| I. Palaeography of Fragment Notes to Part I Fragment Transcription II. Text of Fragment Notes to Part II Plates |
A SIXTH-CENTURY FRAGMENT
OF THE
LETTERS OF
PLINY THE YOUNGER
A STUDY OF SIX LEAVES OF AN UNCIAL
MANUSCRIPT PRESERVED IN
THE PIERPONT MORGAN LIBRARY
NEW YORK
BY
E. A. LOWE
ASSOCIATE OF THE CARNEGIE INSTITUTION OF WASHINGTON
SANDARS READER AT CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY (1914)
LECTURER IN PALAEOGRAPHY AT OXFORD UNIVERSITY
AND
E. K. RAND
PROFESSOR OF LATIN IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY
PUBLISHED BY THE
CARNEGIE INSTITUTION OF WASHINGTON
WASHINGTON, 1922
CARNEGIE INSTITUTION OF WASHINGTON
Publication No. 304
THE UNIVERSITY PRESS
CAMBRIDGE, MASS.
U. S. A.
iii
PREFATORY NOTE.
THE Pierpont Morgan Library, itself a work of art, contains masterpiecesof painting and sculpture, rare books, and illuminated manuscripts.Scholars generally are perhaps not aware that it also possesses theoldest Latin manuscripts in America, including several that even thegreatest European libraries would be proud to own. The collection isalso admirably representative of the development of script throughoutthe Middle Ages. It comprises specimens of the uncial hand, thehalf-uncial, the Merovingian minuscule of the Luxeuil type, the scriptof the famous school of Tours, the St. Gall type, the Irish andVisigothic hands, and the Beneventan and Anglo-Saxon scripts.
Among the oldest manuscripts of the library, in fact the oldest, is ahitherto unnoticed fragment of great significance not only topalaeographers, but to all students of the classics. It consists of sixleaves of an early sixth-century manuscript of the Letters of theyounger Pliny. This new witness to the text, older by three centuriesthan the oldest codex heretofore used by any modern editor, hasreappeared in this unexpected quarter, after centuries of wandering andhiding. The fragment was bought by the late J. Pierpont Morgan in Rome,in December 1910, from the art dealer Imbert; he had obtained it from DeMarinis, of Florence, who had it from the heirs of the Marquis Taccone,of Naples. Nothing is known of the rest of the manuscript.
The present writers had the good fortune to visit the Pierpont MorganLibrary in 1915. One of the first manuscripts put into their hands wasthis early sixth-century fragment of Pliny’s Letters, which formsthe subject of the following pages. Having received permission to studythe manuscript and publish results, they lost no time in acquaintingclassical scholars with this important find. In December of the sameyear, at the joint meeting of the American Archaeological andPhilological Associations, held at Pr