The Codex 429 of

Ravenna Ravenna ( , , also ; rgn, Ravèna) is the capital city of the Province of Ravenna, in the Emilia-Romagna region of Northern Italy. It was the capital city of the Western Roman Empire from 408 until its collapse in 476. It then served as the ca ...

’s Classense Library, attributed to the half of the tenth century, is the most ancient medieval manuscript that preserves the eleven comedies of

Aristophanes Aristophanes (; grc, Ἀριστοφάνης, ; c. 446 – c. 386 BC), son of Philippus, of the deme Kydathenaion ( la, Cydathenaeum), was a comic playwright or comedy-writer of ancient Athens and a poet of Old Attic Comedy. Eleven of his for ...

. The codex arrived in the West in 1423, through the agency of

Giovanni Aurispa Giovanni Aurispa Piciunerio (or Piciuneri) (June/July 1376–c. 25 May 1459) was an Italian historian and savant of the 15th century. He is remembered in particular as a promoter of the revival of the study of Greek in Italy. It is to Aurispa that ...

, who saved this and many other precious manuscripts from the imminent fall of Constantinople, taking them to Florence, to the humanist

Niccolò de' Niccoli Niccolò de' Niccoli (1364 – 22 January 1437) was an Italian Renaissance humanist. He was born and died in Florence, and was one of the chief figures in the company of learned men which gathered around the patronage of Cosimo de' Medici. Nicc ...

. In 1516 Bernardo Giunta used it for the first printed edition of

Lysistrata ''Lysistrata'' ( or ; Attic Greek: , ''Lysistrátē'', "Army Disbander") is an ancient Greek comedy by Aristophanes, originally performed in classical Athens in 411 BC. It is a comic account of a woman's extraordinary mission to end the Peloponne ...

and Thesmophoriazusae; the traces of the manuscript were lost until 1712, when the abbot Pietro Canneti found it at last in Pisa and brought it to Ravenna, in the library of the Monastery of Classe. Simone Beta, ''La donna che sconfigge la guerra: Lisistrata racconta la sua storia'' Carocci editore, 2022.

Notes

{{reflist Aristophanes Greek manuscripts Ravenna