A New Manuscript of Lucan’s Bellum Civile

Samuel J. Huskey (University of Oklahoma)

Regarding the manuscripts of Lucan, A.E. Housman remarked “it may be that somebody roaming through a library will one day stumble upon a hidden treasure” (M. Annaei Lucani Belli Civilis Libri Decem [Oxford, 1927], v). He probably did not imagine that the the librarians in the University of Iowa’s Special Collections would be the ones doing the stumbling, but they recently discovered a fifteenth century manuscript of Lucan’s Bellum Civile that had been sitting, unnoticed and undocumented, in a box on their shelves for the past forty years. The codex contains the text of the entire poem, with interlinear and marginal commentary for the first three books. In my presentation, I shall describe the manuscript, give a brief overview of my collation of the text, and discuss the peculiarities of the commentary, which appears to be a mixture of material from known sources (e.g., the Glosule super Lucanum of Arnulf of Orléans and the Commenta Bernensia) and other scholia that have never been published.