Oxford University Press’s ‘Classical Monographs’ series is intended ‘to publish the best theses … examined by the Faculty Board of Classics’ (p. ii), and T.’s new edition of Brutus surely realises that intention. For although this review will offer a few criticisms, as the laws of the genre require, the book represents a truly extraordinary debut in the field of textual history and criticism: it must now be considered the best edition of this important work, superseding E. Malcovati’s second Teubner edition (1970).
The complete text of Brutus, like those of De oratore and Orator, was preserved in a manuscript discovered, in 1421, in the northern Italian city of Lodi (hence the siglum, L, and the name, Laudensis, by which the manuscript is known today). Unlike the other two works, Brutus owes its survival entirely to L, which was copied at least three and a half times (see below on B) before disappearing in or after 1428. From those initial copies 107 extant manuscripts descend, to provide the material for T.’s edition and for the story he tells, after a rapid introduction, in Part 1: ‘The Transmission of Brutus’.
In the first chapter T. addresses a question raised by two ninth-century leaves known as the ‘Cremona fragment’ (C: Brutus 218–27 and 265–74), discovered by I. Pettenazzi in that city’s Archivio Storico: is C a remnant of L? In brief, T. comes down squarely on ‘yes’ (see esp. p. 23), though, as he acknowledges, we must then assume that early reports of people’s difficulty in reading L are either much exaggerated or based on a part of L quite different from C’s perfectly legible text. In any case, and at most, C’s value resides in the glimpse it might offer of the archetype’s orthography (p. 25).
The balance of Part 1 – ‘A New Stemma’ and ‘A Textual History of Cicero’s Brutus’ – is the far more consequential product of T.’s unmatched familiarity with the manuscripts and editions that constitute the text’s documentary basis. Beginning as an undergraduate guided by S. Oakley, and continuing as a doctoral student of T. Reinhardt, T. collated four different portions of the text – Brutus 1–35, 215–28, 265–80 and 309–33 (about 27% of the whole) – in all 107 manuscripts. As a result, he has identified eleven manuscripts that descend from L independently of each other and has derived from those manuscripts a stemma that, with one reservation, I find completely convincing: in Brutus 1–130 there are three branches, φ (represented by F), λ (represented by J and U), and ρ (represented by O and β, the latter the source of B, copied by Flavio Biondo, and seven other manuscripts); and starting from Brutus 130 magnum fuit Biondo copied B directly from L, creating a fourth branch. With the stemma in place, T. sketches ‘A Textual History’ – from the work’s composition in 46, through its reception in antiquity and its all-but-completely-silent passage through the Middle Ages, to its rediscovery in 1421 – and gives a thorough account of the manuscripts and incunabular editions derived from F, λ, B and ρ, supported by massive amounts of data analysed in three appendices.
The advance made here over the bipartite stemma sketched by P. Reis in his Teubner edition of 1934 (Malcovati did without a stemma) is immediately apparent in the clutch of good readings previously neglected but now shown to be the legacy of the archetype (e.g. 70 etiam FλO : om. β, 72 captum FλO : -to β, 216 instruendo Bλρ : struendo F). As noted above, I do have one reservation: I am not quite convinced that ρ must be posited as the common source of O and β, because it is not clear that Ο is independent of β. In fact, after listing 22 errors of β that are absent from O (pp. 33–4), T. considers the possibility ‘that ρ and β were … the same manuscript and that the errors I have assigned to β were eliminated from O by comparison with L’ – in other words, that O’s scribe copied a β-type exemplar with L on hand, checking it as he went. T. thinks such an operation too cumbersome to have been performed consistently, and that might be correct. But O might well have been copied from a β-type exemplar that had been corrected against L. It seems significant that T.’s list of 22 errors common to the β-family but absent from O includes thirteen places where text has been omitted, and at least another three where the text is plainly problematic: in other words most instances on the list involve places likely to cause a reader to think, ‘Wait – surely that needs checking’. Such things happen: three years after its creation in 1422, O was corrected against L (p. 33, with pp. 45–7).
In Part 2: ‘Text and Commentary’ T. puts all his preparation to excellent use, presenting a well-constructed critical apparatus – thorough but not over-stuffed – and a text that improves on Malcovati’s in scores of places, while ‘avoid[ing] the extremes of radicalism and conservatism’ (p. 8). By my count T. incorporates five of his own emendations (54 M’., 88 illa disquisitione, 216 irri<sionemque au>dientium, 271 praeteribo, 292 ratione), and in judging the emendations proposed by predecessors he is just, balanced and never polemical. The textual commentary addresses 107 passages where T. believed that he had something useful to say; and there is something useful to be learned on every page, thanks to T.’s familiarity with Cicero’s idiom and his unflagging attention to the demands of context. I can mention just a few of the discussions I found especially rewarding: §§46 (on orators reading from written drafts), 111 (on ‘guarded’ speech), 130 (on Hendrickson’s supplement acri), 131 (on Peter’s de damno iniuria, reflecting the key phrase in the law at issue), 142 (retaining the simplex questio, against the far more common conquestio), 162 (accepting the rare defensiuncula conjectured by Lange), 167 (favouring Simon’s leporum), 175 bis (favouring item with Prohasel’s eminuerat and Schütz’s transposing of prope to precede simili), and demonstrations that in my recent translation (2020) I should have abandoned Malcovati’s text in favour of Verginius (Corradus) at §179, vivis eius (L) at §220, and <non> devorabatur (Leeman) at §283. Such places, and many others, are far more numerous than the places where I believe a better decision could have been made: for example, at §16 transposing veteris ubertatis to follow fetus (Oakley) rather than deleting it as a gloss on siti (similarly §181, transposing superioris aetatis to follow iis rather than deleting it, and §197, transposing the -que of animosque to the preceding consecutis, cf. T.’s transposition of the -que of L’s eratque to the preceding verborum at §327 and the -que of L’s viverentque to the preceding mortuo at §330); at §285 it would be better to place the needed supplement aliis before L’s alia (i.e. ali<is ali>a), not after it: although the latter order is much more common, it introduces the un-Ciceronian ‘heroic’ rhythm aliīs mĕlĭōră at clause-end.
Because this edition should be recognised as the new standard text, as I remarked at the outset, I close by urging Oxford University Press to produce an affordable version as soon as possible, whether as a paperback run of this monograph or as a separate edition with preface, Latin text and critical apparatus.
