A Companion to Tacitus

Victoria Emma Pagán

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781405190329
• eBook ISBN: 9781444354164
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

A Companion to Tacitus brings much needed clarity and accessibility to the notoriously difficult language and yet indispensable historical accounts of Tacitus. The companion provides both a broad introduction and showcases new theoretical approaches that enrich our understanding of this complex author.

• Tacitus is one of the most important Roman historians of his time, as well as a great literary stylist, whose work is characterized by his philosophy of human nature
• Encourages interdisciplinary discussion intended to engage scholars beyond Classics including philosophy, cultural studies, political science, and literature
• Showcases new theoretical approaches that enrich our understanding of this complex author
• Clarifies and explains the notoriously difficult language of Tacitus
• Written and designed to prepare a new generation of scholars to examine for themselves the richness of Tacitean thought
• Includes contributions from a broad range of established international scholars and rising stars in the field
  

PART I: Texts

1

The Textual Transmission

Charles E. Murgia

1. Annals 1–6

The textual transmission of the Annals and Histories, to the extent that they survive at all, is relatively simple since the archetypes (the source of all transmitted readings) survive, and these codices have been published in facsimile editions. Annals 1–6 (except for a lacuna covering most of Book 5 and the beginning of Book 6) survive in Florence as Laurentianus Mediceus plut. 68.1 (that is, the first codex chained to Bench 68 in the Library in the cloister of the church of St. Lawrence – the beautiful Basilica di San Lorenzo). This codex was written in the mid-ninth century in Caroline minuscules, probably in Fulda (so Bischoff 1998; facsimile with preface by Rostagno 1902). The fact that the preposition apud is regularly written aput attests to transmission in a Germanic-speaking region, where final d was pronounced as t. Although the correspondence of Poggio shows an attempt to acquire the codex from the monastery at Corvey, it was not until the sixteenth century that Pope Leo X gained possession and handed it over to Beroaldus (Filippo Beroaldo), whose text was used for the first edition (1515).

2. Annals 11–16, Histories

Annals 11–16 and Histories 1–5 are preserved in a mid-eleventh-century MS written in the Beneventan script of Monte Cassino. It is also currently housed in the Medicean Library in Florence, catalogued as Laurentianus Mediceus plut. 68.2 (facsimile with preface by Rostagno 1902). It is bound under the same number with a somewhat later Beneventan MS, through which survive Apuleius’ Apology (titled “On Magic”), Metamorphoses, and Florida. A librarian’s note on the verso of the opening flyleaf indicates that the codex (including the Apuleius) had passed from the estate of Niccolò Niccoli (died 1437) to the monastery of San Marco in Florence. Letters between Poggio and Niccoli confirm his role in the humanists’ discovery of Tacitus. The two Medicean MSS of Tacitus are reported by editors under the symbol (siglum) M. They are the sole sources of transmitted scribal readings of Tacitus (except for quotations of Tacitus by other authors), though at one time an effort was made to establish a later MS, L (whose watermark indicates a date no earlier than 1475, later than the first printed edition of these works, de Spira, Venice, 1472–1473) as having access to a line of transmission independent of the Second Medicean MS. Despite the efforts of Mendell (Mendell and Ives 1951) and Koestermann (1969), most editors now recognize that L, Leiden B. P. L. 16B, copied by Rudolphus Agricola (Roelf Heysman), simply exhibits the ingenuity of fifteenth-century humanists, including Agricola. It is useful for its conjectural corrections of the text as are other fifteenth-century codices, whichever is the earliest to divine a correction of a mildly corrupt text. But they are generally helpless against major errors such as lacunae. M’s text ceases (before the end of the page) at Histories 5.26.3 Flauianus in Pan<no>nia. All the fifteenth-century codices stop either there or at an earlier passage. Editors such as Wellesley (1989) classify the later MSS (over thirty) according to the place where their text stops. Class 1 stops exactly where M stops, Class 2 (which includes Leiden B. P. L. 16B, and its probable main source, the first printed edition) stops substantially earlier at 5.23.2 potiorem, and Class 3 even earlier at 5.13.1 euenerant. Further details and bibliography are available in Tarrant (1983). Although the fifteenth-century MSS lack authority where M is extant, some at least must be invoked where M has suffered loss after the first copies of it were made, as in Histories 1.69 placa|bilem–75.2 incertum and 1.86.2 inopia–2.2.2 Cyprum, where M has suffered the loss of a bifolium. Useful MSS for this purpose include (from Class 1) Vat. Lat. 1958 (which Tarrant described as copied at Genoa in 1449 by Giovanni Andrea de’Bussi) and Laur. Med. plut. 68.5.

3. The Minor Works

Agricola

For the minor works, we again have available the archetype, but only one quire of the original ninth-century MS survives entire, containing Agricola 13.1 munia to 40.2 missum. Some readings of the Agricola survive in palimpsest after 40.2, but for the most part, for both the beginning and end of the Agricola, the ninth-century original was replaced by a fifteenth-century scribe identified by Annibaldi (1907) as Stefano Guarnieri. Guarnieri also added following the Agricola the text of the Germania. This MS (which also has bound with it, in front of the Agricola, the Trojan War of Dictys of Crete) used to be known as the codex Aesinas (Jesi lat. 8), preserved by the Count of Jesi, who successfully hid it from a Nazi attempt to seize it in 1944 (details in Schama 1995, 75–81). After a sojourn in Florence, where some folia were damaged in the flooding of the Arno in 1966 (Schama 1995, 81 and n. 15; Niutta 1996, 178), the codex was acquired in 1994 by the Biblioteca Nazionale in Rome, where it is catalogued as Cod. Vitt. Em. 1631. A full description is given by Niutta (1996), who reports that the codex must have passed from the estate of the Guarnieri family to the Balleani of Jesi in 1793. Its importance was recognized in 1902, and a printed diplomatic copy of the Agricola and perceptive analysis were published by Annibaldi in 1907. Till published a photographic facsimile in 1943, and photos of the entire codex, including the Dictys, are also housed in the paleography room (Widener D) at Harvard University. Annibaldi recognized that the ninth-century text of the Agricola corresponded to an inventory known from letters of Niccolò Niccoli (1431) and Decembrio (1455) of a MS found by a Hersfeld monk that contained in order the Germania, Agricola, Dialogus of Tacitus, and the De Grammaticis et Rhetoribus of Suetonius. This codex is commonly referred to as the Hersfeldensis (Hersfeld codex): the ninth-century writing of Aesinas lat. 8 is given the siglum E by Ogilvie in his Oxford Classical Text and is distinguished from e, the fifteenth-century writing. Doubts about the identification of the Hersfeld codex with E for the Agricola (based on the lack of mention of the Dictys text in the inventories) have been answered in Murgia and Rodgers (1984). The text of the Agricola was copied in the fifteenth century by scribes of two codices, A (Vat. Lat. 3429, written by Pomponio Leto) and T (Toledo 49.2, dated to 1474). Since these scribes copied the codex after it had been supplemented and corrected by Guarnieri, their testimony has no evidential value, but they need to be cited a few times for their conjectural emendations. The same is true of B, Vat. Lat. 4498, a copy of A (see Murgia 1977, 323–326).

The advantage of having extant a quire of the ninth-century MS that transmits the Minor Works is that we do not have to guess at what it was like. We can see that it was liberally corrected by a different ninth-century hand, evidently from a different scribal source, since many of the readings added as variants in the margins would seem to a scribe to be improbable. Murgia (1977, 329) counted “at least 145 notable corrections and variants” in the Agricola text. Therefore when MSS of the Germania (whose fifteenth-century history followed a different path from the Agricola) display marginal variants, we can recognize that they thereby show a closer affinity to the archetype.

Germania

Although when Guarnieri supplemented the text of E he used E itself as his source, he did not use the Hersfeld codex as his immediate source for his text of the Germania. Guarnieri’s text, given by Winterbottom (1975) the siglum E, is placed by Winterbottom in the same family with an equal witness, codex, B: that is, based on shared errors, Winterbottom sees E and B as separated from the archetype by at least one shared MS (a hyparchetype). I could easily believe that even more hyparchetypes intervene, but the process of developing a stemma of the scribal relations is complicated by the fact that the archetype is known to have had corrections and marginal variants. Whenever two MSS share errors one must eliminate the possibility that the archetype had both the error and the correct reading or the codices must share the same choices too often for coincidence. Winterbottom narrowed the witnesses worth citing to six, comprising three families: W and m he combined as the family ζ; E (Guarnieri) and B he combined in the family β; and C he combined with a family Φ into the family

. W is Vienna s. n. 2960 (copied in 1466 by Hugo Haemste), m is Munich Clm 5307, B is Vat. Lat. 1862, C is Vat. Lat. 1518. The chief representative of Φ is Q (Venice Marcianus Lat. 4266, copied in 1464 in Bologna). Each of the three groups he presented as descending independently from the (now lost) Hersfeldensis, and he proposed to make the agreement of any two families usually establish the correct reading. This does not work in a tradition in which the archetype is known to have had variants. So in a reading such as Germania 2.2.9 (the third number is the line number in Winterbottom’s OCT), where Winterbottom printed the Hermiones of βC, but ζ correctly attests Herminones, the more likely explanation is that the archetype had hermiones in the text and herminones as a marginal variant, just as in Agricola 14.1, E had cogidumnus in the text, but the correct (and less Latin-looking) togidumnus as a marginal variant. The fact that βC share the same incorrect variant is compatible with two explanations: either they share a common hyparchetype or they share a preference for the facilior lectio (the easier reading – Hermione being a familiar name in mythology; see Murgia 1977, 340).

Dialogus

Winterbottom used many of the same codices for the Dialogus as for the Germania. But W is now called V, and it joins with Vatican Ottobonianus Lat. 1455 (instead of m) to form ζ. B now stands alone as the representative of β. The relationships of the codices are clearer in the Dialogus in as much as the transmission is inferior. In the Dialogus the fact that there are fewer double readings presented as variants, but a number of apparent conflations of variants, makes it likely that the MSS all descend from a Renaissance apograph of the Hersfeld codex which either suppressed or conflated inherited variants. Some of the shared errors suppose fifteenth-century abbreviations. So 31.7.13 comitem Vahlen citem (with line over i) B ciuitatem

ζ shows the shared mistaking of citem (with line over c, Caroline abbreviation for comitem) for citem (with line over i, Renaissance abbreviation of ciuitatem). The Renaissance abbreviation for forms of ille (i followed by superscript e, or appropriate termination, such as superscript a for illa or d for illud) is frequently expanded as iste or id or iam by B and/or

, and once (41.5.13) all the MSS seem to have corrupted illi to isti. In 21.4.23, where the correct reading is ζ’s illae, BC have regulae, and Q reads re followed by a space of three letters. It is clear that a common source of BCQ had r followed by superscript e (a Renaissance abbreviation of regulae), a mistake for i with superscript e (Renaissance abbreviation for illae). So we have here shared errors that cannot be attributed to marginal variants in the ninth-century Hersfeldensis, since those abbreviations are not known before the fifteenth century. We have to assume at least two Renaissance MSS anteceding BCQ, one of which correctly abbreviated illae with i and superscript e, and a second of which misread the i as an r. Other shared errors, such as at 11.1.21 parantem inquit Walther parant enim quid (quidem V) ζ parant quid enim B

(which show B

sharing a failed conjecture, where ζ more accurately transmits an unintelligible corruption), suggest that the most likely stemma makes B

share a common source (hyparchetype) of which ζ is independent. This was the view of Robinson (1935) on the Germania (where, though the independent value of ζ is clear, the argument is less secure), and Winterbottom (1983, 411) came to concede that Robinson may have been right.

GUIDE TO FURTHER READING

E. A. Lowe (early name Loew) did early paleographic work on the MSS of the Annals and Histories which may conveniently be found collected in his Paleographical Papers (Lowe 1972 Vol. 1: 92–98, 113 n. 3, 289–302 and plates 37–38), as well as in his The Beneventan Script (1980, 34: 43). For the Minor Works the main authority is Bischoff. Although it has often been assumed that the Hersfeldensis was written in Fulda (near Hersfeld, and where M for the Annals 1–6 was written), Bischoff, on paleographic grounds, thought that a monastery on the Loire was the more likely origin of the codex Aesinas.

Oliver (1951) tried to reconstruct a rustic capital archetype of a thirty-book edition of the Annals and Histories together. The words Ab excessu diui Augusti (“From the death of divine Augustus”), which the First Medicean MS has prefixed to each of the first five books of the Annals (the beginning of six does not survive), and which Mendell (1957, 295) interpreted as “the title of the MS,” is written as if part of the text and is interpreted by Oliver as a subtitle for the Annals within the thirty-book collection. But it should be noted that although the Second Medicean MS presents part of a collected edition of Annals and Histories together, it does not contain the alleged subtitle, and it contains within itself clear indication that it was copied from codices in which the Annals were bound separately from the Histories: although Histories 2–5 are titled (in colophons ending books in M) Books 18–21 of Tacitus (the end of Histories 1 and beginning of Histories 2 do not survive in M, but the colophon Cornelii Taciti liber XVII explicit. Incipit XVIII, “Cornelius Tacitus’ Book 17 ends. Book 18 begins,” found in later MSS, fits the pattern of the other book endings), the first book of the Histories begins in M without title on a recto (right-hand page) preceded by a blank verso (left-hand page, with the surviving bit of the end of the Annals on the other side). That indicates that the Second Medicean MS was copied from codices in which the end of the Annals ended the volume (and so was subject to losses, as often happens at the end of volumes) and the Histories began a new codex. So the bind...

Table of contents

• Cover
• BLACKWELL COMPANIONS TO THE ANCIENT WORLD
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Notes on Contributors
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• PART I: Texts
• PART II: Historiography
• PART III: Interpretations
• PART IV: Intertextuality
• PART V: Theoretical Approaches
• Bibliography
• Index