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The Manuscript Tradition of Plutarch Moralia 70–71
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 February 2009
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Parisinus 1672 (E in Wyttenbach and all subsequent editions), executed at the instigation of Maximus Planudes, is the only manuscript which contains all seventy-eight extant moralia of Plutarch. It may be dated soon after 1302, the year in which Planudes appended to his manuscript of the Greek Anthology (Marc. 481) a πίναξ Πλουτρχου containing the titles of the first sixty-nine of the seventy-eight treatises and concluding with the words τατα πντα εὑρθη. The addition of nine further treatises to the Corpus was made possible by the discovery of two further sources, one containing Nos. 70–7 and the other No. 78. The tradition of No. 78 is established beyond doubt: we are concerned here only with the remaining eight, Nos. 70–7.
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References
page 97 note 2 E contains: πίναξ, vitae, moralia 1–78, excerpt from Appian.Treu, M. (Zur Geschichte der Übertieferung von Plutarchs moralia i (1877), pp. 5–6)Google Scholar rightly distinguishes five hands: first, vitae and moralia 1–57; second, moralia 58–76; third, moralia 77; fourth, moralia 78; fifth, πίναξ and Appian.
page 97 note 3 For the history of the Corpus Planudeum seePohlenz, M. in Plutarchi moralia, ed. Teubner, . (1925), vol. iGoogle Scholar, Praefatio, pp. ix ff., and the works there cited, especially Wegehaupt, M., ‘Planudes und Plutarch’ Philol. lxxiii. 244–52 (1914)Google Scholar and Titchener, J. B., ‘The MS. Tradition of Plutarch's Aetia Graeca and Aetia Romano’, Univ. of Illinois Studies in Language and Literature, vol. ix, no. 2 (1924)Google Scholar.
page 97 note 4 Except for No. 38, which was omitted be-cause it was not yet complete: see below, and cf. Pohlenz, , op. cit., p. xxiGoogle Scholar, n. 3.
page 97 note 5 Cf. C. Hubert, ed. Teubner., vol. iv (1938), pp. xiv ff.
page 97 note 6 B contains (all in one hand): vitae xviii; moralia 31, 68, 69, 66, 30, 64, 67, 55, 46, 47, 41–4, 49, 50, 53, 56, 22, 23, 52, 65, 58, 34, 70–7, 38, 40, 4, 5.
page 97 note 7 No. 77 (de anitnae procreatione in Timaeo) is also found in one other MS. containing other moralia, Urbinas 99 (s. xv); in five miscellaneous MSS., Marcianus 523 (s. xv), Laurentknus plut. 70 cod. 5 (s. xv), Oxoniensis (Coll. Corp. Chr. 99) (s. xv), Scbrialensis 72 (s. xv/xvi), Parisinus 1042 (s. xvi); and in two 15th-century MSS. of Plato, in which Plutarch's treatise is appended to the Timaeus, Marciani 184 and 187. Certain of these MSS. were used by Wyttenbach and by Müller (Über die Seelenscköpfung im Timaeus, 1878), but no'reliable collation has been published. As far as I can judge from such readings as are recorded in those editions, there is no reason for suspecting any tradition independent of EB.
page 97 note 8 Some of the lacunae are due to the inability of a scribe to fecognize a word: e.g. πο followed by a lacuna of five letters occurs three times (in 872F bis and 873D) in E where the true reading is πεστώ or πεστοῖ In two of these instances B has the same as E: in the third the restoration πóλενϕιν(cf. below, p. 103). Material damage could hardly be responsible for obliterating the second part of the same word on each of three occasions.Paton, (Pythici dialogi tres (1893), p. xxii)Google Scholar attributes the lacunae found in E in No. 69 (de defectu oraculorum) to the inability of a scribe to make sense of corrupt passages, arid suspects that the same cause underlies the lacunae in EB in 70–7. (Cf. also Titchener, , op. cit., pp. 55–9 and 63.)Google Scholar I hope in a later article to publish a systematic investigation into all these lacunae.
page 98 note 1 Op. cit., p. xi.
page 98 note 2 See Pohlenz, , op. cit., pp. xxviiiGoogle Scholar and xxix.
page 98 note 3 Treu (op. cit. i, p. xiii) places this entry in the fifteenth century. But it cannot be later than the fourteenth, since it does not include the contents of the fourteenth-century part of the MS., which are added immediately below in a later hand (now almost illegible) prefixed by the Word νεγρπησαν.
page 98 note 4 Op. cit., p. 13.
page 98 note 5 Op. cit., p. 396.
page 98 note 6 See p. 97, n. 2, above.
page 98 note 7 ‘Some Textual Notes on Plutarch's Moralia’, C.Q. xxxv (1941), pp. 110Google Scholar ff.
page 98 note 8 For contents of B see p. 97, n. 6, above.
page 99 note 1 I have disregarded all minor differences of from accent, breathing, and division of words. The results here given are based on my own collation from photostats of Nos. 76 and 77 and, for Nos. 70–5, on the published collation of Treu, (op. cit. ii (Ohlau, 1881)Google Scholar supplemented and corrected by Bemardakis (vol. i, pp. l–li), Sieveking (cf. Teubner ed. 2, vol. iii, p. xxviii),Flacelière, (Sur les oracles de la Pythie, 1937), and Raingeard (Le περ το προσώπον de Plutarque, 1935Google Scholar. It is worth recording that of the 160 cases only 5 are from No. 77 (de animae procreatione in Timaeo, and it will be noted that none of the 13 special cases selected for treatment below is from this work. The scholar who found so many oppotunities for emendation in the other treatises must here have been deterred by the technicalities of the subject-matter. There is of course a number of instances in No. 77 of differences due to error in B. It so happens that one of them provides positive evidence of the descent of B from E: in 1029E ντων occurs at the end of a line in E, the ending –ων being written, as often, above the line. At the end of the line imme-diately above we have παίνεται with the symbol for the final –αι reaching well below the line. The tail of this symbol has been mistaken for the symbol for –ας and added to ντ in the line below to produce ντων in B.
page 99 note 2 On the conjectural emendations of Byzantine scholars seeMaas, P., ‘Eustathios als Konjecturalkritiker’, B.Z. xxxv (1935), pp. 299–307Google Scholar and xxxvi (1936), pp. 27–31, and the observations of the same writer on emendations of the ‘Socratic’ letters and of certain works of Xenophon, attributable to Georgios Chrysokokkes in the first half of the 15th century (B.Z. xxviii (1928), p. 430Google Scholar and xxxiii (1933), p. 167).
page 99 note 3 The text in each passage, except where otherwise indicated, is that of E, with the suplements found in B included in brackets « ».
page 101 note 1 I have written Ἡριππίδαν both in mor. 598F and in vit. Pel. 13 instead of the Ἑρμιππίδαν of the MSS., following a suggestion of Professor F.E. Adcock. In mor. 586E the MSS. have κριππίδας Herippidas was active in 399 (cf. Xen. Hell. iii. 4, 6, 26; iv. 1–8 passim). The name Hermippidas is otherwise unknown.
page 101 note 2 For ἄνοσον Reiske conjectured ἄνóσιον, Wilamowitz ἄθεον. Possibly it was originally a gloss on δνσιερον.
page 103 note 1 ἄλλως τε πς EB.
page 103 note 2 πο (lac. 3 litt.) E, πóλενϕιν B.
page 104 note 1 The Aldine text was based entirely on B (cf. Pohlenz, , op. cit., p. xii)Google Scholar, and little use was made of E before Wytennbach. who thought it possible that B was derived from E, though he supposed that the scribe had other MSS. at hand. But since the time of Treu all editors of these treatises have regarded the two MSS. as independent (cf. Bernardakis, Paton, Pohlenz, Sieveking, Hubert, Flacelière, Raingeard, opp. citt.) Of the passages cited by Treu to prove the independence of B some merely show that B is in error; the rest are included among the 160 referred to above. Flacelière (op. cit., p. 84) lays great stress on three instances cited by Treu in which B has lacunae where E has none. But such differences cannot be used to prove independence and they are in fact easily explained: in 407F B reads κα before a lacuna as against και in E, also before a lacuna, an omission on the part of B too slight to deserve attention; in 770C B has a lacuna where E has none in an obviously corrupt passage—i.e. a conjectural lacuna; and in 873C B has a lacuna for κοινομενοσ in E, but although κοινομενοσ is right the punctuation in E and a corruption immediately following make the word unintelligible and explain the omission in B.