Juvenal, Satires. (1918).  Preface to the online edition

A few notes on the unusual manuscript tradition of Juvenal may be of use to readers.

There is no complete list of extant manuscripts of Juvenal, but considerably more than 500 medieval copies are known to exist.  There are also a few leaves preserved from ancient copies, and an indirect transmission of a few lines quoted in other works.

On the face of it, this should give us the materials for an excellent text.  Unfortunately his work is poetry, and so subject to an unusual amount of corruption.

After his death, the work of Juvenal fell out of favour in antiquity.  This lasted until the last quarter of the 4th century.  At that time he reappears in the commentaries on Virgil of Servius, being quoted more than 70 times, and his wide popularity (together with the now lost history of Marius Maximus) is attested by Ammianus Marcellinus (book 28, 4:14).  In consequence a complete ancient commentary on his work was composed, large portions of which are found in some of the medieval manuscripts and themselves help us to understand how the text has changed since.  His works were popular in the middle ages, as the large number of copies attests.

Modern scholars estimate that around 50-100 spurious lines were interpolated into the text before the revival in the 4th century.  These lines are present in all subsequent versions of the text.  

When the work became popular again in the 4th century, the text suffered from its obscurity; difficult or obscure words were sometimes replaced with less difficult or more comprehensible words by readers and copyists, in the interest of producing a book that could be read and understood.  

The overwhelming majority of the manuscripts reflect this ancient edited version of the text.  Worse still, cross-contamination of readings between the medieval copies of this family makes it impossible to draw up a tree of what was copied from what.  Even geographical divisions are unstable and difficult to make precisely.

The following manuscripts of this family were used by W. V. Clausen for his Oxford Classical Texts edition (1959).  Their consensus he referred to as Φ.

Fortunately a number of manuscripts and fragments belong to a different ancient family.  These are often more 'naturally' corrupt, but with many fewer intentional alterations.

The relationship of P, Arou. and Sang. is very close.  The first two are nearly identical twins, even sharing the same layout on the page.  R and V are much less faithful members of the family, and V in particular shows contamination of readings from the other family.

The ancient commentary was also used as a source for scholia composed in the Carolingian period, which are found in some of the Φ manuscripts.  The same source is probably responsible for the commentary of 'Probus' given by Giorgio Valla in his Venice edition of 1486.

There are also the remains of three ancient books.

None of these remains agree consistently with either branch of the medieval tradition.

There are also occasional references in other texts.  The most spectacular of these was the discovery in 1899 by an Oxford undergraduate, E.O.Winstedt, of 36 otherwise unknown lines in the Bodleian ms. Canon. Class. Lat. 41.  The genuineness of these lines has been debated but is now generally accepted.  They are certainly ancient, as they have left traces in the scholia.  If genuine, this section was omitted from both families, and 3 lines partially including some of the same material invented to replace it.  This may have been done by Juvenal himself, or some other capable ancient editor.  As with other serious disturbances in the text of Juvenal, the change must predate the relative stability of the 4th century revival of the text.  The lines are one of a number of major classical texts that owe their survival to the active scriptorium at Monte Cassino under abbot Desiderius.

Bibliography

R.J.Tarrant, Juvenal, in: L.D.Reynolds, Texts and Transmissions.  Oxford: Clarendon (1983) p.200-3.  Checked.

This text was written by Roger Pearse, Ipswich, UK, 2008. This file and all material on this page is in the public domain - copy freely.