Colloquium Celtis

A small papyrus fragment (25.5 × 10.5 cm) dated to the fourth century (M–P3 3004.02, LDAB 8897) contains a severely mutilated colloquium or a bilingual glossary that includes phrases from a colloquium. This mixture of colloquium and glossary material is unusual but not unique, for P.Lond. II.481 (for which see 4.3 below) has a similar mixture with less colloquium material. P.Berol. inv. 21860 has been previously edited by Maehler (2001) and Kramer (2001a: no. 9), both of whom provide detailed discussion justifying their supplements; such discussion is therefore largely omitted here. This re-edition is based on examination of the original papyrus as well as on photographs, and in the course of studying the original I learned from the Berlin papyrus conservator Myriam Krutzsch that a small fragment attached to the main piece of papyrus by a previous conservator is misplaced. As it was not possible for me to determine exactly where the fragment ought to go, I have been obliged simply to remove from the text the letters it contains, which previous editors had read in line 5 of the recto and 31 of the verso.

The layout is original, but word divisions within lines, accents, breathings, and punctuation are editorial. Supplements and corrections are due to Kramer (2001a) unless otherwise noted.

This fourth-century papyrus fragment preserves portions of a Latin–Greek glossary, loosely organized by topic, containing three entries that consist of conversational phrases (lines 1, 36, and 37). These three phrases may be related to the colloquium tradition, though no specific connection to a particular colloquium can be made; in any case they demonstrate the extent to which colloquium-type phrases could circulate without a coherent context in bilingual materials. The Latin is transliterated into Greek script, so the intended audience was clearly one of Greek speakers.

The fragment is 19 cm high and 10 cm wide, but almost 4 cm on the right-hand side are fragmentary and have lost nearly all the ink on both sides. Enough traces remain there to show that another column of writing once existed on the recto, also in Greek script, but it is not possible to identify the language or make out any words; this column is therefore omitted from all editions of the papyrus, including the one below. The writing on the verso is upside down compared to that on the recto, so the papyrus does not come from a codex, but nevertheless recto and verso seem to contain the same text. This suggests that the original may have been a small piece of papyrus rather than a complete roll, for it is hard to imagine that this glossary was ever long enough to cover both sides of a whole roll: in the surviving fragment there are only a few entries on each topic and no identifiable headings or other aids that the reader would need to navigate a long glossary. The top of the recto (bottom of the verso) appears to preserve the original edge of the papyrus, and on the verso there is a bottom margin of 2.5 cm; on the recto there is a top margin of 0.5 cm. The left side of the fragment has a fairly neat edge and may well have been the original left side; if so there is a left-hand margin of 0.5–1 cm. If both these edges are in fact original the glossary has no title but simply begins with the entry on line 1, which runs across both the Latin and the Greek columns.

SOURCES FOR THE TEXT

The basic manuscript tradition of the colloquium Montepessulanum is simple, as the text is found in only one manuscript, but extracts also occur in a glossary that is preserved in a much more complicated fashion. There is also a papyrus containing material related to the colloquium.

THE MONTPELLIER MANUSCRIPT

The colloquium Montepessulanum is named after the only manuscript to preserve it intact, H 306 in the Bibliothèque universitaire de médecine at the Université Montpellier 1 (Mp). This manuscript, produced in France in the second quarter of the ninth century (Bischoff 1998–2004: II.206), contains a large and diverse group of texts, including several glossaries and the Hermeneumata Montepessulana. These Hermeneumata consist of the colloquium, a long capitula section, and a short alphabetical glossary that seems to come from a different source; the colloquium is found at the start of the Hermeneumata section, on folios 139r–146v.

The text is written in a clear, careful hand, laid out with two columns per page and generous spacing. The Greek is in capitals and the Latin in minuscule; the Latin (the right-hand column) was written first and then the Greek (the left-hand column), but the copyist exercised great care to avoid the misalignment that so easily results from such a copying system. He appears to have checked the alignment with almost every Greek word he wrote, for a significant number of lines that had been omitted in copying the Latin (a problem that would normally lead to misalignment when the two columns were copied separately) were added at this stage. After both columns were complete someone – perhaps the original copyist but more likely another from the same time and place – compared the text to its exemplar and made some additional corrections, including indications (using Tironian notes) when the absence of material was due to gaps already present in the original.

In the Greek of the colloquium and the capitula many words have been divided using raised dots, some of which seem to have been written along with the letters themselves and others added subsequently. Goetz believed (1892a: xxvi) that all the dots were later (though still ninth-century) additions by the person who added the Tironian notes, but he failed to observe that there are two distinct types of dots.

Colloquium Montepessulanum

This version of the colloquia is known sometimes as the colloquium Celtis, after the Renaissance scholar who made the only surviving copy of it, Conrad Celtes, and sometimes as the colloquium Vindobonense, because that sole copy is now in Vienna. It is attested only in a late and corrupt form and is full of vocabulary lists that break up the flow of the narrative, but it clearly contains much ancient material, and because the colloquium Celtis is one of the longest versions of the colloquia it provides a significant portion of our evidence for them. This colloquium is better known than the others, because it was first published by Dionisotti (1982) in an article much more accessible than Goetz's work on the other colloquia.

SOURCE FOR THE TEXT

Only one manuscript of this version is known, codex suppl. Gr. 43 in the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek in Vienna (C). It contains the colloquium on folios 12r–17r, preceded by a Renaissance grammar of Greek (folios 1 verso–11 verso) and followed by a very long capitula section (folios 18r–45v). The text is arranged not in the usual narrow columns but in long lines running the full width of the page, with the Greek above the corresponding lines of Latin. Despite the late date of the manuscript it is almost completely without accents, breathings, subscripts, and punctuation. There is no ornamentation except that the Latin is written in black and the Greek in red.

The colloquium section of the manuscript was written in 1495 by the humanist Conrad Celtes, copying a much earlier exemplar that has since disappeared. The exemplar was housed in the German monastery of Sponheim and is probably identifiable with entry 18 in a contemporary catalogue of the Greek works in that monastery, which describes it as codex arcualis formae scriptus, q(ui) co(n)tinet Graecu(m) vocabulariu(m) cu(m) Latino supposito M. Tullii Ciceronis ad filiu(m) suu(m), secu(n)du(m) materias in varios titulos partitu(m), l(iber) 1 ‘a quarto volume that contains a Greek vocabulary, with the Latin placed underneath, of M. Tullius Cicero to his son, divided into various chapters according to the material, one book’.

Title Ἑρμηνεύματα/Interpretamenta: This is the title not of the colloquium but of the Hermeneumata as a whole, which in this version begins with the colloquium. On the use of the terms ἑρμηνεύματα and interpretamenta see vol. I pp. 52–3 with n. 143. The original title for the colloquium itself has been lost from this version; for its probable form see on ME 3a and on the LS title.

Ia–d This preface introduces the Hermeneumata as a whole rather than the colloquium in particular. It is almost identical to part of the preface to the ME version of the Hermeneumata, and less closely related to several other prefaces; comparison of the different versions suggests that the ME preface is the most conservative and that this one has probably innovated where it differs. For a full discussion see on ME 1b–e.

Ic This section is probably a later revision of material that was grammatically awkward in both Latin and Greek (see on ME Id and 1e); it thus indicates that the reviser had a good command of both classical languages.

Ic The Montpellier manuscript has interpretatorus (corrected by a second hand to interpretaturus, but the correction must be simply a desperate attempt to make some sense of the passage), as is clear from inspection of the original and acknowledged by Goetz (1892a: 283.16); Boucherie, however, thought the manuscript had interpretatoriis. The second abscida lucida glossary in Vat. Pal. Lat. 1773 has interpretatorius here (cf. Goetz 1892a: 515.49). None of the manuscript readings is possible as it stands, but Boucherie’s interpretatoriis, even if it has been superseded as a reading of the manuscript, has some merits as an emendation: it makes sense and it matches the Greek. Goetz therefore retained it in his restored version of the colloquium (1892a: 654).

But there are also problems with interpretatoriis. The adjective interpretatorius is very rare: the TLL cites as examples only this passage, the abscida lucida glossary entry derived from it, and one passage in Tertullian (Ad nationes 2.4.6 = Corpus Christianorum series Latina I: 46).

Id ἄρχομαι γράφ〈ε〉ιν/incipio scribere: In Latin this is again (cf. on Ic) a later rationalization, by someone with a good understanding of both languages, of material that was originally more peculiar; see on ME In.