Una praelectio omerica di Niccolò Leonico Tomeo (BAV, Ross. 997)

The Rossianus 997, a manuscript now preserved in the Vatican Library, transmits part of the correspondence of the Venetian humanist Niccolò Leonico Tomeo (1456-1531). In the last few folios of this slender codex, survives a still unpublished text, an inaugural lecture opening a university-course on the Iliad, dated 1486. The name of the author is unknown but thanks to several internal clues we are now able to attribute this text to the same Niccolò Leonico Tomeo, thus adding a new piece of evidence concerning his early years in Padua and the succession of the first teachers of Greek in that city. The new attribution lead to the discovery of a manuscript of the Iliad annotated by Tomeo, possibly connected to his lectures on the text. Following a detailed study of the structure of the text and a full account of the sources exploited by the author, we offer an editio princeps of the lecture accompanied by a commentary.