If one had to select just two traditions, two stories, from antiquity which managed to capture and hold the imaginations of generations upon generations, the obvious choices would be the matter of Troy and the meteoric career of Alexander the Great. Less thought about are the sources for these stories in the Latin west in the post-Roman millennium, which had no direct access to Homer, or Plutarch, or Arrian. Instead, these Greek-less readers were reliant on somewhat less reputable sources: the Ilias Latina, Dares the Phrygian and Dictys of Crete for the Trojan war, Q. Curtius Rufus and (the auspiciously named) Julius Valerius Alexander Polemius for Alexander. It is two of these authors that form the subject of Stephen Oakley's book: Dictys Cretensis and Curtius Rufus. What this study shows us in painstaking and granular detail is how these two texts circulated and diffused throughout Europe before the age of print.

Tales like these are usually told in generalities. But not here. The evidence has always been there in hundreds of codices, now housed in dozens of libraries and collections around the world. Carefully weighing the evidence of texts — the stemmatic relationships, the tell-tale errors and omissions that reveal the occult relationships amongst manuscripts — O. gives us the the building blocks of two stories. The tradition of Curtius Rufus begins in the ninth century, with one of a handful of Carolingian manuscripts plausibly associated with as significant a figure as Haimo of Auxerre. From there the work circulated fairly modestly through religious houses and intellectual centres of northern Europe — France, Germany, England. Suddenly, in the middle of the fourteenth century, we come upon Paris lat. 5720, a manuscript written probably in Milan which came into Petrarch's hands. A half-century later we witness a veritable explosion of manuscripts written in Italy — Florence, Venice, Rome and elsewhere — totalling more than a hundred, which takes us to the editio princeps and a little way beyond. The tradition of Dictys is different: only thirteen of the seventy extant manuscripts date from the fourteenth century or earlier, and only six of those are high medieval, three written in the eleventh century and three in the thirteenth. Even so, our earliest witness is a hugely important manuscript, Rome, Biblioteca nazionale centrale, Vitt. Em. 1361. Dubbed the codex Aesinas after its former domicile in Jesi, and with a fascinating twentieth-century history involving both Nazi antiquarians and flooded bank-vaults, the manuscript is famous (and infamous) for preserving Tacitus’ Agricola and Germania. In the fourteenth century, there is evidence for knowledge of Dictys in Verona, among some of the usual pre-humanistic suspects, like Pastrengo and Benzo d'Alessandria. Another manuscript, now lost, was found by Poggio in Sankt Gallen around 1417, and this led to some circulation of the text in Rome. It was only later in the fifteenth century, however, that the text came to be relatively widespread, both in Italy and the north.

Alongside these two tales, we get two more stories. O. charts in detail what he dubs ‘the progress of scholarship’, that is to say, the story of how scholars have used the evidence of manuscripts over the past several centuries to produce more accurate editions. These offer salutary reminders: the fact that we are able to read basically correct texts of Curtius Rufus and Dictys, should we choose so to do, is because of the vast and now largely invisible labours of generations of scholars from the early modern period through to our own day, who took upon themselves the hard task of sorting through the evidence of the manuscripts — collating, classifying, dating. The measure of their success is how little we see them: what we encounter today are simply, good, clean and readable texts, which betray only the faintest traces of the tremendous scholarship behind them.

It is important to note, however, the way in which these stories are actually told. Besides a relatively brief summary of the shape of the tradition for each of the two authors, what O. provides is the actual raw data from which narratives of transmission and reception can be told. This book (to usurp a phrase of Leighton Reynolds from a rather different context) is ‘hard tack, a diet for pioneers and enthusiasts’. This does not make it any less valuable. Attentive readers will find themselves richly rewarded with all the evidence to understand how these two authors were read, copied and circulated over the longue durée, and find the lineaments of an even grander tale of how the stories of Troy and Alexander continued to find new readers in a changing world. Those with more theoretical interests will also find much to consider: as a whole, the work offers a tremendous validation of the basic premises of the stemmatic method even when applied to difficult and tangled traditions, like the Italian Renaissance manuscripts of Dictys. While the debate about so-called ‘method of Lachmann’ sometimes takes place at a relatively abstract level, the minute examination of the transmission of Curtius Rufus and Dictys undertaken here provides a powerful a fortiori argument for the validity, and indeed the utility, of the method.

Errors are very few. The manuscript of Q. Curtius Rufus in the Bibliotheca Marciana in Venice (no. 1849) is not MS lat. Z 382, which is a copy of Suetonius, but rather MS lat. Z 386 (see p. 157 in Zanetti); the same mistake is found in Lucarini's 2009 Teubner.