The name “papyri” includes a vast range of ancient documents, such as fragments of papyrus, fragments of parchment, tabulae ceratae, and ostraca.
Updated information on papyrus finds for Virgil is now available on the CEDOPAL Mertens-Pack3 database project at the University of Liège; the contributions by Cavenaile and Seider also offer useful overviews on the subject.
The fragments of papyrus rolls containing sections of Virgil provide an interesting contribution to the direct transmission of his poems. A relevant number of witnesses, datable between the first and fourth century CE, were discovered in Egypt and Palestine, thus revealing that the interest and knowledge of the poet’s works was widespread even in the Greek-speaking provinces of the Roman Empire. The fragments derive either from single sheets or from books: none of these remnants is likely to derive from a papyrus roll; the handwriting on display may be of different graphic types (capital, uncial, cursive).
The most ancient papyrus examples go back to the first or second century and consist of fragments of single sheets with schoolchildren’s exercises of grammar and penmanship: some are attempts to write literary texts reworking lines from the Aeneid; some others contain repetitions of a single line, often selected because it contains almost all letters of the alphabet, in order to practice the writing of elegant ancient cursive. A famous sample of papyrus containing handwriting exercises is provided by PHawara24, a picture of which is available on MNAMON or on the website that collects all the Papyri Hawara.
Notably, some fragments are bilingual: the text of the Aeneid is split into two columns, one containing the original Latin text, and the other exhibiting a non-literary Greek translation. These fragments were part of medium-sized (almost 30 cm in both height and width), unadorned codices in papyrus or parchment, produced in or for schools; they might have been used by Greek-speaking citizens who wished to enter an administrative career, for which a knowledge of Latin was mandatory. A few codex fragments distribute text and translation into four columns in order to save space: they are written in common cursive and were probably meant for private use. Some fragments may be connected to large-format codices, identifiable with luxury editions of Virgil’s works or with copies intended for scholars, although it is occasionally difficult to ascertain the original purpose of isolated specimens.
The Antinopolis Papyrus 29 (Pack3 n. 2937), for example, consists of five fragments belonging to a single sheet and containing the end of Georgics 2 and the beginning of Georgics 3: the original codex was of a large format (the average dimensions being 37.5 x 25 cm, according to Seider), with margins wide enough to receive a commentary, and with headings and explicit in red. The codex, probably a luxury item for a learned Middle Eastern collector, may have been produced in the fourth-fifth century in Egypt, where it was found (see Petrucci), or in Syria (Lowe). It is written in uncial, a script designed exclusively for book copying, and contains some interesting interlinear glosses and an argumentum to Georgics 3.
Texts inscribed on makeshift materials, such as ostraca or wax tablets, may also preserve noteworthy documents. Some remarkable handwriting worksheets, going back to the first or second century CE, were discovered in Vindolanda (Chesterholm, close to the Scottish border): a line from Virgil seems even to have been enriched by some sort of illumination (Tab. Vindoland. 2.121, Pack3 n.3026.82).
The corpus of 35 papyrus witnesses of Virgil’s poems, recently edited by Scappaticcio, proves, on the one hand, the widespread notoriety of Virgil among different social classes, even in the marginal areas of the Roman Empire. On the other hand, it demonstrates that the poet’s works were usually engaged with not only by students and schoolmasters in primary and secondary education, but also by learned and upper class readers.