Manuscripts and Editions
The earliest surviving copy, (P=codex Parisinus gr. 2009) was made by John Doukas' confidential secretary, Michael, in the late 11th century. This manuscript was copied in 1509 by Antony Eparchus; this copy known as V=codex Vaticanus-Palatinus gr. 126, has a number of notes in Greek and Latin, added by late readers. A third complete copy, known as F=codex Parisinus gr.2967, is itself a copy of V, which was begun by Eparchus and completed by Michael Damascene; V is undated. There is a fourth, but incomplete, manuscript known as M=codex Mutinensis gr. 179, which is a copy of P made by Andrea Darmari between 1560 and 1586. Two of the manuscripts (P and F) are now located in Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, and the third (V) is in the Vatican Library. The partial manuscript (M) is in Modena.
The Greek text in its entirety was published seven times. The editio princeps, which was based on V, was published in 1611 by Johannes Meursius, who gave it the Latin title by which it is now universally known, and which translates as On Administering the Empire. This edition was published six years later with no changes. The next edition belongs to the ragusan Anselmo Banduri (1711) which is collated copy of the first edition and manuscript P. Banduri's edition was reprinted twice: in 1729 in the Venetian collection of the Byzantine Historians and in 1864 Migne republished Banduri's text with a few corrections.
Constantine himself had not given the work a name, preferring instead to start the text with the standard formal salutation: "Constantine, in Christ the Eternal Sovereign, Emperor of the Romans, to own son Romanos the Emperor crowned of God and born in the purple".
Read more about this topic: De Administrando Imperio
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“The next Augustan age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic. There will, perhaps, be a Thucydides at Boston, a Xenophon at New York, and, in time, a Virgil at Mexico, and a Newton at Peru. At last, some curious traveller from Lima will visit England and give a description of the ruins of St. Paul’s, like the editions of Balbec and Palmyra.”
—Horace Walpole (1717–1797)