The First Edition of Lucian of Samosata

The First Edition of Lucian of SamosataAuthor(s): E. P. GoldschmidtSource: Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 14, No. 1/2 (1951), pp. 7-20Published by: The Warburg InstituteStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/750349 .

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THE FIRST EDITION OF LUCIAN OF SAMOSATA

By E. P. Goldschmidt

The first edition of the original Greek text of Lucian's Dialogues came out at Florence in 1496. But long before then the amusing and irreverent

compositions of the second-century Syrian author were known to a wide circle of scholars and littirateurs and had produced their effect on various writers. Such names as Leon Battista Alberti, Jo. Pontanus, Matteo Maria Boiardo stand out among a multitude of lesser authors whose works betray an admiring acquaintance with the "scoffer at the gods" (subsannator deorum). Some of them may have read their Lucian in Greek manuscripts, but many more knew him only in Latin translations. A number of early Latin versions of single dialogues existed and exists in manuscripts, and several had appeared in print before the Greek original became widely accessible, proving that there was a current demand for such light literature in the second half of the fifteenth century. There are, as far as I could ascertain, twenty-one distinct editions of thirteen different dialogues in Latin before the year 1500. The origin of these translations, the identity of their authors, the tradition of these Latin texts, offer problems that have not so far been satisfactorily investigated. I will leave aside all antecedent and subsequent complications that present themselves, and I will concentrate on describing the nature, the contents and the probable origin of one such edition only, the earliest of all, which was printed at Rome in 1470 and contains six (or rather five) Lucianic Dialogues in Latin. I will only remark that, far from "throwing light" on anything whatsoever, such research as I have indulged in greatly adds to the complexity of the situation and, as is so often the case, seems to create more problems than it solves.

The art of printing reached Italy within a dozen years from its invention, and the two German practitioners who had acquired their skill at Mayence itself, Conrad Sweynheym and Arnold Pannartz, were brought to Rome by 1467, after they had produced the first examples of their craft in the Benedic- tine monastery of Subiaco. The perfervid humanist popes, Nicholas V and Pius II, were by then no longer alive, and their successor on St. Peter's throne, Paul II Barbo, was personally less eagerly in favour, perhaps even a little suspicious, of such studies. Still, the atmosphere of Rome in these years remained imbued with their enthusiasm for classical learning; the college of Cardinals was in its majority created by the Piccolomini pope and, more important still, the huge body of officials of the Curia, comprising such men as Hermolaus Barbarus, Domitius Calderinus, Leonardo Dati, and Gasparo da Verona could fairly be described as a professional corporation of Latin stylists. These scribes of the Papal Chancery, the bureaucracy of the world government of the Roman church, formed the dominant social background of the city from which prelates were chosen and cardinals emerged. Their gossip made reputations and ruined careers, and their tastes determined the fashionable lines of interest among the higher clergy, both resident and visiting from abroad. In a society so strangely constituted, the commission of a blatant error of syntax in a letter could make a man ridiculous for the rest of his life, and the acquaintance with a rare or unknown classical text would confer an aura of distinction on its possessor.

7



8 E. P. GOLDSCHMIDT

It is sometimes stated that in the period of the early Renaissance "the prelates of the Church took up humanist studies with zest" or words to that effect; it would be more correct to say that in the fifteenth century the composition of a work on the finer points of Latin style, the editing, or even the owning of a rare classical text, proved a most efficacious step towards a bishopric or some other conspicuous preferment. The humanist officials of the Curia also revived, for their own benefit and amusement, the semblance of a university, the "Studium Urbis," where scholars like L. Valla, Jo. Aurispa, Pomponius Laetus, lectured on Latin and Greek authors, and which seems to have functioned more like an academy than a teaching institution.1

When the first Roman printing presses started to operate, their products show the urgent demand for classical texts which, it would seem, the calli- graphers had hardly been able to satisfy. They also show by their prefaces and dedications, that the publication of such texts was considered a means for attracting patronage from the highest authorities in the Church. Sweyn- heym and Pannartz were set to work in the palace of a Roman patrician family and, beginning with a Cicero: Epistolae ad Familiares, in 1467, they poured out a succession of classical authors: Aulus Gellius, Julius Caesar, Apuleius, Livy, Lucan, Pliny, Vergil, Quintilian, Suetonius, Silius Italicus, Ovid, and several Ciceros, all before midsummer 1471. They also printed the first Greek author to come out in a Latin translation who, strangely enough, is the geographer Strabo (1469). All these volumes are dedicated to Pope Paul II himself by the editor Giovan Andrea dei Bussi, who seems to have been the literary manager of the enterprise and who was promptly rewarded with a little bishopric, Aleria in Corsica. The printer Sweynheym was eventually presented with a canonry at St. Victor's in Mayence in 1474. It is clear that this first Roman press was an officially sponsored undertaking, enjoying a Papal subvention, and that its productions were accepted as con- tributing to the glory of the reigning Pope.

There were soon other printers in the field, mostly Germans, and other editors of classical texts, rivalling the industrious bishop of Aleria. The foremost among them was J. A. Campanus, since 1463 bishop of Teramo (episcopus Aprutinus). He brought out a Quintilian and a Suetonius in 1470 and the first edition of Plutarch's Lives,2 translated by various scholars. All these editions by Campanus are dedicated by him to Cardinal Francesco Piccolomini, nephew of Pius II,. and later himself for a short time Pope Pius III. To the same Cardinal he addresses his printed edition of the Letters of Phalaris, which the translator, Francesco Griffolini, had dedicated to Malatesta Novello. The Bologna Ovid of 1471 is dedicated by Franciscus Puteolanus to Francesco Gonzaga, Cardinal of Mantua. Georgius Merula dedicated his Plautus in 1472 to Giacomo Zeno, bishop of Padua, Ang. Sabinus his edition of Ammianus Marcellinus to the bishop of Bergamo.3

1 Leo X in 1513 stated about this Studium: adeo scolarium copia defecit, ut quandoque plures sint qui legant quam qui audiant. See Denifle: Univ. d.M.A. I, p. 315. 2 In view of what we are presently coming to it may not be inapposite to mention that

this Plutarch contains a Life of Charlemagne "e graeco sermone in latinum translata," which is in fact by Donato Acciaiuoli.

3 On such dedications the earlier biblio- graphers are more informative than the modern ones. See: A. M. Quirini, De opti-



THE FIRST EDITION OF LUCIAN OF SAMOSATA 9

Enough examples to show that the appearance of a new classical text under the patronage of some powerful prince of Church or State was the normal rule, the dedication of a new edition or translation to a great personage one of the recognized methods of currying favour and support. Let this be granted and the fact that the first Lucian came out without any such preliminary letter or covering flag be taken as a very exceptional feature in a book of this class. We will try to suggest a reason for this singular omission further on, but now, having first underlined what the Roman Lucian of 147o does not contain, we must at last come to a description of the book itself.

It is a rare book; only five copies of it are known to exist: Manchester, John Rylands Library (Lord Spencer's copy); Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale;. Modena, Biblioteca Estense; Rome, Biblioteca Corsiniana; Florence, Biblio- teca Nazionale Centrale.

The small quarto volume contains eighty leaves printed in a rather clumsily cut Roman type, twenty-four lines to the page. The presswork is somewhat rough, the line ends uneven; the printer's craftsmanship remains well below the very excellent standard set by Sweynheym and Pannartz. The type is that known to students of early printing as the first type of Georg Lauer, a native of Wuirzburg, who was the fourth or fifth in sequence among the printers to set up a press at Rome. The book has no title, no subscription and no date. Nevertheless we incunabulists can positively assert the identity of the printer and, from the state of the type, the date 1470 as the year of printing.

How this can be proved would need an explanation in a technical jargon as illuminating as that of a philatelist discoursing on indentations and wire- marks, and we had better leave it at that. Lauer's press is neither a distin- guished one nor a long-lived one; the Lucian is among its earliest products, by May 1471 this particular type is discarded, by 1481 the activity of the press comes to an end. In these few years we know of four Editiones Principes of minor classical authors published by Lauer: Quintus Curtius, Pompeius Festus, Terentius Varro and Nonius Marcellus, all four edited by Pomponius Laetus.

Lauer's Lucian contains six dialogues: Charon, Timon, Palinurus, Alexander, Hannibal and Scipio, Tyrannus, Vitarum Auctio,' following in this order. Each dialogue begins abruptly with the first sentence spoken, without any heading, but with a space of several inches left blank, not only to mark the break with the preceding piece, but also to allow for the title and the names of the interlocutors to be inserted by hand. This is by no means

morum scriptorum editionibus quae Romae primum prodierunt, Lindau, I761.--J. B. Audiffredi, Catalogus historico-criticus Romanarum editionum saeculi XV, Rome, I783.--Most valuable: B. Botfield, Praefationes et Epistolae Editionibus Principibus auctorum veterum praepositae, Cam- bridge, I86I, who gives the full text of these dedicatory letters.

On the general problem of the function of patronage the only book known to me is: K. J. Holzknecht, Literary Patronage in the

Middle Ages, Philadelphia, 1923. But owing to the departmentalized condition of our academic studies, this very useful collection of examples is preponderantly devoted to English and "Romance Philology" texts and, though it cites a few Latin mediaeval books, it practically ignores the humanists.

1 These are Numbers XII, V (-), X, 12,

XVI, XIV of Dindorf's edition, Paris Didot, 1867.



0o E. P. GOLDSCHMIDT

an unusual feature in books of this early period which in this respect were following the example set by the writers of manuscripts. The headings were left out by the scribe to be supplied last of all by a calligrapher who would carefully add them in special script and usually in red ink; hence his job was called that of the "rubricator," and the term "rubric" still remains current as a synonym for a heading. Both in old manuscripts and in early printed books this finishing touch of adding the headings in red was often left undone. They had to be copied in from some model, some exemplar, which frequently seems to have been no longer to hand when the owner might have liked to complete his book; or else, failing to employ a competent calligrapher, many owners preferred to leave the spaces empty rather than spoil the page by clumsily written headings, inserted by themselves.

We have here five dialogues out of the 166 which have come down to us as Lucian's work and which, as we know from the first Greek edition and from the extant Greek manuscripts, were all transmitted together in one volume from the Byzantine East to the Italian West. Nothing has been added to the corpus of Lucianic writings in the course of time, though much has been disputed as spurious by later critics. These few dialogues then just happened to be available to the editor or the printer in Latin versions. As we know from manuscripts, a good many more had been turned into Latin by 1470 and no special significance attaches to the priority of publication of this selection.

But where, when and by whom were these particular dialogues translated? The title headings might have told us if they had been printed together with the text or had been filled in by the rubricator. The Spencer copy at Man- chester and the one at Modena are no help to us at all; they are in their virginal state, with the spaces blank as they left the press. When I saw the Paris copy I was delighted to find all the headings carefully filled in by hand in red ink and I noted them down. But when I came to inspect the Lucian of the Corsiniana I found something still more interesting: the source from which the Paris rubricator obtained his headings. For the copy in Rome contains not eighty leaves but eighty-one, and the extra, isolated leaf bound first in the volume is precisely the sheet of "rubrics" or chapter-headings which the printer supplied with each copy to the purchaser, who could then write them in in their proper places as indicated. (See P1. 4.)1

Such rubricator sheets were, it would seem, quite often supplied by the early printers-and indeed they were essential to the proper completion of such a book-but they are not often preserved. For they formed no integral part of the volume, being loose single leaves, and they were intended to be thrown away when they had served their purpose. However, sufficient examples have survived to make us recognize them when they occur, such as the sheets of chapter headings for the 36-line Bible (about 1460) preserved in the Paris Bibliotheque Nationale; another example of them is reproduced in the Catalogue of Early German Books in the Collection of Charles Fairfax Murray, London, '913, No. 460, and is now in the Cambridge University Library.

Now that I had the original title-headings, the authentic information sup- 1 The copy at Florence also contains this

leaf. It has only come to light and been identified in 1950. (Pressmark L.5.I7.)



Luctant dialogus 9 infmrbit Char5 latinus p Ri- ideuo f sad reueriddfftmu patre dominum cardinaI orinenifm. Seraphius,

Dt alog argume ntu. Demon tile. Incptt d4talgus cuius iterlocutores pmi lit .Mer- urius Caron. Quid turides charon.

hoc Luctani opus p me Beroldu nex greco tra uti

tib de OCzbecca•is

mitto orato1

incltte peregrie. ut ex corre&5e tua labore meo.atiq eteritase orv- at Juptter amabilths. EptRola que pofita .t-

retro poR tractadt de p utantta debet fignai p fi

iPatto quedi aii ratr fqutr tfcdfetcet. Obfecro.

Lucati dtalogus pRinutz denuo tra1atus cuius interlocutores nt Charon Palinus. Obcro.

de parefhrntt. :, : -: AMexa:.der .

::ul -

Luctaniurib clariffi8iFabula de uniattoneu lt cultus tel1octores fun Cha oth er- .

curiusRadanbatus Megapites Cinifeus & Mtiuf rnrortuus lucerna a leauts dernuo trI`&ata p uenera- bd ea patr Criofto a pfon2.Ro.por in.S.Balbina. Eiud Luct ani per eundla tranflatustraatuflus de

oriftaea ueneirao

uendtttolne itap,.culus intertocutores u unt Vitor MercuriusL trptor Philofop bus.

Sheet of Rubrics supplied with Lauer's Lucian, Rome, 1470 (p. 10)




plied by the editor himself on the authors of these versions, everything should have been plain sailing. Alas, the more I examined this promising page, the more I was puzzled. There was not much I knew about the early translators of Lucian before I met with this sheet; but that little was sufficient to show that the man responsible for these "model" title-headings had some surprising things to tell us. On some of the most familiar of these dialogues liis information is quite plainly, even fantastically, wrong. On others it seems to be not only new, but of great weight and importance. However, an editor who can put down the Palinurus, which is not by Lucian at all, which is not even Greek at all, but a fifteenth-century Latin composition by Maffeo Vegio, as "per Rinuccium denuo translatus," forfeits all claims to credence, and his testimony must be scrutinized item by item with the utmost scepticism.

Lauer's Lucian begins on its first page with a resume of the salient points of the Charon, the first of the following dialogues. It begins:

Bona fabula hec que loquitur nobis tot utilia. Aurum quid sit et quam stulte tanti reputatur, etc.

This Prologue continues in similar strain for twenty-two lines altogether. It is not easy to decide whether this piece is intended as prose or as some kind of accentuated free verse, something like the ancient Roman Saturnians.

On the next leaf there follows:

I. Charon. Above the first of the dialogues in the Rome quarto the rubricator is told

to write:

Luciani dialogus qui inscribitur Charon, latinus per Rinutium denuo factus, ad reverendissimum patrem dominum Johannem cardinalem Morinensem.

This is the Charon sive Contemplantes (Dindorf XII) translated' into Latin by Rinuccio of Arezzo (or of Castiglion-fiorentino), on whom see D. P. Lockwood: "De Rinucio Aretino Graecarum literarum interprete," in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 1913, XXIV, pp. 5I-Iog9. Rinuccio (best known perhaps as the translator of the frequently printed Latin version of Aesop's Fables) had been to Constantinople himself (1421-23) and brought back, among other codices, a MS. of Lucian from which he translated the Charon and the Vitarum Auctio (see below) in the summer of 1441 or 1442. At that time he was employed in the Roman chancellery and also held a chair of Rhetoric in the "Studium Urbis" until his death in 1456 or 1457. He dedicates his version to Jean Le Jeune, Cardinal Bishop of Th6rouanne (Cardinalis Morinensis) 14I I-51, elevated to the purple in 1439 by Eugene IV, a great book-collector and hunter of manuscripts, on whom see Sabbadini, Scoperte, I, p. 194.

The words "latinus denuo factus" are correct; there exists an earlier translation, never printed, of which we will have to say something below under Timon. The dedicatory letter to Card. Le Jeune begins with "Seraphius



12 E. P. GOLDSCHMIDT

Urbinas, vir utriusque juris . . ." and is here printed in its proper place. Another dedication to Lorenzo Colonna, belonging to the same dialogue, is found in this edition also, but misplaced on Fol. 56b in front of the Tirannus. On these two dedicatory letters see Lockwood, loc. cit., p. 53 and p. 96.1

II. Timon. Lucian's dialogue on the Misanthrope (Dindorf V) which perhaps had

as momentous an influence on European literature as any of his writings; M. M. Boiardo's Timone, Shakespeare's Timon of Athens, Moliere's Misanthrope derive from it.

The sheet of rubrics gives the heading:

Hoc Luciani opus per me Bertoldum ex greco translatum tibi de Czambec- cariis mitto, oratorum inclite Peregrine, ut ex correctione tua et labore meo aliqua eternitas oriatur.

The information contained in this rubric is new and important. Of the translator Bertoldus nothing at all is known so far, but the patron to whom he addresses his version, Peregrino de' Zambeccari, was chancellor of Bologna and died soon after 14oo. The dedication therefore demands a remarkably early date for this translation, a period much earlier than that in which Greek manuscripts become ordinarily current in Italy, a date anterior by a quarter of a century to the return of Aurispa and Rinuccio from Constantinople (1423) with their codex of Lucian's dialogues.

It is, fortunately, possible to confirm this early date from two independent sources and so to establish the authenticity of the rubric.

The same version of the Timon, together with a Latin translation of the Charon (to which I have referred above) is found in a MS. in the Laurenziana at Florence, Plu. XXV sin. 9. There it has no heading or dedication, nor does it give the translator's name. The Codex comes from Santa Croce and has the full subscription:

1403. 26 mai. scripta sunt haec Florentiae Frater Thedaldus tunc vacans.

On Thedaldo della Casa and his gift of books to Santa Croce in 1406 see R. Sabbadini: Scoperte. Nuove Ricerche, p. 175.2

Reliable confirmation that a translation, and presumably this translation, of the Timon was in existence in 1403 comes from another source. Remigio Sabbadini in Nuovo Archivio Veneto, 1915, N.S. XXX, pp. 219 ff., published a letter from Antonio di Romagno, dated January 16, 1403, addressed to Pietro Marcello, Bishop of Ceneda (1399-1409, died 1429). In this letter Antonio gratefully acknowledges the loan of a book to which he refers as "tuum Timonem." Without disrespect for the great authority of Sabbadini we must

1 See also the rubricator-sheet, lines io- 2, where the editor notices that the letter to Colonna is wrongly placed, but creates fresh confusion by suggesting it belongs in front of the Palinurus.

2 The only other MS. known to me containing these two early translations of the Charon and the Timon is Vat. lat. 989, fols. 81-96, but it neither gives a translator's name nor can it be dated.




be allowed to disagree if, from the mere occurrence of the pronoun "tuum," he jumps to the conclusion that Pietro Marcello must have been not only the owner of the book but the translator of Lucian's Timon from the Greek.

Equally unconvincing is Sabbadini's suggestion made in the same paper that the translation of the Charon in the above-mentioned MSS. is the work of Peregrino de' Zambeccari himself. This proposal is advanced solely "merce una stampa dell'ultimo Quattrocento che assegna la traduzione di questo dialogo a Peregrino de' Zambeccari."

This is an odd way of citing an authority and it seems clear that, for once, Sabbadini must have been careless in making or preserving his notes. It would be impossible to verify his assertion (for it is certain that no printed edition contains in its text such an ascription of the Latin Timon), if it were not that L. Frati in editing the Epistolario of Peregrino de' Zambeccari in the Fonti per la Storia d'Italia, 1929, had given us a little more information on the source of Sabbadini's statement. On page xxii of his introduction Frati cites from a copy of Lucian's Opuscula plurima, Venice, S. Bevilaqua, 1494, preserved in the Bibl. Nazionale Centrale at Florence (pressmark L.5-I7) the hand- written heading over the Charon: "Hoc Luciani opus . . . aliqua eternitas oriatur" in its entirety, which we now know to derive from Lauer's sheet of rubrics. Frati has nothing to say on the translator's name Bertoldus and for us, who know its origin, this written copy of 1494 has lost all evidential value; moreover it is found scribbled out of its proper place, for it is not over the Timon but over the Charon, which in that edition is given in Rinuccio's translation as cited above.'

The only little piece of corroborative evidence which I have found so far, that translations of Lucian by a man named Bertoldus were in existence, is the entry in the inventory of the library of Duke Borso d'Este made in 1467:

Lucianus ex graeco translatus per Bertholdum in membranis in forma mediocri Littera moderna

as given by G. Bertoni: La Biblioteca Estense e la Coltura Ferrarese, 1471-1505, Turin, 1903, p. 216.

That, I am afraid, is all I have been able to discover about this shadowy Bertoldus, who, whoever he was and wherever he worked, must be counted among the earliest of the Renaissance translators from the Greek.

III. Palinurus. After the Charon and the Timon there follows in the first Roman edition

1 The recent rediscovery of the Florence Lucian (see p. Io, n. I) has rendered the above- described confusion even more involved. Both Frati and Sabbadini must have been extraordinarily slipshod. There is no 1494 Lucian with MS. headings in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale. The pressmark Frati cites is that of the 1470 Lucian which has no notes, but does contain the rubricator-sheet

we reproduce. I cannot help adding that since 1947 I have gone four times to the Bibl. Naz. in quest of this Lucian. It remained "irreperibile" and I have not seen it yet. But I owe reliable information on its existence and its contents to my friend Comm. T. de Marinis, who has succeeded in examining it for me.




the dialogue Palinurus, and Lauer's editor instructs the rubricator that he should entitle it:

Luciani dialogus per Rinutium denuo translatus cuius interlocutores sunt Charon et Palinurus. Obsecro ...

We may well wonder how at the time ard place when this was printed, Rome I470, such a grossly false assertion could be published. For the Palinurus, a rather flat-footed discussion between Aeneas' unfortunate helmsman and Charon, the ferryman, on the miseries of all estates on earth, is not by Lucian at all. No Greek original of it exists, so that it could not be "translated" either by Rinuccio or by anyone else. The Palinurus is a composition by Maffeo Vegio of Lodi (I406-58), who from 1433 onwards was one of the more important officials of the Roman Curia. He was an industrious and prolific writer, both in prose and in verse, and he liked to exercise his talent for imitative composition by producing work which was taken to be a deceptive "pastiche" of some ancient author. He was bold enough to write a thirteenth, concluding canto for Virgil's Aeneid, which has found its way with, or even without, his name into several of the early editions.

Lucian seems to have been one of Vegius' favourite authors. The Palinurus is quite closely modelled on Lucian's writings, and not only the names of the interlocutors, but the technique of composition prove his familiarity with the Greek satirist, though we cannot be certain that he read him in Greek. Beside the Palinurus Vegius wrote at least two other "Lucianic" dialogues, a Disputatio inter Solem, Terram et Aurum, and the Philalethes, sive veritas invisa. This seems to have been a very popular piece with the fifteenth-century public and there are a number of printed editions of it from 1473 onwards, generally with the true author's name. But I have found at least one Philalethes, printed at Cracow, by Florian Ungler in 1512, in which the author is given as Lucian of Samosata.1

The bibliographical history of the Palinurus is amusing and peculiar. Its occurrence in the Roman Lucian is no doubt its first appearance. But not long after, in 1473, it is printed again at Cologne from William Caxton's anonymous press in a volume of Ten Dialogues (Hain 6107). Here it is seen together with the Philalethes, both of them with Maphaeus Vegius' name as the author, and it is entitled Dialogus defoelicitate et miseria. On May 13, 1497, Guillaume Le Signerre at Milan brings out a collection of Maphaeus Vegius' writings in which he includes the Dialogus de Foelicitate et Miseria (Hain 15933). But in March 1497 another Milan printer, Ulrich Scinzenzeler, had published a collection of Lucian's works in which the same piece is contained as Lucian's Palinurus (Hain 10262). All this goes to show that the fifteenth century was not keenly interested in questions of authorship. But still we cannot help wondering how a Roman editor could in 1470 attribute the Palinurus to Lucian, when its author Vegius had died in Rome as recently as 1458, and how he could give Rinuccio as its translator, who was certainly still alive in I456. To my mind this blunder confirms the impression that Lauer's Lucian is a surreptitious and almost clandestine publication.

1 See K. Piekarski, Pierzwa Drukarnia Fl. Unglera, 1926, No. 12.



THE FIRST EDITION OF LUCIAN-OF SAMOSATA 15

IV. Scipio. The twelfth of Lucian's Dialogues of the Dead, the Dispute between

Alexander, Hannibal and Scipio, who in the underworld appeal to the judge Minos to decide who was the greatest general of the three.

For this piece the sheet of directions for the rubricator prescribes:

Prohemium libelli de prestantia trium principum, videlicet Alexandri, Annibalis et Scipionis, translati per clarissimum virum Leonardum Aretinum.-Cum in rebus bellicis.

The attribution of the translation to Leonardo Bruni is a surprising and quite unwarranted slip on the part of the anonymous editor. There are few of the early Lucian translations about whose origins we are more reliably informed than on the Scipio. On the other hand we possess exceptionally thorough-going studies on Bruni's translations, based on the examination of hundreds of MSS., viz. L. Bertalot, "Ubersetzungen von Leonardus Aretinus" in Quellen & Forschungen aus italienischen Bibliotheken und Archiven, XXVII, I937; supplementing: H. Baron, Leonardus Bruni Aretinus . . . mit einer Chrono- logie seiner Werke und Briefe, Leipzig, 1928. Neither of them has any mention of Lucian whatsoever, from which we may conclude that nowhere have they met with this false ascription, which seems to be entirely due to the imagination of Lauer's editor.

In fact the Altercatio Alexandri Annibalis et Scipionis, as found here or any- where else in print or in manuscript before I500, is the Latin version by Giovanni Aurispa. It was Aurispa who, together with Rinuccio, brought the Greek manuscript from Constantinople in 1423, and it was Aurispa who in 1425 at Bologna made this translation and dedicated it to Battista Capodiferro, Governor of Bologna. In numerous MSS,1 though strangely enough in none of the printed editions, this dialogue is preceded by the letter: "Ad Baptistam caput de ferrum Romanum civem, disciplinae militaris virum et praetorem Bononiae, Aurispa . . ." The letter itself begins with the words: "Cum in rebus bellicis . . ." and these are the words before which Lauer's sheet directs you to place the heading. In fact the printed text of the Roman edition gives the whole of Aurispa's letter, though without its address, before it gets to: "Alexander: Me, o Lybice, praeponi decet .. ." the opening words of Lucian's dialogue. Before this beginning the rubricator is to insert:

Incipit libellus altercationis Alexandri et Annibalis de prestantia.

A curious peculiarity of Aurispa's version seems worth noting, even in this condensed account. In Lucian's Greek original Scipio only comes in at the very end with one sentence to protest against Hannibal's claims, and the judgment of Minos is given: Alexander to be first, Scipio second, then third perhaps Hannibal, who is not to be despised either.

In the Latin "translation" Scipio by no means confines his claim to a single sentence, but gives a substantial account of his African victories; he

1 On the many MSS. and on the curious deviation from the Greek original, see: R.

F6rster, "Zur Schriftstellerei des Libanios," in Jahrbuch fir Philologie, 1876, pp. 219 if.

2




concludes with the statement that, not for insisting on his own personal preferment, but "pro patria haec dicta sunt." Thereupon Minos gives his judgment: "Per Jovem. o Scipio, et recte et uti Romanum decet locutus es"; you are to be put first, Alexander to be second, and third, perhaps, Hannibal, for he is not to be despised either.

Fdrster, loc. cit., is right, no doubt, in seeing in this arbitrary alteration a compliment to the Roman military Governor to whom Aurispa dedicates his version. I would add that so high handed a "patriotic" distortion of the text before the translator appears to me an ominous symptom of the spirit of nationalism, which the humanists, Petrarch' himself at their head, were to inject into European literature.

V. Tyrannus, seu Trajectus (graece KccraXou;, Dindorf XVI). Lucian's Tyrant follows his favourite device of presenting his characters

in the ferry across the Styx on their way to the underworld. The murderous tyrant arrives, full of conceit and arrogance, and holds up the other passengers by his blustering demands to be immediately returned to earth. He is dragged before the judges, convicted by the testimony not only of human witnesses but also of his bed and of his night lamp, and ultimately condemned never to drink of Lethe and so never to lose the haunting memory of his crimes.

The heading for this Dialogue reads:

Luciani viri clarissimi fabula de venatione (corrected by hand into: navigatione) vel tiranno, cuius interlocutores sunt Charon, Clotho, Mercurius, Radamantus, Megapentes, Ciniscus et Micillus mortuus, lucerna et lectus; denuo translata per venerabilem patrem Cristoforum Personam, Romanum, Priorem in S. Balbina.

There is no reason to doubt the truth of this attribution; Christophorus Persona (1416-86), Prior of the Guilelmite monastery of Santa Balbina at Rome, was an industrious translator from the Greek who, towards the end of his life was appointed Prefect of the Vatican Library by Innocent VIII. Two other of his translations at least appeared in print in his lifetime, one of them, Twenty-five Sermons of St. John Chrysostom (Hain 5039), printed by the same Georg Lauer in the same type and in the same year as this Lucian. The other is an Origen Against Celsus printed also at Rome by Georg Herolt in 1481 (Hain 12078). His translations of the Histories of the Goths by Procopius and by Agathias were published in I506 and in 1516. A notice on him by Fabricius: Bibliotheca mediae et infimae Latinitatis, 1858, I, pp. 348-9, enumerates these and a few other works from his pen, but not this Lucianic dialogue.

Note the words "denuo translata" in the rubric, which in the case of the Charon we have found to be true. I have found no trace of any such earlier translation of the Tyrannus, but the possibility of its existence is by no means to be excluded. However I have no note of any MS. containing the Latin Tyrannus.

1 Petrarch: see Africa, VIII, lines 42-232, where Scipio also is awarded first place, not

without some trace of pro-Italian fervour and anti-Greek animosity.



THE FIRST EDITION OF LUCIAN OF SAMOSATA 17 VI. Vitarum Auctio (Dindorf XIV).

The Auctioning of the Philosophers' Lives must have been a puzzling piece for a fifteenth-century reader. Without some slight knowledge of the doctrines of the Pythagoreans, the Cynics, the Epicureans, the Peripatetics, etc., Lucian's satirical idea of having them put up for auction one by one and cross-examined by the intending purchasers, must have been barely intel- ligible. That this was the case becomes evident when we observe the grotesque mistakes and mistranslations in the early printed versions. Whether Rinuccio's authentic Latin rendering was much better, I for one cannot tell. I have not examined the MSS., and I would suspect that they might be nearly as un- faithful to the original text as the printer's productions seem to be. The choice of this Dialogue for translation suggests the humanists' superior, "highbrow," attitude which put a blight of sterility on so great a proportion of their labours. They were so often pretending to understand texts which, quite plainly for us to judge, remained utterly obscure to them.

The version here printed is that by Rinuccio of Arezzo, on whom see above under Charon (p. I ), but the printed text retains no trace of the dedicatory epistle to Seraphius of Urbino, which should precede it. This translation is found in MSS. generally following that of the Charon (see Lock- wood, loc. cit.) and this explains how Lauer's editor has come to prescribe the rubric:

Eiusdem Luciani per eundem translatus tractatulus de Venditione Vitarum, cuius interlocutores sunt Venditor, Mercurius, Emptor, Philo- sophus.

Since in Lauer's quarto Rinuccio's Vitarum Auctio does not follow upon the Charon, but immediately after Persona's Tyrannus, the words "per eundem translatus" are utterly misleading. *But we have by now ceased to wonder at the erratic fantasies of Lauer's editor.

All this lengthy analysis of a slender volume of eighty leaves may appear somewhat involved and complicated, and if the reader should happen to be a believer in "progress," he may well ask: What does it prove except that the first edition is a very bad one? Nevertheless I would plead that if we admittedly learn little about Lucian from such research, we are brought to see more vividly than we may have done, how the "Revival of Learning" worked in practice. We were led to find out something about the persons of the first translators from the Greek and about their patrons. We had to recognize that, contrary to widely current opinion, it was long before the Fall of Con- stantinople that the Western World became curious about the Greek classics. We met with a crass example of the indifference to authenticity and to problems of authorship prevailing among the fifteenth-century scholars, who would enjoy their Palinurus whether by Lucian or by Vegio. We have encountered an early instance of patriotic falsification of an ancient text in Aurispa's Scipio. And we have left aside many pertinent reflections on the subsequent fate and influence of these early translations, a subject which I hope to pursue more fully in some future publication.

The editor of Lauer's Lucian, the man responsible for the prescribed title-




headings and for the muddled displacements in the text, who gave the printer his script and, presumably, hired or encouraged him to publish it, does not make himself known. It would not be for fear of pedantic strictures like ours on the incompetence of his editorship that he hides his identity; he must have had other reasons. He does not seize the opportunity to offer his production to some patron of learning and so to win favour and a little reputation, to "immortalize" his name and that of his protector, as the composers of prefatory letters were so fond of proclaiming.

It is permissible to make a guess at the motives for such unusual self- effacement. This Lucian is published in Rome in the year 1470. Very shortly before that date, in 1468, an event of nearly tragic consequences had caused some commotion in the literary circles of the city. All the members of the Academia Romana were arrested on a charge of conspiracy against the government of Pope Paul II. They were all closely examined under torture in the Castello Sant' Angelo, soon found to be guiltless of any political machi- nations, and all of them were released within a year. Jo. Baptista Platina, the historian of the Popes, was one of the members who suffered this indignity and he has left us an account of his experience in his, comprehensibly, somewhat spiteful life of Paul II, first published in his Vitae Pontificum, Venice, 1479-

The Academia Romana was a circle of literary and scholarly people, mainly composed of the pupils and admirers of Pomponius Laetus, who was the presiding figure of the society; it mostly met in his house on the Quirinal and hence is sometimes referred to as Sodalitas Quirinalis or Academia Pom- poniana. From 1465 until his death in I498 Pomponius held a salaried lecturership in the Roman University, the Studium Urbis, and his courses on Roman antiquities were assiduously followed by numerous disciples. His "Academy" included some very serious scholars, like Jo. Baptista Platina and Marcus Antonius Sabellicus, the historian of Venice. But it also comprised a crowd of young poets and enthusiasts for the antique. One of the distinctive features which seems to have originated among them was that all its members gave themselves classical names, a custom that persisted in learned societies in and outside Italy for generations. In their trial this discarding of their given Christian saints' names and their use of pagan names like Pomponius, Calli- machus or Pantagathus was one of the points given prominence in their questioning, even by the Pope himself. But their fervour for antiquity did not stop there; they publicly performed some comedies of Plautus in the Piazza Navona, they even went so far as to celebrate the ancient festival of the Palilia on the anniversary of the foundation of Rome. There undeniably was a tendency to flirt with paganism among the less restrained members of this Academy, and there was, it would seem, ample ground for the accusation.that their morals were suspect.

In fact we may well doubt whether the outcome of their trial would have been as mild as it fortunately proved to be if the interrogators had known of the astonishing, if rather puerile, inscriptions which Comm. G. B. de Rossi encountered in the Roman Catacombs in 1852, and which he published in his Roma Sotteranea Cristiana, I864, I, pp. 2-9. It is evident how profoundly he was shocked and upset by these traces of the Roman Academy as his earliest




predecessors in penetrating into the underground chapels and venerable sepulchres of the early martyrs, in the Cemetery of Calixtus. On the walls of these hallowed passages we can see-not scribbled, but traced in lapidary capitals-the record of the presence of: Pantagathus, Mammeius, Papirius, Minicinus, Aemilius, Unanimes Perscrutatores Antiquitatis, regnante Pom. Pont. Max. (signed:) Minutius Rom. Pup. Deliciae. And again: Pomponius Pont. Max., Pantagathus Sacerdos Achademiae Rom. How far such mural writings should be taken seriously may be a matter of opinion, but that the "reigning pontiff" Pomponius and the "Priest of the Roman Academy" Pantagathus were not regarding themselves as Christians, but, playfully perhaps, as servants of some pagan cult, can hardly be doubted.'

A society like the Academy of Pomponius, a group of preponderantly young enthusiasts for pagan antiquity, a kind of advanced, "highbrow" clique in a Rome mainly dominated by canon lawyers and purposeful careerists, was a circle in which Lucian's ironical and disrespectful satires would find their readers and admirers, where every newly translated piece from his pen would circulate and be enjoyed. It seems to me most likely that the haphazard bundle of six dialogues came to Lauer's printing office from some up-to-date young member of Pomponius' classes on Roman Archaology. The happy-go- lucky attitude of the "editor" towards his duty to provide reliable information on the authors of his versions stamps his publication almost as an under- graduate's joke.

The person of the printer, Georg Lauer, affords another clue that points in the same direction. For among the comparatively few productions of his press we met with four classics, the Curtius Rufus, the Varro, the Festus and the Nonius Marcellus edited by Pomponius Laetus in 1471-72.

There must have been personal contact between Lauer and Pomponius as between printer and proof-reader at the least. Witness also the explicit reference to Lauer in the preface to the Nonius Marcellus as reprinted by B. Botfield, loc. cit., p. 138. Not that I would suggest Pomponius himself for the r6le of the first editor of Lucian; he was too solemn a pedant to care for such levities and too anti-Greek to exert himself on behalf of an author so conspicuously lacking in Roman gravity. But the link between the printer and the Academy through the person of its president is demonstrable.

Granted that some minor member of the Academia Romana may have conceived the project of publishing some Lucianic dialogues, he would surely have good reason for keeping his name out of the printed book. It would barely be twelve months since he had come out of prison, absolved of a silly charge of conspiracy, but after a most unpleasant examination, in which the prosecution made ample use of accusations of paganizing impiety, of moral

1 On Pomponius Laetus and his Roman Academy we find some information in Tira- boschi, Storia della Letteratura Italiana, .1795, VI, I, pp. 99-104, and L. Pastor, History of the Popes, 1894, IV, pp. 41-66. Also in J. E. Sandys, History of Classical Scholarship, II, pp. 92-3; M. Maylender, Storia delle Accademie d'Italia, 1929, IV, pp. 320-7. A cluster of

useful footnotes is to be found in G. Zippel's edition of Mich. Canensius, "De Vita et Pontificatu Pauli II," in the Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, 1904, III, pt. 16, pp. 153-6. A fuller study of Pomp. Laetus and especially of the trial of the Academicians, based on manuscript material in the Vatican, is V. Zabughin, Pomponio Leto, I909- I I.




laxity, and of notorious irreverence to authority, implicating the entire Academy and each one of its members singly. Paul' II was still alive-he died the next year-and it can hardly have been advisable for a young scholar to flaunt his admiration for Lucian while his regime lasted.

Nor, under such circumstances, would a dedication of a volume of Lucian to some influential prelate have been helpful or even acceptable. To the half-learned and to the severer scholars little would be known about Lucian, then as now, except that he was a naughty author.

The supposition that the first printed Lucian came to see the light through some impulse generated in the Roman Academy is admittedly pure guesswork; but it may appear as plausible to others as it does to me. May I give further rein to my imagination and record what may well have passed between the printer and the young scholar who brought the manuscript?

"What about a dedication to some cardinal?" asked Lauer. "Never mind," replied the editor, "this book will sell itself."



The First Edition of Lucian of Samosata

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