The intricate story of how Lucretius was rediscovered, repaired and recirculated in fifteenth-century Italy is still being unpicked. It took 55 years – and an unknowable number of manuscript intermediaries – for the revivified text to reach print. The precise date for that transition is unknown, but typographical factors point to late 1472 or early 1473. It therefore lagged slightly behind most other canonical poets: Juvenal (c. 1468), Lucan and Virgil (1469), Terence, Statius, Horace and Persius (c. 1470), Ovid, Martial and Silius Italicus (1471), Plautus, Catullus, Propertius and Tibullus (1472). What is more, it was rather unusual for a first edition to appear in Brescia. But so it was, and Lucretius’ De rerum natura could be bought, for the first time in a thousand years, by those outside the circle of the super-rich.
B., who has published widely on Lucretius and his reception, has now provided scholars of Lucretius and the early printed Classics with a high-quality facsimile of an exceptionally rare book. In fact, so rare is the first Brescia edition that, for several centuries, the editio secunda – which appeared in Verona in 1486 – was wrongly heralded as the princeps. Only four copies of the Brescia Lucretius are known, now scattered between Manchester, Florence, Prague (via Nelahozeves) and Chantilly (via Twickenham). The pages are reproduced from the Florentine copy in the Laurentian Library; for the two leaves where it is defective (101–2, the central leaves of the final gathering), these have been scanned from the copy in the John Rylands Library, Manchester. It is unfortunate that these had to be inserted at the end of the introduction (pp. 55–8) rather than interpolated into their proper place: since there is no evidence that the edition exists in more than one state, the disjunction is odd.
Unlike this lavish reproduction, the princeps itself, edited by Thomas Ferrandus, is a relatively spartan affair, in typography and detail. While it reproduces the part-antique, part-Renaissance capitula of its (lost) manuscript exemplar, it lacks signatures, catchwords and foliation, the last of which is helpfully provided by B. Given that the book is intended primarily for reference, the addition of occasional line-references to the poetic text would have saved the curious many collective man-hours.
Not only is the edition the earliest, but it is also appreciably better than the far commoner second and third editions (Fridenperger, Verona, 1486; de Ragazonibus, Venice, 1495). Although limited to a few hundred copies, it therefore put into broad circulation the best text of the poem until the arrival of Avancius’ Aldine edition of 1500. By 1517 Lucretius’ poem was banned in Florence; but by that point the first commentary had been printed in Paris as well as Bologna, and within two decades it had passed through the publishing powerhouse of Sebastian Gryphius.
B. provides a long and engaging introduction (in Italian) before the facsimile itself. It surveys Lucretius’ life (pp. 9–17), poetry (pp. 17–27) and rediscovery (pp. 29–38), before careful bibliographic discussion of the editio princeps (pp. 39–51). These chapters combine general outlines with a sober assessment of what (often exiguous) details survive. In particular, as a general survey of the burgeoning fortunes of Lucretius throughout fifteenth-century Italy, this is a concise and convenient survey.
It would be untrue, however, to say that the copious information made available by this facsimile materially affects Lucretian scholarship. In the early nineteenth century Dr John Gerard had already collated Lord Spencer's (now the John Rylands) copy of the princeps for the expanded edition of Gilbert Wakefield's Lucretius (1813). Although Hugh Munro rather cryptically called this hard-won work ‘unskilful’, inspection only reveals an error once every 75 lines or so. While most of Gerard's errors were merely orthographical (e.g. 1.53 contemta for contempta, 97 solenni for sollenni, 6.62 adsciscunt for asciscunt), some were not (e.g. 3.11 limant for lunant, 5.3 figere for fingere). Now these pages present unequivocal evidence. However, the lost codex that the princeps reproduced – perhaps with no conscious editorial emendation from Ferrandus or his assistants – is of little value: it is of no independent authority, belonging to a lower branch of the (fifteenth-century) Italian tradition, and contains only a handful of readings not found in earlier codices. Five of these are generally accepted by modern editors (4.53 cluet, 5.776 possent, 934 molirier, 6.76 feruntur, 746 substratus), but many others have since ceded precedence to earlier manuscripts. Much the majority of the edition's unique readings are careless slips.
The book is expensive, and a luxury not afforded to many other deserving ancient authors, but serious libraries will find that it will be routinely disturbed on the shelves.
