“Arouse the dead”: Mai, Leopardi, and Cicero's commonwealth in Restoration Italy

TL;DRAbstract

On December 23, 1819, Monsignor Angelo Mai (not to become a cardinal until 1838 as head of the secretariat De propaganda fide), the recently appointed keeper of the Vatican Library, sent a letter to his employer, Pope Pius VII, to announce important discoveries that he had made in two manuscripts in the library. One of them (Vaticanus Latinus 5750) contained portions of the letters of Fronto, of the so-called Bobbio scholia on Cicero's orations, of Symmachus, and of Ulfila's Gothic Bible: these were all palimpsests, the lower (erased) script of parchments that had then been recopied with the Acts of the Council of Chalcedon. Although the texts found were new, the manuscript in fact was one with which Mai was familiar: he had found the rest of the same book a few years earlier in the Ambrosian Library in Milan. The second manuscript, however, was new to him, and he gave it pride of place in his letter: under a copy of Augustine's Enarrationes in Psalmos (on Psalms 119–140) he found 151

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