The Manuscripts of Aristophanes, Knights (I)

The present study of the manuscripts of the Knights arose out of the preparation of a text of the scholia for a forthcoming edition. The completion of a collation of all the manuscripts for the scholia seemed a suitable occasion for extending the inquiry and re-examining our manuscript tradition in both text and scholia, especially as the scholia in a manuscript, provided they come from the same source as the text, can often reveal facts that might escape an investigator who confined himself to the text. The scholia are far greater in bulk than the text, and scribes are often less careful and so more self-revealing in scholia; so that both from the quantitative and qualitative points of view scholia are important for the student of the tradition.