Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Author(s): L. D. Reynolds
Reviewed work(s):
Source: The Classical Quarterly, New Series, Vol. 18, No. 2 (Nov., 1968), pp. 355-372
Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Classical Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/638078 .
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THE MEDIEVAL
TRADITION
OF SENECA'S
DIALOGUES'
THE manuscript tradition of Seneca's Dialogues consists of one eleventhcentury 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 transmissionof 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 transmissionby 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 transmissionof the Dialoguesmust
begin has been obscured by a long-standing and in some quartersstill current
misconception.2The 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 evidence for this story is a passage in the Monte Cassino Chronicle,3and it should
be obvious that the Desiderius in question is not the Lombard king but the
celebrated abbot of Monte Cassino (1058-87). 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 instructions for the copying of a number of manuscriptsof both Christianand 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 Dialoguesnaturally 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
valuable assistance in the preparation of this
article, to Professor R. G. Austin and Professor Sir Roger Mynors for helpful criticism
and comment.
2 It goes back at least as far as O. Rossbach, De SenecaePhilosophilibrorumrecensione
et emendatione(Breslau, I888), p. 2. It is repeated, for instance, by P. Faider, ttudes sur
Sinique (Gand,
1921),
p. I14; Klaus-Dieter
I. Viansino, L. AnnaeiSenecaeDialogorumlibri
III-IV-V
(Corpus Paravianum, Turin,
1963), p. xxii.
3 M. G. H., script. 7, PP. 746-7: 'non
solum autem in aedificiis, verum etiam in
libris describendis operam Desiderius dare
permaximam studuit. Codices namque nonnullos in hoc loco describi praecepit,
quorum nomina haec sunt: Augustinum
contra
Faustum
. . . Ovidium
Fastorum,
Senecam.'
4 E. A. Lowe (Loew), The Beneventan
Script (Oxford, '914), p. 71.
356
L. D. REYNOLDS
cf. M.
derlateinischen
Literaturdes
Manitius, Geschichte
Polyb. 9. 6: Numquam
stabili con-
op. cit., p. 13 n. 6.
OF SENECA'S DIALOGUES
357
portionem
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 assimilatingit and then reproducingit 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. 1-2. 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
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 Dialoguesat Monte Cassino,A and the archetype itself; and more
copies may have been made, either then or later. These probabilities will
what happened to A itself can
keep until we come to deal with the recentiores:
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.
I306 C.
L. D. REYNOLDS
358
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 twelfthcentury 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 monasteriesof its congregation, for this can
reasonably be assumed from a partially erased ex libris.2By 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 possessionof Cardinal Federigo Borromeo,4and thence into the library
which he founded.5 About the time that it left Caracciolo's possessionit was
used by Muretus, who was professorin Rome from 1563 to 1584 and is surely
to be identified with the vetustissimus
Siculusmentioned in his I585 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 intriguing 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 Lettersof Peter
of Blois (c. II35-c.
1204):
respondence there is a definite and indisputable quotation from the ad Polybium.7This 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 dictandiwhich has been transferredfrom one of the dictaminato 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.
1 190-1249),
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 thirteenth 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
f. 2r 'Iste liber.
Casinen' . . .
. .
Conge
I603'.
s A note by the first librarian Olgiatus
consolatur'
OF SENECA'S DIALOGUES
359
towards the end of the century, there are threeflosculiwhich are said to have
the Dialogues as their source: p. 69. 15 Difficilem habereoportetauremad crimina
('cf. ira 2. 22. 3'); I 13. 26 Ducunt volentemfata, nolentemtrahunt('cf. prov. 5. 7');
S16. 19-20 Inmodicaira gignit insaniam, et animo vitanda est, non moderationiscausa
sed sanitatis ('cf. ira. I. I. 2'). But the first (an iambic trimeter) is one of the
Sententiae
of Publilius Syrus (D I I Meyer), the second is a quotation from letter
I925),
PP- 33-59.
Cf. also C. H.
L. D. REYNOLDS
360
107. x I, the third from letter 18. 15. The compiler of the florilegium knew as
little of the Dialoguesas Peter of Blois. The same is true of the alleged echoes in
the Verbumabbreviatumof Petrus Cantor, written between 1171 and I 197.x
It is clearly safer to start from the premiss that the writers of the twelfth
century did not know the Dialoguesthan to assume that they did. There is,
however, one quotation which is ultimately derived from the de ira. This is
found in the Moraliumdogmaphilosophorum,z
written about the middle of the
nam
contra
autem
fuge iurgia;
century: summopere
paremcontendere
ancepsest, cum
cum
This
from
sordidum.
derives
ira
2.
I : cumpare
inferiore
34.
superiorefuriosum,
cuminferiore
It is curious that
sordidum.
contendere
ancepsest, cumsuperiorefuriosum,
et
the same excerpt appears in a slightly differentform in the Liberconsolationis
consilii3of Albertano of Brescia, written in i246: on p. 93 I1-3we find concumpari dubium,cumminoreveretenderecumsuperiore
furiosumest velpericulosum,
Albertano is more likely to have had access to our text than the author
cundum.
of the Moraliumdogma,but it is very doubtful if he did.4 It is thereforepossible
that this one excerpt enjoyed some independent circulation, perhaps going
back to a secondarysource.5So 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 Dialogueswere virtually unknown in northern Europe
until the thirteenth century. When seen against this background, their rediscovery is somewhat dramatic, especially as they were to all intents and purposes 'rediscovered' by one of the most intriguing of all English medieval
figures, Roger Bacon.
Bacon discovered a manuscript of the Dialoguesin 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 unfortunatelynot yet written.
The passage in Bacon relevant to his discovery reads:
Libros vero Senecae, quorum floresvestrae 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
conaequoanimosustinendasunt imperitorum
vitia, etc. (PL 205, 302 D) has nothing to do
with the de constantiabut, as has been noted
by Nothdurft (op. cit., p. 149), comes from
letter 76. 4. Again, quid refertan garcionesisti
superiusan 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 91. 19:
Demetriusnostersolet dicereeodemloco sibi esse
voces imperitorumquo 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 Io.
2
OF SENECA'S DIALOGUES
361
publicity which he gave his find. He continually stressesthe rarity of this text,'
and makes its rarity his excuse for sending the Pope, in the form of his Moralis
what is little more than an abbreviated transcriptof the Dialogues:
Philosophia,z
Set et causa specialis est quod in hiis libris Senece morer; quia licet
huiusmodi prosecutussum ab infancia, tamen libros De ira et Ad Helbiamet
Cur bonismala accidantet An in sapientemcadantcontumeliaet iniuriaet Ad
Marciamet tres adhuc sequentes3non potui unquam videre nisi modo, et
nescio si ad manus Vestre Glorie pervenerunt; propterea habundanciushic
scribere sum conatus.4
The rediscovery of the Dialoguesin I266 by the doctormirabilishimself 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.6Beeson raised such stimulating questionsthat 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
impressthe Pope, hisjoy 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 'rediscovered' the Dialoguesonly 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 Virginisof John of Garland:
Quapropter divine perfectioni sapientie vestre quoddam opusculum presento, 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 I22o-I at the University of Paris.8 His use of one of the Dialoguesis the first sign that this text had really arrived in northern Europe. Its
I
'(Libri) Senece, qui sunt optimi et
rarissime inveniuntur' (Opus tertium, frag.
Duhem, p. 164); 'protraxi hanc partem
terciam Moralis philosophie gratis propter
pulcritudinem et utilitatem sentenciarum
moralium, et propter hoc quod libri raro
inveniuntur' (Opusmaius,p. 187. I-3 Massa).
2 Part vii of the Opus maius, which has
now been separately edited by E. Massa,
Baconis OperisMaioris Pars Septimaseu Moralis
Philosophia,Zilrich, 1953.
3 The three following are (i) the de brevitate vitae+ the ad Polybium,(2) the de vita beata
+the de otio, and (3) the de tranquillitate.
4 Massa, p. 133. 1-7.
362
L. D. REYNOLDS
1917),
p.
188, and in particular Robert A. Pratt inSpeculum, xli (1966), pp. 627 ff. For recent studies
of John of Wales, see Beryl Smalley, English
Friars and Antiquity in the Early Fourteenth
Century(Oxford, i960), pp. 51-5; W. A.
Pantin, 'John of Wales and Medieval Humanism', in Medieval Studiespresentedto Aubrey
Gwynn, S.J. (Dublin,
OF SENECA'S DIALOGUES
363
All this makes it clear that the Dialogueshad reached the schools of Paris by
the middle of the thirteenth century. Once the text had arrived at this active
intellectual centre, where other worksof 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-centurytexts will doubtless fill in many of the details, but
the general picture is clear: the text re-emergedin southernItaly 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 untapped source for the text. Beeson in particularhas suggested that the extensive
extracts from the dialogiin Roger's Moralisphilosophiashould 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 contemporariesby 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 manuscriptsand 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,z a number of articles have been devoted specificallyto the problem of the
codicesrecentiores.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 manuscriptson the
Ambrosianusis 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 manuscriptsof the Dialoguesare for the most part both corrupt and
contaminated, and in such a jungle finessewill 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
'
2
Castiglioni
(1946),
and Viansino
(1963).
(1949),
continentibus
disputatio',
Athenaum I (19i3),
(1913), 47-52;
H. Wagenvoort,
'De
369-78,
REL xi
9-41
and 22
(I954)
35-65;
B. L.
364
L. D. REYNOLDS
group 7.
The line of division between the two groups inevitably becomes more and
more blurred as horizontal transmissiongathers momentum. The large group
which comprisesthe vast majority of the extant manuscripts,contaminated
(f9),
both with each other and with the manuscriptsof the y group, presentsa daunting problem. But the historical circumstancesof the transmissiongive 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 manuscriptsof this group. It is with these
that we must begin. With the aid of these it is possible, I think, to reconstruct
the basic P text, and this lies at the core of the problem.
Most of the manuscripts of the Dialoguesbelong 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. 153), which I shall call C.2 It belongs to the
first half of the thirteenth century and is almost certainly a little older than
Parisinuslat. 15086 (P), which it has been customaryto regard as the earliestof
The best of the later manuscriptshas by general agreement been
the recentiores.
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. 5-12. 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 subgroups 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 fourteenthcentury 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 editi ons; Laur. 76. 38, 1 to Marouzeau, 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
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
errorsin common. This can only mean that they derive from a common parent,
namely g. A short list of some of the common omissionsand transpositionswill
serve to make this point:
Omissions: I. 4. 3 ipsi; 1. 4- 5 si te; 2. 5. 3 ergo si ... pervenirenonpotest; 3. 8. 2
Not all g manuscripts will contain all these errors; but even the more contaminated 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 frequenterinrita 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 f manuscripts are in fact exactlines 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
perseveravit.
tuos noluit / et in materno contubernio cum vix paternum liberi ferant perseveravit / 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 circumfususvictoris exercitus armis ex superioreloco 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 shamelesslyemended to
patriam violaveratille.
P has nothing after dial. 9. 15; Q has
only a fragment of the de ira and omits the
ad Helviam matremcompletely. Of the three
manuscripts used only C(B) is available for
366
L. D. REYNOLDS
OF SENECA'S DIALOGUES
367
Hist. 2. 6.
6 There are two extant Beneventan manuscripts of Orosius, Monte Cassino 303 and
Vaticanus
century.
lat. 3340,
both
of the eleventh
368
L. D. REYNOLDS
OF SENECA'S DIALOGUES
369
had a blank at the beginning of the de ira, i.e. not later than the twelfth century; 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 fiy have taken the beginning of the deira
must ultimately be the same, since they present us with the identical fragment.
This makes it evident that P and y must also originate from Monte Cassino,
and that this great monastery has preservedfor 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. 14r (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 unsatisfactorysituation. I shall not insist on the attribution of any particular 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 authoritativemanuscript 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 conjectureson 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 fl, 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:
in A3: itis in infitias fly
2. 3. ' itis infitias]post itis superscr.
3. 21 . 3 venit morte contempta]postvenit add.uxor in marg.A3: venit uxor gy
9. 2. I. utique cum ex tempestate requievit] utique cum Haase: ut que cum
A: supracum AZvelpotiusman. 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 brainchildren 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
abdito] in om. a; quietumque]-que om. a;
2. 3 viritim] virium a. f and y have conjunctive errors, e.g. 2. I. reorum a, eorum
si tibi a, tibi si Py.
fly;I 2. 3
L. Annaei Senecae dialogorum libri xii
(Copenhagen, I886), pp. ix-xx.
2 Many of the later corrections, particularly those of A5, a vicious meddler, are
simply taken from one or more of the
recentiores.It may be worth investigating
whether some of them, such as those assigned
370
L. D. REYNOLDS
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 speculation, 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 Ambrosianuswas 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 Ambrosianus-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 Annalsand Historiesof Tacitus, the Golden
Ass of Apuleius, Frontinus' De aquisand Varro's De lingualatina-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 generations in southern Italy. Now that we have discoveredwhich are the key manusome links between Italy and northern Europe can
scriptsamong the recentiores,
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 thirteenthcentury manuscriptwith a mixed text, Angelicus 505, is also Italian. Thus the
tradition is Italy.
home of all forms of the recentior
P is a somewhat mysterious manuscript. Its composite nature has not been
noticed. The first part of the manuscript (ff. 129-86, containing dial. I-4 and
part of 9) is written in one hand, the second part (ff. 187-252, 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
text of the spurious correspondence between
Seneca and St. Paul, edited by C. W. Barlow
(Papers and Monographs of the American
Academyin Rome, x, 1938). A glance at his
stemma shows that this text is closely connected textually with four other manuscripts,
all of German provenance and associated
respectively with St. Emmeram, SaintArnoul (Metz), St. Gall, and Cologne. This
seems to me to be a clear result of the strong
ties existing in the eleventh century between
OF SENECA'S DIALOGUES
371
manuscriptsfirmly rooted in the north. Q, the third of the three earliest extant
representativesof the P 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 remarkablething about his discoverywas 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
and when he transcribed large
earlier than some of the extant recentiores;
it
for
the
of
the
from
edification
excerpts
Pope, he came close to sending coals to
Newcastle. Bacon's miracles and discoverieshave a habit of fading away in the
cold light of historicalinvestigation and this discoveryis no exception. Though
he produced his manuscript like a rabbit out of a hat, there was nothing remarkable 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 manuscriptsin 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 disseminationof the Dialogues.The readingswhich 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 correctionof 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 manuscriptsrather 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 College 297, and University College 6. A manuscript 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 (Animadversionesin L. Annaei
SenecaeOpera[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, Catalogueof theManuscriptsof 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.
Bb
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L. D. REYNOLDS
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 differentwhen the Ambrosianusfails, 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 interrelationship with certainty and they are best regarded as independent witnesses, 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 centuriestoo late: it is a carelesspiece of copying, but is still, I think,
more trustworthy than P y.' The text of the ad Polybiumhas rested on a whole
gaggle of manuscriptschosen 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 Dialoguesis
interesting in that it illustrates a pattern of transmissionnot 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
It is clearly right at least twice against
the other two: 2. I reorum(eorumP y) and
2. 3. si tibi (tibi si i y). An interesting case is
1. 4. Here most editors read (with a) flagrant
ac micantoculi. For ac micantf 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
I
L. D. REYNOLDS
by the fact that the only authoritative edition
of Martin's works (by C. W. Barlow, American Academy in Rome, 1950) 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. Fontin (Emerita xviii
[1950], p. 378) and checked by myself (in
fact it needs hac micant, with the false
aspiration common in Visigothic manuscripts).