Herodotus Beyond Byzantium: The Plethonian Recension of Herodotus between Mistra and the Italian Renaissance

This paper is devoted to the last generation of Byzantine scholarship on Herodotus and its reception in Renaissance Italy, through a sub-family of recentiores derived from Plut. Gr. 70.6 (siglum ‘T’), the manuscript of the Histories which Gemistos Plethon edited, rewrote, and supplemented over the final decades of his life as a teacher in Mistra. I present my ongoing work in reconstructing the full stemma of some 25 manuscripts derived from T. These were copied, commissioned, read, and annotated in various places – including Mistra, Constantinople, Rome and Venice – by various political, literary and religious figures, including Cardinal Bessarion, Laonicus Chalcocondyles, Michael Kritoboulos, John Moschos, John Plousiadenos, Aristoboulos Apostoles, and Demetrios Rhalles Kabakes. In this talk, I focus in particular on two areas of work in progress. First, a sub-group of manuscripts from the T-family which circulated in Venice in the final years of the century and were used inter alia in establishing the text of the 1502 Aldine editio princeps of Herodotus. Second, the annotations left in the margins of another Herodotus manuscript (Vat. Gr. 1359) in the years after 1480 by the crypto-pagan Byzantine statesman Kabakes, then a ‘Spartan’ aristocrat living in impecunious Roman exile. In Rome, Kabakes maintained strong links to the exiled imperial family and initially moved in the circle of Cardinal Bessarion and subsequently, along with his son, maintained strong connection with the Curia. The surprisingly personal marginalia and heliolatric liturgy which he left in his Herodotus manuscript reveals his close engagement with Herodotus’ account of the Persian Wars against the backdrop of the Ottoman conquests.