Abstract

Aristophanes' Peace is preserved in ten manuscripts, the oldest and most complete of which are the tenth-century Ravennas 429 and the eleventh-century Venetus Marcianus 474 . A third manuscript, Venetus Marcianus 475 , is almost certainly a direct copy of V and can therefore be eliminated. The seven remaining manuscripts of the play, along with the Aldine edition of 1498, share numerous variant readings, as well as lacunae at 948–1011 and 1076b, and can accordingly be described as a family. As I will argue in detail below, the stemmatic relationship among the members of this family can be most economically represented as shown in Figure 1