An Unpublished Manuscript of Three Ciceronian Philosophical Works

Dustin Heinen

University of Florida

            For half a century, a fifteenth century manuscript of Cicero, containing De Amicitia, De Senectute, and Paradoxa Stoicorum, has occupied a spot on the shelf of the Special Collections Room of the University of Florida’s Smathers Library (871.C7i.x).  It has received little attention since it arrived at the university in the mid-1950s.  The special collections department at University of Florida houses a number of early editions of Plato, Virgil, Apuleius and Valerius Flaccus, but this is the only classical manuscript in the collections.   In my paper, I will show how 871.C7i.x may be identified as an early fifteenth century product from Florence, Italy.  The manuscript contains three different hands, perhaps from insular scribes such as John Gunthorpe who traveled to Northern Italy to learn the Humanistic hand.  After the composition of the manuscript, nothing is known about its history until it was acquired in by E.H.W. Meyerstein, the former head of the manuscript collection at the British Museum.  Upon Meyerstein’s death in 1952, the manuscript was purchased for a mere fourteen dollars in a Sotheby’s auction.  University of Florida records do not mark any receipt of the manuscript, but it is noted in a 1962 inventory. 

            By tracing the manuscript tradition of the three works contained in the manuscript, I will identify the major family to which the University of Florida’s copy belongs.  While the two dialogues are difficult to date due to extensive contamination, several of the readings in Paradoxa Stoicorum point to an archetype in the mid-fourteenth century, giving a terminus ante quem in the mid-fifteenth century.  An Furthermore, a listing of the Seven Sages of Greece between the two dialogues also identifies this work in a small family of coeval manuscripts produced in Northern Italy.  As I hope to show through this discussion of its palaeographical and textual aspects, the University of Florida manuscript contributes an interesting, and historically valuable piece to the puzzle of manuscripts containing Cicero’s philosophical treatises.