Thanks for this, and thanks also to Jay, for an interesting thread. I learned something. That's always a good sign.ficino wrote:I'm also not sure how much you want to press "know [[my bold]] nothing, reliably." I assume you are familiar with texts from antiquity, the transmission of which occurred via a single manuscript - e.g. Catullus' poems. I don't think anyone who works on Latin poetry would say that we know nothing reliably about Catullus' poems, though there is much about their production and subsequent transmission that we don't know. Obviously, a lot of the time in ancient studies, "know" boils down to "can arrive at a well-supported conclusion." Surely your requirements of proof in ancient studies aren't stricter than the nature of the case allows. But perhaps I'm getting hung up on "know."
Anyway, I agree that the authenticity of the TT, whole or in part, is a problem. It seems to me that the difficulties arise more from Chrestianos/Christianos, as you say, and from the content of the passage than from the fact that we have but one primary MS.
Yes, Jay, looking forward to your summary of his book...
Ficino, well written. Um, yes, I may be overly sensitive to the question of accepting without reservation, manuscript evidence from ancient authors, when portions of that data have been deliberately, transparently distorted, for political purposes. I always worry, about those things I cannot observe, more subtle changes, than the vulgar change of chrestianos to christianos in Tacitus Annals.
In the case of Tacitus, who served as Rome's primary functionary in Turkey, as we call it today, a region with a Greek speaking population, why wouldn't Tacitus have written in Greek, rather than Latin? How do we know that the entire manuscript was not changed from an original, written in Greek, now translated into Latin, inside the monastery walls?
Maybe at the end of the first century, CE, Greek was no longer the lingua franca among the intellectuals of the former Greek empire? Maybe it had been replaced by Latin, and therefore, Tacitus wrote in Latin. I doubt this explanation, but have no proof to the contrary.
Δίων Κάσσιος Κοκκηϊανός , who lived one century AFTER Tacitus, was a Roman consul, roughly equivalent to Tacitus, in rank, maybe not identical, and he wrote in Greek, not Latin. So, even in late second, early third century, intellectuals communicated within the Roman Empire, in GREEK, not Latin. I am deeply suspicious when I encounter an educated man like Tacitus, living in the heart of the ancient Greek empire, writing in Latin. It makes no sense to me. What does make sense, to me, is the dictum from the pope, to FIX the manuscript evidence. I imagine every 11th century monk, following the Pope's orders precisely. The manuscripts we have today, in Latin, were discovered in the 14th century at Monte Cassino monastery by Zanobi da Strada. It has been suggested that they were copied in the 11th century, during the time of the Crusades, but who knows. What is most peculiar, is that there are not a thousand copies of Tacitus' work, available. Why only one copy? That makes sense, only if one seeks to control the message, destroying all copies which have not been "repaired".
