library, from which Victorius borrowed so many Mss for purposes of collation, would appear to have declined notably in importance during his lifetime. The various vicissitudes of the famous Laurentian Aeschylus, known to have belonged to the library of San Marco ca. 1500, and to have been in its present home since 1589,1 could doubtless be paralleled in the history of numerous other Mss, including T, which at one time or another during that century found their way from the convent into the Laurentian. Of particular interest are the words of Victorius, written in 1536:2 "Quaedam (sc. exemplaria) . . . sunt in nobili illa et nunquam satis laudata Mediceae familiae bibliotheca, . . . quae etsi nondum explicata est, studiosorum tamen commodis privatim servit. Reliqua vero in Divi Marci altera non minus priscis voluminibus referta, quae omnibus omni tempore patet." This statement shows conclusively that the Mss sold by the Dominicans in 1508 to Cardinal Giovanni de' Medici must have been largely if not entirely from the private Medicean collection, which had been housed in the convent much of the time between 1494 and that year. That it was the private collection alone which was sold is definitely stated by a contemporary chronicler of San Marco, who writes: "Quo etiam anno 1508... decreverunt tandem prior et patres discreti e nobilissima Medicorum bibliotheca huiusmodi pecunias extrahere, quam nuper pretio trium milium ducatorum a syndicis rebellium . . . comparaverat conventus noster." It is certainly significant that the catalogues of the private library Politian of this same library, among them Publica Medicae gentis bibliotheca, bibliotheca Marcia(na), and Divi Marci Florentina bibliotheca. 1 See Rostagno, L' Eschilo Laurenziano, pref. p. 9 ff. In a Repertorium sive index librorum latinae et graecae bibliothecae conventus sancti Marci de florentia ordinis Praedicatorum, dating from ca. 1500, he finds catalogued about 175 Greek and 1000 Latin Mss, several of which he identifies with Mss long in the Laurentian. 2 In his Explicationes suarum in Ciceronem castigationum, first postscript ad lectorem. 3 In the Annalia Conventus S. Marci, a Ms preserved in the Biblioteca del Museo di S. Marco. I quote from the excerpts published by Piccolomini, Delle condizioni e delle vicende della Libreria Medicea privata dal 1494 al 1508, in Archivio Storico Italiano, XIX (1874), p. 256 f. of the Medici dating from the years 1456, 1495, and ca. 1535,1 contain no trace of a Ms answering to the description of I; we thus have at least negative evidence of the correctness of Victorius' statement regarding the ownership of T in his day. It now remains to determine as accurately as possible the period in Victorius' long career when he made this partial collation of г. Unfortunately we have here no definite data 2 to guide us, and we must accordingly fall back on certain rather general considerations. The internal evidence afforded by these notes points very strongly, it seems to me, to an early period in Victorius' life. Not much of an argument, perhaps, can be derived from the caprice with which he now selects absurd readings and glosses, now overlooks excellent ones. But his carelessness in recording some of the glosses and variants is certainly such as to suggest immaturity. 1 See Piccolomini, Z.c., XX (1874), p. 51 ff., XXI (1875), p. 106 ff., and the Index Bibliothecae Mediceae (Libreria Dante, No. 2, 1885). 2 None of the editions used by him, whether of the comic poet or of the lexicographers, was apparently later than 1515. Of the readings in I which ought certainly to have been recognized by Victorius as superior to those of the Aldine text, he has noted approximately onethird in the Aves and Ach., the two plays I have examined in this respect. And if we include the other readings of I which have been accepted by modern scholars, we shall find that but one good reading in five was recognized by Victorius when he saw it; for we are not justified in supposing that he consulted T simply for various cruces he had marked in his Aldine copy, in view of his express words at the end of the Aves, "cum quo totam comoediam contulimus." Among the serious errors of the Aldine left uncorrected by Victorius may be noted the following, from the first seven hundred verses of the Aves: 27 om. ovv 83 om. αὐτόν 298 πηνέου 472 κορυδὸς 517 οὖν ἕνεκα 521 τις τί 539 om. ΧΟ. 559 ἐπίωσι βάλλειν 595 ὥστ ̓ οὐκ 602 πολλῷ 608 προσθήσου 622 ἑαυτοῖς 649 γε νῶν ὅπως 658 λέγων and ἄγω 659 ἀρίστησον, omitting εὖ. On the other hand, he has noted a number of readings more freakish than plausible; e.g.: Av. 566 καθαγιάζειν 853 σεμνά added 1681 εἰ μὴ ὀρνιθιάζειν 1748 φάνος Vesp. 595 φῆναι 616 τόνδε κεκόσμημαι 9οι ἐξαναστήσειν 1294 κατηγέψασθε. The scholium on Aves 798 and the gloss on Aves 1718 are good illustrations of the absurdity of some of the notes recorded by Victorius. In the gloss on Av. 276 he overlooked ỏ év, which in r is slightly separated from the other words and moreover not very distinct; in the scholium on 778 he writes κατακηρουμένη (confirmed by Mr. Freeman) in place of κατακηλουμένη οι T; cf. also 1667 ovveπelon Vict.] ȧvameloei г Vespae 1053 Koivàs] kavàs and his confusion of the two glosses on Aves 1365. In adding vs. 152 of the Acharnenses This conclusion receives some confirmation when we compare the collation of the Ms of Varro, de Ling. Lat. (now Laurent. 51, 10), which Victorius and his friend Jacopo da Diaceto made in 1521.1 Notwithstanding the claim of minute accuracy put forward for this collation, recent scholars have discovered in it numerous errors.2 That Victorius was, however, a precocious youth is abundantly testified. An edition of Lascaris' Grammar was dedicated to him by Bernardo Giunta in 1515,3 when he was but sixteen years of age; and four years later Francinus, in dedicating to him his edition of Pomponius Mela, used these words: "humanissime Petre praesertim cum ipse utrumque fontem, tam graecum quam latinum (non ut plerique omnes faciunt iuvenes hac nostra tempestate. ..) summis, ut aiunt, labiis degustasti, at toto te corpore proluisti."4 We learn, furthermore, that even before the age of fifteen, when he went to Pisa for his intended university course, he had resorted with two other youths to one Giorgio Riescio da Poggibonsi, a blind professor of Greek, for assistance in reading Aristophanes.5 Comparing this anecdote with Victorius' own statement, in he inserted a superfluous repi before rŵv; and he was deceived at first by the position, in the margin of I, of vs. 1107 of that same play. Due perhaps to deliberate emendation are Aves 1245 kal póßov éμßáλλe‹v Vict.] els ø. è. F and 1582 ἐπίτριβε] σύντριβε ἐπίβαλλε. 1 See Spengel's Varro, de Ling. Lat., 1885, p. iii. The collators' statement reads: "Petrus Victorius ac Iacobus Diacetius contulimus cum vetusto codice ex Divi Marci bibliotheca litteris longobardis exarato tanta diligentia seu potius morosa observatione ut vel quae in eo corrupte legebantur in hunc transtulerimus. Die XIIII Aprilis MDXXI." This Diaceto was a boyhood friend of Victorius (see W. Rüdiger, Petrus Victorius aus Florenz, 1896, p. 4), and one naturally wonders whether he may not have had a share in the collation of r as well. The expression at the end of the Aves is contulimus, which in a book not designed for the public eye would seem hardly called for if Victorius were speaking of himself only. I am unable to cite parallels for contuli from Victorius himself, but that was the form used by Politian (see Bandini, op. cit., p. xxxvi f.). 2 Spengel, op. cit., p. iii ff. 3 On the authority of Bandini, Iuntarum Typographiae Annales (Lucca, 1791), II, p. 97. 4 Ibid., p. 136 f. Rüdiger, l.c., p. 3, on the authority of Salviati and Francesco Vettori. 6 "Fere enim semper quaecunque maiore studio legi, morem habui cum vetustis exemplaribus conferre."— Epist. i, p. 14. 1540, that he had nearly always followed the practice of comparing the text of those authors in whom he became particularly interested with Mss, I feel confident that we shall not be far amiss in dating his work on Aristophanes ca. 1520, with a possible margin of five years on either side.1 When and under what circumstances I left the library of San Marco can be determined only in the light of new evidence. Those who have touched hitherto on the question of the disappearance of various Mss from that library at this period have generally proceeded on the assumption that the means employed were not the most honorable; and 1499, ca. 1519, and 1545 have been suggested as probable dates for the abstraction of Mss from the convent.2 As regards the first two of these occasions, it may be urged that if there had been any wholesale pillaging then for which restitution was never made, Victorius would hardly have been able to speak so highly of the library in 1536.3 We have his statement that the Ms of Varro, de Ling. Lat., was in San Marco as late as 1553; the Aeschylus, however, appears to have been in private hands at that time. It is quite possible, therefore, that the various Mss disappeared from the convent singly or a few at a time during the course of several decades. The present condition of T certainly lends some color to the theory of rough handling in the process of removal to its present home. 1 His activity in the political conflicts of his native city during the three years following 1527 (see Rüdiger, l.c., pp. 9–15), argues against that period as the time of his use of r. 2 For the first two dates see Bandini, op. cit., IV, p. xxxvi f.; the last date is suggested by Rostagno, .c., p. 10, n. I. 8 See above, p. 213. ♦ In his Variae Lect. (1553), V, xxi. The wording remains unchanged in the edition of 1582, but this may have been an oversight. 5 Rostagno, .c., p. 10. |