Michael D. Reeve

Poggio discovered Lucretius and from Konstanz sent to Italy a commissioned copy, the Poggianus, whose relationship to O (s. ix) remains controversial. After a historical and methodological preamble, most of the Italian manuscripts are shown to derive from x, a source originally more like O than any edition reveals but progressively adjusted by conjecture. Non-x readings shared with O occur in the family of FC, which proves to be a contaminated descendant of x, and in various sets of notes; Pomponio Leto seems to have played a part in the diffusion of such readings. An attempt is made to determine whether x was the Poggianus itself or a copy, what sources the non-x readings had, and how much of the Italian tradition goes back to O; new evidence is offered about Mainz, the home of O in 1479. Attention then turns to the corrections in O, on which a subsidiary dispute about the relationship between the Poggianus and O has hinged. Much of the argument is conducted as a debate with the latest editor, Enrico Flores.