The Manuscripts of the Scholia to the Hesiodic Aspis

This paper presents a collation and investigation of some manuscripts of Ioannes Pediasimus’ scholia paraphrastica to the Hesiodic Aspis . The paper demonstrates that the editions currently used by scholars are based on an insecure textual foundation.


1
The scholia to the Hesiodic Aspis have not received much attention from modern scholars.The scholia vetera were last published by Ranke in 1840.1 Some substantial efforts have been made to assess the textual history of this material more fully,2 but there is still a need for further study in this area.A separate group of scholia has fared much less well.Ioannes Pediasimus (c.1240-c.1310)3wrote two sets of scholia on the Aspis: a set of paraphrastic scholia (called Σχόλια παραφραστικά in the manuscripts), and a set of grammatical notes (called Τεχνολογία in the manuscripts).Pediasimus was at one point the leading professor at Constantinople and held the post of ὕπατος τῶν φιλοσόφων, and so his scholia are important for an understanding of how the Hesiodic Aspis was read and understood by major scholars in the Palaeologan age.The scholia of Pediasimus were last published by Gaisford in 1823,4 and since then no study has been made of them save for the publication of a handful of emendations.5Unfortunately, in the available editions of the text these separate scholia are conflated and printed together, so that it can be difficult for a reader to tell exactly where the scholia paraphrastica end and the technologia begins.In fact, these works were clearly demarcated in the manuscripts by different titles, and should be treated as distinct pieces of scholarship.The present article deals only with the manuscripts of Pediasimus' scholia paraphrastica.The aim is to place understanding of this work on a more secure textual foundation by providing information about the readings of the manuscripts.

2
The number of manuscripts known to me, in which Pediasimus' scholia paraphrastica can be found, is nine.(Heinsius, Heinrichius, and Gaisford) do not mention manuscripts.The text of the scholia paraphrastica in these manuscripts has not been examined in modern times.8Gaisford's Leipzig edition is the one most commonly used and referred to by scholars: T. Gaisford, Poetae Minores Graeci, II, Leipzig 1823, 609-654.9References to Pediasimus in this article will follow the page and line numbering of this edition.

3
The tradition of the scholia paraphrastica is comprised of complete manuscripts containing the entirety of the transmitted text on the one hand, and manuscripts containing short excerpts or paraphrases on the other.All the manuscripts descend from an archetype which had an error at 619.8 οἰκέταις] ἱκέταις codd.This error is so absurd as a paraphrase of Sc. 85 ἱκέτῃσι, that one is compelled to postulate that it belongs to the common ancestor of all the manuscripts.
The manuscripts T, M, and V share a very similar text, with only a handful of variants distinguishing them from one another.
5. B = Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Barb.gr.98, ff.12r-17r, saec.XVI (beginning), copied in Otranto.18The manuscript was owned by Girolamo Seripando and later by Giovanni Paolo Parrasio.In the margins there are many notes in Latin and some in Greek; parts of the Greek text have been corrected by a second hand.Collated from high-quality colour images.
The three manuscripts are related to one another, and were probably derived from a common exemplar, which I shall call r.This is demonstrated by the following places where they agree in error against all other manuscripts.20These are the major omissions in common: 627.11 καὶ τὰς σιαγόνας TMV] om.r, 650.11 φέρεται ἐν τοῖς ὄρεσιν ἐν θυμῷ ὥστε μαχέσασθαι TVM] om.r, 652.19 πίμπλαται δὲ ἄρα καὶ ἡ ψυχὴ αὐτοῦ TVM] om.r. 17 Hajdú andSchreiner 2013, 25-52, at 42-43. 18 Capocci 1958, n. 98;Vendruscolo 2005, 512-524, at 517;Formentin 2010, 401-408, at 406 n. 13;Ferreri 2002, 196-197, 199-203. 19 Kavrus-Hoffmann 2010, 207-274, at 232-238. 20  When we look at the relations between G, B, and H, it becomes apparent that no clear internal relations between these manuscripts will emerge.In some places B and H agree against G: 639.14 κεκλεσμέναι Each manuscript is descended from r but has many of its own unique errors, and also shares errors sometimes with one manuscript in the group and sometimes with another.Hence B sometimes shares errors with H against G, but also sometimes shares errors with G against H.An explanation for this is contamination.It will be difficult to determine the internal relations of these manuscripts without the discovery of other related manuscript witnesses descended from r.

5
The next three manuscripts of the fifteenth century offer an abridged form of the text.They have proved to be textually unhelpful.Sigla have not been accorded to them.
Lascaris was fond of paraphrase and abbreviation.Elsewhere in this same manuscript there is an anonymous paraphrase of the Aspis (from f. 121),25 which I have not been able to examine.There is also an abbreviated version of Pediasimus' technologia in Matr.4629, ff.68v-69v, and, according to Corrales Pérez, Lascaris used this to annotate his text of the Aspis.26Corrales Pérez reported that in the margins of the text of the Aspis in Matr.4607 a few mythological scholia can be found, and that these have been adapted from Pediasimus' scholia paraphrastica.27I have not been able to check the text of these.9. Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Laur.Plut.31.24,saec.XV (perhaps 1480s), written by George Hermonymus.28The manuscript belonged to Piero de' Medici, to whom it was given by his father, Lorenzo.Collated from high-quality colour images.On ff.142r-143r there is a small selected excerpt from the scholia paraphrastica of Pediasimus, headed by the title καὶ ταῦτα εἰς τὴν Ἀσπίδα τοῦ Ἡσιόδου.

6
I now turn to the editions of the text.This particular set of scholia has been edited five times: The manuscript basis of this edition was a combination of T and M. Trincavelli carries over the readings of M against those of T in the following places: 625.9 ἐζωφραφημένος T] ἐζωγραφισμένος M, Trinc., 652.The most important error in Trincavelli's edition comes at 635.33, where the mistake has influenced all later editions (the lemma is the agreement of all the manuscripts): 635.33 Κῆρες ω] χεῖρες Trinc., Heinsius, Heinrichius, Gaisford This common error suggests that Trincavelli's collation of the text was not checked against the manuscripts by any later editors.
In 1603 Heinsius published the scholia paraphrastica of Pediasimus as part of his edition of the text of Hesiod.Heinsius says nothing about the manuscript sources of his text.The significance of Heinsius' edition lies in the fact that he incorporated his own corrections in various places, and these in turn were integrated into the later editions of Heinrichius and Gaisford:  It is premature to offer broad conclusions about the transmission of Pediasimus' scholia paraphrastica before all of the manuscripts containing scholia to the Aspis have been thoroughly collated and investigated.No stemma can yet be drawn safely.The aim of this discussion has been to bring attention to the readings found in the manuscripts, not to provide a full history of the text.Since Pediasimus' scholia are in general poorly catalogued, versions of the scholia paraphrastica might still lie undetected in the margins of manuscripts of the Aspis not yet fully studied or accurately described.More discoveries are therefore to be expected.