Codex Vaticanus Latinus 3868

The Vatican Terence (Terentius Vaticanus), or Codex Vaticanus Latinus 3868, is a 9th-century illuminated manuscript of the Latin comedies of Publius Terentius Afer, housed in the Vatican Library.

The Vatican has digitized the manuscript and added it to its online library, DigiVatLib, as a part of its project to provide free, online access to the Vatican Library's collections of manuscripts and incunabula.

[4] Since the end of the 19th century many scholars tried to estimate the age of the model from which Vaticanus 3868 was copied.

[2]: 4  On the basis of the art-historical data the original manuscript was dated to the 5th century by Weitzmann, Koehler, and Mütherich.

The hairstyle of the Terence portrait is close to the one favoured by emperors between the years 238 and 249, suggesting that models from which the codex was copied were made in the 3rd century.