Massimo Planude, la Suda e i proverbi. La raccolta paremiografica nel Vat. Urb. gr. 125, Suda α 3337 Adler e lo Ius naufragii

This contribution focuses on a very important witness of the ‘philological’ and erudite activity of Maximus Planudes, namely MS Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Urbinas Graecus 125 (dating in the 1290s). There, a collection of proverbs with a provisional and incomplete appearance is transmitted, more specifically on fols. 10v–11r, i.e. on the third-last and penultimate page of the initial quaternion inserted by Planudes himself as a flyleaf, with remnants, sketches and drafts that had not found a place in a book and were recovered as safekeeping for the body of our manuscript. The essay first analyses the contribution of the learned monk to the transmission of the Paroemiographi Graeci and then it focuses on the small anthology of the Urbinate codex. This is an alphabetical series containing 87 proverbs all relating to the letter alpha. The source from which Planudes draws this small collection —undoubtedly the result of provisional work that was later shelved— cannot be identified with one of the works included in the Corpus Paroemiographorum Graecorum. Here we are dealing rather with proverbs contained in the Suda lexicon, in whose rubrics quotations from the paroemiographical tradition, usually introduced by the indication καὶ παροιμία, are notoriously attested quite often within the explanation of the lemma. More specifically, on the two surviving pages in the Urbinate codex a selection from the proverbs included between headings α 301 and α 3798 of the Suda is transmitted. As a specimen, we present an example that appears instructive in investigating more closely the working method of our maître d’œuvre. This is No. 80 of the series of proverbs identified here —“From a sinking ship” and on the so-called Ius naufragii—, which is found only in the Suda and in a later gnomologist (Macarius Chrysocephalus). In a careful philological examination, the divergences that emerge from the comparison between the text of the Urbinate and that of Ada Adler’s edition of the Suda (1928–1938) are discussed: these variations and modifications offer us a notable and exemplary glimpse of Planudes’ modus operandi and of his teaching-related activity.