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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780252029837 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Illinois Press |
| Publication date: | 10/27/2004 |
| Series: | Traditions |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 224 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Homer's Text and Language
By GREGORY NAGY
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2004 Board of Trustees of the University of IllinoisAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0-252-02983-6
Chapter One
The Quest for a Definitive Text of Homer: Evidence from the Homeric Scholia and Beyond
As of this writing, Homeric scholarship has not yet succeeded in achieving a definitive text of either the Iliad or the Odyssey. Ideally, such a text would encompass the full historical reality of the Homeric textual tradition as it evolved through time, from the pre-Classical era well into the medieval. The problem is that Homeric scholarship has not yet reached a consensus on the criteria for establishing a Homeric text that is "definitive." The ongoing disagreements reflect a wide variety of answers to the many serious questions that remain about Homer and Homeric poetry. Crucial to most of these questions is the evidence provided by the Homeric scholia.
The relevance of the scholia (plural of scholion), that is, of annotations that accompany the text of Homer in a wide variety of manuscripts, was first made manifest to the world of modern Homeric scholarship in 1788, when Jean Baptiste Gaspard d'Ansse de Villoison published the tenth-century Venetus A codex manuscript of the Iliad of Homer (codex Marcianus 454). In his Prolegomena, Villoison assesses the impact of the Venetus A scholia on Homeric scholarship:
by way of these scholia, never before published, the greatest light is shed on Homer's poetry. Obscure passages are illuminated; the rites, customs, mythology, and geography of the ancients are explained; the original and genuine reading is established; the variant readings of various codices and editions as well as the emendations of the Critics are weighed. For it is evident that the Homeric contextus, which was recited by the rhapsodes from memory and which used to be sung orally by everyone, was already for a long time corrupt, since it would have been impossible for the different rhapsodes of the different regions of Greece not to be forced by necessity to subtract, add, and change many things. That Homer committed his poems to writing is denied by Josephus at the beginning of Book I of his Against Apion, and this opinion seems to be shared by an unpublished Scholiast to Dionysius Thrax, who narrates that the poems of Homer, which were preserved only in men's minds and memory and were not written, had become extinct by the time of Peisistratos, and that he accordingly offered a reward to those who would bring him Homeric verses, and that, as a result, many people, greedy for money, sold Peisistratos their verses as if they were Homeric. The Critics left these spurious verses in the Edition, but they did so in a special way, marking them with the obelus.
This assessment in Villoison's 788 Prolegomena anticipated in some significant details the ultimately far more influential views of Friedrich August Wolf in his Prolegomena ad Homerum, published in 1795 (English-language edition 1985). In other details, however, Wolf 's assessment diverged radically from that of Villoison. This divergence is crucial for weighing the importance of the Homeric scholia and, by extension, even for establishing the text of Homer. The point of disagreement centers on what the scholia tell us about the ancient kritikoi or Critics, as Villoison refers to them in the passage just quoted.
These critics are the scholars responsible for the textual transmission of Homer in the Library of Alexandria, founded in the early third century BCE, the era of Zenodotus of Ephesus, who is credited with the first Alexandrian "edition" of Homer. There were subsequent "editions" by Aristophanes of Byzantium, who became director of the Library around the beginning of the second century BCE, and by a later director, Aristarchus of Samothrace, the culmination of whose work is dated around the middle of the second century BCE. It is the "edition" of Homer by Aristarchus, as frequently cited by the scholia of the Venetus A manuscript, that constitutes the primary authority behind these Homeric scholia.
Here we come to the central point of divergence between Villoison and Wolf: whereas Villoison viewed the Venetus A scholia as an authoritative witness to an authoritative edition of Homer by Aristarchus, Wolf swerved from this position by questioning the authoritativeness of the Homeric scholia and, more fundamentally, the authority of Aristarchus as an editor of Homeric poetry. This swerve away from Villoison's position is reflected in the fullest single collection of data currently available on the Homeric scholia, Hartmut Erbse's edition of the Iliad scholia.
Erbse's edition aims to encompass two main components of the scholiastic tradition on Homer: (1) "Ap.H.," the archetype of the Venetus A scholia and a main source for the twelfth-century Homer commentator Eustathius (as also for the Etymologicum Genuinum), and (2) c, the archetype of the b and the T scholia. Erbse's edition excludes, however, the so-called D scholia. Erbse also excludes the material from the Homeric Questions of Porphyry (third century CE).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Homer's Text and Language by GREGORY NAGY Copyright © 2004 by Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission.
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