Abstract

The article is concerned with the relation between Lorenzo Valla’s Latin translation of Thucydides and the Thucydidean scholiastic corpus. We know from g.B. alberti’s studies that the text of Valla’s version is based on two lost greek manuscripts, called ξ and ρ. in 1985 alberti also suggested that Valla had used scholia transmitted by the recentiores X and Pl. in the present work i examine book i of the Historiae in order to provide arguments for his hypothesis. in the first part i demonstrate that some features of Valla’s translation imply he made use of the scholia. i list places where scholia were transcribed into the Latin text and where Valla’s rendering of the greek original results from the exegesis proposed by the scholium. The examples i give concern scholia from the corpus found in Hude’s critical edition. in the second part i deal with the scholiastic corpus of Pl. i first give a description of the manuscript and then list places, not mentioned by alberti, where the translator was influenced by scholia of the codex Parisinus, which i collated using a microfilm copy. since none of these Pl-scholia is to be found in H, we can assume Valla didn’t find them in his lost model ξ, from which H descends. There is no evidence the translator made a direct use of Pl, but we can state he had a source, different from ξ and very close to Pl, where he found the scholia to Thucydides