Page:Philological Museum v2.djvu/252

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242
HEADERTEXT.
242

242 Miscellaneous Observations. a blank leaf, which is followed by one marked a ii, although the Anabasis, which precedes it, concludes with one marked L iiii^. Consequently of the title Paralipomena Thucydidis one half is destitute of authority, and the other half is con- fined to the titlepage, while the superscription of the book, which doubtless approaches more closely to the reading of the manuscript, does not agree with it. Nevertheless Niebuhr's conjecture that Aldus took the name of Parali- pomena from some manuscript, is completely confirmed by the collation of Victorius, in which there is noted at the be- ginning of the first book ^BevocpwPTo^ irapoKeLiroixeva 'E- XrjvLKwi^^ at the end of the seventh TeXo9 tcov *5<evo(pu)VTo^ TrapaXeLTTOjiiepcov, Niebuhr thought that this TrapoXeiTro/uLeva together with the name of Thucydides (supposing that both words were supported by manuscript authority), was the original title of the first two books, only misapplied by being extended to all the seven : on the contrary, I am convinced that it was only invented at a very late period, probably from a remembrance of the Paralipomena of the Old Testament, by some one who considered the whole work in connexion with Thucydides, and perhaps with Herodotus also, as forming a body of Greek history, which Gemistus carried down to the destruction of Greece at Chseronea. Hence Aldus in the preface to his Thucydides gives the same name to the work of Gemistus, although in his

  • That Dindorf is perfectly right in his notion that the Hellenics in the Aldine

Xenophon of 1525 were not printed for that edition, but were transferred to it from that of 1503, which must probably have hung on hand, and in which it formed a part of the same volume with Gemistus, Herodian, and the Scholia on Thucydides, is proved to the eye by the colour of the paper, by the shape of the types, by the number of lines in a page (55 instead of 54), and the width of the spaces between them. In all these re- spects the Hellenics, with the exception of one or two leaves that are reprinted, difter from the rest of the volume in which they are found, and agree with that from which they have been taken. Owing to this a complete copy of the volume publisht in 1503 appears to be a rarity : at least Dindorf had only seen one that wanted the Xenophon : and this is all that is found in the Bodleian catalogue, or in the library of the Uni- versity of Cambridge, or in that of Trinity College, though the latter is very rich in Greek Alduses since the bequests it has received from Dr Raine and Professor Dobree, who took great pains in collecting them. When these imperfect copies were issued, Asulanus prefixt a new titlepage to them, and on the reverse of it he tells the reader, quae Xenophontis opera^ turn irapaXenrofxeva turn eWnvLKci a Graecis appel- lata, in hunc locum (Aldus) incluserat^ nos tanquam avulsum memhrum^ cum totum Xenophontein emitteremus^ quasi suo corpori conjungendum putavimus.