A Companion to Livy

Bernard Mineo, Bernard Mineo

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781118338971
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

A Companion to Livy features a collection of essays representing the most up-to-date international scholarship on the life and works of the Roman historian Livy.

• Features contributions from top Livian scholars from around the world
• Presents for the first time a new interpretation of Livy's historical philosophy, which represents a key to an overall interpretation of Livy's body of work
• Includes studies of Livy's work from an Indo-European comparative aspect
• Provides the most modern studies on literary archetypes for Livy's narrative of the history of early Rome

Part I

Text and Context

Chapter 1
Livian Manuscript Tradition

Marielle de Franchis

Liuius ingens, Martial's famous metonymy (14.190), shows how ancient readers were impressed by the immensity of Livy's work, of which only Books 1–10 and 21–45 are available today. The bulk of the work,¹ which from late Antiquity probably caused both its fragmentation and the disappearance of most of it, accounts for its being circulated in various forms adapted to the different types of readership²: one could read Livy complete, in groups of books, or in a reduced form, excerpts (Excerpta) or summaries³ (Periochae).

The only attestation in late Antiquity regarding the whole of the work is to be found in a letter by Symmachus (9.13), the famous orator, written in 401, about the delay in his revision of the whole of Livy's work (totius Liuiani operis), and does not tell us how many books there were altogether.⁴

At the end of the fifth century, Priscianus, the grammarian, makes numerous allusions to the historian in his Institutiones grammaticae, but they do not go further than Book 118 (fr. 58 Jal), and none of them proves that Priscianus still had a complete Livy.

During the sixth century, there is nothing in Cassiodorus (485–580) to prove that he had direct access to Livy (Aricò 1986, 167). Recent research questions the hypothesis according to which our oldest manuscripts of Livy were at Vivarium (Troncarelli 1998, 40 n. 1).

As for Pope Gregory I's (540–604) responsibility in the destruction of Livy's History, it is merely a groundless allegation that comes from a legend spread in the twelfth century by John of Salisbury's Policraticus (1.142 and 8.19), and taken up in the sixteenth century by Machiavelli (Discorsi, 2.5.1).

The surviving parts go back to late antique exemplars, some of which are still extant (Cameron 2011, 466–467), while others have to be reconstructed from their descendants.

The transmission of the work was complex in the Middle Ages, taking the form of independent units, “Decades” (groups of 10 books), or perhaps sometimes “Pentads” (groups of five books). One cannot be sure of the link between Livy's method of composition and this form of transmission, nor of how much of his work circulated in separate Decades in Antiquity. The Periochae as well as Lucan's scholia testify, for example, to a separate circulation of a group of eight books under the title The Civil War (Fr. 37 Jal).

Still, Decades seem to have been the most common form of transmission for Greek and Roman historians (Irigoin 1997, 128–129), but the only attestation in Antiquity of such circulation of Livy's work occurs late, at the end of the fifth century, in a letter traditionally attributed to Pope Gelasius I⁵ (492–496), which mentions the second Decade (lost today).

The only Decades that circulated in the Middle Ages are the First, the Third, and the Fourth. They were available in Bamberg in the eleventh century (Reeve 1987a, 146). They appear together in a single volume in Italy from the end of the thirteenth century.⁶ The beginning of the Fifth Decade (Books 41–45) only reappeared in the sixteenth century. There is also a fragment of Book 91 discovered in the eighteenth century in a palimpsest⁷ and a fragment of Book 11 (fifth century) that reappeared in Egypt in 1986.⁸

The abundant research done in the past 30 years makes it necessary to update Reynold's excellent synthesis (1983). It concerns two main domains: first, the census of Livy's manuscripts copied from the ninth to the twelfth centuries (Munk Olsen⁹ 1982–2009, II, 1–16 and III, 2, 88–91, with complements in Munk Olsen 1991–2007) and of inventories of medieval libraries (Munk Olsen 1982–2009, III, 1); and second, a much deeper examination of the many recentiores, whose interest had been stressed by Giuseppe Billanovich (1951 and 1981).

Still, the investigations into the jungle of recentiores have led to a revaluation of what Billanovich thought was Petrarch's prime role in the transmission of Decades, notably for the Third and the Fourth (Reeve 1986 and 1989b). They have also revealed that the brilliant conjectures that Billanovich had attributed to Petrarch were in fact prior to him (Reeve 1987b, 424–430). He had above all a remarkable knowledge of manuscripts on which obscure readers had relentlessly made a critical work. To reach his conclusions, Michael Reeve benefited from progress on dating the illuminations in Italian manuscripts of the thirteenth–fifteenth centuries (Avril et al. 1984, 139–142; de la Mare 1985). Indeed, the confrontation of data on the dating of the text and those concerning the illuminations permits a much stricter control of the dating of the volume itself.

Therefore, we now have a precise inventory of the Livian tradition, with lists of manuscripts for the First (Reeve 1996c, 89–90) and Third (de Franchis 2000, 34–40) Decades. With the resources of libraries being gradually made available online, it is easier now to update these inventories and consult manuscripts. We shall limit ourselves to presenting the essential aspects of the transmission of the text, for each surviving Decade or part of one.

Books 1–10

Stephen Oakley (1997, 152–327; 2005, 494–501) has devoted a large study to the transmission of the First Decade. He shows how effective the stemmatic method¹⁰ is for going back rigorously to a lost late antique archetype, even within a contaminated tradition, that is, one in which manuscripts frequently change affiliation (Oakley 1997, 154).

His investigation embraces all the manuscripts of the First Decade (about 200) available today.¹¹ This Decade was transmitted in one piece, without any distinction between Pentades,¹² between the fourth and fifteenth centuries, by manuscripts, a large majority of which consist of recentiores.

Only 24 witnesses are from time periods earlier than the thirteenth century. One must straightaway isolate two late antique ones, which did not play any part in the transmission, because they have no known descendants, but one of which helps us to understand the mechanisms of that transmission.

The first witness of the two (=

), is a papyrus from the fourth–fifth century, discovered in Oxyrhynchus (Egypt) at the end of the nineteenth century.¹³ It contains a tiny fragment of Book 1, far too small to be of any significance (Lowe 1934–1971, 2, n. 247; Funari 2011, 229–237).

The second (=V) is a palimpsest.¹⁴ Fragments of Books 3–6 written in uncials at the beginning of the fifth century, probably in Italy, were identified by Karl Blume in 1827 and published by Mommsen in 1868 (Lowe 1934–1971, 4, n. 499). This publication has revealed unsuspected corruptions in the other manuscripts, which all go back to a lost late antique exemplar.

This lost model [N] resulted from a revision of Livy's text made at the turn of the fourth–fifth century by two senatorial families, the Nicomachi and Symmachi (Cameron 2011, 498–526; Paschoud 2012, 361–363). The medieval manuscripts have kept traces of this exemplar, in the form of subscriptions (subscriptiones), that is, notes mentioning this revision and the names of its authors (Pecere 1986, 59–69; Cameron 2011, 498–516). It is traditionally referred to as Symmachean...