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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 January 2019
After the notable editions of Suetonius by Roth, Preud'homme, Ihm and Ailloud, the De uita Caesarum edited by R.A. Kaster in the Oxford Classical Texts has made available to scholars a critical text which rests on the firm foundations of a thorough exploration of the tradition and the scholarship on the subject. The relationship of the eighteen medieval manuscripts, placed in a time-frame between the ninth century, the age of the oldest copy, Par. Lat. 6115, and the beginning of the thirteenth century, has been extensively and carefully examined and schematized in a complex stemma codicum, which illustrates the network of copying and contamination. Moreover, the editor has revised the dating of the manuscripts, in the light of the most recent studies, and brought order to the sigla assigned to them by previous editors.
1 Roth, C.L. (ed.), C. Suetoni Tranquilli quae supersunt omnia (Leipzig, 1858)Google Scholar.
2 Preud'homme, L. (ed.), C. Suetoni Tranquilli De uita Caesarum libri VIII (Groningen, 1906)Google Scholar.
3 Ihm, M. (ed.), C. Suetoni Tranquilli De uita Caesarum libri VIII (Leipzig, 1907)Google Scholar.
4 Ailloud, H. (ed. and transl.), Suétone, Vies des douze Césars, vol. 1 (Paris, 1931–2)Google Scholar.
5 Kaster, R.A. (ed.), C. Suetoni Tranquilli De uita Caesarum libros VIII et De grammaticis et rhetoribus (Oxford, 2016[a])CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The edition goes with a volume of Studies on the Text of Suetonius’ De uita Caesarum (Oxford, 2016[b]).
6 On the Greek in the Lives: Townend, G.B., ‘The sources of the Greek in Suetonius’, Hermes 88 (1960), 98–120Google Scholar; Berthet, J.F., ‘La culture homérique des Césars d'après Suétone’, REL 56 (1978), 314–34Google Scholar; Best, E.E., ‘Suetonius: the use of Greek among the Julio-Claudian emperors’, RSA 15 (1985), 77–95Google Scholar.
7 Fera, V., ‘Un nuovo libro della biblioteca del Salutati’, in Polara, G. (ed.), Munusculum. Studi in onore di Fabio Cupaiuolo (Naples, 1993), 25–36Google Scholar; Rollo, A., ‘Manuele Crisolora e il restauro del greco nel De vita Caesarum di Svetonio: un nuovo manoscritto’, in Fera, V., Ferraù, G., Rizzo, S. (edd.), Talking to the Text: Marginalia from Papyri to Print (Messina, 2002), 401–5Google Scholar.
8 I quote the Greek passages from Kaster's edition (see n. 5 [2016(a)] above).
9 ‘Augustus and the Muses (Suetonius, Tiberius 21.4)’, CQ 40 (1990), 579–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10 Strictly speaking, the ε of τε should not be included in the letters placed between cruces because it is a corrupt form of the initial sigma of the following word, στρατηγῶν: for the reading of the archetype must have been CΤΕΤΡΑ-, which is transmitted by most of the manuscripts (together with CΤΗΤΡΑ-), while CΤΕCΤΡΑ- is only in VLS.
11 In the margin of B.R. 91 of the National Library of Florence Poliziano noted the conjecture τοῖς ἄλλοις.
12 The D shape in LS is noted only in Ailloud's apparatus criticus.
13 Archilochus’ verses quoted by Plut. Phoc. 7.6 can serve as a parallel expression, as Maria Cannatà suggests to me: although postponed, δίς—or the prefix δι in διστρατηγῶν—someway recalls the term ἀμφότερον, placed before, which points out the double competence, military and oratorical: καὶ γὰρ τῶν ἀνδρῶν ἐκείνων ἕκαστος ἐφαίνετο κατὰ τὸν Ἀρχίλοχον ‘ἀμφότερον, θεράπων μὲν Ἐνυαλίοιο θεοῖο | καὶ Μουσέων ἐρατᾶν δῶρον ἐπιστάμενος’. Athenaeus (Deipn. 627c) quotes the first verse with εἰμὶ δ᾿ ἐγὼ instead of ἀμφότερον.
14 ΔΙCΤΕΤΡΑΤΗΓΩΝ should therefore be a haplographic error for ΔΙCCΤΕΤΡ-.
15 On this incunable, see Fera, V., Una ignota expositio Suetoni del Poliziano (Messina, 1983), 85–94Google Scholar.
16 Martinelli, L. Cesarini, ‘Il Poliziano e Svetonio: osservazioni su un recente contributo alla storia della filologia umanistica’, Rinascimento 16 (1976), 111–31Google Scholar, now in Gentile, S. (ed.), Umanesimo e filologia. Lucia Cesarini Martinelli (Pisa, 2016), 65–85Google Scholar; see also Fera (n. 15), 35.
17 rode caper uitem, tamen hinc cum stabis ad aras | in tua quod spargi cornua possit erit. Poliziano correctly recognized in Ovid's verses a reference to Euenus’ Greek epigram (Anth. Gr. 9.75: κἤν με φάγῃς ἐπὶ ῥίζαν, ὅμως ἔτι καρποφορήσω | ὅσσον ἐπισπεῖσαι σοί, τράγε, θυομένῳ) and advanced the conjecture καίσαρι instead of τράγε. The restoration is discussed in chap. XXVI of the first Miscellanea and is also recorded in B.R. 91 of the National Library of Florence.
18 On the question of the eta sound in Late Antiquity and in the Western Middle Ages, see A. Rollo, ‘La trasmissione medievale dei graeca’, in I graeca nei libri latini tra medioevo e umanesimo. Atti della giornata di studi in ricordo di Alessandro Daneloni, Messina, 28 ottobre 2015 = SMU 14 (2016), 26–39.
19 These are the same manuscripts that contain another interpolation, with the same origin, at Cal. 22.1 (εἷς κοίρανος ἔστω, εἷς βασιλεύς); here too the medieval translation de celo venit nobis rex infiltrated the text. The two interpolations are the only relics, along with the interlinear sentence erit semper bene at Dom. 23.2 and dubitationem at Aug. 92.2, in Par. Lat. 5801 and Laur. 66.39, of the medieval translation that in the other passages Montepess. H 117, Laur. 68.7 and Vat. Lat. 833 preserve between the lines. As regards such interpolations, Vat. Lat. 1904 does not come into consideration because, despite containing the translation, it breaks off at Cal. 3.3 decreta sua re<scindenti>.
20 This reading emerges in the tradition of Suetonius instead of the form restored by Chrysoloras and is known both to Sabellicus and to Beroaldus. It appears, for example, in Par. Lat. 5809 and in Bonon. 2810, but without δέ; in Vat. Lat. 6800 a reader wrote it in the margin, together with the words rectas facite, drawn from a c[odex] a[ntiquus].
21 This is noted in the right margin with the Greek letters from Laur. 68.7. In B.R. 92 we read ὁ ἔρως δ᾿ ἐπείγεται along with the variant reading ὀρθῶς δ᾿ ἐπείγεται.
22 Fera (n. 15), 167–8 n. 3.
23 The reading ὁ τρώσας ἰάσεται was written by a late hand in the margin of Par. Lat. 5801, while both forms, with and without καί, are recorded in Vat. Pal. Lat. 898.
24 Victorii, Petri Variarum lectionum libri XXV (Florence, 1553), 381–2Google Scholar (ὁ τρώσας καὶ ἰάσεται, referring to ‘Victorius l. 24 c. 14 Vari<arum>’, has also been transcribed in the margin of Beroaldus's commentary, next to the passage at issue, in a copy of the 1493 edition preserved at the Naples National Library with the shelfmark S.Q. XI I 16).
25 Unless, as Michele Bandini suggests to me, ΠΕΙCΕΤΑΙ, future of πάσχω, is a conjecture by an ancient reader who aimed at healing a text that was somehow corrupt.
26 Kaster (n. 5[2016(b)]), 258.
27 ‘Zur Litteratur des Suetonius’, Jahrbücher für classische Philologie 87 (1863), 205–6.
28 See Kaster, R.A., ‘Making sense of Suetonius in the twelfth century’, in Grafton, A. and Most, G.W. (edd.), Canonical Texts and Scholarly Practices. A Global Comparative Approach (Cambridge, 2016), 110–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
29 Kaster (n. 5[2016(b)]), 129.
30 On the equivalence of αἰτέω to postulo and peto in medieval lexica: Corpus Glossariorum Latinorum, 2.154: ‘postulo αξιω αιτω’ (Par. Lat. 7651, f. 157r); 2.221: ‘αιτω posco postolo peto’ (Harl. 5792, f. 7r).
31 However, it is remarkable that in Neap. IV C 25 there emerges an attempt to reformulate the sentence by means of a new back-version that also takes into account the opening word of the medieval translation: ἐξαίτει καὶ δότε κροταλισμὸν καὶ πάντες ὑμᾶς μετὰ γαυρότιτος τι ποιήσατε.
32 We find one of these in the 1480 Venice edition, in which κρότον became κρᾶτον. But this error prompted consistent reactions, for a reader wrote in the margin of a copy of this edition preserved in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich, with the shelfmark Ink S-612: date vinum et vos cum laetitia aliquid bibite. He also expunged the ο of ποιεῖτε.
33 In PCG 8.275 the immediately preceding letters ΔΕ have also been included between cruces.
34 Suetonius points it out quite clearly (percontatus ecquid iis u ideretur mimum uitae commode transegisse), and even more so Cassius Dio (ἐπὶ μίμου τελευτῇ τινος).
35 See Rollo (n. 18), 35. As is well known, the false diphthong οι and the vowel υ retained the same sound until about the tenth century a.d. A similar change occurred in the tradition of Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae, where at 2.2.13, in the quotation from Il. 24.527–8, the manuscripts show ΔΥΟΥC or ΔΥΟC, with some exceptions, such as Par. Lat. 7181 and Vat. Lat. 3363, which have ΔΥΟ (while the reading ΔΥΟ of Einsidlensis 302 is a correction of ΔΥΟΥC, the two final letters of which have been erased; in Laur. 14.15 they have been struck out). Peiper restored—either aware of the origin of this error or just to adhere to the Homeric text—the reading δοιούς, whereas Bieler adopted δύο (like Planudes), probably considering ΔΥΟΥC a corrupt form. In fact, the traditional reading ΔΥΟΥC is readily explicable through the phonetic convergence of Υ and ΟΙ in Antiquity.