the preferred text. Still, I think, Teubner must be considered the pre-eminent publisher in their field.

A few decades after the Bibliotheca Teubneriana started publishing in 1851, someone had the idea of giving the covers of all of the volumes the Greek texts one color, and the Latin texts another. In Teubner's case, from the late 19th century until today, it's been orange for Greek and blue for Latin.

This idea has caught on with other publishers, so that now we have Loeb volumes with green covers for Greek and red covers for Latin, and orange for Latin and green for Greek for the Medieval texts in Brepols' series Corpus Christianorum.

The Oxford Classical Texts started in the 1890's and the oldest volumes in that series, both Greek and Latin, have orange covers which make them look very much like Teubner's Greek titles.

Today, the Oxford Classical Texts, also known as the OCT, all have black covers, but the Greek titles have blue dust jackets and the Latin titles have green ones.

My main concern about Teubner is the same as with publishers of Classics in general: the volumes get thinner while the prices go up. Well, and also, as I mentioned in a previous blog post, along with getting thinner the Teubner volumes keep getting taller and wider, and therefore more and more impossible to fit into any pocket. That too is inconvenient.

ISBN 978-3-598-71346-0

Bibliotheeca Scriptorum Graecorum et Romanorum Teubneriana, Eutropii Breviarium Ab Urbe Condita, recognovit Carolus Santini. It's the 2011 reprint of the 1992 reprint of the 1979 edition.

The thing is, it's very wide and tall compared to earlier editions from Teubner's renowned Library. Aside from the Library, Teubner would publish a critical edition now and then in quatro, but the Library's volumes, from the beginning in the mid-19th century on, were small octavios, about 4 1/2 by 6 inches. They fit into many pockets, these old Teubners. Then, around the 1960's or 70's, perhaps, they suddenly grew to about 5" by 7", and in the 1990's some new editions were just barely larger than that, and now there's this Eutropius -- and, I assume, other recent titles: 6.1" by 9.1". That's not going to fit into any pocket of anyone I know. With small purses it'll be between dicey and impossible. Backpacks are needed.

Does this bother me? Yeah, kinda. I'm used to sticking the old, pre-1960's Teubners into a jacket pocket. I'll live.

A surprising detail on this 2011 reprint -- and other recent titles -- is that, apparently, De Gruyter has taken over the operation from K G Saur. In the past 2-3 years, I'd guess. La-dee-da, eh? In addition to growing the volumes to an unwieldy size, De Gruyter has given the covers a new design.

Since before 1900, a blue cover on a Teubner Library volume meant the text was Latin, and an orange or red cover meant it was Greek. And it mostly still does, but: now there's also at least one green cover, on: Papyri Graecae magicae. Die griechischen Zauberpapyri: Vol. I. Greek papyrii used to be in orange covers like other Greek material. Does the green signify papyrii? or perhaps that some of the apparatus is in German? Or perhaps something else? Beats me. And a couple of volumes look more yellow than orange or red to me. Chaos. Chaos and decadence, and change is bad. Unwieldy sizes and unnecessary proliferation of colors of titles, and apparatus in vernaculars. 2 books of Livy per volume. As recently as a couple of decades ago every Teubner volume of Livy contained 5 books. And sometimes a little more: the Mueller/Weissenborn edition, printed until the mid-20th century, also included the periochae and testimony of the missing books. Yr dang right that was cool. Use to be before that, before Teubner, centuries ago, 1 volume would more often than not have all 35 books. You call this a martini?! This is no way to run a railroad! Get off my lawn, you punks! *shaking my fist at a cloud* Seriously, though, it's bad.

And even more in earnest: even with all the decadence, Teubner still kicks the living shit out of the Oxford Classical Texts and every other publisher of ancient Classical texts I know. Here and there an individual volume by Oxford or even by (shudder, facing-page translation, decadence, decadence) Loeb may be the one you want, or one by Brill or Bude or someone else. But all things being equal, always check Teubner first, it saves time. Teubner is the big leagues. Teubner is the quality shizznit. It's the stuff. Still.

The index historicus of the 1979/1992/2011 Santini Eutropius, in addition to giving the location in the volume itself of its subjects, also refers in many cases to der kleine Pauly (dkP), and in a few other either to The Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire (PLRE) or to the Pauly-Wissowa (PW).