Library › Latin: Lyric & Elegy › Versus in Subscriptione Codicis
A short hexameter poem written by Cyprian, bishop of Toulon (d. c. 546), as a subscription at the end of a manuscript of Hegesippus, the Latin adaptation of Josephus’s Jewish War. Addressing a revered father who had commissioned the work, Cyprian says he has carried out the command as well as he could, correcting the text and marking the punctuation and ambiguous passages, and asks pardon for any faults.
Cyprian was a disciple of Caesarius of Arles and one of the authors of Caesarius’s Life. His verses are a valuable witness to the copying and correcting of books in sixth-century Gaul and to the care that bishops gave to establishing reliable texts. Their irregular metre also reflects the changes in Latin pronunciation of the period. The poem is a rare personal statement from a sixth-century editor about his work.
About this edition. The Latin text comes from Musisque Deoque, the digital archive of Latin poetry (edition: V. Ussani, 1932), licensed CC BY-SA. Every word has been analyzed with LatinCy, a neural language model for Latin — click or tap any word for its dictionary form, part of speech, and complete morphology, together with the full entry from Lewis & Short’s A Latin Dictionary.