This book is primarily a companion volume to B.’s recent OCT edition of Livy, Books 21–5 (2016), providing detailed treatments of textual issues that could not be discussed in full in the OCT apparatus criticus. However, it also includes discussions and additional material related to B.’s Teubner editions of and Oxford commentaries on Books 31–45 (1973; 1981; 1991; 2008; 2012).
After an introductory survey of the editions of Livy from the advent of the printing press to the present day (pp. 1–20), the volume is divided into two parts: the first – and by far the longest – is devoted to Books 21–5, the second to the Fourth and Fifth Decades.
The bulk of the book is constituted by five chapters (2–6) that contain discussions of textual issues concerning Books 21–5 (one chapter being devoted to each book). B. here expands on his OCT apparatus by clarifying some of his editorial choices and illustrating conjectures of previous scholars in more detail. As he explains, most of the texts under scrutiny are: ‘1) obelized passages; 2) passages involving supplementation, except when the supplement required is obvious; 3) passages where the apparatus is long and/or complex’ (p. 25).
B.’s discussion of textual matters, resting on his excellent knowledge of Livy's linguistic and stylistic usage and on his cautious approach to emendation, is both accurate and sensible. He tends to preserve the transmitted text unless corruption is evident and consistently obelizes words or passages for which no conjecture appears clearly superior to others. His methodological stance is apparent from the several occasions on which he remarks that a certain emendation, whilst possible, ‘is not something which should be introduced by conjecture’ (e.g. pp. 56; 70; 121). He also appears wary of altering the transmitted text on the basis of stylistic considerations (e.g. p. 105: ‘I think we should accept that L. deliberately accepted a contorted word-order here’) and repeatedly reminds the reader that factual errors in the text might have originated from ignorance of specific details on Livy's part (cf. e.g. p. 52 on 22.3.6) or from his misunderstanding of his sources (e.g. pp. 120–1 on 24.34.10), rather than from textual corruptions.
In one of such cases, Livy's adaptation of Polybius in 24.33.9–34.11 (the siege of Syracuse), B.’s note on p. 119 is slightly inaccurate. B. states that the passage ‘is adapted from Polybius 8.4–6’ and quotes F.W. Walbank's commentary as well as H. Tränkle, Livius und Polybios (1977), pp. 201–4, in brackets in support of his statement. In fact, Tränkle denies any direct dependence of Livy on Polybius in this narrative sequence. Since the issue of the relationship between the Third Decade and Polybius has recently attracted renewed attention, a brief mention of the recent critical debate (especially of D. Levene, Livy's Hannibalic War [2010]) would have been helpful.
Surveys of past conjectures in B.’s discussions are exhaustive; B. generally weighs their respective merits carefully and in detail, even when he does not print any of them in the text.
Chapter 7 discusses the paternity of a group of annotations found in the famous manuscript BL Harley 2493 (A), which belonged to Petrarch and later to Lorenzo Valla. In his editions of Livy 31–40 and 21–5 B. refers to such annotations as Az; both in a previous article (B. in BRL 62 [1979/1980]) and in the preface to his edition of 31–40 he advanced the hypothesis that they might not have been made by Valla, as was commonly assumed. B. counters the objections advanced in a 1986 article by M. Regoliosi (in O. Besomi and M. Regoliosi [edd.], Lorenzo Valla e l'Umanesimo italiano, pp. 51–71). He also follows a suggestion by A.C. de la Mare that the hand of Az might have been that of Panormita, a Humanist and a rival of Valla.
The following five chapters provide details that have been omitted from B.’s OCT edition. Chapter 8 lists readings of the Puteanus (= Par. BnF lat. 5730, the main extant manuscript for the Third Decade), which provide purely orthographic variants and which B., therefore, excluded from his apparatus criticus (cf. B. 2016, pp. xx–xxi). Chapter 9 identifies the Renaissance manuscripts he cited in his edition as det(t.) (codices deteriores) or – when identification is not possible – the previous scholars who cited their readings. Chapters 10, 11 and 12 give precise references for conjectures by Weissenborn, Madvig and H.J. Müller, respectively. A chapter of addenda and corrigenda (Chapter 12) closes the first part of the volume.
Chapter 14 expands on a textual problem at Livy 34.4.16, arguing for the possibility that Livy used asseverative ne not followed by a pronoun – a usage that is usually assumed not to have been current in classical Latin. Chapter 15 discusses the stemmatic position of the α(a) group of manuscripts. The two final chapters contain addenda and corrigenda to, respectively, B.’s commentaries of Books 38–45 and his edition of Books 31–40, followed by a very brief note on the expressions bonum/malum publicum, which corrects what is stated in B.’s commentary on Sisenna in FRHist 3. The book closes with a list of addenda and corrigenda and indexes.
As a companion, the volume is a valuable complement to B.’s edition of Books 21–5, as well as providing updated discussions of problems tackled by B. at several points in the past. Therefore, scholars working on Livy's manuscript tradition and/or textual criticism of the Ab urbe condita will find much of interest in it. Because of their methodological clarity, however, some parts of the book – in particular, the textual discussions of Chapters 2–6 – can also be profitably read by literary scholars or students who wish to gain a better knowledge of the methods and procedures of textual criticism.
There are a few printing mistakes (e.g. ‘57.6’ for ’56.6’ at p. 79; ‘movimg’ for ‘moving’ at p. 97; ‘editio peinceps’ for ‘editio princeps’ at p. 122), but they do not significantly detract from the readability of the book.
