Scholarly Contributions and the Manuscript Tradition
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O is the basis for the text of the Curiosum|
Scholarly Contributions and the Manuscript Tradition The work that preserves the regions of the ancient city of Rome, known most commonly today as the Regionary Catalogues or simply the Regionaries, consists of two interpolated recensions, the Notitia Quae Dicitur (sc. Notitia) and the Curiosum urbis Romae regionum XIIII (sc. Curiosum). As a brief review of the scholarship reveals, a complex text tradition obscures the manuscript history and the interrelation of the two documents themselves, making it difficult to understand the true nature of the Catalogue. Given these challenges, scholars have focused on the nature and chronology of the relationship between the Notitia and the Curiosum. Of the two, the Notitia is more extensive, in that it preserves a number of entries not found in the Curiosum. (provide examples) A reasonable explanation would seem to be, therefore, that the Notitia is more or less derived from the Curiosum, with the addition of a certain number of interpolated entries. This argument, advanced by Preller in 1846, (Die Regionen der Stadt Rom (Jena, I846), was challenged four years later by Theodor Mommsen, who maintained that, on the basis of internal chronological evidence of certain individual entries, both recensions belonged to a common archetype dating to c. 312 CE, with the Notitia dating between 334 CE and 357 CE, and the Curiosum sometime after 357 CE. (Abh. d. k. sachsischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften, phil.-hist. Classe, Leipzig, I, I850, 601-05). This was the prevailing view for nearly a century until Arvast Nordh published his Prolegomena till den romerska regionskatalogen in Swedish in 1936, which treated more thoroughly and successfully than any of the previous works the various problems associated with the true character of the Catalogue. This included Nordh’s belief that the items listed in each of the 14 regions denoted key landmarks and could be used for indicating addresses (89-113), an argument that was ultimately unpersuasive. Nevertheless, the Prolegomena was essential and was followed shortly thereafter by the first edition and commentary of the Curiosum and Notitia by R. Valentini and G. Zucchetti, the Codice Topografico della Città di Roma, I (Fonti per la Storia d’Italia, LXXXI [1940], 63-192). Valentini and Zuchetti largely accepted Nordh’s views while failing to explain the nature and relations of the various MSS. This latter deficiency was addressed by Nordh himself, who published his own critical edition, the Libellus de Regionibus Urbis Romae, in Latin in 1949. Here, in addition to carefully reviewing the theories that had been offered regarding the nature of the documents (XX), he examined in detail the nature of the manuscript tradition (3-57). In sum, the Curiosum had been transmitted by three Latin manuscripts of the Vatican, one going back to the 8th cent. CE (no. 3321), the other two derived from it and dating to the 11th to 12th cent. CE. (nos. 1984 and 3327) All three works provided exactly the same text and appendix and are preserved along with manuscripts as diverse as Cicero’s Philippics and the Dream of Scipio, as well as excerpts from the Liber Pontificalis. The Notitia essentially derived from a single manuscript from Spire (9th to 11th cent. CE), which was lost in the 16th cent. but survived in copies from Oxford (no. 378, 15th cent.), Paris (no. 9661, 15th cent.), Vienna (no. 3103, 15th cent.; no. 3416, 15th cent.), and Munich (no. 10291, 16th cent.), with the same distinction between the texts and the appendix as in the Curiosum. These manuscripts were preserved with works of a generally more technical nature, including, for example, the Itinerarium Antonini, the Notitia Galliarum, the Notitia Dignitatum, and the treatise De rebus bellicis. (Chastagnol 1995) Download 19.46 Kb. Share with your friends:
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