Notes from ancient readers: a journey through Lucan's scholia

In the Middle Ages, Lucan's Bellum Civile was a widely read and studied work, almost on a par with Virgil: this popularity is revealed by the large number of manuscripts that have come down to us, almost 300, and by the massive presence of glosses, comments and scholia, i.e. notes written by readers in the margins of the pages. The scholia are valuable evidence of the transmission of a text, living testimony to the interest in classical authors by scholars and erudites over time, from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance.