F.’s magnificent volumes address two different publics: Pindar specialists, who will find here a careful investigation of a crucial moment in Pindar's textual history, the 1515 editio Romana; and book historians, who will discover a remarkable case study in Renaissance book production: in fact, the quarto edition discussed is the first Greek book printed in Rome – the ‘Medicean Rome’ of Pope Leo X, hosting the Greek College directed by Janus Lascaris. (Curiously enough, though, F. states on p. xiii that knowledge of Greek is not necessary to read his work.)
Classical scholars know well the importance of the Renaissance in the history of text transmission, for it was at that time that the passage from handwritten medieval copies to the early printed editions took place; this often happened thanks to the passion of several educated men in Western Europe's courts, specifically in Italy; and, as far as Greek literature is concerned, thanks to a network of Greek scribes, scholars and printers, such as Zacharias Kallierges (c. 1470–1524). F.’s study sheds light on how these circles – which involved some major Greek scholars of the day, such as Marcus Musurus, and some Italian patrons like the powerful Sienese banker Agostino Chigi – had a direct influence on the shaping of first editions. Kallierges' edition is not the first edition of Pindar (the princeps was published by Aldus in Venice in 1513); however, it made available for the first time the ancient and medieval scholia on his poems.
Kallierges' ‘Roman edition’, on which F. has been working since 1974, has always been of particular interest: it contains a peculiar textual version of Pindar's Odes, representing to some extent the equivalent of a good manuscript. Aside from the text of the scholia, the relevance of the editio Romana to Pindar's constitutio textus has been acknowledged since the eighteenth century. Nonetheless, modern Pindar editors, like W. Christ, O. Schroeder, B. Snell, A. Turyn and recently G. Liberman (2004), seem to discard the direct study of it and mainly owe their references from it to the 1864 edition by Tycho Mommsen – a partial exception is C.M. Bowra's apparatus (see pp. 212–20). J. Irigoin's 1952 Histoire du texte de Pindare also drew attention to the editio Romana and provided some important elements for its re-evaluation: in particular, he emphasised the role played by MS X (Paris. gr. 2709), among other sources, as a possible exemplar for four quires (A-Δ) of this edition, including the text of Pyth. 1.1–4.169.
The present study carries such a number of new features and remarks that Kallierges' edition is again put in full light: it will therefore provide much information to both Pindar scholars and Renaissance Greek scholars. A brilliant example of what could be named ‘codicology of early-printed editions', F.’s material and textual investigation of no less than 227 copies of the editio Romana (see the ‘Census', pp. 502–31) generated two important discoveries: the first one is the presence of two quite different settings in the first four quires of the Pythian Odes, the same ones Irigoin analysed. This modification remained unnoticed until now; the reader can see it in the plates included in volume 2, 80 from each setting (called a and b). This discovery has led F. to a vast inquiry: first, to ascertain how the two settings were generated (a being proven prior to b); second, to outline the possible sources besides the above mentioned MS X: some variants appear to have been driven from a new, unidentified manuscript rather than from the scholia (see Chapter 5, pp. 265–94); third, to remark on how these changes imply significant textual variants (see pp. 200–4, a double list of 118 items) and how and to what extent the variae lectiones in the editio Romana were taken into account by early modern Pindar editors (pp. 224–61); this also depends on the random permutation of the sheets including either a or b setting: see pp. 482–7 and 488–92 for two helpful tables of permutations, by copy order and by variant order. This careful analysis of all possible layouts displayed in the extant copies of Kallierges' edition may help to identify with a high degree of probability the copies used by scholars and especially by Pindar editors – as has been done, for instance p. 232, for the 1523 Ceporinus/Cratander edition.
F.’s second major discovery concerns the preliminary texts and brings in some more typical Renaissance mystery. Only one among the 227 editio Romana copies that were inspected, Cambridge, Jesus College Library, E.4.27 (n. 134 of the Census), contains some pages – although not the complete text – of a Greek dedication: it is addressed to Kallierges' close friend Marcus Musurus, who assisted him in his activity as a printer and editor for a long time, ever since the editio princeps of the Etymologicum magnum (Venice: Z. Kallierges and N. Vlastos, 1499). Kallierges' dedication contains a vibrant laudatio of his first Roman sponsor Agostino Chigi and announces the publication of – among others – an edition of Pausanias, a desideratum of most humanists that, however, did not come from Kallierges' press. F. found out (see p. 377) that this letter's text is to a large extent the same as another, much more celebrated, dedication: one published some months later by Marcus Musurus himself just ahead of his Pausanias' editio princeps (Venice: heirs of Aldus, 1516) – and addressed to Janus Lascaris. (See the edition of this dedication with an Italian translation in L. Ferreri, L'Italia degli umanisti 1. Marco Musuro [2014], pp. 215–29; see this excellent volume in general for all of Musurus' book production.)
How to explain such a curious fact? Studying the details of the preliminary pages of this unique copy of the editio Romana gave F. the opportunity to seek new meaning in what we already know of Kallierges' work in Rome and of his relationship with his sponsors, mainly Agostino Chigi (see Chapter 1 for the general background and Chapter 7 for the specific story). This feature is given all the necessary care by F., who offers a transcription and translation of the interrupted dedicatory epistle and tries to reconstruct the story of how Kallierges' project of a Roman edition of Pausanias had to be abandoned in a hurry while his edition of Pindar was already under press (pp. 358–60). The subsequent work by Kallierges, realised again with the philological assistance of Musurus, was in fact a smaller but still important one: the 1516 edition, with scholia, of Theocritus – a poet that corresponds, together with Pindar, to the ‘Augustan conceit’ of literature inspiring Kallierges' patrons (p. 20), Theocritus and Pindar being among the models of Virgil and Horace, as well as traditionally included in the Greek syllabus of Byzantine and Renaissance schools of Greek.
This sudden change seems to explain why the ample dedication to Musurus was replaced by a short dedicatory poem composed by the humanist Benedetto Lampridio from Cremona and addressed to Chancellor Cornelio Benigno, Agostino Chigi's friend and counsellor, who financed Kallierges' press in replacement of Chigi. As concerns the text of the two dedications, the one signed by Kallierges (which survives in only one copy) and the one signed by Musurus, F. evokes a quite probable ‘pillaging’ by Musurus of his friend's text (p. 377). Another possibility could be true, as absurd as it may seem: that the first dedication was actually written by Musurus, upon the request of Kallierges, for a reason we do not know. This hypothesis would thus imply that Musurus was both the hidden author and the dedicatee: this might not be absurd if we consider that the Pindar’s aborted dedication was mainly focused on the praise of Agostino Chigi, not of Musurus. If Musurus was the author of this first draft of the text, it would be less surprising that he eventually reused it for one of his major editions, the princeps of Pausanias' Periegesis.
It would be too long to describe every aspect of such a large work. I will just underline that F.’s inquiry also includes: a partial review of Kallierges' ‘insufficient’ proofreading and correction in press (Appendix 2); a thorough study of paper stocks and watermarks (Chapter 8 and Appendix 3); a full, if tentative, reconstruction of the compositors' work, including considering the possibility of duplicate-setting of the inner and outer print ‘formes' (p. 228). F.’s textual approach is very detailed, when he highlights the slight difference that could exist between a genuine variant and a simple misprint. To give one example, F. largely demonstrates that Mommsen relied on his ‘setting b’ copy; but, on a specific point such as Pyth. 4.147, on the Romana page signed [Δviii]r, he takes into consideration the fact that Mommsen printed a ‘setting a’ variant, χαλκοτόροις, not the syncopated ‘b’ form, χαλκτόροις (see plates 157–8), probably due to an intuitive misreading, while in the apparatus he only gave the end of this word (see pp. 220–4). Instead of immediately providing the reader with answers and explanations of all problems and quibbles, F. prefers to have the reader ‘make the journey in [his] company’ (p. xv); this approach makes the reading very engaging and gives it somewhat of the suspense of an elegantly written scientific novel.
Volume 1 includes 20 tables inserted along the nine chapters; volume 2 comprises three Appendices, 160 plates of the two Romana editio settings, a bibliography and detailed indexes comprising eleven sections.
