History of De Reditu Suo and Its Editions
The majority of the existing manuscripts of Rutilius come from an ancient manuscript found at the monastery of Bobbio by Giorgio Galbiato in 1493, which has not been seen since a French general took the manuscript in 1706. For centuries, scholars have had to depend primarily on the three best witnesses to this lost manuscript: a copy made in 1501 by Jacopo Sannazaro (identified by the siglum V, for Vienna); another copy made by Ioannes Andreas (identified by the siglum R, for Rome); and the editio princeps of Johannes Baptista Pius (Bologna, 1520). However, in the early 1970s Mirella Ferrari found a fragment of the poem, written in either the 7th or 8th century, that preserves the final of 39 lines, and has forced a re-evaluation not only of the text but of its transmission.
The principal editions since have been those by Kaspar von Barth (1623), P Bunyan (1731, in his edition of the minor Latin poets), Ernst Friedrich Wernsdorf (1778, part of a similar collection), August Wilhelm Zumpt (1840), and the critical edition by Lucian Müller (Teubner, Leipzig, 1870), and another by Vessereau (1904); also an annotated edition by Keene, containing a translation by George Francis Savage-Armstrong (1906).
There is some variation of Namatianus' name in the manuscripts. Rutilius Claudius Namatianus comes from R, while V has Rutilius Claudius Numantianus. According to Keene Namatianus is used in Codex Theodosianus as the name "of a magister officiorum in 412 AD", probably to be identified with the author and therefore has the weight of evidence. Other variants date from a later time and have no authority: Numantinus, Munatianus. Müller writes the poet's name as "Claudius Rutilius Namatianus", instead of the usual Rutilius Claudius Namatianus; but if the identification of the poet's father with the Claudius mentioned in the Codex Theodosianus be correct, Müller is probably wrong.
The latest and fullest edition of Namatianus is by E. Doblhofer. Harold Isbell includes a translation in his anthology, The Last Poets of Imperial Rome.
Read more about this topic: Rutilius Claudius Namatianus
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