Modern Editions

Over a hundred printed editions of the BC have been produced. The editio princeps was published by Giovanni Andrea Bussi in Rome in 1469. It established the precedent of incorporating all the war commentaries in one edition; accordingly, separate editions of the BC were extremely rare until the end of the nineteenth century (V. Brown 1972: 1-2). In 1737 Franz van Oudendorp created the first text based on the comparison of many codices, in 1847 Karl Nipperdey the first critical edition worthy of this name and the first stemma based on a systematic, though still limited, classification of codices (ibid. 6-7). Addition of authoritative manuscripts by Heinrich Meusel (1885), Alfred Holder (1898), and Pierre Fabre (1936) brought the number to eight. The editors of the best texts available today, Alfred Klotz (2nd edn. 1950) and Fabre (1936), unfortunately did not personally examine all eight codices. Virginia Brown, who did so, never realized her intention of producing a full new text (1972: preface, 9-10). Demonstrating that of the eight MSS two are derived from one other, all produced in the same French scriptorium, and one more can be eliminated as a copy of another, Brown reduces the number of authoritative MSS to five and postulates an archetype produced in a French school that ‘‘could have been written in any of the pre-Caroline scripts used in France or even in Caroline minuscules’’ (ibid. ch. 3, esp. 38-9; see also Hering 1963, critically discussed by Brown). The authoritative German commentary, written initially in the mid-nineteenth century, was repeatedly revised and updated (Kraner, Hofmann, & Meusel 1963); in the 1990s, John Carter produced a historical commentary (1991, 1993). Cynthia Damon, Gregory Bucher, and Kurt Raaflaub are currently working on a new edition and historical-philological commentary.

Little is known about the history of the text of the BC between Suetonius and the production of the pre-Carolingian archetype. Jean Andrieu (1949) has demonstrated that the work originally appeared in the three books of the modern editions, thus obviating alternative theses such as that of Klotz (1950: vi) or Will Richter (1977: 172-4), postulating an original two-book format, or that of M. Chenerie (1974), that the work was initially planned with an annalistic structure (against which see Boatwright 1988: 37 with n. 25).