De nova Philostrati editione a Rudolpho Stefec parata disputatiuncula

The contribution is a study on the tradition and text of Philostratus’ Vitae Sophistarum based on the recent edition of Stefec. This edition profits from the advancements of the last two centuries both in the field of textual criticism and in that of palaeography, since until now the reference text had been the one established by Kayser in his three editions (1838; 1844; 1870-71), which however had been conducted with pre-Lachmannian criteria. In the first part of the contribution we retrace the process that led the publisher to reconstruct the relationships between the manuscripts and to reconfigure the codices into two families, instead of three: the publisher shows that those that according to Kayser were part of the second (A, Ma, R, O, Pb, He, Ha) and of the third family (P, G, Pe, N, La, Pa, Pc, Pb) actually belong to two branches of the same family, the second, whose stemma codicum is elaborated by Stefec in gradual stages in which he identifies and takes into account also the cases of contamination. Stefec’s studies on the manuscript tradition of Philostratus led the publisher to make, from an ecdotic point of view, quite different choices from his predecessors. The discussion of these choices is the subject of the second part of this article. The appendix contains a list of the passages in which Kayser and Stefec’s edd. differ.