The Medieval Tradition of Seneca's DialoguesAuthor(s): L. D. ReynoldsSource: The Classical Quarterly, New Series, Vol. 18, No. 2 (Nov., 1968), pp. 355-372Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Classical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/638078Accessed: 09/10/2009 16:51

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THE MEDIEVAL TRADITION OF SENECA'S DIAL O G UES

THE manuscript tradition of Seneca's Dialogues consists of one eleventh- century manuscript, Ambrosianus C 90 inf. (= A), which is the main source for the text, and a ruck of later manuscripts of lesser and disputed worth. There are over a hundred of these, far more than has been supposed.

The purpose of this article is twofold. First, I wish to try to trace the history of the transmission of the text from its emergence in the eleventh century to the period of its expansion in the fourteenth, devoting some attention to the part played in the transmission by Roger Bacon. Secondly, I shall try to examine the relationship between A and the later manuscripts in an attempt to settle the question whether they, or some of them, have any independent textual value. As both parts are to some extent interlaced, a third section will present some general conclusions.

I. THE STORY OF THE TRANSMISSION

The point at which any account of the transmission of the Dialogues must begin has been obscured by a long-standing and in some quarters still current misconception.2 The history of Seneca's influence in the Middle Ages has often begun with the story that Desiderius, the king of the Lombards (756-74), ordered the copying of Seneca's works. This is a myth, founded on a schoolboy blunder, and it is incredible that it has survived so long. The supposed evi- dence for this story is a passage in the Monte Cassino Chronicle,3 and it should be obvious that the Desiderius in question is not the Lombard king but the celebrated abbot of Monte Cassino (IO58-87). The time is the second half of the eleventh century, and the place is specifically Monte Cassino.

From the chronicle we learn that during his abbacy Desiderius gave instruc- tions for the copying of a number of manuscripts of both Christian and pagan authors, and that these included a text of Seneca. The Seneca text is not specified, and in theory it could have been any of his genuine works or those which circulated under his name. But the Dialogues naturally come to mind in this context, because the Ambrosian manuscript is written in a Beneventan hand and was copied, in the opinion of E. A. Lowe, at Monte Cassino itself.4 Lowe concluded from his study of the script that A was written during the

I am indebted to Dr. R. W. Hunt for I. Viansino, L. Annaei Senecae Dialogorum libri valuable assistance in the preparation of this III-IV-V (Corpus Paravianum, Turin, article, to Professor R. G. Austin and Pro- I963), p. xxii. fessor Sir Roger Mynors for helpful criticism 3 M. G. H., script. 7, pp. 746-7: 'non and comment. solum autem in aedificiis, verum etiam in

2 It goes back at least as far as O. Ross- libris describendis operam Desiderius dare bach, De Senecae Philosophi librorum recensione permaximam studuit. Codices namque non- et emendatione (Breslau, i888), p. 2. It is re- nullos in hoc loco describi praecepit, peated, for instance, by P. Faider, ttudes sur quorum nomina haec sunt: Augustinum Seneque (Gand, 1921), p. 1I4; Klaus-Dieter contra Faustum . . . Ovidium Fastorum, Nothdurft, Studien zum Einfluss Senecas auf die Senecam.' Philosophie und Theologie des zwdlften Jahr- 4 E. A. Lowe (Loew), The Beneventan hunderts (Leiden-Cologne, I963), p. I ; Script (Oxford, I914), p. 71.

Aa

L. D. REYNOLDS

latter part of the eleventh century.' There is therefore a strong probability that the Seneca text which Monte Cassino possessed in the eleventh century was none other than the Dialogues, and that the extant Ambrosianus is the manuscript written on the instructions of the abbot; but cautious scholars have rightly refused to go further than this.2 To my mind probability turns into virtual certainty when a new piece of evidence is brought into play.

The text of the Dialogues was extremely rare in the early Middle Ages: they were almost unknown between the sixth century, when the de ira was lavishly plagiarized by the Spanish bishop, Martin of Braga, and their re-emergence in the thirteenth. With one exception, no certain quotation from them has been found in any writer between the sixth and late twelfth century; the one man known to have broken this silence is Guaiferius of Salerno, who quotes from the de constantia sapientis.3 Nobody seems to have given this fact the attention it deserves. Guaiferius is known as a poet of the South Italian School; more significantly, he was a monk at Monte Cassino during the abbacy of Desiderius.

The known quotation occurs in one of his prose works, his Vita S. Lucii Papae, an ill-balanced but vigorously written Life of Lucius I, composed some- time after Io75.4 A single quotation could perhaps be dismissed as unimpor- tant, and it has been suggested that Guaiferius may have culled his passage from a florilegium.5 But this is short of the mark. The central part of his vita is a homily put into the mouth of the Pope; its theme is the contempt of worldly goods, and Guaiferius' treatment of it has been justly praised for its vigour and latinity. However, it has not been noticed that it owes the greater part of both its vigour and latinity to another vigorous latinist, to Seneca himself. It is in fact nothing but a brilliant Senecan pastiche, largely composed of elements derived from one body of Seneca's work, the Ambrosian dialogues. An analysis of the opening passage6 will illustrate his method:

PL, 1304 D-I305 B: Lubrica sunt et incerta omnia, nec dici possunt bona quae speciosa sed fallaci voluptate miseros mortales alliciunt, pecunia, dignitas, potentia et alia id genus ad quae tot homines inducti caeca cupiditate obstupescunt: ista cum labore possidentur, cum invidia con- spiciuntur, neminem non sollicitum faciunt, neminem bene felicem, nemi- nem bene securum. Nullus stabili constitit loco, iactantur omnes, pendent, fluctuant, in alter- utrum illiduntur: alii alios cadentes trahunt, alii aliis exitio sunt. Strages est ista, non vita, et coacervatio alios

I Op. cit., p. 34I. There is a facsimile of fol. 52v-53r in 1. Chatelain, PalMographie des

classiques latins (Paris, I884-I900), plate I67.

2 e.g. Lowe, op. cit., p. 50 n. 5. 3 PL 147, I306 D = const. io. 2; cf. M.

Manitius, Geschichte der lateinischen Literatur des

Polyb. 9. 5: Omnia ista bona quae nos

speciosa sed fallaci voluptate delec- tant, pecunia, dignitas, potentia aliaque complura ad quae generis humani caeca cupiditas obstupescit, cum labore possidentur, cum invidia conspiciuntur, . . . lubrica et incerta sunt.

Polyb. 9. 6: Numquam stabili con- sistimus loco, pendemus et fluctuamur et alter in alterum illidimur. vita beata I. 4: Nemo ita cadit ut non et alium in se adtrahat, primique

Mittelalters,vol. ii (Munich, 1923), p. 487n. i. 4 Manitius, op. cit., p. 489. s Nothdurft, op. cit., p. 13 n. 6. 6 Quotations from the Dialogues occur,

though more thinly, in other parts of the Vita, and also in his Vita Secundini.

356

THE MEDIEVAL TRADITION OF SENECA'S DIALOGUES 357

super alios ruentium. Respondeat sibi licet quisque ad votum, credatque voluptatem summum bonum, gloriam et saeculi pompas et ultima vitia in summa felicitate ponat, omnia tamen humana brevia et caduca sunt, nec procedentia in partem aliquam tem- poris longioris: cito transeunt et immaturo citra incrementum ter- mino concluduntur, ut nec illis diu stare contigerit. Etiam ad illa quae vetustate gloriantur extendamus, si libet, aetatis nostrae metam, cuius medium pauci computant in annum centesimum; inde ducatur animus ad longissima et infinita aevi spatia; haec tempora, aeternitati comparata, quam proportionem facerent, etiam si nobis aetas annum millesimum in- dulgeret?

exitio sequentibus sunt. I. 3. Inde ista tanta coacervatio aliorum super alios ruentium.

Marc. 2 I. : Omnia humana brevia et caduca sunt et infiniti temporis nul- lam partem occupantia.

Marc. 2I. I: Videbis quam non diu steterint etiam quae vetustate glori- antur.

cf. brev. 3. 2. Marc. 21. 2: Minorem portionem aetas nostra quam puncti habet si omni tempori comparetur ...: quid ergo interest id extendere cuius quantumcumque fuerit incrementum non multum aberit a nihilo?

Guaiferius does not belong to those medieval writers who throw in the odd Senecan tag as a casual literary embellishment: he is making full use of his material, thoroughly assimilating it and then reproducing it in a form which is both coherent and delicately adapted to suit the Christian context. He must have known the dialogues backwards, for he is able to jump from one to another with great ease, and he quotes from the whole extent of the text. To have acquired such a grasp of his material he must have brooded over-or even copied-a manuscript of the Dialogues, and it is reasonable to suppose that he did this at Monte Cassino.

Of still more interest is the fact that Guaiferius was not using the extant Ambrosianus. For the beginning of the de ira was omitted by the scribe of A and not filled in until later; consequently in the eleventh century A offered an area of blank page where de ira I. I-2. 3 should have been.' But Guaiferius knew the beginning of the de ira, for he quotes passages from i. I-I. 4.2 There- fore he was using either an independent copy of the text or, very possibly, the manuscript from which A itself was copied; in other words, either a twin of A or the archetype itself. This means that Guaiferius of Salerno will in future deserve some mention as one who witnessed a critical stage in the transmission of a classical text; it also means that we can be fairly certain that the Seneca manuscript which Desiderius wished to have copied was in fact a manuscript of the Dialogues, and that Monte Cassino was the home of the archetype.

Therefore in the late eleventh century there must have been at least two copies of the Dialogues at Monte Cassino, A and the archetype itself; and more copies may have been made, either then or later. These probabilities will keep until we come to deal with the recentiores: what happened to A itself can to a certain extent be traced. The twelfth-century catalogue of the Monte

I For a more detailed discussion of the missing part of the de ira, see pp. 368-9. 2 I306 C.

Cassino library does not help very much. It contains two Seneca entries.' The first is a copy of the de beneficiis, a fairly standard item in any twelfth- century library; the second entry refers to a Seneca of unspecified content which is held by the library as a deposit for another Seneca on loan, and we have no means of knowing whether the Ambrosianus was involved in this transaction. What is fairly clear is that by the fifteenth century A had passed from Monte Cassino to one of the monasteries of its congregation, for this can reasonably be assumed from a partially erased ex libris.2 By 1583 it was in the hands of a private owner, Antonio Francesco Caracciolo,3 then living at Messina and probably connected with the prolific Caraccioli dynasty which flourished for centuries in the kingdom of Naples. From Caracciolo it passed into the possession of Cardinal Federigo Borromeo,4 and thence into the library which he founded.5 About the time that it left Caracciolo's possession it was used by Muretus, who was professor in Rome from 1563 to 1584 and is surely to be identified with the vetustissimus Siculus mentioned in his 1585 edition.6 The important fact for future reference is that during the medieval period A did not leave the orbit of Monte Cassino.

The story of the early history of this tradition, localized during this period in the south of Italy, would end here were it not for one unexpected and in- triguing piece of evidence. This evidence has to be reached by a long detour, and the starting-point is to be found, rather surprisingly, in the Letters of Peter of Blois (c. II35-c. I204): in letter 175 of the printed collection of his cor-

respondence there is a definite and indisputable quotation from the ad Poly- bium.7 This would be hard to explain if letter 175 were authentic, but it is in fact one of the later accretions to his correspondence, an elegant sample of the ars dictandi which has been transferred from one of the dictamina to another. It is one of a group of three letters of similar content, all addressed to Italian universities, and it was long ago suggested8 that all three more properly belonged to Peter delle Vigna (c. I I90-I249), the famous minister of Frederic

II; they are in fact found in both the manuscript and printed collections of his correspondence. So the time of composition has been advanced to the thir- teenth century, the scene has moved to Italy, and this begins to make sense; but it is not the end of the story, for it seems certain that the letter in question was no more written by Peter delle Vigna than by Peter of Blois. As printed in Migne, the letter has a truncated and almost meaningless preamble, and the

I G. Becker, Catalogi bibliothecarum antiqui (Bonn, I885), p. 246; I 9, I2 Seneca de

beneficiis I; I19, 8 Senecam magistri amici quem abemus pro alio Seneca monasterii in pignore I. i

2 f. 2r 'Iste liber . .Congre Casinen' ... Cf. Lowe, p. 71.

3 f. 2r 'Antonii Franc. Neapolitae Carac- cioli Siculi et amicorum Anno D. MDLXXXIII Xo Kal. Novembr. Mes- sanae.'

4 f. 2r 'Card. Federici Borrhomaei anno I603'.

5 A note by the first librarian Olgiatus (f. iV) tells us that it was already in the Ambrosiana by I603.

6 This identification was disputed by M. C. Gertz (Studia critica in L. Annaei Senecae

Dialogos [Copenhagen, I874], pp. 9-10), who found discrepancies between the readings of Muretus' codex Siculus and those of A. But inaccurate collations were not unknown in the sixteenth century, and one would be hard put to it to find another 'Sicilian' manu- script of the Dialogues. His liber Siculus of the Letters is almost certainly Ambrosianus C 85 inf., which also belonged to Caracciolo, though again the readings do not entirely tally.

7 'Testante philosopho, crudelitatem fati aequalitas consolatur' (PL 207, 470 C) = 'ut crudelitatem fati consolaretur aequalitas' (Polyb. I. 4).

8 By E. S. Cohn, English Historical Review 41 (I926), p. 46.

358 L. D. REYNOLDS

THE MEDIEVAL TRADITION OF SENECA'S DIALOGUES 359

writer has so universalized his identity that he actually refers to himself as quilibet homo.1 But in 1865 the letter was properly edited from a more reliable manuscript by Huillard-Breholles,2 and it should begin:

Vagientibus adhuc in cunis artis grammaticae natis discipulis et majoribus professionis cuiuslibet in amoena Bononia docentibus, Terrisius solo nomine dictus magister, homo qui sequitur veritatem, vitam bonam et exitum meliorem.

Rescued from the ruins of a rhetorical exercise, quilibet homo becomes the august Magister Terrisius, to be identified with Terrisio di Atina, who moved in the same circles as Peter delle Vigna, addressed a poem on the reform of judicial abuses to Frederic II, was involved in a dispute arising out of the election of Pandulfus to the abbacy of Monte Cassino in 1237, and became Professor of Rhetoric in the newly founded University of Naples, where he was punningly known to his pupils as the 'terror' of the schools.3 The letter can, moreover, be dated, for it is addressed to the Professors and Students of the University of Bologna and was written to console them on the death of one of their pro- fessors of Grammar, auspiciously named Bene. Bene may well have been Terrisio's teacher; he was appointed to his chair in 1218, was still alive in 1226, and probably died in I238.4 Therefore the letter containing the Seneca quota- tion was written in the second quarter of the thirteenth century. It has been a long haul from Peter of Blois to the young University of Naples, but it is per- haps worth the effort to meet such a colourful character as Maestro Terrisio, especially as he bears witness to the continued availability of the text of the Dialogues in southern Italy at this time.

Guaiferius of Salerno, Terrisio of Atina, and the Ambrosian manuscript itself make it clear that the Dialogues were both available and read in southern Italy from the eleventh century onwards. But while enjoying this limited circulation in the south, they were almost unknown north of the Alps. This is remarkable, because the twelfth and thirteenth centuries formed what was very much an aetas Annaeana. The editors of medieval texts have indeed found a number of echoes from the Dialogues in twelfth-century writers, but these die out on closer examination.

For instance, in the Florilegium Morale Oxoniense,5 compiled in England towards the end of the century, there are three fosculi which are said to have the Dialogues as their source: p. 69. 15 Difficilem habere oportet aurem ad crimina ('cf. ira 2. 22. 3'); I 13. 26 Ducunt volentemfata, nolentem trahunt ('cf. prov. 5. 7'); I 16. 19-20 Inmodica ira gignit insaniam, et animo vitanda est, non moderationis causa sed sanitatis ('cf. ira. I. I. 2'). But the first (an iambic trimeter) is one of the Sententiae of Publilius Syrus (D I Meyer), the second is a quotation from letter

I PL 207, 469 D. It begins 'vagientibus Anedotti di storia letteraria napoletana (Citta del in cunis adhuc artis grammaticae, natisque Castello, I925), pp. 33-59. Cf. also C. H. recens discipulis, quilibet homo, qui sequitur Haskins, Studies in Medieval Culture (Oxford, veritatem, vitam bonam et exitum meli- I929), pp. I29, I35. orem'. 4 For Bene, see A. Gaudenzi, 'Sulle opere

2 A. Huillard-Breholles, Vie et correspon- dei dettatori bolognesi', Bulletino dell'Istituto dance de Pierre de la Vigne (Paris, 1865), storico italiano 14 (I895), 150 ff.; C. Frati, pp. 300-2. A proposito di maestro Bene, Rome, I895.

3 What is known about Terrisio has been 5 MS. Bodley 633, edited by P. Delhaye assembled by F. Torraca, 'Maestro Terrisio and C. H. Talbot, Analecta Mediaevalia di Atina', Archivio storico per le province napole- Namurcensia, 5-6 (Namur-Lille, I955-6). tane 36 (I911), pp. 231-53, reprinted in his

107. I i, the third from letter 18. 15. The compiler of the florilegium knew as little of the Dialogues as Peter of Blois. The same is true of the alleged echoes in the Verbum abbreviatum of Petrus Cantor, written between I171 and I 97.'

It is clearly safer to start from the premiss that the writers of the twelfth century did not know the Dialogues than to assume that they did. There is, however, one quotation which is ultimately derived from the de ira. This is found in the Moralium dogma philosophorum,2 written about the middle of the century: summopere autem fuge iurgia; nam contra parem contendere anceps est, cum superiorefuriosum, cum inferiore sordidum. This derives from ira 2. 34. I: cum pare contendere anceps est, cum superiorefuriosum, cum inferiore sordidum. It is curious that the same excerpt appears in a slightly different form in the Liber consolationis et consilii3 of Albertano of Brescia, written in I246: on p. 93. I-3 we find con- tendere cum superiore furiosum est vel periculosum, cum pari dubium, cum minore vere- cundum. Albertano is more likely to have had access to our text than the author of the Moralium dogma, but it is very doubtful if he did.4 It is therefore possible that this one excerpt enjoyed some independent circulation, perhaps going back to a secondary source.5 So far the twelfth century has thrown up only one quotation from the Dialogues, and the discovery of more will hardly change the general position: the Dialogues were virtually unknown in northern Europe until the thirteenth century. When seen against this background, their re- discovery is somewhat dramatic, especially as they were to all intents and pur- poses 'rediscovered' by one of the most intriguing of all English medieval figures, Roger Bacon.

Bacon discovered a manuscript of the Dialogues in the year 1266. This was the year in which Pope Clement IV sent Bacon the famous mandate requesting a copy of his great opera-works which Roger had unfortunately not yet written. The passage in Bacon relevant to his discovery reads:

Libros vero Senecae, quorum flores vestrae beatitudini conscripsi, numquam potui invenire nisi a tempore mandati vestri, quamvis diligens fui in hac parte iam a viginti annis et pluribus.6

The excitement which he derived from his discovery readily excuses the

I aequo animo sustinenda sunt imperitorum con- vitia, etc. (PL 205, 302 D) has nothing to do with the de constantia but, as has been noted by Nothdurft (op. cit., p. 149), comes from letter 76. 4. Again, quid refert an garciones isti superius an inferius intonent? sicut in posteriori parte, sicfetunt et in ore (ibid.) was not inspired by any passages in the dialogi, as has generally been supposed, but surely by letter 9I. 19: Demetrius noster solet dicere eodem loco sibi esse voces imperitorum quo ventre redditos crepitus. 'Quid enim' inquit 'mea, susum isti an deosum sonent?' Similarly 351 D-352 A is not a free adaptation of ideas from the de brevitate, as has been thought: it is the beginning of letter o01.

2 Edited by J. Holmberg, Uppsala, 1929. For the quotation, cf. p. 50. 1-3.

3 Edited by Thor Sundby, Chaucer Society, Ser. ii, pt. 8, London, 1873.

4 The only other alleged quotation from the Dialogues in the works of Albertano which have so far been edited will not bear examination. Liber consol., p. 55. 3-4 facilius est vitia excludere quam admissa comprimere is not, as has been assumed, an echo of ira I. 7. 2.

facilius est excludere perniciosa quam regere, et non admittere quam admissa moderari, close though it is: it is a direct quotation from letter 85. 3 cum facilius sit excludere quam admissa com- primere.

5 It is found in the de ira of Marin of Braga: cum superiore contendere furiosum est, cum pari anceps, cum inferiore iam sordidum (C. W. Barlow, Martini Episcopi Bracarensis Opera Omnia [American Academy in Rome, 19501, P. 153. 35); but this is not the source of the two later quotations.

6 Opus tertium, edited byJ. S. Brewer, Rolls Series (London, I859), p. 56.

360 L. D. REYNOLDS

THE MEDIEVAL TRADITION OF SENECA'S DIALOGUES 36I

publicity which he gave his find. He continually stresses the rarity of this text,' and makes its rarity his excuse for sending the Pope, in the form of his Moralis Philosophia,2 what is little more than an abbreviated transcript of the Dialogues:

Set et causa specialis est quod in hiis libris Senece morer; quia licet huiusmodi prosecutus sum ab infancia, tamen libros De ira et Ad Helbiam et Cur bonis mala accidant et An in sapientem cadant contumelia et iniuria et Ad Marciam et tres adhuc sequentes3 non potui unquam videre nisi modo, et nescio si ad manus Vestre Glorie pervenerunt; propterea habundancius hic scribere sum conatus.4

The rediscovery of the Dialogues in I266 by the doctor mirabilis himself is dramatic enough to rouse more interest than it appears to have done, and C. H. Beeson, who has made the sole contribution to this subject,5 roundly attacked Senecan scholars for their total neglect of the indirect medieval tradition.6 Beeson raised such stimulating questions that it matters little that he provided what appear to me to have been the wrong answers, and it is high time that Bacon's part in the transmission of the text should be examined afresh.

Though Roger may have exaggerated the importance of his find in order to impress the Pope, his joy and excitement were genuine enough, and it is only in the light of a closer historical investigation that his discovery begins to lose its significance. In the first place, it will already be apparent that Bacon 're- discovered' the Dialogues only in the limited sense that, with characteristic panache, he proclaimed the arrival in northern Europe of a text which had been known in southern Italy for a couple of centuries. To have been the first to know the text in northern Europe would still have been something, but Roger had in fact been anticipated by an older contemporary. For there is a direct quotation from the de constantia sapientis (8. 2) in the prologue to the unedited Epithalamium B. Marie Virginis of John of Garland:

Quapropter divine perfectioni sapientie vestre quoddam opusculum pre- sento, considerans quod dicit Seneca de sapiente: sapiens autem vicinus proximusque deo constitit, excepta mortalitate similis deo, ad summa nitens et pergens excelsa.7

The Epithalamium is now recognized to be one of John of Garland's earlier works, written I220-I at the University of Paris.8 His use of one of the Dia- logues is the first sign that this text had really arrived in northern Europe. Its

'(Libri) Senece, qui sunt optimi et 5 'Roger Bacon and the 'Dialogues' of rarissime inveniuntur' (Opus tertium, frag. Seneca', Manly Anniversary Studies in Language Duhem, p. I64); 'protraxi hanc partem and Literature (Chicago, 1923), pp. 243-53. terciam Moralis philosophie gratis propter 6 No one has looked at Guaiferius in this pulcritudinem et utilitatem sentenciarum connection, and the importance of the epi- moralium, et propter hoc quod libri raro tome of the de ira by Martin of Braga was not inveniuntur' (Opus maius, p. 187. '-3 Massa). pointed out until 1937 (C. W. Barlow, TAPA

2 Part vii of the Opus maius, which has xlviii [I937], pp. 26-42). now been separately edited by E. Massa, 7 Quoted from a MS. in the Bodleian Baconis Operis Maioris Pars Septima seu Moralis Library (Digby 65, f. 02) by L. J. Paetow in Philosophia, Zurich, I953. The Morale Scolarium of John of Garland

3 The three following are (i) the de brevi- (Memoirs of the University of California, iv, tate vitae+ the ad Polybium, (2) the de vita beata Berkeley, I927), p. IOI n. 87. + the de otio, and (3) the de tranquillitate. 8 Paetow, p. I 3.

4 Massa, p. 133. 1-7.

appearance at this great university centre is interesting in itself and fits in with the rest of our story, for it is likely that Roger too found his manuscript at Paris. It could have been sent to him by one of his contacts abroad; but at the time of his discovery Roger was living under close supervision in the Franciscan house at Paris, and the simplest assumption-which fits the other evidence-is that he found his text locally.

As the text was a rarity in northern Europe at this time, there is surely a connection between the manuscripts used by John of Garland and Roger Bacon; a more significant link between their Senecan interests is unlikely, though Roger claimed to have heard John of Garland lecture at Paris.' Of more interest is the discovery that Roger is but one of a group of individuals who show an acquaintance with this text at approximately the same time.

The first of these is Roger Bacon, another is Guibert of Tournai.2 Guibert's life and work have to be hung on a few scanty chronological pegs,3 but he was born by the second decade of the century and is known to have died in

I284. He was therefore a contemporary of Bacon's; more than that, after

being a master of theology at Paris for many years, he joined the Franciscans and so became attached to the very Franciscan house in which Roger was constrained at the time of his discovery. Many of Guibert's works are not fully explored and few are datable, so that we cannot be certain which of them got hold of a text of the Dialogues first. In his de modo addiscendi, now dated to the years 1264 to 1268, Guibert quotes lavishly from the epistulae, the de beneficiis, and de clementia (the standard ration), but not from the dialogi. Of the three works in which he uses the Dialogues, the de pace was written c. I275 and the other two are apparently late, so that his knowledge of the text may not ante- date Bacon's discovery in I266.

The third member of the trio, John of Wales, is contemporary with the other two and likewise a Friar; he was born in the first third of the century and prob- ably died in I285. He had become regent master at the Franciscan house in Oxford by the late fifties and moved to Paris about I270, where he is known to have been regent master of theology c. 1282. He quotes frequently from the Dialogues in his edifying compendium of anecdote and table talk for preachers, the Communiloquium.4 It is unfortunate that the chronology of his works has not been fixed; we do not even know whether they first appeared at Oxford or at Paris. His acquaintance with the Dialogues suggests the latter, and one cannot resist the conclusion that for this text he was using the same source as Roger Bacon and Guibert of Tournai, the manuscript in the Franciscan house at Paris.

Compendium studiiphilosophie (ed. Brewer), on E. Bonifacio, Gilberto de Tournai; De modo p. 453. addiscendi (Turin, I953), pp. 7 ff.

2 Balduinus ab Amsterdam (Collectanea 4 For his use of the Dialogues see A. G. Franciscana 32 [I962], 234 ff.) has drawn Little, Studies in English Franciscan History, Pub- attention to a similar reworking of passages lications of the University of Manchester, His- from the de ira in three works by Guibert, torical Series, xxix (Manchester, 1917), p. the de septem verbis, the de pace, and the de i88, and in particular Robert A. Pratt inSpecu- nomine Iesu. In the de pace I have noticed an lum, xli (I966), pp. 627 ff. For recent studies adaptation of the beginning of the de vita of John of Wales, see Beryl Smalley, English beata (De pace, ed. E. Longpre, Bibliotheca Friars and Antiquity in the Early Fourteenth Franciscana Ascetica MediiAevi VI [Quaracchi, Century (Oxford, I960), pp. 5I-5; W. A. 1925], p. I62), so that his borrowings are not Pantin, 'John of Wales and Medieval Hum- confined to the de ira. anism', in Medieval Studies presented to Aubrey

3 For the chronology I have mainly relied Gwynn, S.7. (Dublin, 196 ), pp. 297-319.

362 L. D. REYNOLDS

THE MEDIEVAL TRADITION OF SENECA'S DIALOGUES 363

All this makes it clear that the Dialogues had reached the schools of Paris by the middle of the thirteenth century. Once the text had arrived at this active intellectual centre, where other works of Seneca had long been read and prized, its wider distribution in France, England, and the Low Countries would follow as a matter of course, and by the middle of the next century the Dialogues were a fairly common text both north and south of the Alps. The Franciscans may have played an important part in its dissemination.

This is as far as the indirect tradition takes us. The further exploration and editing of thirteenth-century texts will doubtless fill in many of the details, but the general picture is clear: the text re-emerged in southern Italy in the eleventh century and again in the thirteenth in northern France. The origin of the Baconian text has not been traced; the mystery which surrounds it, coupled with its appearance at such an early stage in the development of the recentior tradition, breeds the notion that Bacon had stumbled upon a good and un- tapped source for the text. Beeson in particular has suggested that the extensive extracts from the dialogi in Roger's Moralis philosophia should have received serious attention from editors of Seneca,' and his vigorously propounded thesis has been left unanswered by Senecan scholars. We can best find out more about the texts used by Bacon and his contemporaries by looking at the recentiores themselves, and it is time in any case to move from the story behind the text to a critical appraisal of the later manuscripts and their use, if any, to an editor.

II. THE MANUSCRIPTS

In addition to what has been said by editors in the prefaces to their critical texts,2 a number of articles have been devoted specifically to the problem of the codices recentiores.3 Some of these studies contain much of interest and value, but the contribution which they have made towards solving the fundamental problem of the dependence or non-dependence of the later manuscripts on the Ambrosianus is so minimal that I see no point in repeating what has been said. It is clear that the later manuscripts have at most a modest contribution to make to the text and there is a limit to the amount of time and energy which should be expended on them. There is no point in beating about the bush. What we need to know is simply this: are any of the recentiores independent of A and, if so, which ?

The later manuscripts of the Dialogues are for the most part both corrupt and contaminated, and in such a jungle finesse will serve little purpose. I think that a real start can be made in solving the fundamental questions if we forget the laborious attempts which have been made to work out the affiliation of this or

I Op. cit., pp. 248 ff. de Seneca en bibliotecas espaiolas y su lugar 2 In particular those of Gertz (i886), en tradici6n de los dialogos', Emerita xvii

Castiglioni (1946), and Viansino (I963). (I949), 9-4I and 22 (I954) 35-65; B. L. 3 L. Castiglioni, 'De quibusdam deteriori- Hijmans B. L. F. and M. P. Forder, 'De

bus codicibus Senecae opuscula De Ira xxxii codicibus recentioribus L. A. Senecae continentibus disputatio', Athenaum 1(1913), libellum De providentia continentibus', 98-II ; J. Marouzeau, 'Ce que valent les Mnem. I960, 39-62. The last marks an ad- manuscrits des Dialogi de Seneque', RPh, vance on the others; although I cannot accept xxxvii (1913), 47-52; H. Wagenvoort, 'De their stemma or their conclusions, Hijmans codice Senecae Angelico (MS. Lat. 1356)', and Forder give some useful information Mnem. 1913, 153-63; A. Bourgery, 'Apropos about a large number of manuscripts and des manuscrits du "De Ira"', REL xi their affiliations. (I933), 369-78, A. Fontan, Algunos c6dices

that manuscript or group of manuscripts and concentrate on the basic pattern which to my mind emerges clearly from a general survey of the later manu- scripts as a whole, namely that they appear to fall into two basic groups, a very large group and a very small group. The large group I shall call ]3, the small group y.

The line of division between the two groups inevitably becomes more and more blurred as horizontal transmission gathers momentum. The large group (/), which comprises the vast majority of the extant manuscripts, contaminated both with each other and with the manuscripts of the y group, presents a daunt- ing problem. But the historical circumstances of the transmission give a ray of hope: it takes two, after all, to contaminate, and texts were so rare in the thirteenth century that there must be a chance of finding some uncontaminated witnesses among the earliest extant manuscripts of this group. It is with these that we must begin. With the aid of these it is possible, I think, to reconstruct the basic / text, and this lies at the core of the problem.

Most of the manuscripts of the Dialogues belong to the fourteenth century and later, and some of those which have been dated earlier are impostors.' But a few can be assigned with confidence to the thirteenth century. The manuscript with which I begin has never attracted any attention; it is a Vatican manuscript (Chigi H.V. I53), which I shall call C.2 It belongs to the first half of the thirteenth century and is almost certainly a little older than Parisinus lat. 15086 (P), which it has been customary to regard as the earliest of the recentiores. The best of the later manuscripts has by general agreement been B (Berlin Lat. Fol. 47), but B was written at least half a century later than C and is a copy-and almost certainly a direct copy-of it. Owing to the loss of a quire, C omits dial. 9. 15. 5-I2. 9. 2, and here B remains the best available

manuscript of this group.3 To these we may add Parisinus lat. 6379, which I shall call Q; it is portentously corrupt, but it does not seem to be seriously contaminated and belongs to the later reaches of the thirteenth century.4 CPQ are independent of each other and represent the whole range of sub- groups into which the later manuscripts of this group can-more or less-be

I Laurentianus 76. 32, known usually as L, and containing the de ira, was at one time dated to the twelfth century, more recently to the thirteenth. It should be placed firmly in the second half of the fourteenth century. On the strength of its spurious seniority it was taken up by Gertz and eventually won a place in the Teubner text. It is a poor piece of work. Laurentianus 76. 38 (dated to the thirteenth century by Marouzeau and Viansino) is a perfectly decent fourteenth- century manuscript. Perugia 57, catalogued as thirteenth, belongs to the fifteenth century.

2 The sigla are a headache. As a sample of the confusion, Fickert's two Ambrosiani (B 2 sup. and C 293 inf.), which he called E and D respectively, became D and E in Hermes' Teubner text, and finally B and C in the Pravia editions; Laur. 76. 38, 1 to Marou- zeau, is F3 to Viansino in his edition of the consolationes, while in his edition of the de ira F3 is Laur. 76. 32, known to Gertz and Hermes as L; P3 and P4 are usually-and

also in Viansino's edition of the consolationes -Palatine manuscripts, but in his edition of the de ira they become Parisini (6379 and 6380), known to Hijmans and Forder as Z and ,, P being Fickert's designation for B, known to Viansino as Ber. As unused sigla are scarce (both the Greek and Latin alpha- bet have been exhausted), I see no alternative but to start afresh and to allot unsophis- ticated sigla to those few manuscripts which deserve them.

3 It remains a very important witness in the ad Polybium, most of which is missing in A.

4 The only other certain thirteenth-century manuscript I have noticed is in Rome, Biblio- teca Angelica 505. It belongs to the latter part of the century, and contains the first two books of the de ira and part of the third. It was used by Barriera for his edition of the de ira (Paravia, 919) and is a scrappy piece of work with a mixed text.

364 L. D. REYNOLDS

THE MEDIEVAL TRADITION OF SENECA'S DIALOGUES 365

divided. On the basis of CPQ or BPQ-or any two of these where the third is lacking'-we can build up a picture of how the text of this large group of manuscripts looked in the early thirteenth century.

C(B)PQ have more than two hundred omissions, transpositions, and other errors in common. This can only mean that they derive from a common parent, namely /. A short list of some of the common omissions and transpositions will serve to make this point: Omissions: I. 4. 3 ipsi; I. 4. 5 si te; 2. 5. 3 ergo si . . . pervenire non potest; 3. 8. 2 in primis; 4. 7. 3 habent alius . . . cum matre; 4. 28. 7 hoc et ipse . . . invenies; 5. 7. I. tenerique . . . voluntas; 5. 22. 4 et aliquid; 6. io. i quod circa; 6. 20. I laudatur expectatutque] laudaturque; 6. 24. I et in materno . . . perseveravit; 7. 2. 2 ergo; 7. 25. 5 esse; 9. 2. Io spes; 10. 2. 4 nemo se sibi vindicat ; i. 17. 6 sit.

Transpositions: I. 2. 5 numquam flere numquam contristari; 2. 10. 2 factum dic- tumque; 2. 17. 3 ille potuit; 3. 6. 3 mollioribus his; 3. I4. I bonus vir non; 3. I9.4 ipsi sibi; 7. 12. 3 a virtute separari; I . 7. 6 mihi vivere ; I . 17. 2 alios in terra, alios in mari; I I. I8. 6 pectore gemitus; I . I8. 9 verba homini.

Not all / manuscripts will contain all these errors; but even the more con- taminated manuscripts usually have a sufficient portion of them to leave no doubt about their origin.

As can be seen, p has a number of extensive omissions. Some of these are roughly equal in size, and are of the type which arise when a line of a parent manuscript is accidentally omitted in copying, as for example the following two (4- 7 3; 5. 7. ):

habent alius iudicia patris accusat quae vereri satius fuit alius cum matre

tenerique iam visa cum ipso cadunt ita fit ut frequenter inrita sit eius voluntas

The first light is shed on the problem of the recentiores when one notices that these groups of words omitted in the / manuscripts are in fact exact lines of the Ambrosianus. To these may be added a line omission of another classic type (6. 24. I), where the scribe has jumped from a point within a line to the same point in the next line, omitting et in . . . perseveravit.

tuos noluit / et in materno contubernio cum vix paternum liberi ferant per- severavit / adulescens statura pulchritudine certo corporis robore castris

Still more instructive is an omission at 2. 5. 6-7, where A reads:

filias rapuerat hostis et patria in ali/enam condicionem pervenerat et ipsum rex circumfusus victoris exercitus armis ex superiore loco rogitabat. / at ille

Here the words marked off by oblique strokes represent a line in A; they have again been omitted in P. When the scribe jumped this line, bisecting a word in the process, his copy must inevitably have read patria inaliat ille. Our manuscript C, with touching candour, reads precisely this; Q offers almost the same-patria mali at ille; P, the rogue, has shamelessly emended to patriam violaverat ille.

P has nothing after dial. 9. 15; Q has the ad Helviam, so that / readings for this only a fragment of the de ira and omits the dialogue can be reconstructed only by call- ad Helviam matrem completely. Of the three ing in other and later manuscripts. manuscripts used only C(B) is available for

Little more remains to be said.' The / manuscripts, which amount to nine in ten of the extant manuscripts, are ultimately derived from the Am- brosianus and are of value only where it is lacking. Among the fallen idols are a number of editorial favourites, manuscripts which here and there have come

up with the right answer. This is sometimes a happy conjecture, more often the result of the transmission of variants horizontally from the other recentior

group (y). Although many of the later manuscripts have absorbed some y readings,z

only four pure y manuscripts have come to light so far. They are Vaticanus lat.

2214 and 2215, Laurentianus 76. 35 and 76. 4I.3 The two Vaticani belong to the fourteenth century, the two Laurentiani to the fifteenth. The Laurentian twins are later in date and considerably more corrupt than the Vatican pair, and as the latter are adequate for the reconstruction of y, we can dispense with the services of the former. Vaticanus 2215, the better of the two, I shall call R, the other V. Neither R nor V has ever been used by any editor.4

R and V have no less than a thousand errors in common. This is sufficient to establish not only their common parenthood (y), but the fact that y was

prodigiously corrupt. But a corrupt source is not necessarily valueless, and y has something to offer. When it has been reconstructed for the whole of the

text, a remarkable fact emerges: if we take the Teubner text as our standard, y offers the right reading in over a hundred and fifty places where A (and con- sequently /3) have got it wrong. This is a high total; reputations have been made on less. Moreover, y has an uncanny knack of anticipating generally accepted conjectures by later scholars; it does this over thirty times, including the fore- stalling of three emendations by Madvig, four by Pincianus, four by Erasmus, five by Muretus, and seven by Gertz. Either someone along the line had a flair for conjectural criticism, or y goes back independently to the archetype.

Many of the correct y readings are well within the capacity of a medieval scribe or reader, and some of them are doubtless conjectures. Others are more impressive. Debate about the origin of these readings would be long and in- conclusive. A high degree of probability is often a necessary substitute for certainty in such matters, and with this proviso I would conclude that the y tradition is in fact independent of A. Two examples will illustrate the nature of the problem.

5. 8. 8. Quotiens disputatio longior et pugnacior erit, in prima resistamus, antequam (robur accipiat): alit se ipsa contentio et demissos altius tenet; facilius est se a certamine abstinere quam abducere.

I Line omission on this scale and to the ituro] lauro, a classic miscopying in /P which nearest letter of the line is as good evidence has led to an orgy of emendation in its pro- as we are likely to get. But there is other geny: laturo, labituro, fluituro, duraturo, casuro. evidence for the dependence of /, not valid in 2 And even whole stretches of y text. itself, but corroborative. Glosses in A appear 3 An important step forward was the in the text of /3, and are particularly in- emergence of these four as a group in the formative where an intelligible gloss in A is stemma constructed by Hijmans and Forder. garbled in /3, as, e.g., 4. 23. I: ecquis] pro an 4 But the Laurentian manuscripts have quis Ac above the line, pro antiquis et quis P. been used. Laur. 76. 41 was collated by Wrong division in A causes trouble, e.g. Gertz for the ad Polybium and the ad Marciam, 9. I. I neutrum] ne utrum A, utrum ne P. Less and his collations were taken over by Hermes conclusive are the errors in P3 arising from in the Teubner text; both have been drawn the confusion of letters written in Beneven- upon by Viansino. tan, as at o. 12. 6 natare] noctare, and o. 9. 2

366 L. D. REYNOLDS

THE MEDIEVAL TRADITION OF SENECA'S DIALOGUES 367

This is an old chestnut. The words robur accipiat are missing in A and have to be salvaged from a number of late manuscripts. They are accepted by editors, by many as a genuine supplement of unknown source, by some as a felicitous stopgap. There has been talk, but no facts. Some of the facts are these: robur is one of Seneca's favourite words, and he uses it with dare (epist. 94. 46; I6. 8), addere ( 6. I), habere (dial. I I. 6. i) and, more pertinently, colligere (dial. . 2. 6; 2. 3. 5). I have found no other example of robur accipere in Seneca; but it is found in his nephew Lucan (4. 642) and his contemporary Columella (2. 9. 12;

4. 3. 4; 4. Io. 2), and vires accipere is common enough.' Here the words give excel- lent sense and, more significantly, an excellent clausula. Senecan in style and rhythm, but not found elsewhere in Seneca, this does not seem to be a medieval interpolation. The genuineness of these words was rejected even by some believers in the recentiores, because they did not appear in their 'best' manu- scripts. The 'better' a manuscript is, i.e. the closer it is to A, the less likely it is to have them. For it is clear that these words, whether conjectural in origin or not, were initially confined to y, and that from there they percolated, at first into the margins,2 then into the text, of some of the f manuscripts. Others3 used this supplement as a keystone for their classification of the manuscripts, a hasty step, for though the absence of these words is significant,their presence is more often the result of horizontal than of vertical transmission.

This is not the only place where words missing in A (and all or most of the / manuscripts) are supplied by y. There are eight in all: quid (3. 5. 2), in (4. 9. 4; o. 15. 4; I2. 14. 3), est (6 4. 2), tam (6. I5. 2), e (6. 24. 2), nec (Io. 6. 4). These

are on a different footing: they could more easily be conjectural supplements, but, if y is indeed independent, they need not be.

One other y reading is worth discussing, because it has not before been found in a manuscript.

5. 2I. I. (Cyrus) Gynden late fusum amnem vado transire temptavit.

The river which gave Cyrus trouble was the Gyndes (modern Dijala) in Babylonia. In A the name of the river appears as Gyges. The scribes knew better than that, and emended to Ganges. The correct name was restored by Erasmus from Herodotus I. 189. But y quite correctly produces Gindes. The story is found in Herodotus and very briefly alluded to in pseudo-Tibullus,4 but the chances of a medieval scribe correcting the text from either source are too remote to merit consideration. The independence of y could be settled at a blow, were it not that the story is repeated again in the fifth century by Orosius,5 an author widely read throughout the Middle Ages and not least in southern Italy.6 A clever scribe or reader-at Monte Cassino, for example- could have made the change; but the man who 'corrected' the y tradition would have been such a critical virtuoso that I should be happier to accept the simpler and more credible hypothesis, that the y manuscripts go back to a parent which was close to A, and probably inferior to it, but which descended independently from the archetype.

I Cf. T.L.L. i. 317. 58 ff. 5 Hist. 2. 6. 2 As in Balliol College MS. 129. 6 There are two extant Beneventan manu- 3 e.g. Castiglioni, Athenesum 19I3, p. Ioo: scripts of Orosius, Monte Cassino 303 and

tamquamfundamentumdiiudicandarumad- Vaticanus lat. 3340, both of the eleventh finitatum ponimus. century.

4 4. I. 141.

Basically then the position is simple: we have a large number of manuscripts (/3) which are ultimately derived from A itself, and a smaller number (y) which appear to go back to an independent source. Most of the / manuscripts, contaminated with each other and with the y tradition, form the vulgate text of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Any attempt to reduce these to a stemma would, I think, be ill conceived and pointless: the result would look more like a furze bush than a family tree, and it is difficult to see what use it could be to anyone. The problem of the contaminati can legitimately be re- moved by ignoring them; an examination of these manuscripts confirms the obvious, that they contain nothing of value which cannot be found in its original form in either ,f or y. The process of contamination can be illustrated from a concrete example, the manuscript Ambrosianus C. 293 inf., which has its margin equipped with a selection of y variants.'

There are problems, however, which must be discussed, if not answered. The first concerns the beginning of the de ira. Here the archetype must have been damaged or illegible. The scribe of A, when faced with this difficulty, skipped the beginning of the dialogue and began again at i. 2. 4, in mid- sentence. In the hope that the missing part of the text might be recoverable later, he left a number of blank pages, apparently two leaves and the recto of what is now fol. 4 (i.e. five sides in all); this may be an indication of the length of the original text. At a later date the two blank leaves were cut out and the blank recto of fol. I4 was filled up by another scribe (known as a), who squeezed on to it the beginning of the de ira (i. 1-2. 3 capitis damna(tos>), stopping in the middle of a word. This is a much shorter text than that originally intended to cover five sides, and there is a manifest lacuna between 2. 3 (where a stopped) and 2. 4 (where A had begun again). This loss has never been repaired. One can only conclude that by this time it was impossible to salvage the beginning of the de ira complete; the archetype had suffered further physical deteriora- tion, perhaps the loss of a leaf or more, and it or such copies of it as could be found contained this fragment of the missing passage and nothing more.

The first point is the date of a. This page has usually been assigned to 'the fourteenth or even the fifteenth century'. The recentiores do not omit i. I-2. 3, and, as some of them are earlier than the fourteenth century, the fact that they contain this passage has been regarded as incontrovertible evidence2 that they must be independent of A. But such a late dating is absurd; Dr. Lowe, who kindly inspected this page for me, is of the firm opinion that it could not have been written later than the twelfth century. It therefore predates all the recentiores and can no longer be regarded as an argument for their indepen- dence. But the really curious fact emerges when we consider the ,f manuscripts. Had the manuscript from which they descend (fl itself) been copied from A before the addition of I. I-2. 3, we should expect them to omit this passage; if later, we should expect them to have it in the form in which it is found in A. They do neither. They present us with this same fragment of the de ira, but, although they have taken the bulk of their text from A, they have not taken de ira I. 1-2. 3 from a: they have taken it from a different source, and one close to y.3 This can only mean that the original ,f text was copied from A when A still

I This manuscript is known as D, E, or C, marginal readings in this manuscript and are and has found a place in most editions. A indeed not s' but y variants. number of corrections attributed in the 2 e.g. Beeson, op. cit., p. 246. Teubner text to s can be traced back to 3 a has errors from which PB (and y) are

L. D. REYNOLDS 368

THE MEDIEVAL TRADITION OF SENECA'S DIALOGUES 369

had a blank at the beginning of the de ira, i.e. not later than the twelfth cen- tury; faced with an obvious lacuna, the scribe did exactly what a was to do under the same circumstances-he filled up the gap by referring to another manuscript. The source from which a P y have taken the beginning of the de ira must ultimately be the same, since they present us with the identical fragment. This makes it evident that f and y must also originate from Monte Cassino, and that this great monastery has preserved for us the whole sum of the text of the dialogi.

Much more trying is the problem of the correcting hands in A. In addition to the original scribe (A or A1) and the writer off. I4r (a), Gertz' distinguished five hands, which he labelled A2 to A6. Admiration for his meticulous work is often tempered with scepticism and few would emulate his confidence in assigning an expunging dot to this hand or that, but one has to make the best of an unsatisfactory situation. I shall not insist on the attribution of any par- ticular correction to a particular hand. Some of the changes made in the text by these secondary hands and assigned to A2 and A3, i.e. to the twelfth century rather than later,2 are genuine corrections or supplements which must have been taken from an authoritative manuscript source, either the archetype itself or an independent copy of it. Other changes which appear to have been made by the same hands are obvious interpolations, and various views are possible about their origin. They could be conjectures on the part of A2 and A3; or they could have been taken from the archetype, if we assume that it had suffered correction since A was copied from it in the eleventh century, a likely enough occurrence; thirdly, they could have been taken from an independent but interpolated copy of the archetype.

These interpolations have often been incorporated into the text of f, and there is nothing strange about this. Sometimes, though less often,3 they appear also in the text of y, as in the following examples:

2. 3. i itis infitias] post itis superscr. in A3: itis in infitias fy 3. 2 I. 3 venit morte contempta] post venit add. uxor in marg. A3: venit uxor fy

9. 2. i. utique cum ex tempestate requievit] utique cum Haase: ut que cum A: supra cum A2 vel potius man. recentior lacus addidit: ut lacus que CQ: ut lacus qui P: aut lacus cum y At first sight it would seem that y might after all be derived from A. But this

argument would apply only if these interpolations originated as the brain- children of A2 and A3: it is at least as probable that they took them from the same source as they had taken the genuine corrections, from another manuscript, either the archetype, now corrupted by time, or an independent free: I. 4 depravantium se] se om. a; I. 5 in to A6, are in the hand of Zanobi da Strada, abdito] in om. a; quietumque]-que om. a; now well known for his habit of annotating 2. 3 viritim] virium a. ,B and y have con- Cassinese manuscripts: cf. Gius. Billanovich, junctive errors, e.g. 2. i. reorum a, eorum I primi umanisti e le tradizioni dei classici latini gy; 2. 3 si tibi a, tibi si -y. (Fribourg, I953), pp. 29 ff.

I L. Annaei Senecae dialogorum libri xii 3 There are two glosses in the margin of (Copenhagen, I886), pp. ix-xx. one page of A: 2. 2. 2 abstractus] in marg. vel

2 Many of the later corrections, particu- arreptus, and 2. 3. I tectum] in marg. vel larly those of A5, a vicious meddler, are vestitum. There is no sign of these in y, but simply taken from one or more of the the f manuscripts read abstractus vel arreptus recentiores. It may be worth investigating and tectum vel vestitum (or something similar). whether some of them, such as those assigned

but interpolated copy of it. The text of the y manuscripts is such that their origin could easily be either of these. But there is little point in further specu- lation, unless new facts come to light. If, as I have maintained, the early history of this text took place under one roof, the most unorthodox things could happen, and they probably did.

III. CONCLUSIONS

It can now safely be assumed that the Seneca manuscript which Desiderius caused to be copied at Monte Cassino during his abbacy (1058-87) was a text of the dialogi, and that the Ambrosianus was a product of this copying. What happened to the text between the sixth and the eleventh century is unknown.' When the text of the later tradition is examined, it becomes apparent that the two main streams of this tradition spring from a source so close to the Am- brosianus-in one case indeed the Ambrosianus itself-that we can also assume that Monte Cassino was not only the home of the best manuscript of the Dialogues, but the unique source for this text, which can now take its place alongside the other works-the later Annals and Histories of Tacitus, the Golden Ass of Apuleius, Frontinus' De aquis and Varro's De lingua latina-which have been preserved for posterity by this one monastery.

The conclusion that Monte Cassino is the source of the whole tradition emerges fairly clearly from what has been said already; but I have produced no evidence to show that the text which circulated in the schools of Paris in the thirteenth century is in fact the same text as that known to previous genera- tions in southern Italy. Now that we have discovered which are the key manu- scripts among the recentiores, some links between Italy and northern Europe can be established. The oldest manuscript after A and the earliest witness of the f tradition is C, and both C and its copy B were written in Italy; the earliest examples of the pure y text, R and V, are likewise Italian; the only thirteenth- century manuscript with a mixed text, Angelicus 505, is also Italian. Thus the home of all forms of the recentior tradition is Italy.

P is a somewhat mysterious manuscript. Its composite nature has not been noticed. The first part of the manuscript (if. 129-86, containing dial. I-4 and part of 9) is written in one hand, the second part (if. I87-252, containing dial. 5-8) is in a different hand and has a different, though similar, strain of text.2 The second scribe takes over where the first leaves off, in the middle of a quire, so that the book would appear to have been a piece of collaboration. The second hand is distinctly Italian, the first is less easy to place; it is less obviously Italian and possibly French. Once again we have a definite Italian connection, but P eventually found its way to the abbey of Saint Victor at Paris and probably reached France at an early date, for it has textual affinities with

I In addition to the Dialogues A has a Germany and Monte Cassino, which had text of the spurious correspondence between recently had two German abbots. But the Seneca and St. Paul, edited by C. W. Barlow Dialogues need not have come from Ger- (Papers and Monographs of the American many; there is no evidence that they had Academy in Rome, x, I938). A glance at his ever left southern Europe. stemma shows that this text is closely con- 2 The alien origin of the second part of P nected textually with four other manuscripts, is corroborated by the fact that other all of German provenance and associated manuscripts which are very close to P (e.g. respectively with St. Emmeram, Saint- Hunterian MS. U. I. 9 in the University Arnoul (Metz), St. Gall, and Cologne. This Library in Glasgow, of the fourteenth cen- seems to me to be a clear result of the strong tury) contain only dialogues 1-4 and 9. ties existing in the eleventh century between

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manuscripts firmly rooted in the north. Q, the third of the three earliest extant representatives of the f text, appears to have been written towards the end of the century in France. The evidence is sketchy, but the Italian origin of the texts which later circulated in France is clear enough.

And what of Roger Bacon and his celebrated manuscript? We have already seen that the only really remarkable thing about his discovery was the loudness with which he proclaimed it. He was in the van of those in northern Europe who knew the text, but he was not the first, nor was his manuscript necessarily earlier than some of the extant recentiores; and when he transcribed large excerpts from it for the edification of the Pope, he came close to sending coals to Newcastle. Bacon's miracles and discoveries have a habit of fading away in the cold light of historical investigation and this discovery is no exception. Though he produced his manuscript like a rabbit out of a hat, there was nothing re- markable about the hat or the rabbit. It is clear from his excerpts that he had come by a manuscript with a mixed text, no better than some which we still possess. The manuscript which he actually used seems to have been lost. But there are similar manuscripts in abundance and three of these--there may be more-have a certain degree of affinity with Bacon's text. These three have an added interest in that they form an English branch of the tradition and so mark a new stage in the dissemination of the Dialogues. The readings which are peculiar to them and to Bacon's excerpts2 are not sufficiently numerous to postulate a strong connection between Roger's manuscript and the parent of the English group, but they probably give us a text which is very like that which Bacon used, and as good. The use of an indirect tradition is full of pitfalls: though Bacon quotes for the most part verbatim, he makes such changes as the abbreviation of a longer text or the adaptation of a pagan source entails and he is not above smoothing over or omitting corrupt or difficult passages and introducing the occasional hasty correction of his own.3 If I thought that there was anything of textual value to be gleaned from this area of the tradition, I should prefer to use these manuscripts rather than Bacon's excerpts, as being complete and more reliable; but I have found nothing of value in either.

All three of the fourteenth century and all now preserved in the libraries of Oxford colleges: Balliol College 129, Merton Col- lege 297, and University College 6. A manu- script which appears to have been related to them-to judge from such readings as have been preserved-is the lost Coloniensis of Gruter, lent to him by the Fratres minores of Cologne (Animadversiones in L. Annaei Senecae Opera [Heidelberg, 1594], p. iv.) It is perhaps worth mentioning that the Balliol manuscript, while in the possession of William Gray, later Bishop of Ely, travelled with him to Cologne in 1442: cf. R. A. B. Mynors, Catalogue of the Manuscripts of Balliol College, Oxford (Oxford, 1963), pp. xxix, Io8. A connection between a Cologne manuscript and a purely English group would be more explicable than appears at first sight; but this text may well have travelled directly from Paris to Cologne, and the Friars seem once again to provide the link.

2 e.g. 2. 5. 5 movetur iactura; 5. 4. I defixis et haerentibus] defixo inhaerentibus; 7. I. I post lapsus est add. vir; 8. 6. 4 maiora egisse . . . gessissent errores] maiora gessisse . . . egissent errores. If such common readings prove to be more widespread than they appear to be, then the affinity between Bacon and the English manuscripts will be more tenuous.

3 For example at I. 4. 9 the manuscripts read velut perpetua ebrietate sopiti, but the structure of the period demands a finite verb. Beeson has pointed out that Bacon (p. 7I. 8 in Massa's edition) supports Feld- mann's sopiuntur. But if we read further, we find Bacon quoting the same passage again (p. Io6. 30), and this time he has sopiti. Bacon does not support anyone; he has just had the same idea as Feldmann did a long time after him, and both are wrong: a finite verb has to be inserted somewhere, but the rhythm shows that the end of the period should be left undisturbed.

Bb

For the bulk of the text only two out of about a hundred recentiores, the two earliest and best witnesses of the y tradition (R and V), appear to me to be of any value. The position is different when the Ambrosianus fails, as it does at the beginning of the de ira and for nearly all of the ad Polybium. For de ira I. 1-2. 3 we have three witnesses-a f y; the area of text is too small to fix their inter- relationship with certainty and they are best regarded as independent wit- nesses, with f y being closer to each other than they are to a. a has been somewhat undervalued by recent editors, possibly because it had been dated a couple of centuries too late: it is a careless piece of copying, but is still, I think, more trustworthy than f y.' The text of the ad Polybium has rested on a whole gaggle of manuscripts chosen at random, including some of very dubious merit, such as the Hauniensis, which had the good fortune to end up in the town in which Gertz professed. The textual basis of this dialogue can be rationalized by simply reducing the manuscript evidence to two witnesses, f and y. As C has lost the relevant quire and P does not contain this dialogue, the best manuscript available on the f side is B; after that one has to scrape the bottom of the barrel.

In general one may say that the manuscript tradition of the Dialogues is interesting in that it illustrates a pattern of transmission not easily paralleled in the history of Latin texts. Here we have a text which was passed over by the two great classical revivals of the Middle Ages, those of the ninth and twelfth centuries, and yet had firmly established itself by the early fourteenth century and was in time to appear, as an afterthought, in Petrach's list of favourite books. It seems to have been the only one of the 'Monte Cassino texts' to have had a medieval tradition in northern Europe; the others remained behind the monastery walls until a Boccaccio or a Poggio let them loose upon the Renaissance.

Brasenose College, Oxford I It is clearly right at least twice against

the other two: 2. I reorum (eorum f y) and 2. 3. si tibi (tibi si P y). An interesting case is I. 4. Here most editors read (with a) flagrant ac micant oculi. For ac micant [B offers emicant, V et micant, R micant. These readings open up possibilities, but the same phrase appears in Martin of Braga's epitome o :the de ira, made in the sixth century, and he reads ac micant. One cannot build an empire on a conjunction, but a is strikingly supported, and this support should not be undermined

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by the fact that the only authoritative edition of Martin's works (by C. W. Barlow, Ameri- can Academy in Rome, I950) reads et micant: the one medieval manuscript, on which Martin's work (and Barlow's edition) mainly rests, is Escorial M. III. 3, of the tenth century, and that has ac micant, as pointed out by A. Fontan (Emerita xviii [I950], P. 378) and checked by myself (in fact it needs hac micant, with the false aspiration common in Visigothic manu- scripts).

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