John Chrysostom (Theodoros Daphnopates), Eclogues from various homilies

These thirty-two eclogues are properly sequences of thematically grouped excerpts from Chrysostomic or pseudo-Chrysostomic homilies in form of new speeches (on love, prayer, repentance, etc.) by Theodoros Daphnopates, the erudite, secretary of the Empire and officer of high rank who lived in Byzantium between the ninth and the tenth century. The provenance of this codex, as of other 22 Greek, Latin and Jewish codices kept in the same library of Udine, is the book collection of the Venetian cardinal and patriarch of Aquileia Domenico Grimani (1461-1523) who had acquired it by the heirs of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s library. Upon Grimani’s death, occurred in Rome in 1523, his books were transported to Venice, into the convent of St. Antonio di Castello, where perhaps the volume still was during the ruinous fire of 1687. A decade later, however, it belonged to a Venetian patrician, Antonio Capello, in whose ‘museum’ it was seen by the great scholar Bernard de Montfaucon (1655-1741), the father of Greek palaeography, who recorded it in his Diarium Italicum (1702). From Capello or his heirs the codex was to be purchased by Dionisio Dolfin, last but one patriarch of Aquileia and founder of the Patriarchal Library of Udine in 1711.