Talk:Vatican Mythographer

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A fact from Vatican Mythographer appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know? column on February 9, 2007.
Wikipedia


[edit] Chronology?

It would be helpful if more information could be provided on the dates of the three mythographers. Haiduc 07:42, 15 September 2007 (UTC)

Only dates of the manuscripts can be assessed, giving the very broad termini in the article. "Nevio Zorzetti places the original text of the First Vatican Mythographer between the last quarter of the ninth century and the third quarter of the eleventh." --Wetman 09:41, 15 September 2007 (UTC)
Thanks. That still leaves me wondering about the second and the third mythographer. Do you also get the sense that the materials are in the Vatican library but are not accessible? Haiduc 00:04, 16 September 2007 (UTC)
The "Second" and "Third" Mythographers are ghostly personalities, deductions drawn from the existence of additional material in mss. other than the one inspected by Mai. The Vatican? Any further material possibly lurking in the Vatican Library will have been bound in a hitherto unrecognized miscellany that has been catalogued under its first, major text— one that is otherwise well represented in numerous mss and so not very interesting and therefore has often not been looked at in decades. Or it will be in an unrecognized palimpsest that has been scraped so clean that only modern techniques will make it evident that an earlier text is actually there at all. Or it will have been chopped about and used to stiffen a binding. Slender chances. But stuff does turn up. I'd focus my hopes on a papyrus fragment of an Alexandrian copy of the missing last volume of Bibliotheke. After all we got a new poem by Sappho in 2005. Or retrieving the "missing" Latin library in unexplored parts of Villa of the Papyri: was Calpurnius Piso such a snob he just didn't have any Latin books? --Wetman 08:10, 16 September 2007 (UTC)
That excavation has been blocked for years, and not for lack of funds. I have a strong suspicion that after 2000 years of successful censorship, the last thing the Vatican wants is an ancient library unearthed. Haiduc 12:41, 16 September 2007 (UTC)