The significance of two manuscripts for Grillius' tradition

Abstract

Two MSS O [= Oxford, D’Orville 152] and Q [= Venezia, Lat. XI, 15], which also contain Grill. 1, 1-7, 180 J., are important witnesses to the textual tradition of Grillius’ Commentum in Ciceronis Rhetorica, the second ancient commentary on Cicero’s De inventione. Contrary to what has been assumed by the previous editor R. Jakobi, several excellent readings provided by OQ cannot be explained as the product of clever emendations and scholarly interventions by the excerptor, but are likely to have been inherited via a common ancestor λ, which must have had access to a splendid copy of the text and itself constitutes a hyparchetype λ that joins the group αβ(γ) = ω in Jakobi’s stemma, which in fact does not represent the archetype, but merely another hyparchetype. In passing, I also introduce several new conjectures, which improve upon our current text of Grillius.