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Updated: April 30, 2025
More than this, the first efforts of poets and story-tellers are very commonly palimpsests: beneath the rhymes or the fiction one can almost always spell out the characters which betray the writer's self.
Both of these are fourth-century books at latest. Denis, is a pictured copy too, but not nearly so good in style. It was formerly in the abbey library of Bobbio. These three books are written in "rustic capitals." A larger, but still small, group of books of "classical" date are the palimpsests, the most famous of which are at Milan and Rome.
In such cases the erasion was so clumsily performed as often to leave distinct traces of the previous letters. The possibility of recovering lost writings from these palimpsests was first suggested by Montfaucon in the seventeenth century; but the earliest successful experiment of the kind was made by Bruns, a German scholar, in the latter part of the eighteenth, century.
Whoever wrote this story of Dante must have been at the economical pains to erase carefully the ecclesiastical script, thus curiously avenging so many palimpsests of Greek poets and Latin poets, whose lyrics have been scrubbed away with pumice-stone to make room for homilies and liturgies and hagiologies.
You may notice some compromise or accommodation in the handwriting of the direction, evidently to slur over the difference. I suggest that the letter should be referred to some specialist in palimpsests, who may be able to detect some of the underlying original, which is absolutely invisible to me.
It was composed 54 B.C. It was originally in two books: then it was altered and enlarged into nine, and finally reduced to six. With the exception of the dream of Scipio, in the last book, the whole treatise was lost till the year 1822, when the librarian of the Vatican discovered a portion of them among the palimpsests in that library.
Doubtless these old parchment visages are palimpsests, and would tell the whole history of Padua if you could get at each successive inscription.
Here is another flash of self-revealment: "Byzance is rumoured to have been the sewer of every sin, yet such was its beauty that it is the canker of our heart we could not have lived there." Always this turning to the far past, this delving in rosetta stones and palimpsests, this preoccupation with the sights and sins of the ancient gods and kings.
I saw in this library the famous Palimpsests. My readers know, of course, what these are. The Palimpsests are little books of vellum, from which an original and ancient writing has been erased, to make room for the productions of later ages and of other pens.
It is, however, very probable that it may have been brought to perfection at Pergamus, as it was one of the principal articles of commerce of that kingdom. Parchment, in early times, was not only expensive, but often very difficult to procure; whence arose the practice of erasing old writing from it, and engrossing it a second time. Such manuscripts are called "palimpsests."
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