Studies on the Text of Macrobius' Saturnalia

Studies on the Text of Macrobius'Saturnalia is a companion to new editions of Macrobius' encyclopedic dialogue that are to appear in the Loeb Classical Library and the Oxford Classical Texts series. The first chapter reports the results of a new survey of all the extant manuscripts of the work written before the 13th century and provides the first detailed stemma, which allows the early medieval archetype to be reconstructed more reliably than previously. Chapter 2 discusses some of the nearly 300 passages in which the new text differs from the standard edition of James Willis (Teubner 1963); the critical discussions then continue in Chapter 3, which considers some questions of editorial practice posed by a text whose author was not just the author but also, to a very extensive degree, a copyist himself. Three appendixes supplement the arguments in the body of the monograph.

Robert Kaster is Professor of Classics and Kennedy Foundation Professor of Latin at Princeton University.