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Ad Fourmontii inscriptiones spurias addendum

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 December 2013

J. Enoch Powell
Affiliation:
Trinity College, Cambridge

Extract

P. M. Paciaudi was first librarian of the ducal library at Parma upon its opening in 1769, and an antiquary of some repute, having already published two books on Greek epigraphy in 1751 and 1761 respectively. As librarian he procured from the Jesuits of Milan a fifteenth-century manuscript of Thucydides, now no. 342, and on having this rebound, he inserted between the front guard-leaves and the MS. proper a quaternion of stout white paper. This, in an irreproachable hand, he filled with a dissertation of his own composition, which, after a preamble on Thucydides, gives valuable details of the previous owners of the book. He then returns to the historian, and relates a remarkable discovery once made by himself. We will let him tell the story in his own words.

Type
Notes
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies 1935

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References

page 81 note 4 I have made a complete collation of the MS.

page 81 note 5 In his Receuil d'antiquités égyptiennes, étrusques, grecques, romaines et gauloises, Vol. VI, Paris, 1764, pp. 163 ff.Google Scholar, the Comte de Caylus gives fourteen plates of hitherto unpublished inscriptions from Fourmont's papers, in the introduction to which he acknowledges help in translation and commentary received from Paciaudi, doubtless on the occasion referred to above. The plates include a ‘tomb’ of ΜΙΛΤΙΑΔΗΣ ΚΙΜωΝΟΣ not dissimilar to the tomb of Thucydides. (The spurious inscriptions of Fourmont published by Boeckh in his dissertation on the forgeries (CIG. I. 44–69) are purely Peloponnesian.)

page 81 note 6 A confusion of the Abbé Michel Fourmont with his brother Stéphan Fourmont, a noted orientalist.

page 82 note 1 The reference is to Philostratus, Senior, Vit. Soph. II, 10Google Scholar, 4; but P.'s memory has played him false. The saying of Hadrian, who was a Tyrian by birth, was an insolent piece of self-commendation which he flaunted in the face of the Athenians. It has no connexion with the anecdote preceding in the same chapter, which evinces Hadrian's admiration for his master Herodes. ‘Herodis Attici columnas’ is merely Paciaudi's imagination.

page 82 note 2 The observation of Paciaudi only shews that Fourmont read his Marcellinus carefully, noting particularly sections 16 and 55, before he proceeded to concoct his inscription.

page 82 note 3 i.e. at 4,1044, where, in fact, all MSS. have Ὀλόρου.