Medieval Wandering Quires and Classical Lost Poems : problems and Methodology of Direct and Indirect Tradition

Ott. gr. 59 is nowadays severely spoiled on the bottom of the page and damaged by water. Nevertheless, this harmed treasure chest is the major testimony of two different cases of textual transmission, both paradigmatic in their own way. Together with the Laur. Plut. 59.12, this codex is the most important testimony of Michael Choniates’ poems, elsewhere scattered in individual folios. The Ottobonianus is written by an extremely faithful scribe who copied a varia lectio and interleaved four pages of metrical commentary on Ariphron and Mesomedes’ hymns between Choniates’ poems, without break in continuity. These data and the comparison to the MS Barocci 131 suggest that the archetype of the entire tradition wasn’t a proper codex, but quires shuttled from Anatoly to Epirus where they were used for the Laurentianus and the MS Petr. 250. The stemmatic settlement of the Ottobonianus explains its role in the preservation of the two hymns and Apolinarius’ Metaphrasis. This evidence tears apart the traditional imaginary of concrete single archetypes and leads to a methodological speculation on the reconstruction of antigraphs of compound manuscripts. Furthermore, the clarification of Choniates’ transmission benefits from the examination of the quotes from Aitia and Hecale within Choniates’ poems. Michael directly read Callimachus’ last known codex and made an extensive - probably mnemonic - use of them in poetical composition. These poetical quotations, evidently dissimilar to lexica or prose, offer a pattern which can be employed to find lost texts. Thus, the paper faces basic epistemological problems in contemporary textual criticism. Firstly, this case of study demonstrates that the cooperation between Classical and Byzantine philology and codicological and palaeographical advanced techniques can provide solutions to similar stemmatic problems yet unresolved. Finally, a new methodology to profitably sound out Byzantine literary texts will be proposed to discovery classical literary relics.