Arranging One's Letters in 9+1 Books

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Peter Kirby
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Arranging One's Letters in 9+1 Books

Post by Peter Kirby »

Relevant to Roger Pearse's data on the ten books of Pliny's letters:

http://www.tertullian.org/rpearse/pliny/pliny_mss.htm

It appears that he may have started a trend (according to Moreschini):

"At the formal level Ambrose seems to have imitated the arrangement of the correspondence of Pliny the Younger, famous in late antiquity: nine books of letters to friends and a tenth of letters of an official kind. It is likely that the correspondence of Symmachus, which was likewise arranged in the last years of that writer's life, followed a similar pattern." (Early Greek and Latin Literature, vol. 2)

Insert speculation about the letters of Paul here. :P

My point in mentioning the quote is that this is some level of further evidence for the antiquity of the tenth book of Pliny's letters, when set alongside more direct references to the letters, if that were needed.
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Re: Arranging One's Letters in 9+1 Books

Post by Roger Pearse »

Didn't Sidonius Apollinaris do likewise?
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Leucius Charinus
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Re: Arranging One's Letters in 9+1 Books

Post by Leucius Charinus »

The Origin of the Ten-Book Family of Pliny Manuscripts [1]
Author(s): S. E. Stout
Source: Classical Philology, Vol. 53, No. 3 (Jul., 1958), pp. 171-173
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/265876 .


The Basis of the Text in Book X of Pliny's Letters
Author(s): S. E. Stout
Source: Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, Vol. 86 (1955), pp. 233-249
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/283620 .


[quote]

Some time between 1499 and 1506, probably not before 1502, the Italian scholar Fra Giacondo of Verona discovered in or near Paris a minuscule manuscript of the ten books of Pliny's Letters, which had descended from Z. This manuscript is now referred to as P.

It had only a brief history of a half-dozen years after it was discovered, but made important contribution to our knowledge of the text of the Letters. Giacondo first made a complete copy of P, to which I shall refer as I. He intended to use I in preparing his pro- jected edition of the Letters, but upon his return to Italy in 1506 his attention was required by other pressing matters and he turned Manuscript I over to his friend Aldus Manutius, the publisher, who used it in preparing the text of his edition of the Letters which was published at Venice in November 1508, the earliest printed edition that contained ten books. This edition is now referred to as a.

Manuscript I disappeared after a was published. Manuscript P itself, having been secured by the Venetian Senator Mocenicus, who was ambassador from Venice at the court of Louis XII at this time, was taken to Venice by him in 1508 and given to Aldus some time before a was published.

It was perhaps used to some extent by Aldus in the last stage of the preparation of the text for his edition.
No trace of P has ever come to light since the publication of the edition of Aldus. Fortunately a direct copy of portions of P or I, made by Giacondo for the French scholar Bude before 1506, is still preserved in a volume in the Bodleian Library of Oxford University.
[/quote]
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Re: Arranging One's Letters in 9+1 Books

Post by Roger Pearse »

This is a little odd. The basis for book 10 is the 5th century Saint Victor manuscript of all 10 books. This was discovered at the renaissance, taken to Italy and used by Aldus for his edition. It was then dismembered, as so many manuscripts were; often just used as scrap parchment. A portion of it still exists in the J. P. Morgan collection, although not from book 10.
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Re: Arranging One's Letters in 9+1 Books

Post by Leucius Charinus »

Roger Pearse wrote:This is a little odd. The basis for book 10 is the 5th century Saint Victor manuscript of all 10 books.
Don't you mean a 12th, 13th, 14th or 15th century manuscript?
This was discovered at the renaissance, taken to Italy and used by Aldus for his edition. It was then dismembered, as so many manuscripts were; often just used as scrap parchment. A portion of it still exists in the J. P. Morgan collection, although not from book 10.
A number of scholars state this manuscript was "suddenly discovered" and then "suddenly lost" for the Aldus edition.

If the portion is not from Book 10 then the portion cannot evidence Book 10.

A number of articles deal with a 9-Book manuscript tradition in which any 10th book was not evidenced.

The following makes an interesting read:
http://forums.delphiforums.com/n/main.a ... 2042863915
A Forgery
From: michael sympson
Pliny published his letters in nine books. Book ten was published posthumously. Centuries later the writer Sidonius Apollinaris in Gaul (430 ? 487) still knew only of nine books .....

So what else can Pliny?s letter X, 96 be, but a forgery? The only question here is: how much more did the forger make up in the tenth book of Pliny?s letters?

[...]

but concludes .....

Still some work to do on that one. "Gut feelings is what costs you money" a friend of mine used to say when he left the casino, but for the moment my money is ? with misgivings ? on the notion that this letter is genuine. Not yet the final verdict.
A "cobbler of fables" [Augustine]; "Leucius is the disciple of the devil" [Decretum Gelasianum]; and his books "should be utterly swept away and burned" [Pope Leo I]; they are the "source and mother of all heresy" [Photius]
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Re: Arranging One's Letters in 9+1 Books

Post by Roger Pearse »

Leucius Charinus wrote:
Roger Pearse wrote:This is a little odd. The basis for book 10 is the 5th century Saint Victor manuscript of all 10 books.
Don't you mean a 12th, 13th, 14th or 15th century manuscript?
The Saint Victor ms. was an ancient codex in uncials. A portion of it - not of book 10 - still exists in the J.P. Morgan collection.

Unless my terminally softened memory deceives me, of course.

All the best,

Roger Pearse
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Re: Arranging One's Letters in 9+1 Books

Post by Clive »

I thought this arrangement of ten predated Pliny. Seneca? Others?
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