Pinakes | Πίνακες

Résumé :

[= Διαυγὲς ἀγλάϊσμα τῆς Καλαβρίας. Studi in onore di Santo Lucà I, a cura di Donatella Bucca, Francesco D’Aiuto, Mario Re] The on-going process of cataloguing the many parchment fragments of medieval manuscripts that were (at least partially) dismembered, and re-used as material for the makeshift restoration of other codices in the library of the monastery of S. Salvatore de lingua phari in Messina during the early modern period, has revealed the surprising presence of a few tiny fragments of a lost parchment codex of Polybius’ Historiae (from books XV and XVIII) that can be paleographically dated to the 10th century. Various hypotheses can be formulated about this fragmentarily preserved Polybian witness. On the one hand, this «new» manuscript may represent a further copy of Polybius’ Excerpta antiqua. On the other hand, and more convincingly for various reasons, the new Messina fragments might be reliquiae from the Polybian section of a manuscript witness of the Excerpta Constantiniana by Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus. In fact, the hand of the scribe of these fragments seems to be one and the same as that of the copyist of the famous codex Turonensis 980, the precious 10th-century codex containing the first volume of the Constantinian Excerpta de virtutibus et vitiis. The fact that more volumes of the same collection could have been copied by the same scribe is not implausible. Moreover, the textual contents of the new fragments – embassies to the Romans – seem to fit well with the Constantinian Excerpta de legationibus (in particular, de legationibus gentium ad Romanos), whose precious Escurial manuscript (call number B.I.4/Θ.I.4: now lost because of the fire suffered by the Spanish library in 1671) was acquired in Messina by Jerónimo Zurita (1512-1580) for Juan Páez de Castro (1510-1570 ca.). The lost Escurial codex was a medieval parchment manuscript that had already suffered the loss of some leaves at its beginning and end. As far as we can gather from its later 16th-century copies, it did not contain the portion of Polybian text that is witnessed by the fragments now in Messina. Therefore, the latter may represent the meager remnants of a few folia that had already fallen out of the Escurial manuscript prior to its transfer from Messina to Spain. These folia, which must have been left hidden somewhere in the S. Salvatore monastery, were later cut into pieces and used, along with a quantity of other scraps from different codices, to restore various manuscripts of the monastic collection.