Reading, rereading and annotation Cicero in the Eastern Roman Empire: towards a new edition of P.Ryl. III 477 (div. in Caec. 33-37; 44-46)

The importance of P.Ryl. III 477 – a fragmentary bifolium from a papyrus-codex in half-uncial of V A.D. – does not simply lie in being one of the most ancient witnesses of the Divinatio in Caecilium: it is above all a fascinating expression of the ‘lives’ that a manuscripts of an auctor like Cicero could have in the bilingual cultural milieux of Late Antiquity Egypt. Acquired in 1920 and published by Colin Henderson Roberts in his Catalogue of Greek and Latin Papyriin the John Rylands Library Manchesterin 1938, the P.Ryl. III 477 contains a few paragraphs of the Divinatio(33-37; 44-46). What is worth noting is that the Ciceronian text is heavily annotated both in Latin and in Greek, both in the margins of the pages and in the interlinear space. An in-depth and direct examination of the papyrus let us identify four different hands (and so, readers and/or commentators) besides the scribe himself: the first bilingual one annotated heavily the margins with comments and paraphrases in Greekand mostly emphasizing elements linked to the juridical praxis, but it also intervened twice in Latin; a second one is a ‘philological’ hand which wrote only in Latin both in the margins and in the interlinear spaces, which wrote accentuation and punctuation marks and sometimes corrected the scribe’s text; a third hand wrote a few of Greek comments in the margins, while a fourth one recopied the adjective scopuloso (Cic. in Caec. 36) in the higher section of the upper margin of the page.Therefore, Cicero was read (and reread) and annotated not only because he aimed literary interest but also because he was used as repertory of situations linked to the juridical praxis.