[Greek Prose and Verse on the Labors of Hercules].

Forms part of the Kenneth Willis Clark Collection of Greek Manuscripts (David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University)

Format: Manuscript codex.

Title supplied by cataloger.

Layout: Written in 1 column of 23 lines; ruled on the recto side with only the outline of the ruling space marked (no ruling for the lines of text).

Script: A neat minuscule written in black ink, now faded brown, with glosses in faded red ink. Titles also in a faded red ink. By the same scribe as Bodmer MSS 3 and 64 and Yale University, Beinecke 244.

Decoration: Faded red ornamenal uncial initial on fol. 1r; ornamental tailpiece in a black ink traced with a red ink (fol. 31r); initial letters in red and some casual swash "S" running patterns between sections of the text.

Title cataloged from existing description.

This interesting collection of unusual texts was at one time part of an anthology of classical and Byzantine Greek for the instruction of a student of the early post-Byzantine period. Plays by Aeschylus and Euripides also belonged to the same anthology. The longest item in the present volume (fol. 1-31) is a series of texts which range in length from 15 to 80 closely written lines of prose and which are concerned mostly with ethics (Drury's title for the volume was Anonymi Ethica) but also with mythology and philology. The glossator has written a title του̃ ̔υπάτου τω̃ν φιλοσόφων (transliterated: tou Hypatou tōn philosophōn) at the head of fol. 1. This is probably an attribution to the eleventh-century writer, Michael Psellus, who was known by various honorific titles, such as 'the highest philosopher'. The work, not likely by Psellus, is known to him in two other manuscripts: Paris: Bibl. Nat. Supplément gr. 58, fol. 40r-69v and Naples: Biblioteca Brancancciana IV.A.5, fol. 208v-228v (for the latter see Elpidio Mioni, Catalogo di manoscritti greci existenti nelle biblioteche italiene. [Rome] : Istituto Poligrafico dello Stato, Libreria dello Stato, [1964]). The remaining texts in the volume are a poem in 'political' verse on the Christian faith addessed by Psellus to the Emperor Michael Ducas (fol. 31v-32v; an abridged version of the poem printed in Migne) and the prose work on the Labors of Hercules by the fourteeth-century chartophylax of Bulgaria Joannes Pediasimus (fol. 34v-51v, with interlinear gloss and sections of continuous commentary).

Binding: Early nineteenth-century light brown morocco by Charles Lewis with the arms of Henry Drury, gilt on upper and lower covers with edges gilt.