and two long S letters – ſ
ſ
–; ‘Accessi confinium mortis.’ – ‘I reached the threshold of death.’].
The passage can be transcribed as follows:Having had the pleasure of looking up quotes in the oldest surviving versions of various texts (e.g. the New Testament, both in the Vulgate and in the Codex Vaticanus; Vaticanus Graecus 325 – Porphyry; Liber divinorum operum – Hildegardis Bingensis or Saint Hildegard), on Monday evening I decided to take up the challenge of doing so with the fictional account of Lucius’s initiation into the mysteries* of Isis. So four words typed in Yippy (https://www.yippy.com/search?query=%22Apuleius%22+Metamorphoses+++oldest+manuscript) were enough to allow me to find out that the oldest surviving manuscript, Plut.68.2, was kept in Florence, at the Laurentian Library (Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana). When I saw that this library had quite a well-stocked up ‘digital repository’ (http://mss.bmlonline.it), I knew that I would get to locate the above sentences in a digitised copy of the oldest surviving Latin manuscript most probably before going to bed.
However, the manuscript (Plut.68.2 http://mss.bmlonline.it/Catalogo.aspx?Shelfmark=Plut.68.2, which had been preserved at the monastery of Monte Cassino until it was spotted there by a Renaissance manuscript hunter, probably stolen by that same person and subsequently brought to Florence – more here) also contains the Annals and Histories of Tacitus as well as other works by Apuleius (De Magia and Florida). As such, I should have paid more attention to the last two words of the rather antiquated bibliographic description in Latin (‘III. Eiusdem [Apuleii Platonici Madaurensis] Metamorphoseon, seu de asino aureo libri XI praevio prologo’) because some of the pages I looked at initially in volume III were not from The Metamorphoses, but from Florida).
An extra difficulty is that the text was written during the eleventh century in a script specific to the southern Italian region known as Duchy of Benevento – hence the name of Beneventan script – which comprised the scriptoria at Monte Cassino, Bari and Benevento. What is more, not only does this script rely heavily on abbreviations, but it does not shy away from having words joined together. As I did not study mediaeval Latin palaeography in university (and therefore have very little knowledge in that field), I had to resort to the simple, but time-consuming method of spotting unusual words in the manuscript and then to looking them up (ctrl+f) in one of the electronic versions of the Latin text available on the Internet (e.g. http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/apuleius/apuleius11.shtml; http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Apul.+Met.+11.23&fromdoc=Perseus%3Atext%3A2008.01.0502; https://www.hs-augsburg.de/~harsch/Chronologia/Lspost02/Apuleius/apu_me11.html).
Eventually I found the page I was looking for, catalogued as ‘182v’. Below is a link that goes directly to the picture of the page** with the ‘chapters’ from book 11 of Apuleius’s Metamorphoses I was interested in (i.e. chapters 23 and 24) and which is displayed on the website of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana:
http://mss.bmlonline.it/GetImagePrev.ashx?id=AWOItV6GI1A4r7GxMMC1&n=370
[To zoom in or out of the picture or part of the picture, the URL to use is http://mss.bmlonline.it/s.aspx?Id=AWOIyDfWI1A4r7GxMM1-&c=III.%20Eiusdem%20[Apuleii%20Platonici%20Madaurensis%20Metamorphoseon,%20seu%20de%20asino%20aureo%20libri%20XI%20praevio%20prologo#/oro/370]
This excerpt (unfortunately written in
a script rather uneasy to read for an untrained eye, I must repeat) is
to be found in the bottom part of the LEFT
column, starting from the large H that sports some kind of back-slash
bar (an abbreviation I am not familiar with) – incidentally, almost
level with the line ending with ‘Accessi’ [with the uncial
and two long S letters – ſ
ſ
–; ‘Accessi confinium mortis.’ – ‘I reached the threshold of death.’].
The passage can be transcribed as follows:
Igitur audi, sed crede, quae vera sunt. Accessi confinium mortis et calcato Proserpinae limine per omnia vectus elementa remeavi; nocte media vidi solem candido coruscantem lumine; deos inferos et deos superos accessi coram et adoravi de proxumo. Ecce tibi rettuli quae, quamvis audita, ignores tamen necesse est: ergo quod solum potest sine piaculo ad profanorum intellegentias enuntiari, referam.
Mane factum est, et perfectis sollemnibus processi duodecim sacratus stolis, habitu quidem religioso satis, sed effari de eo nullo vinculo prohibeor, quippe [...]
In (sixteenth century) English (that of William Adlington) revised over a century ago (by Stephen Gaselee; see https://archive.org/stream/goldenassbeingme00apuliala/goldenassbeingme00apuliala_djvu.txt), this gives:
Listen therefore, and believe it to be true. Thou shalt understand that I approached near unto hell, even to the gates of Proserpine, and after that I was ravished throughout all the elements, I returned to my proper place: about midnight I saw the sun brightly shine, I saw likewise the gods celestial and the gods infernal, before whom I presented myself and worshipped them. Behold now have I told thee, which although thou hast heard, yet it is necessary that thou conceal it; wherefore this only will I tell, which may be declared without offence for the understanding of the profane.
When morning came and that the solemnities were finished, I came forth sanctified with twelve stoles and in a religious habit, whereof I am not forbidden to speak, considering […]
[For a translation a little more modern, click here.]
Having not read the rest of book 11, I shall refrain from making any comment as to whether or not ‘Accessi confinium mortis’ constitutes a genuine near-death experience other than a little earlier in book 11 the initiation process is described by the following phrase: ‘ipsamque traditionem ad instar voluntariae mortis’ (‘and that undergoing such an initiation was like a voluntary death’ – my translation).
Hopefully, the above will have demonstrated to you, dear reader, that, thanks to the efforts of some software corporations (Google and Microsoft), of a foundation (the Internet Archive) as well as of those academic institutions that decided to digitise their rare book collections in-house, the first editions or even the manuscripts of many European canonical literary works can now be found online. Furthermore, I hope that browsing through the pages of digitised pictures of mediaeval manuscripts will make us ponder the amount of work that was required for such masterpieces to be produced in the first place, as well as remind us of how lucky we are to be living in the age of the electronic text.
*This refers to any of the secret religious initiation rites that would take place in either Egypt or in the Greek world in antiquity, not to any secular secret, nor to an obscure or unsolved point (be it past or contemporary), not even to any literary work of a fictional nature (say, a thriller versus a mediaeval Mystery play).
** This because Italian copyright laws do not allow for unauthorised reproduction of pictures belonging to an institution – see the bottom of https://sexycodicology.net/blog/laurentian-library-manuscripts.
The Britannica’s entry on The Metamorphoses, as archived at the Internet Archive.
https://sexycodicology.net/blog/codicology/medieval-scripts/beneventan-script/
Elias Avery Lowe [Boris Johnson’s maternal great-grandfather], The Beneventan script: a history of the South Italian minuscule, Oxford, 1914, available either from https://archive.org/details/aey3547.0001.001.umich.edu or https://archive.org/details/beneventanscript00loweuoft.
