Achille Tatius édité et inédit au XVIe siècle

The first readers of Achilles Tatius in Western Europe were the Renaissance scholars who read this novelist in manuscripts. Before the Greek text was printed (1601), Leucippe and Clitophon appeared in Latin, and in other modern languages (Italian, English, and French). In 1544 Achilles Tatius was published anonymously and without books I-IV in a Latin version by Annibale Della Croce: this version was made from a manuscript containing the only last four books, that seems to have been the same as MS 1197 of St Catherine on Sinai (which was written by the Cretan scholar Zacharias Calliergis and belonged to the learned man Giovan Battista Rasario). Then the first complete version was printed in 1551 by Francesco Angelo Coccio, Achilles Tatius’ first translator into a modern language. By mid-century other scholars attempted to publish Achilles Tatius’ novel but without success (Fulvio Orsini, Henri Estienne). Furthermore, before the Greek text was printed, a few selected passages drawn from Achilles Tatius were printed in Longus’ editio princeps (1598) by Raffaele Colombani