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The Codex Turnebi of Plautus and the Bodleian Marginalia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 October 2009

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Original Contributions
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1899

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References

page 254 note 1 It was not till after the appearance of the Classical Review articles that I learnt from M. Léon Dorez of the Bibliothèque Nationale, a gentleman whose knowledge of the handwriting of the sixteenth century scholars is unrivalled, that the entry on the fly-leaf: Hae notae in margine sunt manu Francisci Duareni Juriscons. celeberrimi ex veteri Codice, came from the pen of Joseph Scaliger, a younger contemporary of Duaren. Being unable to find at Paris or elsewhere any specimens of Duaren's handwriting, I had previously felt some hesitation in regarding this statement on the fly-leaf as certain proof that the marginalia were written by Duaren. When Prof. Sonnenschein says ‘ I fancy I detect evidence of a distinct hand in some places,’ he is, I suppose, referring to one or two entries by Scaliger (or Nicholas Heinsius, I cannot be sure which), such as these on p. 493 (see the collotype) : si credis, numo. si non, ne mina quidem (Camerarius' emendation of Pseud. 877), condiam (ad v. 882), nimis (ad v. 889), to which I have called attention in my notes. There are in the earlier part of the volume a few entries by a third party (perhaps the poet Remy Belleau or his friend and brother-poet, Étienne Tabourot, both of whom were successive owners of the volume), e.g. ‘ung pot a vin’ (ad cirneam, i.e. hirneam, Amph. 431). But these are so few and so trivial as to be unworthy of mention. That the whole body of marginalia is written by one person is unmistakable ; and with the explicit statement of Scaliger before us, we can hardly venture to doubt that that person is Duaren.

page 254 note 2 This transposition (there are many similar cases) has led Prof. Sonnenschein into the mistake of supposing that v. 748 has two variants from a source indicated by a symbol to be discussed later, these two being (1) non aeque scitus, which, as we have just seen, belongs really to v. 745, and (2) scitust, which is the proper variant for the line. Duaren's handwriting, though not nearly so illegible as Turnèbe's, is not always of the clearest, so that it is not surprising that Prof. Sonnenschein should have read the symbol in its first occurrence as dn. But a closer examination of the different ways in which Duaren forms the various letters, makes it certain that the letter here is r and not n. So the statement ‘ On Pseud. 748 we find different readings signed respectively dn, dr’ is erroneous. Both are signed dr, and the first of them refers to v. 745, not to v. 748.

page 255 note 1 That, by the way, seems the explanation of the intrusion into the left-hand or outer margin on p. 488 of the variant for Pseud. 730 Caristo. It had to be squeezed into an open space in the centre of that entry Ex fragmentis, &c., which I mention below.

page 255 note 2 The proofs of this relationship cited in the Appendix to my Codex Turnebi are, I trust, such as can leave no room for doubt. It is possible that the transcript still exists in some library, public or private. But neither a printed circular sent to public libraries in France and elsewhere, nor an article in the Revue de Philohgie, have as yet succeeded in eliciting any clue to its existence. And really the Codex Burneianus supplies us with all that we need.

page 258 note 1 Goetz seems to be perfectly right in adding to this list other readings from the Adversaria in which the reference to the Codex Turnebi is not so unmistakable. But it will be well here for purposes of argument to omit any reading which might be challenged.

page 259 note 1 Still I am less inclined to censure Duaren, now that I have had opportunity of examining Turnébe's handwriting. The best that can be said of it is that it is not quite so illegible as Lambin's. Duaren had a far more difficult task than the writer of the Paris transcript of these Bodleian marginalia. And yet, if we compare the two, I do not know that Duaren's mistakes greatly outnumber the other's. For all that, such mistakes as (on p. 488) columnae for Columbae, un i for uno i, alta manu for altera manu (again on p. 493 eastigatus alta nu for castigatus altera manu) are provoking at the outset of a transcript of so important a collation. The alta, by the way, is more likely to represent altera than alia; for if altera were written with the contraction of ter, viz. t with a cross-stroke intersecting the upper part of the shaft of the t, this contraction would be very easily confused with that by-form of t, which has become with us the current form. Prof. Sonnenschein's remarks about alta manus and his reference to the mysterious altana scriptura, mentioned by Ducange, are hardly to be taken seriously.

page 259 note 2 Those who would refer a correct reading in a dr.entry to a conjecture, say of Camerarius (e.g. Rud. 738), will have to explain why a wrong emendation of Camerarius never occurs in these entries. At Rud. 614 it is worth mentioning that the entry is animus miraiur, not animus miratur meus.

page 261 note 1 The Duaren entry at Pseud; 738, quoted above, appears in this misleading and incomplete form:hircum ab aliis It cum ab aliis P. sed ab aliis

page 261 note 2 The scattered readings in the Oxford marginalia from the Bacchides in addition to the continuous collation of Pseud, (latter half), Poen., Pers., Rud. (first half), are a curious feature. In the ‘ variorum ’ marginalia of the Paris Aldine mentioned above, there is a set of variants for the Bacchides alone. They come from a collation, made by J. Corbinelli, of D for this single play. Corbinelli chose the Bacchides, I fancy, because this was the opening play of the recently discovered portion of Plautus, viz. the last twelve plays. In what order the ‘membranae’ stood when they came into Turnèbe's possession, we cannot say. Certainly the Duaren-marginalia make us imagine the leaves containing Pseud. 730–Rud.79O to have occupied the first place.

page 262 note 1 I fancy the same thing occurs elsewhere, e.g. at Rud. 534 arerem. The Paris transcriber often adopts the same method with illegible entries of Duaren, e.g. this very entry at Bud. 63.

page 262 note 2 Lambin has clearly borrowed his note on this passage from Turnèbe.

page 263 note 1 His citations for the Pseudolus begin with v. 738 and for the Rudens end either with v. 767 or with v. 724, in striking agreement with the range of the dr.-variants in these plays.

page 264 note 1 What Turnèbe did to lay himself open to the charge of publishing as new emendations of his own those that had been already made by Camerarius or others before the first appearance of the Adversaria in 1564, was probably in reality this. He made emendations of the current text with the help of T, and when the time came for publication of these emendations in his Adversaria, he omitted the duty of striking out all of them which had been later made independently by Camerarius with the help of B, a MS. very similar to T.