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Harley MS 2682

Record Id:

040-002048513

Hierarchy Root Ancestor Record Id:

040-002048513

MDARK:

ark:/81055/vdc_100000000761.0x00037c

LARK:

SLARK:

Format:

ISAD(G)

Reference (shelfmark):

Harley MS 2682

Title:

Cicero, Epistolae ad Familiares, Laelius de amicitia, Cato Maior de Senectute, various speeches (including Philippicae, Orationes in Catilinam, Pro Marcello), Paradoxa Stoicorum, De Officiis; Pseudo-Quintus Tullius Cicero, De petitione consulatus; Pseudo-Cicero, Invectiva in Sallusti; Fulgentius, Expositio sermonum antiquorum; Pseudo-Alexander, Epistola magni Alexandri ad Aristotelem

Scope & Content:

This manuscript, containing mainly works of Marcus Tullius Cicero (b. 106 BC, d. 43 BC), has long been an important source for scholarship and textual criticism on Cicero’s works. It was first collated in the late-16th century by the Flemish jurist and humanist François Modius (b. 1556, d. 1597) (see Clark, Collations from the Harleian MS (1891), p. iv). It is known as the ‘Cologne Cicero’ due to its possible place of origin and early provenance, and is given the siglum ‘H’ in textual criticism. It appears to be the earliest surviving attempt to bring together all of Cicero’s works in one volume and was compiled from several exemplars. For instance, the three ‘Caesarian speeches’ (Pro Marcello, Pro Q. Ligario, and Pro rege Deiotaro) have been copied twice in two different recensions, and the exemplar for the first recension was apparently imperfect, since it only contained the first half of Pro rege Deiotaro. The manuscript contains marginal glosses and notae symbols throughout, both near-contemporary and of the 12th and 13th centuries.

Contents:

f. 1r: List of the letters contained in the Epistulae ad Familiares.

ff. 1v-51v: Marcus Tullius Cicero, Epistulae ad Familiares (Letters to friends).

ff. 51v-53r: Pseudo-Cicero, Epistula ad Octavianum (Letter to Octavian).

ff. 53r-56v: Pseudo-Cicero, De petitione consulatus (On running for the consulship).

ff. 57r-64r : Marcus Tullius Cicero, Laelius de amicitia (Laelius on Friendship).

ff. 64v-70v: Marcus Tullius Cicero, Cato Maior de Senectute (Cato the Elder on Old Age).

ff. 71r-113r: Marcus Tullius Cicero, Philippicae (Phillippics).

ff. 113r-114v: Pseudo-Cicero, Invectiva in Sallustium (Invective against Sallust), beginning: '[E]a demum magna voluptas est Salusti equalem’.

ff. 115r-125v: Marcus Tullius Cicero, Orationes in Catilinam (Catiline Orations).

ff. 125v-129r: Marcus Tullius Cicero, Paradoxa Stoicorum (Stoic Paradoxes).

ff. 129r-131r: Marcus Tullius Cicero, Pro Marcello (On behalf of Marcellus).

ff. 131r-133v: Marcus Tullius Cicero, Pro Quinto Ligario (On behalf of Ligarius before Caesar).

ff. 134r-135v: Marcus Tullius Cicero, Pro rege Deiotaro (On behalf of King Deiotarus before Caesar), containing approximately the first half of the text and ending: ‘Haec in illo est ab ineunte aetate’.

ff. 135v-137v: Fabius Planciades Fulgentius (fl. late 5th-early 6th century), Expositio sermonum antiquorum (The Explanation of Obsolete Words).

ff. 137v-140r: Marcus Tullius Cicero, Pro Marcello, second recension.

ff. 140r-142v: Marcus Tullius Cicero, Pro Quinto Ligario, second recension.

ff. 142v-146r: Marcus Tullius Cicero, Pro rege Deiotaro, second recension.

ff. 146r-153r: Marcus Tullius Cicero, Pro Milone (In Defence of Titus Annius Milo).

ff. 153v-159r: Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Imperio Cn. Pompei (On the command of Pompey).

ff. 159r-164v: Excerpts from Marcus Tullius Cicero, In Verrem (Against Gaius Verres).

ff. 164v-180r: Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Officiis (On duties), imperfect and ending in Bk II: ‘...opinione probitatis. Quam obrem intellegentie'.

ff. 180r-192r: Pseudo-Alexander, Epistola magni Alexandri ad Aristotelem (Letter of Alexander the Great to Aristotle), beginning: '[S]emper memor tui etiam inter dubia bellorum'.

The following are later additions:

f. 1r: An incomplete list of contents of the manuscript, added in the late 15th or 16th century.

f. 30v: An anonymous verse, added in the 12th century on an originally blank page, with the heading ‘De sum et non sum, de non sum et fui, de esse et non esse, de idem et non idem, de minus et non minus, de magis et non magis’, beginning: ‘Scribam quod verum devitans promere falsum’.

f. 192v: A simple diagram added on an originally blank page in the 15th or 16th century.

Decoration:

2-3 line initials in brown ink at the start of each text. Small initials in brown ink highlighted in red (f. 2v).

Collection Area:

Western Manuscripts

Project / Collection:

Harley Collection

Hierarchy Tree:

[{ "id" : "040-002048513", "parent" : "#", "text" : "Harley MS 2682: Cicero, Epistolae ad Familiares, Laelius de amicitia, Cato Maior de Senectute, various speeches (including Philippicae, Orationes in…" , "li_attr" : {"class": "orderable"} }]

Hierarchy Record Ids:

032-002045828
040-002048513

Is part of:

Harley MS 1-7661 : Harley Manuscripts

Harley MS 2682 : Cicero, Epistolae ad Familiares, Laelius de amicitia, Cato Maior de Senectute, various speeches (including Philippicae, Orationes…

Hierarchy:

032-002045828[2683]/040-002048513

Container:

View / search within Archive / Collection: Harley MS 1-7661

Record Type (Level):

File

Extent:

1 volume

Digitised Content:

Languages:

Greek, Ancient
Latin

Scripts:

Latin

Start Date:

1050

End Date:

1099

Date Range:

2nd half of the 11th century

Era:

Access:

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User Conditions:

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Physical Characteristics:

Materials: Parchment.

Dimensions: 345 x 250 mm (written area 265 x 190 mm).

Foliation: ff. 192 (+ 4 unfoliated modern paper flyleaves at the beginning + 4 unfoliated modern paper flyleaves at the end). 1 unfoliated blank folio after f. 56.

Collation: Based on the quire marks, which are consistently provided in the centre lower margin of the last verso, the quires are mainly regular quaternions with a few exceptions. From quire number 9 (‘VIIII’, f. 64v) the quires were originally misnumbered, number ‘VIII’ being entered twice, but this was later corrected on all subsequent quire marks.

Script: Caroline minuscule.

Binding: Post-1600: Harley binding of gilt-tooled red morocco attributable to Thomas Elliott, with marbled endpapers; subsequently rebacked. Rust marks from the original medieval binding (f. 192r).

Custodial History:

Origin:

Possibly Cologne, western Germany.

Provenance:

Cologne Cathedral: owned until 1688, when borrowed by the classical scholar Graevius and not returned (see Clark, 'Library of J. G. Graevius' (1891), pp. 370, 372).

Johann Georg Graevius (b. 1632, d. 1703), German classical scholar and critic: his manuscript number 2; possibly sold to Wilhelm in 1703 with the rest of his library (see Clark, 'Library of J. G. Graevius' (1891), p. 370; Wright, Fontes Harleiani (1972), p. 169).

Johann Wilhelm, Elector Palatine (b. 1658, d. 1716), owner of a library in Düsseldorf: bought the entire Graevius library in 1703 (see Wright, Fontes Harleiani (1972), p. 169).

Giovanni Giacomo Zamboni (d. 1753), resident in London for the Landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadt (c. 1723-1753), friend of Michael Mattaire, the classical scholar and historian of printing: bought the Wilhelm library sometime before 1724 through Johann Büchels (b. 1659, d. 1738) (see Wright, Fontes Harleiani (1972), p. 367); sold to Edward Harley on 20 October 1725 (see Wright and Wright, Diary of Humfrey Wanley (1966), p. 385 n. 6).

The Harley Collection, formed by Robert Harley (b. 1661, d. 1724), 1st earl of Oxford and Mortimer, politician, and Edward Harley (b. 1689, d. 1741), 2nd earl of Oxford and Mortimer, book collector and patron of the arts: inscribed as usual by their librarian, Humfrey Wanley ‘20 die mensis Octobris, A.D. 1725’ (f. 1r); inscribed 'Oxford B.H.' (f. 1r).

Edward Harley bequeathed the library to his widow, Henrietta Cavendish, née Holles (b. 1694, d. 1755) during her lifetime and thereafter to their daughter, Margaret Cavendish Bentinck (b. 1715, d. 1785), duchess of Portland; the manuscripts were sold by the Countess and the Duchess in 1753 to the nation for £10,000 (a fraction of their contemporary value) under the Act of Parliament that also established the British Museum; the Harley manuscripts form one of the foundation collections of the British Library.

Information About Copies:

Select digital coverage available for this manuscript: see Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts at http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/welcome.htm.

Publications:

A Catalogue of the Harleian Manuscripts in the British Museum, 4 vols (London: Eyre and Strahan, 1808-12), II (1808), p. 707, no. 2682.

Albert C. Clark, Collations from the Harleian MS. of Cicero 2682. With a Facsimile (Oxford: Clarendon Press: 1891).

Albert C. Clark, 'The Library of J. G. Graevius', The Classical Review, 5 (1891), 365-72 (pp. 370 no. 7, 372).

H. Schwartz, 'Über den Harleianus 2682 des Cicero', Philologus, 54 (1895), 163-77.

Marcus Tullius Cicero, De officiis: Les Devoirs. Introduction. Livre 1, ed. by Maurice Testard (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1965), p. 74.

The Diary of Humfrey Wanley 1715-1726, ed. by Cyril Ernest Wright and Ruth C. Wright, 2 vols (London: Bibliographical Society, 1966), II: 1723-1726, p. 385 n. 6.

Cyril Ernest Wright, Fontes Harleiani: A Study of the Sources of the Harleian Collection of Manuscripts in the British Museum (London: British Museum, 1972), pp. 109, 169, 367, 414.

Birger Munk Olsen, L’Étude des auteurs classiques latins aux XIe et XIIe siècles, 3 vols (Paris: Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1982-1989), I (1982), pp. 211-13 no. Cic. C. 245 [with full table of contents and further bibliography]; II (1985), p. 330, Sall. C. 58.

Richard H. Rouse et al., 'Cicero', in Texts and Transmission: A Survey of the Latin Classics, ed. by Leighton D. Reynolds (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), pp. 62, 65-66, 70-72, 77, 90, 96, 117, 119, 121, 123, 127, 141-42, 350, 351 [MS siglum H].

Sigrid Krämer, Handschriftenerbe des deutschen Mittelalters, Mittelalterliche Bibliothekskataloge Deutschlands der Schweiz, ed. by Bernard Bischoff, Supplement 1, 3 vols (Munich: Beck, 1989-1990), II (1989): Köln-Zyfflich, p. 417.

Paul Oskar Kristeller, Iter Italicum: Accedunt Alia Itinera: A Finding List of Uncatalogued or Incompletely Catalogued Humanistic Manuscripts of the Renaissance in Italian and other Libraries, 7 vols (London: Warburg Institute; Leiden: Brill, 1963-1997), IV (1989), p. 165.

Michael Winterbottom, 'The Transmission of Cicero's De Officiis', The Classical Quarterly, 43 (1993), 215-42 (pp. 216-17, 222) [MS sigla I].

Marcus Tullius Cicero, De officiis, ed. by Michael Winterbottom, Scriptorum classicorum bibliotheca Oxoniensis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. vi.

Joachim M. Plotzek, 'Zur Geschichte der Kölner DombibliotheK, in Glaube und Wissen im Mittelalter: Die Kölner Dombibliothek. Ausstellung, Erzbischöfliches Diözesanmuseum, Köln, 7 August – 15 November 1998, by Joachim M. Plotzek and others (Munich: Hirmer, 1998), pp. 15-64 (p. 34).

Michael Gullick, ‘A Scribe at Work: Fragments as Witnesses to Changes in Style’, in Interpreting and Collecting Fragments of Medieval Books, ed. by Linda L. Brownrigg and Margaret M. Smith (London: The Red Gull Press, 2000), 205-09 (p. 208 n. 10).

Anna Novokhatko, 'Eine Liste der Handschriften der im Sallustund Cicerocorpus überlieferten Invektiven (Sallustii in Ciceronem et invicem Invectivae)', Eikasmos, 13 (2002), 273-86 (p. 278).

Henry Mayr-Harting, Church and Cosmos in Early Ottonian Germany: The View from Cologne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 140.

Material Type:

Archives and Manuscripts

Legal Status:

Not Public Record(s)

Names:

Fulgentius, Fabius Claudius Gordianus Planciades
Graevius, Johann Georg, German classical scholar, 1632-1703
Pseudo-Alexander the Great,,
   see also http://isni.org/isni/0000000122835816,
   see also http://viaf.org/viaf/88742742
Pseudo-Cicero, 1st century BC,
   see also http://isni.org/isni/0000000139322910,
   see also http://viaf.org/viaf/305360068
Tullius Cicero, Marcus, 106 BC-43 BC,
   see also http://isni.org/isni/0000000139322910,
   see also http://viaf.org/viaf/78769600
Wilhelm, Johann, Elector Palatine, 1658-1716
Zamboni, Giovanni Giacomo, Chargé d'Affaires of the Landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadt in England, d. 1753

Places:

Cologne, Germany

Related Material:

A Catalogue of the Harleian Manuscripts in the British Museum, II (London: Eyre and Strahan, 1808), p. 707:

‘1. M. T. Ciceronis Epistolarum ad familiares, libri 8 posteriores. X. 2. --- Epistola ad Octavianum. 3. --- de petitione consulatus, liber. 4. --- de amicitia, liber. 5. --- de senectute, liber. 6. --- in M. Antonium, Phillipicarum libri 14. 7. --- in Sallustum, & Sallustii in eum, oratio. 8. --- in Catilinam, oratienes 4. 9. --- Paradoxa, ad M. Brutum. 10. --- pro M. Marcello, oratio. 11. --- pro Q. Ligario. 12. --- pro rege Deiotaro. 13. Fabii Planciadis Fulgentii expositio sermonum antiquorum. 14. M. T. Ciceronis, pro M. Marcello, oratio. 15. --- pro Q. Ligario, ad Caesarem. 16. --- pro rege Deiotaro, ad Caesarem. 17. --- pro T. Annio Milone. 18. --- pro lege Manilia, ad populum Romanum. 19. --- Anonymi fragmentum de Causa miloniana. "P. Clodius Senator Seditiosus erat." 20. --- accusationis in Verrem Libri 4ti fragmentum. 21. --- de officiis, liber 1tis, & media pars 2di. 22. Alexandri M. ad Aristotelem, epistolae: una cum illius historia. 23. Inferuntur in pagina vacante sub initium, Versus Iusorii, "de Sum & non sum, de non sum & fui, de esse & non esse, de idem & non idem," &c. Codex membranaceus.'