A Sixth-Century Fragment of the Letters of Pliny the Younger

Excerpt: ...possibly they went to cover preserve-jars, or tennis-racquets; possibly into some final dust-heap. At any rate the manuscript is gone; the copy by Iucundus is gone; the copy of the correspondence with Trajan that Avantius owed to Petrus Leander is gone; if others had any other copies of Book X, in whole or in part, they are gone too. The Bodleian volume In 1708 Thomas Hearne, the antiquary, bought at auction a peculiar volume of Pliny's Letters. It consisted of Beroaldus's edition of the nine books (1498), the portions of Book X published by Avantius in 1502, and, on inserted leaves, the missing letters of Books VIII and X.8 The printed portions, moreover, were provided with over five hundred variant readings and lemmata in a different hand from that which appeared on the inserted leaves; the hand that added the variants also wrote in the margin the sixteenth letter of Book IX, which is not in the edition of Beroaldus. Hearne recognized the importance of this supplementary matter, for he copied the variants into his own edition of the Letters (1703), intending, apparently, to use them in a larger edition which he is said to have published in 1709; he also lent the book to Jean Masson, who refers to it in his Plinii Vita. Upon Hearne's death, this valuable volume was acquired by the Bodleian Library in Oxford, but lay unnoticed until Mr. E. G. Hardy, in 1888,9 examined it and, after a comparison of the readings, pronounced it the very copy from which Aldus had printed his edition in 1508. External proof of this highly exciting surmise seemed to appear in a manuscript note on the last page of the edition of Avantius, written in the hand that had inserted the variants and supplements throughout the volume:10 hae plinii iunioris epistolae ex uetustissimo exemplari parisiensi et restitutae et emendatae sunt opera et industria ioannis iucundi prestantissimi architecti hominis imprimis antiquarii. What more natural to conclude than that here...