Porfirio esegeta di Omero. Edizione, traduzione e commento delle Quaestiones Homericae nel Vat. Gr. 305

The Quaestiones Homericae (QH) written by Porphyry of Tyre (3rd century) aim to provide linguistic-grammatical explanations of selected passages from Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. The QH represent a crucial stage in the history of Homeric exegesis in Antiquity, for they witness Porphyry's interpretations of numerous sections of the poems and they constitute a precious, often unique, source for a large number of scholarly works on the Homeric text. The QH are directly transmitted in a codex unicus, the codex Vat. Gr. 305 (siglum V); however, excerpts from the QH also appear in the margins of manuscripts of the Iliad and Odyssey, among the other Homeric scholia. These fragments correspond only partially to the text transmitted by V and they frequently transmit parts of the text that are not preserved by V. Moreover, when the comparison between these excerpts and V is possible, they clearly date back to a different recensio of the text, which has been called recensio χ by A. R. Sodano. This thesis has a twofold objective. First and foremost, it provides a critical-textual study of the text transmitted by V, which allows a better understanding of its relationship with the recensio χ. This thesis also offers a new critical edition, an Italian translation and a scientific commentary to the section of QH that has survived in V. This commentary mainly focuses on describing Porphyry's philological method and the sources which he used. Furthermore, this study also presents new codicological-palaeographical descriptions of the codex Vat. Gr. 305 and of the main manuscripts of the Iliad where excerpta of the QH appear, as well as a survey of the history of studies on the QH, from the sixteenth century to the present day. A new discussion on the dating of the QH and on the relationship between the QH and the other Homerica composed by Porphyry is also presented. A glossary of terms related to philology, literary and rhetorical analysis adopted by Porphyry in the QH and a critical-textual study of the unpublished Latin translation of the QH composed by Vicente Marnier de Alagón (XVII c.) are also included.