MANUSCRIPT TRADITION. - In common usage it is the body of codices that contribute to reconstructing an ancient literary work in the form closest to the original. It must be stated at once, however, that the concept of manuscript tradition also applies to documentary texts and that the criterion by which codices are investigated and assessed extends to editiones principes and to other printed editions if they reproduce lost manuscripts. The manuscript tradition is also designated as "direct tradition," to distinguish it from the indirect one, based on all the complementary testimonies (quotations, references, parallel texts, sometimes even translations, etc.) which, in harmony or in conflict with the manuscript tradition, make it possible to establish the exact reading of a passage.
An organic evaluation of the manuscript tradition for the purposes of textual criticism was reached only in the last century with C. Lachmann (v.), who, although he partly adopted criteria already elaborated by others, especially with regard to the Greek text of the New Testament, may be considered the first legislator of the method of editing: his rules, though affected by an excessive mechanicism (the fruit of a justified reaction against the subjectivism that had prevailed since ancient philology, but by then almost consecrated by the teaching of R. Bentley [(1662-1742]), had the merit of clearly distinguishing in the work of editing the moment of the recensio from that of the emendatio and of setting the former on the tracks of systematicity. The subsequent conquests of philology corrected, refined, and in part even destroyed the Lachmannian canons: but the new ferment has its origin in him. No critical editor today can dispense with reconstructing in its history the manuscript tradition of the text he publishes.
I. THE PHASES OF THE MANUSCRIPT TRADITION
From the author's original to the surviving manuscripts of a work, one normally passes through a series of intermediate links, whose mutual relations vary from case to case: only in the documentary tradition does it happen with some frequency that the original is preserved, or at least that copies survive which descend from it recta via. In book texts, on the other hand, which are destined by their nature to diffusion, such favorable conditions occur only exceptionally. Once the work has left the hands of the author or of his publisher, copies multiply in a short time, reach public libraries and private houses, and serve in turn as models for subsequent copies; historical events, chance occurrences, and trends of taste bring about after some time a gradual thinning of the copies in circulation, at times to the point of total disappearance, at others instead reducing them to a small number of exemplars, sometimes only one; new trends, changed historical conditions, and unhoped-for discoveries lead, after various generations, to unearthing the surviving copies, to making new exemplars from them, and the manuscripts that are preserved today may belong to one or the other phase of these alternating vicissitudes in the fortune of the work, may derive from one or from several models, may stand to one another in a relation of direct descent, or may represent various parallel traditions, or may even be the result of interferences of one with another. It is clear therefore that every text has its own manuscript tradition, which cannot be reduced to a factor common with those of other texts. On its formation there do indeed bear upon general phenomena, such as, for example, the ten-
the tendency, characteristic of the school, to gather particular texts into anthologies, to draw excerpta, to form corpora of works in which a common link is discerned, to separate from the others authors and writings consecrated by official canons; or also the phenomenon of codification or that of transliteration from majuscule script to minuscule; or again the ἐκδόξους of the grammarians, etc.; but these, even if they are found thus in the Eastern world as in the Western, do not develop simultaneously nor with the same characteristics in all regions, and are rather tied to the history of the culture of each country, so that one cannot reconstruct the m. t. of a text without localizing its various phases. Certain coincidences can occur between texts of the same nature, when it is a matter of phenomena tied to a literary "genre": thus historical works of vast bulk tend at a certain moment to disappear to give way to epitomes of easier reading; legal collections fallen into disuse give way to the compilations in force; continuous commentaries on poetic works pass into the form of marginal annotations in the manuscripts of those same works, where they become confused with glosses and scholia coming from other commentaries, etc. But the process of such transformations remains distinct for individual cases, and the transmitted manuscripts do not testify for every "genre" to the same stage of evolution. There remains therefore the necessity of reconstructing individually the m. t. of a work (sometimes even of individual parts of it), working back from the surviving codices to the author's original, or, at least, to a phase that approaches it as closely as possible.
II. RECONSTRUCTION OF MANUSCRIPT TRADITION
The task of the recensor is first of all to discover the relationships among the surviving witnesses of the tradition: except in the limiting case in which the preserved codex is reduced to only one, he must establish whether and which of the manuscripts at his disposal descend from a single source, and group them into families through the examination of concordances and divergences. The fundamental principle of this operation is that concordance in a genuine reading does not constitute a guarantee of relationship, which instead manifests itself through the parallelism of corruptions (especially the so-called cruces or monstra, that is, passages or words that yield no sense), interpolations, lacunae or common transpositions, etc. It must be borne in mind, however, both that isolated concordances may have entered a family through collation with a representative of another family, without postulating a direct descent (this holds all the more for coincidences in extrinsic elements, such as the division of the text, the subscriptions of codices, etc.), and that presumed common corruptions may have arisen independently in two or more manuscripts, especially when they are of mechanical origin or represent trivializations. To this end, it is useful on the one hand to reconstruct (through the examination of particular exchanges of letters, the extent of lacunae, etc.) the external characteristics of the lost model of each codex taken into consideration, that is, the type and arrangement of the script, the number of lines per leaf and of letters per line, etc.; on the other hand, the notion of the successive phases into which the copyist's work is articulated (reading of the model, retention in memory of the passage read, mental self-dictation of the passage, writing out), each of which can be a source of material errors of a determinate nature. Once the various groups of relationship among the codices have been exactly distinguished, it is possible to apply the criterion of the eliminatio codicum descriptorum, by which both the apographs of preserved models and the late witnesses of traditions represented by older prototypes are set aside, provided that no other readings have entered them through horizontal transmission. The verification of this condition obviously requires an examination of the manuscripts on a very broad basis, not restricted to mere cruces. Lachmann's presumption, which rejected humanistic codices as deteriores on the grounds that they were certainly interpolated, has proved in many cases fallacious, and more recent methodology has established among its principles that a more or less ample number of interpolations does not suffice to deny authority to a manuscript or to a printed edition of which not all the sources are preserved: «chi rifiuta di servirsi degli interpolati, rischia di lasciar perdere anche la tradizione genuina» (G. Pasquali, cited in bibl.).
The grouping of the surviving codices does not exhaust the investigation of the manuscript tradition: it is generally necessary to reconstruct for each family, through its representatives already variously and notably disfigured, the archetype, since only rarely is it preserved. Moreover, the various archetypes in turn represent so many elaborations of one or more models, whose relations with the original must be established. It is at this point that the notion of "archetype" comes into play.
III. THE ARCHETYPE
The use of this term among philologists is not yet sufficiently rigorous, so that a definition of it cannot correspond to all the senses to which it is adapted from time to time; the most recent is that of Dain (v. bibl.), who designates the archetype as "the oldest witness of the tradition to which the text of an author is entrusted in the form in which it has been transmitted to us." Dain, however, introduces a distinction between the archetype proper and what he calls "le plus-proche-commun-à": the former would be a unicum, a manuscript deposited in an official library; the latter a copy of it that would have given rise, through paths often complex and more or less direct, to all the surviving representatives of the m.t. In reality, this clarification, which narrows the meaning of archetype, does not seem capable of being taken as a general rule: for many authors of antiquity, especially Latin ones, "le plus-proche-commun-à" goes back to an era in which their work circulated in everyone's hands, was found in the bookseller's shop as in the private individual's library, and one cannot presume by definition that it was a copy of an officially deposited text. It is therefore advisable to eliminate this distinction, reserving the right to examine case by case the existence or non-existence of a "subarchetype." From the definition given above the following observations arise: 1) the archetype may be represented by a manuscript that has come down to us, but more often it must be reconstructed through its ramifications; 2) it may coincide with the author's original: but this is a case, especially for antiquity, that is extremely rare; 3) if the m.t. is not reducible to a unitary form, that is, if its forms are more than one (open recension), the archetypes too are more than one; 4) the archetype is the stage closest to the original reachable by way of recensio; beyond it, normally, only conjecture can supply the lack, in the phase of emendatio, by exploiting considerations that go beyond the simple evaluation of the m.t. (historical criticism, glottology, grammar, metrics and often subjective aesthetic sensibility); 5) these same criteria necessarily represent the only guide in the choice of one or another archetype in the case of open recension;
(from M. Tulli Ciceronis Cato Maior, ed. A. Barriera, in Corpus Paracianum, M. Turin n.d., p. 3)
MANUSCRIPT TRADITION. - Stemma codicum of the tradition of Cicero's Cato Maior according to A. Barriera. The descendants of 5 represent inferior codices, among which those marked with dots alone are of humanistic age.
6) only with the aid of a particularly rich indirect tradition is the (partial) reconstruction of a "pre-archetype" possible.
What has been set forth thus far does not coincide with the statement expressed by G. Pasquali in the most brilliant of his works (v. bibl.), summarizing its results in the preface: "The medieval tradition of Greek and Latin texts does not always go back to an archetype that is itself medieval or belonging to the later period of antiquity." But the contradiction is only apparent and arises precisely from a different definition of the term "archetype"; whereas for Dain, as has been seen, an open recension admits several archetypes, for Pasquali, as already for Lachmann, the archetype is only the single source, "a single exemplar already disfigured by errors and lacunae." What essentially matters is that the m. t. of a text, in the earliest phase to which it is possible to trace back, may present itself either as unitary (both in the case that it descends directly and at a short distance from the author's exemplar or even is identified with it, and in the case that a single exemplar proved, from a certain epoch onward, to be productive), or as multiple, already branched into as many traditions, each of which had its own descent.
Just as the grouping of manuscripts into families leads to the reconstruction of the head of the family, so the comparison of the various heads of families leads to recognizing the archetype. Evident therefore is the importance attributed to the various operations on the basis of which one attempts to establish the genealogical tree of the codices, and the various attempts to fix them within ever more precise laws in order to guarantee their objectivity are thereby explained. Among the most recent, those of A. C. Clark and of Dom E. Quentin should be remembered: the first based on the numerical calculation of letters in omissions (which are not, however, due to homoeoteleuton) and in dittographies; the second on the relationship that links together the codices of a ternary group with respect to the frequency of agreement or disagreement for each variant, and therefore on that which exists between the "intermediate" codex among the first three and another, and so on. In reality both, but especially the second, do nothing but theorize, through a complicated mechanism, the principle of comparison in an inferior reading, which remains, if used with acumen, the quickest and surest criterion for determining the relationships among the various manuscripts.
IV. THE ANCIENT VARIANTS
Once the archetype has been reached, it sometimes happens that one observes how it does not represent a stable text, but bears in several places the testimony of variants among which the tradition was already wavering, before the work of serious copyists intervened to alter the text. The phenomenon occurs particularly in those works that enjoyed a wide diffusion from the very beginning, in which the multiplicity of readings reflects precisely the public's familiarity with that text; quotations from memory, rhythmic assonances, expressions that have passed into proverbial use easily bring about unconscious mutations: to find such variants gathered together in the archetype indicates, as a rule, that there exists a pre-archetype represented by an ancient edition, which welcomed the testimonies of parallel traditions, for the most part distinguishing them with critical signs, afterwards lost. In some cases (very rare for antiquity, more frequent for medieval texts or recensions), such variants may go back directly to the author, reflect two different redactions both sanctioned by an edition, or find expression, as the uncertainty of choice persists, in the single original draft of which the public had taken possession before the author's decision definitively condemned one or the other. To choose a variant in this case is not possible by way of recensio, and even at the stage of emendatio the choice will be objectively legitimate only where external testimonies come in favor of one or the other.
V. THE «STEMMA CODICUM»
The manuscript tradition of a text thus unfolds through various phases which may be summarized schematically as follows: author's original, pre-archetype, archetype, progenitors of the various families, terminal ramifications. On the basis of the results of the investigation, the stemma codicum then takes shape, that is, the graphic representation of the relationships of kinship among the surviving witnesses and the earlier stages to which these same witnesses allow us to trace back. It makes it possible to evaluate at a glance the place of each codex in the transmission of the text and thus constitutes an important criterion of certainty in the choice of readings: it does not, however, eliminate the intervention, case by case, of individual critical sensibility. Between one stage and another of the manuscript tradition there may elapse a very brief span of time, just as entire centuries may intervene; each successive copy, if on the one hand it rarely emends the mechanical errors of its model, always adds new ones and sometimes modifies consciously according to the taste of the age; it may, on the other hand, welcome genuine readings by another route. To reconstruct the history of the manuscript tradition for a given text does not therefore mean renouncing the editor's acribia, but simply means investigation and arrangement of the elements indispensable for identifying the alterations of that text and their origin: and it also means penetrating the taste of the various ages and the various regions that such a history concerns, entering into the cultural tendencies, in the literary sensibility, in the capacity of men and of circles distant by centuries from an author to understand and relive him. - See plate XLII.
