[Footnote 18: The spellings Karet and Karitas, whether Pliny's or not, are a sign of antiquity. In the first century A.D., as we see from Velius Longus (p. 53, 12 K) and Quintilian (I, 7, 10), certain old-timers clung to the use of k for c when the vowel a followed. By the fourth century, theorists of the opposite tendency proposed the abandonment of k and q as superfluous letters, since their functions were performed by c. Donatus (p. 368, 7 K) and Diomedes, too, according to Keil (p. 423, 11), still believed in the rule of ka for ca, but these rigid critics had passed away in the time of Servius, who, in his commentary on Donatus (p. 422, 35 K), remarks k vero et q aliter nos utimur, aliter usi sunt maiores nostri. Namque illi, quotienscumque a sequebatur, k praeponebant in omni parte orationis, ut Kaput et similia; nos vero non usurpamus k litteram nisi in Kalendarum nomine scribendo. See also Cledonius (p. 28, 5K); W. Brambach, Latein. Orthog. 1868, pp. 210 ff.; W.M. Lindsay, The Latin Language, 1894, pp. 6 f. There would thus be no temptation for a scribe at the end of the fifth century or the beginning of the sixth to adopt ka for ca as a habit. The writer of our fragment was copying faithfully from his original a spelling that he apparently would not have used himself. There are various other cases of ca in our text (e.g., calceos, III, i, 4; canere, 11), but there we find the usual spelling. On traces of ka in the Bellovacensis, see below, p. 57. I should not be surprised if Pliny himself employed the spelling ka, which was gradually modified in the successive copies of his work; it may be, however, that our manuscript represents a text which had passed through the hand of some archaeologizing scholar of a later age, like Donatus. At any rate, this feature of our fragment is an indication of genuineness and of antiquity.]
A study of our collation will also show some forty cases of correction in {Pi} by either the scribe himself or a second and possibly a third ancient hand. Here Aldus, if he read the pages of our fragment and read them with care, might have seen warrant for following either the original text or the emended form, as he preferred. The most important cases are: 61, 14 sera] {Pi}a SERUA {Pi}{2} 61, 21 considit] {Pi} CONSIDET {Pi}{2}a The original reading of {Pi} is clearly CONSIDIT. The second I has been altered to a capital E, which of course is not the proper form for uncial. 62, 5 residit] {Pi} residet a Here {Pi} is not corrected, but Aldus may have thought that the preceding case of CONSIDET (m. 2) supported what he supposed the better form residet. 63, 11 posset] a POSSIT (in posset m. 1?) {Pi} Again the corrected E is capital, not uncial, but Aldus would have had no hesitation in adopting the reading of the second hand. 64, 2 modica vel etiam] a MODICA EST ETIAM (corr. m. 2) {Pi} 64, 28 excurrissem accepto, ut praefectus aerari, commeatu] a Here {Pi} omitted accepto ut praefectus aerari,--evidently a line of the manuscript that he was copying, for there are no similar endings to account otherwise for the omission. 66, 2 dissentientis] a ex DISSITIENTIS m. 1 (?) {Pi}.
There are also a few careless errors of the first hand, uncorrected, in {Pi}, which Aldus himself might easily have corrected or have found the right reading already in the early editions. 62, 23 conteror quorum] a CONTEROR QUI HORUM {Pi} B F 63, 28 si] a SIBI {Pi} 64, 24 conprobasse] COMPROUASSE {Pi}.
In view of these certain errors of the first hand of {Pi}, most of them corrected but a few not, Aldus may have felt justified in abiding by one of the early editions in the following three cases, where {Pi} might well have seemed to him wrong; in one of them (64,3) modern editors agree with him: 62, 20 aurium oculorum vigor] {Pi} aurium oculorumque uigor a 64, 3 proferenda] a CONFERANDA {Pi} 65, 11 et alii] {Pi} etiam alii a.
There is only one case of possible emendation to note: 64, 29 questuri] {Pi} quaesturi MVa Aldus's reading, as I learn from Professor Merrill, is in the anonymous edition ascribed to Roscius (Venice, 1492?), but not in any of the editions cited by Keil. This may be a conscious emendation, but it is just as possibly an error of hearing made by either Aldus or his compositor in repeating the word to himself as he wrote or set up the passage. Once in the text, quaesturi gives no offense, and is not corrected by Aldus in his edition of 1518. An apparently more certain effort at emendation is reported by Keil on 62, 13, where Aldus is said to differ from all the manuscripts and the editions in reading agere for facere. So he does in his second edition; but here he has facere with everybody else. The changes in the second edition are few and are largely confined to the correction of obvious misprints. There is no point in substituting agere for facere. I should attribute this innovation to a careless compositor, who tried to memorize too large a bit of text, rather than to an emending editor. At all events, it has no bearing on our immediate concern.
The striking similarity, therefore, between Aldus's text and that of our fragment confirms our surmise that the latter may be a part of that ancient manuscript which he professes to have used in his edition. Whatever his procedure may have been, he has produced a text that differs from {Pi} only in certain spellings, in the correction, with the help of existing editions, of three obvious errors of {Pi} and of three of its readings that to Aldus might well have seemed erroneous, in two misprints, and in one reading which is possibly an emendation but which may just as well be another misprint. Thus the internal evidence of the text offers no contradiction of what the script and the history of the manuscript have suggested. I can not claim to have established an irrefutable conclusion, but the signs all point in one direction. I see enough evidence to warrant a working hypothesis, which we may use circumspectly as a clue, submit to further tests, and abandon in case these tests yield evidence with which it can not be reconciled.
[Sidenote: _Editorial methods of Aldus_]
Further, if we are justified in our assumption that Aldus used the manuscript of which {Pi} is a part, the fragment is instructive as to his editorial methods. If he proceeded elsewhere as carefully as here, he certainly did not perform his task with the high-handedness of the traditional humanistic editor; rather, he treated his ancient witness with respect, and abandoned it only when confronted with what seemed its obvious mistakes. I will revert to this matter at a later stage of the argument.
RELATION OF THE MORGAN FRAGMENT TO THE OTHER MANUSCRIPTS OF THE LETTERS.
But, it will be asked, how do we know that Aldus used {Pi} rather than some other manuscript that had a very similar text and that happened to have gone through the same travels? To answer this question we must examine the relation of {Pi} to the other extant manuscripts in the light of what is known of the transmission of Pliny's Letters in the Middle Ages. A convenient summary is given by Merrill on the basis of his abundant researches.[19]
[Footnote 19: C.P. X (1915), pp. 8 ff. A classified list of the manuscripts of the Letters is given by Miss Dora Johnson in C.P. VII (1912), pp. 66 ff.]
[Sidenote: _Classes of the manuscripts_]
Manuscripts of the Letters may be divided into three classes, distinguished by the number of books that each contains.
Class I, the ten-book family, consists of B (Bellovacensis or Riccardianus), now Ashburnhamensis, R 98 in the Laurentian Library in Florence, its former home, whence it had been diverted on an interesting pilgrimage by the noted book-thief Libri. This manuscript is attributed to the tenth century by Merrill, and by Chatelain in his description of the book. But Chatelain labels his facsimile page "_Saec._ IX."[20] The latter seems the more probable date. The free use of a flat-topped a, along with the general appearance of the script, reminds me of the style in vogue at Fleury and its environs about the middle of the ninth century. A good specimen is accessible in a codex of St. Hilary on the Psalms (Vaticanus Reginensis 95), written at Micy between 846 and 859, of which a page is reproduced by Ehrle and Liebaert.[21] F (Florentinus), the other important representative of this class, is also in the Laurentian Library (S. Marco 284). The date assigned to it seems also too late. It is apparently as early as the tenth century, and also has some of the characteristics of the script of Fleury; it is French work, at any rate. Keil's suggestion[22] that it may be the book mentioned as liber epistolarum Gaii Plinii in a tenth-century catalogue of the manuscripts at Lorsch may be perfectly correct; though not written at Lorsch, it might have been presented to the monastery by that time.[23] These two manuscripts agree in containing, by the first hand, only Books I-V, vi (F having all and B only a part of the sixth letter). However, as the initial title in B is PLINI · SECUNDI · EPISTULARUM · LIBRI · DECEM, we may infer that some ancestor, if not the immediate ancestor, of B and F had all ten books.
[Footnote 20: Pal. des Class. Lat. pl. CXLIII. See our plates XIII and XIV. At least as early as the thirteenth century, the manuscript was at Beauvais. The ancient press-mark S. Petri Beluacensis, in writing perhaps of the twelfth century, may still be discerned on the recto of the first folio. See Merrill, C.P. X, p. 16. If the book was written at Beauvais, as Chatelain thinks (Journal des Savants, 1900, p. 48), then something like what I call the mid-century style of Fleury was also cultivated, possibly a bit later, in the north. The Beauvais Horace, Leidensis lat. 28 saec. IX (Chatelain, pl. LXXVIII), shows a certain similarity in the script to that of B. If both were done at Beauvais, the Horace would seem to be the later book. It belongs, we may observe, to a group of manuscripts of which a Floriacensis (Paris lat. 7971) is a conspicuous member. To settle the case of B, we need a study of all the books of Beauvais. For this, a valuable preliminary survey is given by Omont in Mém. de l'Acad. des Ins. et Belles Lettres XL (1914), pp. 1 ff.]
[Footnote 21: Specimina Cod. Lat. Vatic. 1912, pl. 30. See also H.M. Bannister, Paleografia Musicale Vaticana 1913, p. 30, No. 109.]
[Footnote 22: See the preface to his edition, p. xi.]
[Footnote 23: For the script of F, see plates XV and XVI. Bern. 136, s. XIII (Merrill, C.P. X, p. 18) is a copy of F.]
In Class II the leading manuscript is another Laurentian codex (Mediceus XLVII 36), which contains Books I-IX, xxvi, 8. It was written in the ninth century, at Corvey, whence it was brought to Rome at the beginning of the sixteenth century. It is part of a volume that also once contained our only manuscript of the first part of the Annals of Tacitus.[24] The other chief manuscript of this class is V (Vaticanus Latinus 3864), which has Books I-IV. The script has been variously estimated. I am inclined to the opinion that the book was written somewhere near Tours, perhaps Fleury, in the earlier part of the ninth century.[25] If Ullman is right in seeing a reference to Pliny's Letters in a notice in a mediaeval catalogue of Corbie,[26] it may be that the codex is a Corbeiensis. But it is also possible that a volume of the Letters at Corbie was twice copied, once at Corvey (M) and once in the neighborhood of Tours (V). At any rate, with the help of V, we may reach farther back than Corvey and Germany for the origin of this class. There are likewise two fragmentary texts, both of brief extent, Monacensis 14641 (olim Emmeramensis) saec. IX, and Leidensis Vossianus 98 saec. IX, the latter partly in Tironian notes. Merrill regards these as bearing "testimony to the existence of the nine-book text in the same geographical region," namely Germany.[27] There they are to-day, in Germany and Holland, but where they were written is another affair. The Munich fragment is part of a composite volume of which it occupies only a page or two. The script is continental, and may well be that of Regensburg, but it shows marked traces of insular influence, English rather than Irish in character. The work immediately preceding the fragment is in an insular hand, of the kind practised at various continental monasteries, such as Fulda; there are certain notes in the usual continental hand. Evidently the manuscript deserves consideration in the history of the struggle between the insular and the continental hands in Germany.[28] The script of the Leyden fragment, on the other hand, so far as I can judge from a photograph, looks very much like the mid-century Fleury variety with which I have associated the Bellovacensis; there can hardly be doubt, at any rate, that De Vries is correct in assigning it to France, where Voss obtained so many of his manuscripts.[29] Except, therefore, for M and the Munich fragment, there is no evidence furnished by the chief manuscripts which connects the tradition of the Letters with Germany. The insular clue afforded by the latter book deserves further attention, but I can not follow it here. The question of the Parisinus aside, B and F of Class I and V of Class II are sure signs that the propagation of the text started from one or more centres--Fleury and Corbie seem the most probable--in France.
