Medieval and Early Modern Greek Manuscripts : Pindar's Olympic Odes and Lykophron's Alexandra

Medieval and Early Modern Greek Manuscripts

<p style='text-align: justify;'>This manuscript, probably copied in the mid-16th century, contains ten of <i>Pindar's Olympic Odes and Lykophron's Alexandra</i>. The Odes present here are the first ten of the set of fourteen surviving poems composed by the Theban poet in the 5th century BCE to celebrate victors at the Olympic games. The <i>Alexandra</i> is a long poem framed as a prophecy of Cassandra, relating the deeds of heroes of the Trojan War, traditionally attributed to the 4th-3rd-century BCE tragedian Lykophron of Chalkis.</p><p style='text-align: justify;'>These two items of content were copied by different scribes and separated by a long run of blank folios. Both were written on widely spaced lines in order to accommodate interlinear and marginal scholia, which clarify and comment on the text. The scholia accompanying the <i>Alexandra</i> belong to the collection organised by the 12th-century Byzantine scholar John Tzetzes.</p><p style='text-align: justify;'>The presence in a Greek note on <a href='' onclick='store.loadPage(8);return false;'>f. i verso</a> of a name apparently containing the Venetian honorific Miser suggests that the manuscript may have spent time in a Greek population under Venetian rule.</p><p style='text-align: justify;'>Dr Christopher Wright</p>