Ricerc@Sapienza

The paper presents the project Codices Graeci Antiquiores, whose goals are the census, the description and the study of Greek manuscripts in codex form from the first extant witnesses to the year 900 AD. Because of the extreme variety of the items included in such limits, a new catalogue description has been developed, by combining more epistemological models belonging to different disciplines, mainly codicology and papyrology.

Is it possible, or even methodologically correct, to (re)construct a community just from textual evidence, especially when this evidence is represented mainly by texts written in epic language (i. e., a language elusive in itself)? The paper deals with one of the most intriguing findings in Greek Christian papyrology of the last thirty years, the relevant corpus of previously unknown epic poems with Christian content of P. Bodmer 29–37.