Vaticanus Urbinas graecus 92 (ff. 1r‒3v, 270r‒272v) – C

Previous descriptions: Stornajolo (1895, 136‒7).

Reproductions: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana

Family: d

Siglum: C

Shelfmark: Vaticanus Urbinas graecus 92

Date: Second half of the 10th century

Format: 272 ff.; ff. 1–3 and 270–272 are parchment, the others paper.

Material: the ink in some parts has faded.

Binding: ‒

Watermarks: ‒

Scribes: the six folios were written by the same scribe.

Annotations: on f. 2r a later (perhaps 14th-century) hand wrote ἰστέον δὲ ὅτι ὁ ἐπόνιμος (i.e. ἐπώνυμος) τῆς τοῦ θεοῦ λόγου ἁγίας σοφίας ναὸς γέγονε κατὰ .ςτμθ ἔτους ἰνδικτίονος δ ʻOne must know that the church bearing the name of the holy wisdom of God’s logos was built in the year 6349, in the 4th indictionʼ; on f. 3v Francesco Barbaro wrote Thucydides historicus de bello Peloponnesiaco; est Francisci Barbari quondam domini Candiani quem sub corone emit Franciscus Gezzius anno Christi MCCCCXV, ʻThucydides the historian on the Peloponnesian War; it belongs to Francesco Barbaro (son) of the late Candiano, which Francesco Gezzi bought in Korone (?) in 1415ʼ; on f. 269v there is a bilingual inscription that is very difficult to understand: το βιβλιο τοτο legete catilinae (?) tuquididis iparchi domino monachus Iosep / αὕτη βίβλος ἐστὶ [±19] ἣν ἀναγινώσκειν καὶ διελθεῖν διετέλεσα τῇ γ πρὸ καλαντῶν τοῦ μαίου ‘this book is said of Catilina? of Thucydides?, it belongs to the monk Ioseph / this book is [±19] that I finished reading and going through three days before the kalends of May’.

The manuscript Vat. Urb. gr. 92 consists of two codicological units: the one containing Pollux’s text has six folios that belonged to Heidelbergensis Pal. gr. 375Heid. Pal. gr. 375 (cf. Pierleoni 1896 and Bethe 1900–1937 vol. 1, X) and were used by a librarian in the 13/14th century as a cover or flyleaves for this Urbinas manuscript (the ownership note by Francesco BarbaroFrancesco Barbaro on f. 3v shows that at that time the manuscript had already acquired its present form); the other codicological unit (ff. 4r‒260r Thucydides, Historiae; ff. 260r‒265r Dionysius Halicarnassensis, De Thucydidis idiomatibus; ff. 265r‒267v Marcellinus, Vita Thucydidis) has not been examined in this survey.

1 (ff. 1r‒3v) Fragments from Pollux, Onomasticon. No title. Incipit: γοναῖς οὗπερ αἱ χύτραι (10.109). Explicit: στελμονίαι ῥόπαλα σκ[υτάλαι] (10.142).

(ff. 270r‒272v) Fragments from Pollux, Onomasticon. No title. Incipit: ἐπὶ γὰρ τούτου τάττεται (5.141). Explicit: τοὺς μὲν δὴ γείτονας καὶ προσοίκους καὶ συνοίκους καὶ παροι[κοῦντας] (9.37).

Ff. 1–3 and 270–272 were part of Heid. Pal. gr. 375Heid. Pal. gr. 375, a manuscript that can be dated to the second half of the 10th century, as Bianconi (2013, 378–9) pointed out, despite the date proposed by Bethe and then reported by other scholars. How and when this loss in C occurred is impossible to say. We may suppose that when a librarian in the 13th or 14th century completed the copy of Thucydides’Histories and the related material, he used those pages, belonging to what he considered an old book, as flyleaves at the beginning and the end of the volume as flyleaves; but it is equally possible that this operation was carried out later. However, when Francesco Barbaro (1390‒1453; DBI 6.101‒3) received this book from a certain Francesco GezziFrancesco Gezzi in 1415, it was in the same state as it is today: as shown above (see A.), the humanist’s ownership note is on f. 3v, which belonged to Heid. Pal. gr. 375. The present Urbinas manuscript entered the refined library of the Venetian patrizio, a man of letters who at the time was studying Greek under Guarino Veronese, but later devoted himself to politics, abandoning his classical interests. After some time, the manuscript found its way into the library of Ermolao BarbaroErmolao Barbaro (1453/4‒93; see DBI 6.96‒99), his nephew and a renowned scholar of the Italian Renaissance. The volume is identified as ‘Thucydides historicus. Francisci’ in the catalogue of Ermolao’s library on ff. 253r‒293v of Vat. lat. 3436; see Diller (1963, 259) and Vendruscolo (2020, 110). The fate of Ermolao’s library remains unknown (see Diller 1963, 255); this manuscript may have been one of those which were dispersed after Ermolao’s death in Rome in 1493. At a later and undefined time, it became part of the Urbinate collection, which was finally incorporated into the Vatican Library in 1657.