¹ For an assessment of the importance of this discovery, ‘one of the earliest in a succession of discoveries that by the 1570s had transformed the canon of classical Latin literature’, see Reeve, M.D., ‘Classical scholarship’, in Kraye, J. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism (Cambridge, 1996), 20–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 20–6.

² Circa quintum et vigesimum vitae annum inter Belgas Helvetiosque festinans, cum Leodium pervenissem, audito quod esset ibi bona copia librorum, substiti comitesque detinui, donec unam Ciceronis orationem manu amici, alteram mea manu scripsi, quam postea per Italiam effudi; et ut rideas, in tam bona civitate barbarica atramenti aliquid, et id croco simillimum, reperire magnus labor fuit (Sen. 16.1). Petrarch's links with the Low Countries are discussed by Dykmans, M., ‘Les premiers rapports de Petrarque avec les Pays-Bas’, BIBR 20 (1939), 51–122Google Scholar, at 51–63. An overview of the more recent publications about Petrarch and the Low Countries is given by Tournoy, G., ‘La fortuna del Petrarca nei Paesi Bassi’, in Blanc, P. (ed.), Dynamique d'une expansion culturelle: Pétrarque en Europe XIVe–XXe siècle: actes du XXVI^e congrès international du CEFI, Turin et Chambéry, 11–15 décembre 1995 (Paris, 2001), 583–94Google Scholar, at 584 n. 6.

³ See for an analysis of the Collatio laureationis among others Verhulst, S., ‘Le Pro Archia comme paradigme d'amplification: réflexions sur le discours épidictique de Pétrarque à la Raccolta aragonese’, in Galand-Hallyn, P. and Hallyn, F. (eds.), Poétiques de la Renaissance. Le modèle italien, le monde franco-bourguignon et leur héritage en France au XVIe siècle (Geneva, 2001), 346–60Google Scholar; and more recently Mazzotta, G., ‘Petrarca e il discorso di Roma’, in Finucci, V. (ed.), Petrarca: canoni, esemplarità (Rome, 2006), 259–72Google Scholar.

⁴ Collatio laureationis, 1.6–7: Quanta, inquam, sit naturaliter difficultas propositi mei ex hoc apparet quod, cum in ceteribus artibus studio et labore possit ad terminum perveniri, in arte poetica secus est, in qua nil agitur sine interna quadam et divinitus in animum vatis infusa vi. Non michi, sed Ciceroni credite, qui, in oratione pro Aulo Licinio Archia, de poetis loquens verbis talibus utitur: ‘Ab eruditissimis viris atque doctissimis sic accepimus: ceterarum rerum studia et ingenio et doctrina et arte constare, poetam natura ipsa valere et mentis viribus excitari et quasi divino quodam spiritu afflari ut non inmerito noster ille Hennius, suo quodam iure, “sanctos” appellat “poetas”, quod deorum munere nobis commendati esse videantur’; hec Cicero. See further Godi, C., ‘La «Collatio laureationis» del Petrarca nelle due redazioni’, Studi petrarcheschi ns 5 (1988), 1–58Google Scholar, at 30–1. Petrarch is quoting Arch. 18.

⁵ The exchange has been reconstructed by Foresti, A., ‘Le lettere a Lapo da Castiglionchio e il suo libro ciceroniano’, in Benvenuti, A. Tissoni (ed.), Aneddoti della vita di Francesco Petrarca (Padua, 1977), 242–50Google Scholar.

⁶ Var. 45: Orationem Tullianam pro Licinio Archia, quam pollicitus sum tibi, praesentem mitto refertam miris poetarum laudibus. Iuvabit puto fide digno teste cognoscere, quod studiis quibus delectamur praeco ingens et praeclarissimus Orator accesserit, cuius rei admonuisse te velim, ut rem licet parvam in pretio habeas. Neve pro una tres eiusdem oratoris remisisse te pigeat, quas fateor ipse mecum detulissem, et sicut uno, sic duobus te libris uno tempore spoliassem per fiduciam, nisi propere Philippicas dimisissem, neque id eo proposito ut eis perpetuo careres, sed ut accuratius et littera floridiore transcriptas ad te quamprimum remitterem. Ego enim usque adeo vetustati oculos assuefeci ut novam scripturam qualemcunque fastidiam. Super hoc nichil amplius. Tuus sum et Lapum meum lappis tenacissimis amoris obsitum fuisse nunc sentio, a quo divelli nequeo. Sic te semel complexus animo inhaereo. Feliciter vale. Franciscus Petracch. Tuus. Parmae, octavo Idus Ianuarii festinanter valde. See Pancheri, A. (ed.), Lettere disperse. Varie e miscellanee (Parma, 1994), 102–5Google Scholar.

⁷ Fam. 7.16: Milonianam Ciceronis cum reliquis accepi; gratias ago. Non michi nunc primum tue mentis indulgentia nota est; rescribi faciam, et remittam. Cf. Fam. 12.8, a letter ‘about Cicero and his works’: Quod autem nominatim ad libellum tuum attinet, amice, et Milo defensus et Laterensis offensus et Silla excusatus et Pompeius laudatus aderant.

⁸ Fam. 13.6: Quam non apposui quoniam orationem illam, ab extremis olim Germaniae advectam, dum loca illa visendi ardore iuveniliter peragrarem, et anno altero in patriam vobis optantibus transmissam, habetis studioseque legitis, quod in literis inde venientibus recognosco.

⁹ ‘Puto igitur hunc librum ad ipsum Lapum redire et vel ab ipso vel in eius usum fuisse transcriptum.’ Clark, A.C. (ed.), M. Tulli Ciceronis Orationes. Pro Tullio. Pro Fonteio. Pro Sulla. Pro Archia. Pro Plancio. Pro Scauro (Oxford, 1911)Google Scholar, ix.

¹⁰ Preceding a series of Cicero's Orationes, this manuscript also contains the Tusculanae, De senectute and the Paradoxa Stoicorum. The most extensive description has recently been printed by De Robertis, T., ‘Un'edizione di Cicerone in gran parte copiata da Salutati (Firenze, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Pluteo 23 sin. 3)’, in De Robertis, T., Tanturli, G. and Zamponi, S. (edd.), Coluccio Salutati e l'invenzione dell'Umanesimo (Florence, 2008), 321–3Google Scholar, no. 104.

¹¹ See Billanovich, G., Petrarca e il primo umanesimo (Padova, 1996), 97–116Google Scholar (a reprint with some additions of id., ‘Petrarca e Cicerone’, in Miscellanea Giovanni Mercati IV, Letteratura classica e umanistica [Vatican City, 1946], 88–106), esp. 109 n. 40: ‘Dunque il Petrarca, oltra la Pro Archia, dovette comunicare pure questa orazione agli amici di Firenze. Ma è un nuovo indice di percezione geniale che egli non abbia amato né unirla alla Pro Archia, né richiamarne delle citazioni.’ This is not the only instance where Billanovich is cutting corners, founding his speculation on argumenta ex silentio.

¹² Rizzo, S., ‘Da Firenze alla biblioteca del Petrarca. Scambio di doni ciceroniani fra Petrarca e Lapo da Castiglionchio. Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, XXIII sin. 3’, in Feo, M. (ed.), Codici latini del Petrarca nelle biblioteche fiorentine (Florence, 1991), 9–14Google Scholar, at 12–13: ‘L'interesse di a è dato proprio dal suo essere immune dagli interventi petrarcheschi, così da costituire quasi una cartina di tornasole che ci aiuta a distinguere la lezione originaria dalle congetture del Petrarca. Ciò ha permesso di stabilire che lezioni registrate dagli editori negli apparati (e talvolta nel testo) come provenienti dalla familia Gallica [that is, the branch containing all other descendants of Petrarch's copy] sono in realtà congetture, e a volte semplici glosse penetrate nel testo, risalenti al Petrarca.’ In these pages, Silvia Rizzo gives the best overview of the whole issue, recapitulating the contributions of Clark, Billanovich and others. In the same year, Albinia de la Mare declared a an autograph by Coluccio Salutati, but in the meantime, it has been demonstrated that there are several hands at work, only one of them Salutati's: see De Robertis (n. 10). A new discussion of the attribution – based only on paleographical grounds – of a to Salutati's hand, is given by Berté, M., ‘Petrarca, Salutati e le orazioni di Cicerone’, in De Paolis, P. (ed.), Manoscritti e lettori di Cicerone tra Medioevo ed Umanesimo (Cassino, 2012), 21–52Google Scholar. I wish to thank the author for allowing me to see her work before publication.

¹³ Rouse, R.H. and Reeve, M.D., ‘Cicero. Speeches’, in Reynolds, L.D. (ed.), Texts and Transmission: A Survey of the Latin Classics (Oxford, 1983), 54–98Google Scholar, at 86 n. 186.

¹⁴ Kasten, H. (ed.), M. Tulli Ciceronis scripta quae manserunt omnia. Fasc 19. Oratio pro P. Sulla. Oratio pro Archia poeta (Leipzig, 1966 ³), ix–xiGoogle Scholar. See also Maslowski, T. and Rouse, R.H., ‘Twelfth-century extracts from Cicero's “Pro Archia” and “Pro Cluentio” in Paris, B.N., MS lat. 18104’, IMU 22 (1979), 97–122Google Scholar, at 99–102, for a synthesis in English.

¹⁵ Rouse and Reeve (n. 13), 86 n. 187: ‘So H. Nohl (Vienna – Prague – Leipzig, 1889), xi–xii. Clark misguidedly separated the manuscripts into a German and a French family without offering a stemma. The stemma in the Teubner of P. Reis (1933¹, 1949²) reflects Clark's view of the tradition. H. Kasten's new Teubner … is a great improvement both in assessment of the manuscripts and in accuracy, but of the two readings that he regards as Bindefehler of G (and ω), one, the gloss Archia in 1, is not in both branches of (ω), and the other, 16 profugium for perfugium, is trivial. F. Gaffiot in vol. xii of the Budé Discours (1938) contributes nothing on the manuscripts.’ Gaffiot indeed goes to great lengths to defend even the harshest particular readings of G against sounder alternatives in other branches of the tradition, in his all-out allegiance to G's codex optimus status, already advocated by É. Thomas, Discours de Cicéron pour le poète Archias. Publié d'après les travaux les plus récents avec une nouvelle collation du Gemblacensis, un commentaire critique et explicatif, une introduction et un index (Paris, 1883)Google Scholar. Thomas claims to have examined all Paris manuscripts of the text (he enumerates 19 of the 26 that I list in the appendix below), but confines himself to classifying them all in the same group and then dismisses them as ‘des copies inférieures du texte que nous avons sous une forme plus pure dans le Gemblacensis, et qui sont à rejeter’ (at 18). I will dwell on the stemmatical relation between Petrarch's Liège find and the other major witnesses in another publication.

¹⁶ See Billanovich (n. 11).

¹⁷ Rizzo, S., ‘Apparati Ciceroniani e congetture del Petrarca’, RFIC 103 (1975), 5–15Google Scholar.

¹⁸ See also Fiorilla, M., Marginalia figurati nei codici di Petrarca (Florence, 2005), 31–3Google Scholar.

¹⁹ Ornato, E., ‘La Redécouverte des discours de Cicéron en Italie et en France à la fin du XIV^e siècle et au début du XV^e siècle’, in Schoeck, R.J. (ed.), Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Bononiensis. Proceedings of the Fourth International Congress of Neo-Latin Studies. Bologna 26 August to 1 September 1979 (Binghamton, NY, 1985), 564–76Google Scholar, at 572 n. 13.

²⁰ Q breaks off in the middle of Red. pop., but M.D. Reeve argued that the manuscript may originally have contained the same parts of the two Post reditum speeches as Petrarch's well-known Ciceronian collection in Troyes, Bibliothèque Municipale 552 (the so-called Trecensis, containing most of Cicero's rhetorica and philosophica, and several speeches; see for its content P. de Nolhac, Pétrarque et l'humanisme [Paris, 1965²], 1.227–30), and that the missing parts were supplemented later on in Q's apograph Paris BNF Lat. 7778. See Reeve, M.D., ‘Recovering annotations from Petrarch’, in Quaderni Petrarcheschi 9–10 (1992–3), 333–48Google Scholar, at 343 and id. (ed.), M. Tullii Ciceronis Oratio pro P. Quinctio (Stuttgart and Leipzig, 1992), xii–xvGoogle Scholar.

²¹ Rouse and Reeve (n. 13), at 54–7 and passim.

²² In theory some of these numerous descendants could go back to the lost Liège manuscript independently of Petrarch's copy, if the errors they all share against the united reading of G, E and V (qua for quae at 11.18; the omission of hoc at 15.28; atque instead of et at 15.29; the omission of at at 16.7) were all of them already present in Petrarch's source and he made a faithful transcription without adding any mistakes. However, no elements in either the date or the geographical origin of the more antique or primitive members of the branch point to such a hypothesis; the oldest copies stem from the last quarter of the fourteenth century, and they all are of Italian origin.

²³ Gaffiot, F. and Boulanger, A. (ed.), Cicéron. Discours. Tome XII. Pour le poète Archias, Pour L. Flaccus (Paris, 1938), 33 and 23Google Scholar.

²⁴ All textual references are to the paragraphs and line numbers of Helmut Kasten's Teubner edition (n. 14).

²⁵ Particular errors of B, on the other hand, are adsint (8.13), praediti (10.5), om. Chii suum (19.3), statis (25.30) and expeditum (31.17).

²⁶ As F ended up in the public library of San Marco before it was incorporated into the Laurenziana, it is not unlikely that it may have been a source for later erudite compilers, although it is of course not unlikely that its felicitous emendations surfaced elsewhere independently.

²⁷ The only other manuscript where I have seen this reading is Bologna, Universitaria 2488.

²⁸ Its value has been unduly downplayed by Courtney, E., ‘Notes on Ciceronian manuscripts and textual criticism’, in BICS 10 (1963), 13–16Google Scholar. Courtney lists a few interesting readings (adding ‘I should perhaps make it plain that while I regard all this as of some interest, I do not consider it of high significance’), yet before his dismissive conclusion, he had noted that the manuscript ‘is of the same general character as a, i.e. intermediate between the German family and the distinctively Italian’. The implications for a's alleged unique status seem to have escaped scholars. I am very grateful to Gabriella Pomaro, who identified Niccoli's hand while kindly examining this manuscript and sharing her expert advice with me.

²⁹ See Winter, U., Das Handschriften-Verzeichnis der Deutschen Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin. Neue Folgen. Erster Band. Die europäischen Handschriften der Bibliothek Diez (Leipzig, 1986), 127Google Scholar.

³⁰ See n. 54 below for the relation between Plut. 48.11 and Plut. 48.10.

³¹ Gavinelli, S., ‘Miscellanea ciceroniana di opere retoriche e filosofiche: la formazione dell'umanista. Milano, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, D 69 inf.’, in Ballarini, M., Frasso, G. and Monti, C.M. (edd.), Francesco Petrarca. Manoscritti e libri a stampa della Biblioteca Ambrosiana (Milan, 2004), 108Google Scholar.

³² The ‘cosidetta classe Z’ is a somewhat ambiguous reference: Rizzo (n. 17), 8 used it for referring to ‘(sigla usata dal Kasten) il perduto codice di Lapo’ (while Kasten used Z only in his stemma of the Pro Sulla), but as Gavinelli explicitly denies B a Petrarchan origin, she seems to be referring to Maslowski and Rouse ([n. 14], 101), who used Z to refer to the common ancestor of E and V – which would make B only the third member of this important family, and therefore all the more relevant.

³³ In M Lapo's quartet is present as such, as it is in Plut. 48.10, but in neither case is it immediately followed by Arch. In other members of β₁ the dissipation is even more substantial, which points to the independent origin of many compilations, and corroborates the hypothesis that in β the Arch. did not come with a comprehensive series of speeches.

³⁴ http://ambrosiana.comperio.it/opac/detail/ambro:catalog:33602 (accessed 12 April 2012).

³⁵ See the critical edition of these verses in Friedrich, A., Das Symposium der XII Sapientes: Kommentar und Verfasserfrage (Berlin and New York, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 65 (sap. 119) and 226–7.

³⁶ S. Rizzo, ‘I distici rimati composti dal Petrarca per i libri della sua biblioteca’, in Feo (n. 12), 97–8.

³⁷ The manuscript has been described by Leonardi, C., ‘I codici di Marziano Capella’, Aevum 34 (1960), 1–99Google Scholar, at 41–3. Anzotus subscribed and dated several parts of the codex, which was written in several stages: as Arch. is on ff. 47r–48v, it can be surmised to have been written between 1407 (date on f. 37v) and 1415 (f. 52r).

³⁸ While C has various second-hand corrections, some of them in rasura, the original reading can often be recovered from its Vatican apograph Rossi 1034, which reflects C's readings ante correctionem.

³⁹ Many members of this group share, in variable constellations, several other errors, but most of them are recentiores and show signs of correction – to which this metathesis proved immune.

⁴⁰ This last metathesis may, as Michael Reeve kindly points out to me, originate from Paris BNF 7778, probably the most primitive member of the group of manuscripts containing it; other members of this group – this list makes no claims for completeness – are, with reference to the numeration in the appendix: 35, 46, 47, 78, 80, 117, 119, 132, 137, 138, 143, 145, 147, 148, 152, 155, 182, 193, 195, 196, 218, 220, 233, 238, 243, 245, 246, 255. Nevertheless, the fact that many of these do not share the omission of hunc at 8.15 and some other corruptions present in BNF 7778, points to contamination in this branch, which makes it hard to establish with certainty whether all these witnesses do indeed stem from BNF 7778.

⁴¹ I have seen not a single case of a collator correcting a transposition. Indeed, a–b or ” ' transpositions tend to be introduced by copyists who are at once correcting themselves. This observation of course applies to prose texts alone, as in poetry some metatheses give themselves away more easily, being at odds with the metre, and they will often be corrected by shrewd copyists or readers.

⁴² See Rizzo, S., ‘Congetture di Battista Egnazio ad Orazioni di Cicerone’, in Avesani, R., Billanovich, G., Ferrari, M. and Pozzi, G. (edd.), Miscellanea Augusto Campana II (Padua, 1981), 671–80Google Scholar, at 671–4.

⁴³ Often misquoted as 2 c 5. I am very grateful to Luigi Silvano for his photographs (and his tenacious pursuit) of the two elusive Casale manuscripts.

⁴⁴ I am using these sigla merely for the convenience of this particular discussion.

⁴⁵ Clark (n. 9), vi, discusses a's value in Lapo's quartet, but does not mention it when (xii) he comes to Arch. He may not have seen a himself, perhaps relying on Lagomarsini's famous collations of Florentine Cicero manuscripts. For a list of Lagomarsini's ‘codices Ciceroniani’, see Ruysschaert, J., Bibliothecae Apostolicae Vaticanae codices manu scripti recensiti: Codices Vaticani Latini. Codices 11414–11709 (Vatican City, 1959), xiv–xxvGoogle Scholar. The Arch. collations in ms Vat. lat. 11628 are described at 431–2.

⁴⁶ In either case, the correctors seem to have acted in a rather superficial way, maintaining numerous untenable, even nonsensical readings. Whether they descend from a itself or from a's source, in either case b and c appear to do so through a common intermediary, as they share the errors solum nobis ad at 14.17 and adiuvaretur at 16.2.

⁴⁷ Avignon, Bibl. mun. 1215, ‘Ex bibliotheca ff. Praedicatorum conventus Avinionensis’, is a fifteenth-century parchment manuscript of 87 folia (+ f. 37bis), and contains the three Caesarianae, the ‘thirteen’ Philippicae, Pro Archia, Red. pop., Red. sen., Pridie, Pro Milone and the beginning of De lege Manilia. I wish to thank Anna Bellettini, who provided me with a full description of the manuscript from the I.R.H.T. archives in Paris. A few illuminated capitals from A can be found on http://www.enluminures.culture.fr (accessed 12 April 2012).

⁴⁸ A somewhat enigmatic case is Oxford's Balliol College 146B. This manuscript was copied for William Gray, probably in 1443 in Cologne: see Mynors, R.A.B., Catalogue of the Manuscripts of Balliol College Oxford (Oxford, 1963), 125–7Google Scholar. Mynors notes that ‘Billanovich 14 n. 27 suggests that this is a descendant of the copy of the pro Archia sent by Petrarch (its discoverer) to Boccaccio in 1351’. The reference is to Billanovich, G., ‘Pietro Piccolo da Monteforte tra il Petrarca e il Boccaccio’, in Medioevo e Rinascimento. Studi in onore di Bruno Nardi (Florence, 1955), 1–76Google Scholar, at 10–14 (and n. 27). The variants quoted above, however, seem to leave no doubt that the Balliol manuscript belongs to the α branch, instead of being a direct copy from Petrarch's codex for Boccaccio. Although in general its Pro Archia readings seem to qualify as an illustration of sloppiness and ignorance rather than of Petrarchan genius – as its text is utterly corrupt – it must go back to a deliberate collation process and probably a significantly less corrupt source after all. Among its numerous deviations, it combines the above-mentioned variants unequivocally typical of α with others that originated in β₁ (such as: 8.11 et fide ] ac fide β₁Bal; 12.22 defessae ] om. β₁Bal; 13.7 quoque ] om. β₁Bal) and that are too numerous to be coincidental. Therefore, it seems safe to conclude that, the Boccaccian appearances notwithstanding, Balliol 146B does not stem directly from Petrarch's desk. And given its heavily contaminated nature, if not its merger of two otherwise sufficiently attested families, it has no utility for the reconstruction of π anyway.

⁴⁹ At 17.13, where P, Q and T only repeat the name of Roscius in the glosses, A adds ‘mimi ut puto’. At 27.11, Q alone repeats the name of D. Brutus in a marginal note. There A has ‘Decimus Brutus qui navali proelio Massilienses pro C<aesar>e superavit’.

⁵⁰ P has the same note, omitting natura; T has incorporated it into the text after mentis viribus. The notes present in P have been published by Billanovich (n. 11), 103–4.

⁵¹ It would have been the only one, as the one other innovation shared by β and γ, that is the addition of the first sive at 30.12, is so much called for by the context that it would be hazardous to base any stemmatic conclusions on such an obvious correction.

⁵² Vat. lat. 1742 was copied from O before the latter was corrected, while BNF lat. 17154, B.L. Harley 5428, and Balliol 248A (the latter contaminated by the β branch) reflect O's corrected stage. The fact that the large Ciceronean collection BNF lat. 17154 belongs to the very restricted α branch might hold some promise for deciding the much debated origin of this important collection: see Hunt, T.J., A Textual History of Cicero's Academici Libri (Leiden, 1998), 144–6Google Scholar.

⁵³ This α family largely corresponds to the ‘familia sexta’ in Elżbieta Olechowska's edition of Pro Cn. Plancio, Pro C. Rabirio Postumo (Leipzig, 1981), viii. While not without merit, Olechowska's grouping has serious shortcomings: her forgoing of any attempt at an eliminatio codicum descriptorum in combination with a rather vague dating, often limited to ‘saec. xv’, prevents us from seeing the wood for the trees. Out of the ten manuscripts listed as members of this sixth family, B⁵, O³ and P³ are in my opinion (and at least in Arch.) descendants of a twin of V⁴ (my O), from which descends β directly, while A² and D⁵ are late (after 1450), corrupt and contaminated. As R³ and ζ in Arch. belong to the γ branch, the only two remaining relevant members of this family are my O and N. Likewise, other groups can probably be pruned significantly, freeing the stemma from quite a few of the dotted lines that may justly reflect contamination trails between families, but preclude a clearer view of the relationship between the more primitive witnesses belonging to each of them.

⁵⁴ Another argument for the presence of alternative readings in β may be that M's probable twin, Plut. 48.10, has iussit at 25.30. The precise relation between Plut. 48.11 and Plut. 48.10, however, is somewhat problematical. Textual evidence surely excludes 48.10 as the source of 48.11, yet whether it descends from it is harder to prove or rebut. As Plut. 48.10 has iussit at 25.30, either β indeed had at least this double reading (but then, as iussit is absent from 48.11, the possibility must be excluded that 48.10 is a direct descendant from 48.11), or 48.10 is somehow contaminated, and then it is very hard to prove whether it is a contaminated descendant or twin of 48.11.

⁵⁵ A detailed description of the manuscript is provided in the library's catalogue, Casarsa, L., D'Angelo, M., Scalon, C., La libreria di Guarnerio d'Artegna (Udine, 1991), 266–8Google Scholar (description by Mario D'Angelo). The manuscript opens with the pseudo-Ciceronian Fifth Catilinarian, for which it is the oldest preserved witness.

⁵⁶ In addition to the presence in both manuscripts of Lapo's quartet in the classical order, D from textual units 17 to 23 (Pridie, Vatin., Red. pop., Har. resp., Catil., Ps.-Sall. Inv., Ad Alex.) has the same order as R. Moreover, in Cluent., both break off at 41.17: see Rizzo, S., La tradizione manoscritta della «Pro Cluentio» di Cicerone (Genoa, 1979), 123–4Google Scholar and 149–50. Both also contain pseudo-Demosthenes' Ad regem Alexandrum. This text is followed only in D by pseudo-Plutarch's Institutio Traiani. For the relation of this last text to Petrarch, see Zucchelli, B., ‘Petrarca, Plutarco e l'Institutio Traiani’, in Gallo, I. (ed.), L'eredità culturale di Plutarco dall'antichità al Rinascimento (Naples, 1998), 203–27Google Scholar.

⁵⁷ Given the relatively late date of the genesis of D (compared to Petrarch's lifetime), I prefer to surmise the existence of an intermediate δ.

⁵⁸ At any rate, the common origin of R and D that has been suggested (‘Le numerose analogie, segnalate da S. Rizzo [n. 55] con il Palat. lat. 1481, fanno pensare a una comune origine dei due manoscritti,’ D'Angelo [n. 55], 268) can only be contextual, and as far as Arch. is concerned not textual, as D's readings in our text show no affinity whatsoever with γ.

⁵⁹ Ornato (n. 19), 565.

⁶⁰ Ornato (n. 19), 565–6; Rizzo (n. 56), 33; Rouse and Reeve (n. 13), 87.

⁶¹ Unless one were even to hazard the hypothesis that Petrarch himself released the β copy of Arch. during his stay in Milan (1353–61), when he dedicated himself mostly to the study of the classics, especially Cicero: see Berté (n. 12).

⁶² It goes without saying that in a very complex and layered environment like the one characterizing the transmission of Ciceronian speeches in the late fourteenth and fifteenth century, one cannot jump to conclusions, from one stemma to another, that is. My reconstruction of the transmission may, for example, seem untenably at odds with the one presented in the 1992 Teubner edition of Quinct. – the only one, to my knowledge, containing an attempt to place all witnesses into a comprehensive stemma – as Reeve derives from my Q a mass of manuscripts that in Arch. display different dependencies. This contradiction is only apparent. When Quinct. came into circulation relatively late (at the end of the fourteenth century, see Rouse and Reeve [n. 13], 87), Arch. was already around in different families, where new apographs then added Quinct. Likewise, it comes as no surprise that the numerous manuscripts that Reeve traces back to his L (Vat. lat. 2903) in Arch. are spread over three families (α, β and γ), as Arch. is absent from L and L's descendants that do contain Arch. may have added it independently and therefore from different sources.

⁶³ Novati, F. (ed.), Epistolario di Coluccio Salutati (Rome, 1891), 331–2Google Scholar: Sed ne, dum omnia quero, pluribus caream, hos vel in papyro transcribi peto: De lege frumentaria, Ad Hortensium, Pro Plancio, Pro P. Silla, De laudibus Magni Pompeii et Milonianam, quam ultimam habeo adeo corruptam et inexpletam, quod dici potest me illam penitus non habere. The order Planc., Sull., Manil., Mil. does not correspond to any of our manuscripts, but reflects the order of Petrarch's letter 12.8 to Lapo (quoted n. 7), with the only exception that there Mil. precedes the other three. It seems to make sense that Salutati knew Petrarch's letter and therefore tried to obtain the text from Petrarch's heirs, yet changed the order because of the specification he wanted to add about his own copy of the Mil. In 1370 he had already sent a copy of his Arch. to Tancredo Vergiolesi: Orationem Ciceronicam pro A. Licinio Archia egerrime manu mea exemplatam mitto (ibid. at 134).

⁶⁴ See Rizzo (n. 12) for an overview of evolving views about this matter.

⁶⁵ The bifurcation has been affirmed once more by, for example, Dominic Berry in his recent Pro Sulla edition (Cambridge, 1996), 72.

⁶⁶ The importance of Q, as the most complete witness to Petrarch's emendations and other marginal annotations, should not overshadow its textual flaws. In fact, P is a more faithful witness to γ than Q, and their common ancestor γ₃ ultimately represents only a limited part of γ.

⁶⁷ Of course, early cases of Einzelüberlieferung and manuscripts containing one or more members of the quartet, and wanting the Pro Archia, deserve more attention than has hitherto been paid to them. In due time, I intend to test my stemmatic conclusions about the Pro Archia on the transmission of the Pro Sulla, the quartet member where the Itali branch is most important for the constitutio textus.