Niebuhr's lectures on Roman history, Vol. 1 (of 3)Niebuhr, Barthold Georg
History
Niebuhr's lectures on Roman history, Vol. 1 (of 3)
Niebuhr, Barthold Georg
Rome -- History
said that the loss of the books of Dio was the fault of Xiphilinus.
His manuscript was still complete as regards the reigns of Augustus,
Tiberius, and Claudius, where the Venetian is full of gaps. The very
late author of the _Lexicon Syntacticum_, which Bekker has edited,
already in all probability had no more the first five and thirty; as
from these, in comparison with the other books, he gives scarcely any
extracts at all. We have a fragment which is generally thought to
be of the thirty-fifth book, but which, according to Reimarus, most
likely belongs to the thirty-sixth; then from the thirty-seventh to the
fifty-fourth complete, and the fifty-fifth and fifty-sixth mutilated.
Of the first twenty books we have the abstract of Zonaras, with slight
admixtures from Plutarch; of the last forty-five, that of Xiphilinus
likewise with admixtures. Of books 78, 79 and 80, we have an important
fragment from the Vatican library. In books 55 to 60, the manuscripts
are full of gaps: Xiphilinus, however, had yet a complete copy of them.
Morelli, an excellent philologist, found these books in the year 1797,
when, to console himself for the downfall of his republic, he took to
ancient history as a refuge, in a very old manuscript in the library
of St. Mark, and discovered that it had formerly been complete, but
had suffered much from the destruction of part of the fascicles and
leaves; that this was the mother-manuscript for these six books; but
that when the copyist in his transcript had come to a stop in some
story, and the beginning of the next was mutilated, he had entirely
dropped such incomplete narrations, and disguised the gaps. Morelli has
collected these defective passages, so that we see how at one place
some leaves, at another, whole quaternions are missing. From what he
communicated, the remarkable expedition of Ahenobarbus to Germany was
first brought to light, which had till then been unknown. Thus also in
Diodorus, the halves of two books are entirely wanting, a circumstance
which is nowhere noticed. In a third passage, Perizonius and others
have discovered it. Such a thing was by no means of rare occurrence
among the volatile Greeks of the fifteenth century, who gained their
livelihood by copying.--What remains of the three last books of Dio
Cassius, has been edited by Fulvius Ursinus. The manuscript is of
the seventh or eighth century; yet the centre column only has been
preserved entire: the two others along the margins are illegible.
Nevertheless something may be gleaned from it. In the excerpta _de
Legationibus_, _de Virtutibus et Vitiis_, and _de Sententiis_, many
pieces from Dio are to be found. We have also many fragments elsewhere,
as Dio was very much read. There are besides the abridgments of
Xiphilinus and Zonaras. It is surprising that the latter is not also
reprinted in the edition of Reimarus. This Zonaras,[28] under Alexius
and Kalojohannes Comnenus, was a man of business, and wrote a history
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