Virgil’s works became “Classics” soon after their composition: according to Suetonius, Gramm. 16, a freedman of Atticus by the name of Q. Caecilius Epirota used to lecture on the Aeneid in public while the poet was still alive.
Quickly spreading throughout the Roman Empire, Virgil’s opera soon became a “universal text” (Petrucci): as a dominating textbook it was read, copied, and memorized by generations of students, and widely circulated in cheap editions which were often full of mistakes. Starting from the fourth century CE, Virgil’s poetry began to be treated as a reference text, collected in books for educated readers, or in elegant copies to be exhibited as luxury objects.
Virgil has been read and copied in different social and cultural contexts, for various reasons, and in order to comply with manifold requests from Antiquity to the advent of typography in the Western world. Geographically, this influence covered all the Roman Empire and later those areas of Europe where Medieval and Humanistic erudition mostly influenced the developing culture.
Thanks to their prompt and widespread popularity, the Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid have come down to us through more than 1,000 manuscripts (mainly copies from the Humanistic age). Such abundance cannot be found for any other author of ancient Roman literature, and yet it represents only a minimal part of the thousands of rolls and codices produced in the 1,500 years between the publication of Virgil’s poems and the advent of the first printed editions of them.
The following sections offer an overview of the direct and indirect sources of Virgil’s text from Antiquity to Renaissance Humanism, illustrating their material features and the historical-literary value of the various sources, with a focus on their importance as witnesses of Virgilian text. Special attention is given to new perspectives of study and research on Virgil’s manuscript tradition.