A total of fifty-one manuscripts were digitized this week. One pattern that has re-emerged is the weekly cycle, with the mass of manuscripts getting uploaded on Monday, with only a few getting added during the rest of the week. The distribution of manuscripts, however, did not follow any recent pattern. The largest number of manuscripts came from Reg.lat and Vat.lat, with twelve and eleven respectively. Close onto those were Barb.lat and Ott.lat, each with nine. The rest were distributed over smaller collections, Pal.gr with four, Vat.ar with two, and Reg.gr.Pio.II, Vat.et, Vat.gr, and Vat.turc with one each.

To the right is f.50r from Barb.lat.721. This is an eleventh century manuscript principally containing the works of Venantius Fortunatus, but with the Aenigmata of Symphosius at the end. This is a late antique collection of 100 riddles in hexameter verse. In this copy the title of each riddle, that is the solution, is written in a Caesarian cypher, a form of substitution encryption perported to have been invented by Augustus Caesar. This page begins with Riddle 15:

Non possule nasci si non occidero matre[m] Occidli matre[m] sed me manet exitus ide[m] Id mea mors patitur mea quod iam fecit origo

In the 1912 translation by Elizabeth Hickman Du Bois

To live at all, my mother I must kill: I killed my mother -- her lot waits me still, So death and birth one destiny fulfill

The answer is "Vipera" (the viper), here only the "E" has been encoded as an "F", rendering the answer "Vipfra". In his Natural History (X, 82), Pliny relates that the Viper gives birth to live young, and in doing so, dies.

The border at the bottom is is from f.27r of Vat.gr.1810, taken with ultra-violet light. The shorter-than-usual wavelength causes the ink of the lower text of this palimpsest to be more visible. In this case the lower text is a smaller hand, so two lines are visible behind the single line of upper text.