Verg. Aen. 2.311–12 iam proximus ardet | Vcalegon. This striking phrase is twice echoed, as commentators observe. The burning neighbour Ucalegon reappears in Juv. 3.198–201 iam poscit aquam, iam friuola transfert | Vcalegon … | ultimus ardebit quem …. And the words proximus ardet reappear in Hor. Epist. 1.18.84 paries cum proximus ardet.

It has been the fate of Corippus' Iohannis to survive in one manuscript, the fourteenth-century Trivultianus, and to find one competent editor. The first edition of the Iohannis was published in 1820 by P. Mazzucchelli. It contained a few notes, in content mainly geographical and ethnographical and useless for the interpretation of the text; it remains the only commentary in existence.

Barrett has given a brief account of the affiliations of Hn with the manuscripts which he has collated. He derives his information about the readings of Hn from the reports of nineteenth-century editors, and he does not report this manuscript in his apparatus criticus. He concludes that ‘In three instances Haun. has the truth, or an approximation to it, where the rest of our tradition is at fault … in each case the reading can be accounted for as a lucky (...) accident, and so I judge it in fact to be.’ Of the other four manuscripts, which editors have not collated, he gives no account. ‘From a number of readings cited by Turyn it appears that they are all more or less closely related to Haun.’ K. Matthiessen has voiced a mild regret that Barrett did not settle the question by collation. I have collated these five manuscripts from photographs or microfilms. (shrink)