Vergilius Augusteus

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hat makes the Vergilius Augusteus so famous? The philologist will answer that it is one of the very extant copies of the Vergilian text. However, at the same time he will have to admit that the modest number of verses – 284 out of originally nearly 13,000 – limits its importance as a textual witness considerably. In fact, had the fragments never appeared, it would have made little difference to the current critical edition of Vergil's opera maiora.

The palaeographer will feature the Vergilius Augusteus as one of the few remains of a rare form of Late-Classical majuscule script. The Capitalis quadrata however, being a somewhat artificial branch on the tree of Latin handwriting, this particular form of lettering was of short duration and did not notably influence the development that followed.

For the art historian the Vergilius Augusteus is a document of primary historical importance, since Istanbul fifteen decorated letters mark the beginning of the development which in due time would lead to the virtually numberless initial in thousands upon thousands of Medieval manuscripts. Thus, it may be said that the greatest importance of the Vergilius Augusteus resides in its decoration, for all the latter's seeming modesty."

The fact that we know only three manuscripts in Capitalis quadrata – all of which are fragmentary – makes it difficult to date them by using paleographic criteria; particularly since the relative chronology of the rustica manuscripts, with which they are most comparable, is by no means certain. So far the Augusteus has been placed in a time period extending over several centuries. Vetustissimus – extremely ancient – was the catalogue entry of the Vatican library for the two double leaves bequeathed by Orsini. And when G. H. Pertz first ventured to propose a more precise period, he seriously believed the manuscript to be contemporary with the poet's emperor friend, and therefore gave it the name of Augustus.

However influential the judgment of the most experienced historians of ancient hand-writing may be, the last word as regards the dating of the Vergilius Augusteus belongs not to paleography but to art history. It is only thanks to the decorative initials, which constitute a special claim to glory for the Vergilius Augusteus, that we are able to anchor the manuscript with some certainty to other datable monuments. The initials, four or five times as large as the ordinary letters, decorate the upper left corner of each column of writing, no matter whether the word so distinguished stands at the beginning of a new sentence or not. This system had already struck Dom Ruinart as noteworthy in the fragment from the Bibliotheca Pithoeana. The custom of enlarging the first letter of each page or column is, as Lowe was first to point out, characteristic of the most ancient Latin manuscripts, even more so of those from the fourth to fifth centuries than of those from the fifth to sixth – another reason to place the date of the Vergilius Augusteus earlier rather than later.

The Vergilius Augusteus is not only the oldest manuscript we know with ornamental letters, but it is also the only one so decorated for which a dating as early as the fourth century can be considered. We must wait another century before once again finding examples of that blending of script and ornament which is characteristic of the decorative initial. For only in the sixth century did this form of book ornamentation find a somewhat broader basis, and even then it was far from being generally accepted at first. The isolated position of the Vergilius Augusteus within the history of ancient book decoration has been a stumbling-block to many researchers, causing them to disallow such an early dating of the manuscript.

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