The colloquium Harleianum offers lessThe colloquium Harleianum offers less in the way of coherent, connected text than the Part Title colloquia and perhaps for that reason has largely been neglected. Nevertheless it is of vital importance for understanding the history and transmission of all the colloquia, and it contains some of the best material about ancient social relations.

SOURCES FOR THE TEXT

The colloquium is named after the manuscript in which it is primarily preserved, which dates from c . 900, but a few fragments can also be found in a much older papyrus, and some more material is preserved in a seventeenth-century notebook written by Claudius Salmasius. Two other manuscripts have been argued to contain extracts from this colloquium, but the remains they preserve are too mangled to tell us anything about the original readings of the text.

THE HARLEY MANUSCRIPT

The primary source for the colloquium is the manuscript after which it is named (H): British Library Harleianus 5642, which was copied around AD 900 (probably in St Gall, Switzerland) and contains the colloquium on folios 29r–33v. This manuscript also contains other Hermeneumata material belonging to the Leidensia family, as well as extracts from the grammar of Dositheus. It is in general not a very good manuscript: much of what it contains overlaps with Leiden Voss. Gr. Q. 7 (the main manuscript of the Hermeneumata Leidensia) and/or Sangallensis 902 (the primary manuscript of Dositheus’ grammar), and comparison with these sources suggests that the material in Harleianus 5642 is frequently garbled and/or incomplete. For most texts, therefore, editors prefer other manuscripts (Krumbacher (1884: 354) commented ‘im allgemein aber ist der Harleianus nur mit der grössten Vorsicht zu benutzen’ and Goetz (1892a: xxxv) referred to it as ‘codex pessime habitus’), but in the case of the colloquium we have no choice but to rely on this one, for the other sources cover only a very small percentage of the text.

The manuscript is undecorated but carefully written, with four columns (two in each language) on each page and reasonably generous outer margins. At the start of the manuscript the Greek is transliterated, but from the middle of folio 4r it is written in Greek uncials; the Latin is consistently in minuscule. The words are usually left undivided in both languages.