This chapter examines the so-called Hadrianus, a Latin prose text first published in 2010, which has the emperor Hadrian as its main character. The first part proposes some remarks concerning the content, literary genre, narrative form, language, and date of this pseudohistorical tale. The following section discusses some text-critical issues.

This contribution explores the presence of accents in the text of the Catilinarians preserved in the fourth-century CE Codex Miscellaneus of Montserrat. Starting from a general consideration of the sign in the Latin grammatical tradition, where it is closely linked to that of the apex, it moves to the particular analysis of each of the instances of the sign in the text, both from a material point of view and a philological, grammatical perspective. Whereas in fact some of them are proved to be not ink, but papyrus debris, and some others may be doubted as accents by reason of their shape, the remaining cases where an intention on the part of the scribe to write an acutus sign is clear point to a practical, non-erudite purpose for their presence. In accordance with the miscellaneous nature of the codex and its declared educational purposes, the presence of the signs seems to be connected with the earlier stages in Latin learning within the context of the hellenophone provinces of the East after Diocletian’s reforms.

Two papyri dated to the fourth and fifth centuries (P.Vindob. inv. L 103 and P.Oxy. XXIV 2401), prior to the Bembinus codex, transmit the earliest critical edition, corrected and annotated, of Terence: 162 verses from the Andria, that is to say 2.6 per cent of the whole of Terence’s theatrical corpus. This modest papyrological corpus, which is part of a tradition of ancient ecdotics, nourished by several centuries of exegesis, proves to be rich in information: on the text itself and its variants, as well as on its context of use, in a Greek-speaking environment, and for educational purpose. The theatrical, prosodic, and metrical dimensions of the text have been completely ignored in favour of a grammatical approach. Terence has not been performed on stage for a long time; he has become a canonical author of reference for the training of the elite of the Roman Empire, widely used by grammarians and commentators. The two papyri thus have their rightful place in the history of the Latin grammatical tradition, just as they do in the exegetical tradition.

This chapter offers a re-examination of P.Ital. 1 (445–6 CE), the well-known documentary dossier on the Sicilian properties of Lauricius, praepositus sacri cubiculi. More precisely, it aims to propose a new interpretation of a formula in the document 2013 ante barbarico fisco praestabatur – which, according to most scholars, starting with Theodor Mommsen, alludes to the existence of a fiscus barbaricus, a special treasury of the empire intended to collect taxes for the sustenance of non-Roman (i.e. barbarian) troops. The structure of the documents that make up the dossier, and the linguistic variations in the texts, suggest that the formula in question does not refer to a fiscus barbaricus, but rather to the fiscus, i.e. the imperial treasury, on the one hand, and to the barbaricum, i.e. the upheavals in Sicily due to the Vandal incursions in the Mediterranean, on the other.

This chapter presents a survey of the interpunction and abbreviation devices in Latin documents (papyri, ostraca, and tablets) between the first century BCE and the seventh CE, with a focus on the Roman East. The signs are described and catalogued according to their chronological range, the textual typology, and the letter(s) they are associated with. It discusses the origin and the scope of signs; the possible connection with other graphic systems; the influence of bureaucratic standardisation; and the degree of custom and personal taste beyond abbreviating choices. It emerges how the common ancestral punctuation and abbreviation marks in Roman culture, the interpunctum and the titulus, became obsolete or were seldom represented in documentary evidence outside stone from the first century of the Empire; they were finally overtaken by different signs – the high dot, the short oblique stroke – which in turn dwindled to nothing at the dawn of Late Antiquity, when the new generation of bureaucrats started employing the so-called long oblique stroke and the flourish. Any attempt at explaining the origin and reciprocal relationship of these signs must collide with the scarcity of the evidence and its concentration in very specific areas.

The classified glossaries of the Hermeneumata Pseudodositheana, preserved by medieval manuscripts in many different versions, are also transmitted in numerous papyri, some as early as the first/second century CE. This piece examines the relationship of the papyri to the medieval versions, showing that different papyri are related to different medieval versions and that therefore at least four of those versions had already diverged from one another in antiquity. Surprisingly, one of those four is the Celtis glossary (Vienna suppl. Gr. 43), whose ‘medieval’ attestation is so late as really to be from the Renaissance. Further investigation shows that the papyrus related to Celtis (CLTP III.11 = P.Stras. inv. Gr. 1173) is not a direct ancestor of the Celtis glossary as it appears in the Renaissance manuscript; the Celtis glossary must therefore be older than this papyrus, which was copied in the third or fourth century CE. And since the papyrus’ transliteration (the Latin is in Greek script) probably dates to the first/second century, the Celtis glossary probably goes back at least that far – and it is possible that the Renaissance version is a retransliteration of one that circulated with Latin in Greek script.

The study of papyrus evidence can help us to a better understanding not only of the thinking of the great jurists of the first three centuries CE, but also of those who, in the ‘dark’ centuries that followed, studied and transmitted ‘jurisprudential’ law up to Justinian and beyond. The author proposes some considerations based on two papyri. The first is P.Oxy. LXXXV 5495, which contains the Greek translation and paraphrase of some rubrics of Justinian’s Digesta. In particular, the author dwells on some lines of the so-called successio auctorum of the enchiridion of Sextus Pomponius. The other papyrus dates to the end of the third/beginning of the fourth century CE: it is P.Haun. de legatis et fideicommissis, in which the opinions of several jurists on intricate questions concerning the law of succession are recorded. The style in argumentation of the anonymous author suggests that this text may be considered an important testimony to the transition between the creative jurisprudence of the early centuries CE and the legal world of Late Antiquity.

Virgilian centos are school products; therefore it is highly probable that the portions of verses reused in them reflect more closely the text of Virgil circulating in schools and testified by some papyrus finds than the text of the oldest Virgilian manuscripts which were made to adorn the libraries of aristocratic families of Late Antiquity. The chapter investigates the osmotic relationship between Virgilian centos and Virgilian papyri, with its multiple implications, considering some significant case studies.

A fair number of Greek texts written in shorthand are preserved from the first to the seventh century from Egypt and in particular from Antinoopolis: copies of the tachygraphic manual, glossaries, syllabaries, and also annotations on the margins of literary texts. The situation for the same period concerning the evidence of the Latin shorthand is quite different: the texts in notae are extremely few in number, and they come from different and distant parts of the late Roman Empire, are written on various material supports, differing in form, length, and content, and among the direct attestations of Latin tachygraphy there is nothing comparable to the Greek tachygraphic commentaries. On this basis the chapter argues for the need to move beyond the classifications proposed by the greatest innovator in this field, Arthur Mentz, posing questions that have not yet been asked and seeking answers from a variety of elements and remarks that have not been involved so far in the investigation of the remains of the Latin shorthand from Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, which represents the most problematic and crucial period for Latin palaeographers.