Prefatory Information | |
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We were familiar with Olivieri's Melothesia, having consulted it years ago. Wanting to re-examine it and not finding a hard copy after an initial search, we turned to the national libraries. But, alas, everything had changed: the catalogues are "managed" by the Ministry of Culture. According to the catalogues available online, our Melothesia was preserved in several libraries, including the National Library of Naples. Since, after sending a few emails, we were unable to obtain any response, we turned to the Braidense Library in Milan. The reply arrived, but it was negative: the surviving copies of the Melothesia were only in Florence and Naples. From Florence, we were unfortunately informed that the copy had been missing since 1966, probably lost following the disastrous flooding of the Arno. That left only Naples. Does the Reader perhaps believe that our request was successful? No! Insisting would have been useless, given that all email correspondence may be read by the staff of all the connected libraries; in other words, all the librarians in all the libraries could read what we were looking for.
Being, by conviction matured over time, determinists, we had calmly resigned ourselves. However, by decree of the stars, we found ourselves in possession of an almost worn but still perfectly legible photocopy of this Melothesia, which, by virtue of its value and rarity, we have decided to republish for the benefit of those, albeit few, students or scholars who wish to benefit from it
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Alessandro Olivieri (Senigallia, 15 November 1872 - † Naples, 11 October 1950) was one of the greatest classicists of the last century: a true philologist, unrivalled today. Being a great expert on codices, of which he was an avid reader, he was invited by Franz Cumont to collaborate on the Catalogus codicum astrologorum Graecorum thanks to his expertise; so he participated in the edition of the volumes dedicated to the codices Florentini, Veneti, and Italici. He was also editor for Teubner of the Περὶ τοῦ καθ' Ὅμηρον ἀγαθοῦ βασιλέως (1909) and the Περὶ παρρησίας (1914), from the Herculanean papyri of Philodemus. In 1915, he published the Lamellae aureae Orphicae in the Kleine Texte collection. Called upon to collaborate on the Corpus medicorum Graecorum, he edited the volume VIII.1 of the collection in 1935, i.e. Aetii Amideni libri medicinales I÷IV (pp. xviii-408), and a few weeks before his death he had the joy of seeing the completion of the second volume, interrupted by the war, of books V÷VIII (pp. iv-554), with the publication of which the Berlin Academy intended to celebrate its 250th anniversary (for further information, see the obituary by Raffaele Cantarella in “Aevum” 24 [1950] p. 511 ff.).
In proposing this new edition of the Melothesia to the Reader, we have corrected the rare misprints that occurred in the citations of the sources. We have also tried to trace the editions used, which are no longer those consulted today; for example, Olivieri cites Ptolemy according to the edition of Giuntini (1581), because at that time a critical edition of the Quadripartitum was not yet available, which saw the light for the types of Teubner in 1940, so that, where the correspondence of the chapters was different, we added in brackets the references to the recent edition by Hübner; again, the note 65 of p. 21 appears in the original as follows: «Abbozzo di una dottrina dei colori (Werke Iub. Xl p. 71.)», while in this edition you read: «Abbozzo di una dottrina dei colori, in Goethe's Sämtliche Werke, Jubiläums-Ausgabe, 40. Band, Stuttgart-Berlin 1907, p. 71.». In two cases, referred to in the notes, we were unable to trace the edition consulted. Some of our notes are always preceded by “Nota del curatore.”, while the insertion here and there of the Greek text, where it seemed appropriate, is not reported. On p. 40 we have added, for convenience, the list of reference texts marked by lowercase and uppercase letters of the alphabet, which in the introduction follow a different order. In standardising the citations, we have compiled a list of them in the form of a bibliography (p. 41), where the editions used by the author are detailed. We have completed the title of the quoted literature and integrated the place and/or year of publication, where these were missing.
In the "Memorie", each paper is preceded by a title page and a blank page, so that the text always begins with an odd page numbered on the outside, while inside, in square brackets, the numbering of the individual paper is given. To facilitate the retrieval of a place in the Melothesia cited elsewhere, we have indicated in the course of the text the point where the page changes number in the following way: e.g. |[p. 22/4], where the first number indicates the page of the volume, while the second that of the paper. The numbering of the notes, on the other hand, which in the original always starts from 1 on each page, in this edition starts again from 1 on each chapter.
Even if our edition proves useful to only one person, we will still feel that our time and effort have been well spent.
Dorno, February 2026.
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