Marco Buonocore

Epigraphy and Philology: Manuscript Sources

in «The Oxford Handbook of Roman Epigraphy» edited by C. Bruun and J. Edmondson, Oxford University Press, 2014, pp. 21-41

When Theodor Mommsen was planning the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (CIL), he realized that to achieve a level of accuracy beyond that of the existing printed collections of inscriptions, it would be necessary to take account of the entire manuscript tradition which, from the Carolingian age down to the nineteenth century, had collected and preserved important information about epigraphic texts (Ch. 3). He knew that for the many no longer surviving inscriptions the only available source was what could be found in a parchment or paper codex. It would not be sufficient, however, merely to record the existence of an inscription in a particular manuscript; one would need to work in exactly the same way as when preparing a philological edition of a literary text; i.e., consider the textual tradition of each inscription, paying attention to textual variants and attempting to explain the differences. Above all, one would need to identify, if possible, the author of the manuscript and to assess his overall reliability by evaluating his modus operandi. Mommsen thus found himself facing an unprecedented task, which required a detailed inventory of the manuscript holdings and archives of the most important European libraries. Every CIL collaborator was instructed to pay the closest attention to this matter. Giovanni Battista de Rossi (1822–94), who worked at one of the most renowned libraries in the world, the Vatican Library (Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, BAV), became a cornerstone of this project. Not only was he in daily contact with the formidably rich manuscript holdings of the BAV, but also, because of his long experience, he was often contacted for advice by the many collaborators on the project. So highly was his contribution valued that Mommsen frequently invited him to compile a Bibliotheca epigraphica manuscriptorum or a Bibliographia codicum epigraphicorum, and de Rossi made a fundamental contribution in 1888 in the praefatio to the second volume of his Inscriptiones Christianae Urbis Romae (ICUR).

An enormous quantity of information relating to the manuscript tradition was included in the various CIL volumes both in the introductory chapter of each, dedicated to a conspectus auctorum, and in the preface to each single town. At the end of the nineteenth century, then, an impressively varied picture of this fundamental aspect of epigraphic studies was available. The whole project, as devised by Mommsen, was inspired by the German philological methods developed for the editing of the texts of Greek and Latin authors.

Over a century since the first volumes of the CIL, new archival discoveries, a better understanding of the manuscript tradition, and improved interpretative methods have much increased our knowledge in this field. We are now in a better position to recover from these manuscripts information about inscriptions that would otherwise remain unknown. A fully rounded epigrapher, therefore, must also be a good philologist and, when editing an inscription, especially if the original text no longer survives for inspection, must consider as closely as possible the manuscript tradition (and even early printed works), attempting to explain the differing readings and renderings of the text that these sources provide. This detailed work is time-consuming, but thanks to the availability of modern library catalogues and inventories (sometimes on the internet), the task is much easier than it was for the nineteenth-century pioneers...