The Scholia to Aelian’s De natura animalium: birth and rebirth of a corpus

At the end of the 19th century E. L. De Stefani undertook a systematic examination of the manuscript tradition of Aelian’s De natura animalium. A collateral outcome of this investigation was the discovery of six annotations, belonging to an exegetical-lexicographic vein of primary importance, as demonstrated by the poetic and grammatical quotations contained therein. A scholium handed down by Laur. pl. 86, 8 and by the Vat. Pal. gr. 260, and others, contained in the Laur. pl. 86, 7 (L), most likely derive from Diogenianus, as suggested by Latte. According to K. Alpers, this material descends from a corpus of scholia to the De natura animalium, once preserved in a manuscript with a richer exegetical apparatus than that found in L. Further investigations allowed us to recover many unpublished annotations and to reconstruct, at least partially, the original corpus.