The Homer Multitext

The Catalogue of Ships

2012-02-14T14:32:00.000-08:00

In this post I'd like to discuss the special treatment of the so-called "Catalogue of Ships" (Iliad 2.494–877) in the Venetus A and E4 manuscripts of the Iliad, as well as in the Venetus B and E3. The Catalogue of Ships, in which the Achaean and Trojan and allied forces at Troy are listed and described, has long been a subject of scholarly controversy, perhaps dating back to antiquity, and so it is worth making note of how it is treated in our oldest manuscripts of the poem. In the end, as we have seen several times now in other posts, E4 will be shown to have an intriguing connection with the scholarly material recorded in the Venetus A, and all four manuscripts will have something to say about the limitations of traditional critical editions of the Iliad.

Why is the Catalogue of Ships so controversial? It is by no means the only catalogue in surviving Homeric poetry, but at nearly four hundred verses in length it is by far the longest. Its placement in the narrative, at the start of a battle in the tenth year of the war, seems odd. The catalogue follows a circuitous geographical progression that begins in Boeotia, and the region of Boeotia and its neighboring areas are disproportionately represented. The Catalogue seems to reflect, for the most part, the political geography of Bronze Age Greece, but there are many exceptions and aspects that are hard to explain. As Oliver Dickinson (2011) has recently concluded:

All in all, the Catalogue is a strange compilation, and it does not seem possible to devise any rational explanation for its peculiarities. Here, as with many Homeric problems, the lack of pre-Homeric or contemporary "heroic" poetry is a major obstacle to the creation of plausible hypotheses. The most that can be safely said is that the Catalogue is likely to have been compiled from materials of different origins and dates and that care has been taken to harmonize it to other Greek traditions; but, although in some parts it does show a degree of historical consistency, on the whole it is most unlikely to bear any resemblance to the probable political configuration of those parts of Greece that it covers at any time period.

In fact, many of the controversies associated with the Catalogue of Ships can be at least partially explained if we understand it to have been composed as part of a traditional system of oral composition-in-performance that evolved over many centuries. Names and places that seem obscure to us would have had a prominent place in the epic tradition at one time or another. Some places that flourished in the Bronze Age no doubt became obscure already even for ancient audiences of the Archaic period, but a brief record of their heroes was preserved and eventually crystallized as part of the Catalogue. In many ways, such a catalogue functions as an index to the full diachronic expanse of the Epic Tradition itself. As for the oddity of having the Achaean and Trojan forces listed in the tenth year of the war, we can easily see how, in an oral tradition in which the song is composed anew each time, episodes could be rearranged to meet the needs of the current composition. It has long been understood that there are many episodes in the Iliad that logically belong far earlier in the story of the Trojan War (such as the scene in Book 3 in which Helen points out the Achaean heroes to Priam and the old men watching from the walls, and indeed the duel for Helen by Paris and Menelaos, which also takes place in that book). As the Iliad evolved into the monumental poem that we know, those chronologically earlier episodes came to be folded into the narrative structure of the poem, and became integral to it.

Understanding the traditional and oral nature of the Catalogue does not explain all of the questions associated with it, however, and the controversies it has generated may explain why it is missing from several manuscripts of the Iliad, including the Townley and the Genavensis and a 3rd-century papyrus. The Venetus A, the Venetus B, E3, and E4 all include the Catalogue, but it is formatted in such a way that set it apart visually.

Let's look first at E4, and the compare it to the other manuscripts. If you look at Folio 21v (you may want to look first, for comparison, at Folio 21r), you'll quickly see that it is not a typical one. The folios of E4 usually have two columns of equal-sized text on each folio, and these columns are surrounded by scholia. The left columns contain the text of the poem and the right columns consist of a paraphrase. Here we are in the middle of Book 2, but what we find is in fact a title page.

Each book of the Iliad in E4 has a title page that spreads over two folios, from the verso of one folio on the left side to recto of the other on the right. (See, e.g., folio 187v and 188r.) On the left side page, scholia surround a central text block, which typically includes scholia followed by one or more (usually two) brief prose summaries, or hypotheses. These hypotheses are transmitted in a variety of manuscripts, including Ve1 (= West Z, Rom. Bibl. Nat. Gr. 6 + Matrit. 4626), a ninth-century manuscript containing “D” scholia that is older than any of our minuscule manuscripts of the Iliad itself. After the hypothesis of each book, on the facing page and above the main text of the poem and its paraphrase, comes a title line (e.g. “rhapsody 10 of the Iliad of Homer”) followed by a one-verse summary of the plot of the book in dactylic hexameter. The title line is placed over the column of text that contains the Iliad, while the summary is placed over the column that contains the paraphrase.

Folio 21v of E4 in fact follows exactly the pattern that we find for the beginning of each book of the Iliad. A large portion of the page is taken up by a block of scholia, which is itself surrounded by other scholia. (The sources of these distinct groups of scholia will be explored in another post.) Next we find: ὑπόθεσις τῆς Βοιωτίας written in crimson ink at the center of the page. Instead of "Rhapsody ___," the Catalogue of Ships has been given the title of Βοιωτία, a title which may well have been a traditional way of referring to it in antiquity, reflecting the central importance of the region of Boeotia in the Catalogue. And, as for other books in E4, we find two hypotheses.

A question immediately springs to mind. Where do these hypotheses come from? Has the Catalogue always been treated as a separate composition, such that hypotheses survive for it just as for the twenty-four books of the Iliad? A closer look, however, reveals that these hypotheses are not quite the same as those of other texts. For one thing, they have lemmata: each begins with a quotation of Iliad 2.494. The other hypotheses in E4 have not such lemmata. Where there are two hypotheses for other books, the second one is usually preceded by ἄλλως or καὶ ἄλλως. That is not the case here. Moreover, if we turn to Folio 22r, we find other differences from other books. Though the folio is formatted much as the initial folio of a book of the Iliad would be in E4, there is no paraphrase in the right column. The right column is instead taken up with scholia. (This holds true for the entire length of the Catalogue of Ships in E4.) There is no metrical summary, and instead of a title, we find merely the ὑπόθεσις τῆς Βοιωτίας of the previous folio repeated (even though what follows is poetry, not a summary).

If the hypotheses for the Catalogue in E4 were related to those of the other books of the Iliad, we would expect to find them in the other manuscripts that preserve these hypotheses, such as Ve1, but we do not. To be more precise, they do not survive as hypotheses. They must have another source, and in fact we do find them preserved among the "D" scholia as scholia. The source seems to be most likely the same one that preserves the other scholia with lemmata in E4, scholia which, as we have seen, are related to the scholarly material that we find in the Venetus A. So let's turn now to the Venetus A (folio 34r), and see what we find there.

If we look at folio 34r of the Venetus A, we see that line 2.494 immediately follows upon what precedes it. There is no gap in the text nor a title line nor a metrical summary. But other features do indeed set it apart. The first letter of 2.494 in the Venetus A is a beautiful capital beta, such as you find at the beginning of books. Moreover a decorative line has been placed between verses 493 and 494. It is as if the scribe is aware of a tradition that treats the Catalogue of Ships as a separate unit, and formats it accordingly.

If we look above and to the right of the text block, we find several scholia that are easy to spot with their semiuncial lemmata—a quotation of verse 494. What follows the lemma of the first of these scholia is what has been formatted as the first hypothesis of E4. The comment following the second of these lemmata is very close to what has been formatted as the second hypothesis in E4:

The notes do not match perfectly, and I am not asserting that the Venetus A is the source of the hypotheses of E4, only that the scribe of E4 has drawn here from a scholia tradition that we also find in A.

If we compare the Venetus B (folio 31v) and E3 (folio 30v), we find that they too, like E4, format the start of the Catalogue of Ships as if it were the beginning of a new book of the Iliad. These manuscripts do not contain hypotheses for any of the books, so we would not expect to find one here. They both have a title line however: ἀρχὴ τῆς Βοιοτίας. And they both have an initial capital, as in the Venetus A.

Among the oldest manuscripts of the Iliad, we have seen that two omit the Catalogue of Ships entirely, and four format it in such way that make it clear that it was perceived as being in some sense a separate composition, or else its own "whole," much as the other books or "rhapsodies" of the Iliad. What does this formatting signify? Might it reflect, in some dim way, an ancient performance tradition, in which the Catalogue was performed on its own as a unit, as has been suggested for the individual books of the poem? (Cf. Aelian, Varia Historia 13.14, where the Catalogue of Ships is named explicitly as one of the episodes that "the ancients" used to perform separately.) Or is it the result of scholarly debate in antiquity, debates which may have deemed the Catalogue unHomeric? I don't yet have answers to these questions. But visual inspection reveals once again what is otherwise obscured in a traditional edition. If we did not have these images, we would only know that A, B, E3, and E4 include the Catalogue of Ships, and we would be unable to see how it has been so carefully set apart from the rest of Book 2 in each manuscript.

Further reading:

Dickinson, O. 2011. "Catalogue of Ships." In M. Finkleberg, ed. The Homer Encyclopedia. Blackwell.

Tsagalis, C. 2010. "The Dynamic Hypertext: Lists and Catalogues in the Homeric Epics." In C. Tsagalis. ed. Homeric Hypertextuality. Trends in Classics 2. De Gruyter. 323–347.

Comparing Scholia: one example

2012-02-09T10:41:00.000-08:00

In this blogpost, I will compare what four of our manuscripts contain in their scholia on one particular line of the Iliad, Iliad 10.435. I have chosen this line because in our book, Iliad 10 and the Poetics of Ambush, Casey Dué and I discuss the scholia on this line at length, having found that the scholia provided the best evidence for the traditional stories about Rhesos, the Thracian king whom Diomedes kills during the night raid. When we were writing the book, we had the photography only for the Venetus A and B, and we used the edition of Maass (1887) for the Townley (British Museum, Burney 86) to look at three versions of commentary on this line. Now we can add the scholia from the two Escorial manuscripts, which we often refer to by Allen’s notation of E3 and E4. I am not going to develop here any full-blown arguments about the scholia, but rather just make some observations and raise some questions. I will note some of the details of the stories about Rhesos, but our book provides a much fuller discussion.

To start, here are the readings of line 10.435 and the corresponding scholia read directly from the photography of the four manuscripts (A, B, E3, and E4), with case endings expanded and capitalization normalized for proper names:

Venetus A (134v):
10.435: ἐν δέ σφιν Ῥῆσος βασιλεὺς. παῖς Ἠϊονῆος·
and among them is the king, Rhesos the son of Eioneus.

Scholia:
Ῥῆσος γένει μὲν ἦν Θρᾷξ, ὑιὸς δὲ Στρυμόνος τοῦ αὐτόθι ποταμοῦ καὶ Εὐτέρπης μιᾶς τῶν Μουσῶν. διάφορος δὲ τῶν καθ’ αὑτὸν γενόμενος ἐν πολεμικοῖς ἔργοις ἐπῆλθε τοῖς Ἕλλησιν, ὅπως Τρωσὶ συμμαχήσῃ, καὶ συμβαλὼν πολλοὺς τῶν Ἑλλήνων ἀπέκτεινεν. δείσασα δὲ Ἥρα περὶ τῶν Ἑλλήνων Ἀθηνᾶν ἐπὶ τὴν τούτου διαφθορὰν πέμπει. κατελθοῦσα δὲ ἡ θεὸς Ὀδυσσέα τε καὶ Διομήδη ἐπὶ τὴν κατασκοπὴν ἐποίησε προελθεῖν. ἐπιστάντες δὲ ἐκεῖνοι κοιμωμένῳ Ῥήσῳ αὐτὸν τε καὶ τοὺς ἑταίρους αὐτοῦ κτείνουσιν, ὡς ἱστορεῖ Πίνδαρος. ἔνιοι δὲ λέγουσι νυκτὸς παραγεγονέναι τὸν Ῥῆσον εἰς τὴν Τροίαν, καὶ πρὶν γεύσασθαι αὐτὸν τοῦ ὕδατος καὶ οἱ ἵπποι αὐτοῦ τοῦ Σκαμάνδρου πίουσιν καὶ τῆς αὐτόθι νομῆς, ἀκαταμάχητος ἔσται εἰς τὸ παντελές.

[at the bottom of the folio] ὅσοι ἐκ Μουσῶν τίκτονται: Ορφεὺς, ἐκ Καλλιόπης ἢ Κλειοῦς, Λῖνος Τερψιχόρης ἢ ὥς τινες Εὐτέρπης· Ῥῆσος Τερψιχόρης ἢ Εὐτέρπης· Θρὰξ [perhaps corrected to Θρᾲξ], Θαλλίας· Παλαίφατος, Ἐρατοῦς Θάμυρις ὁ Θρᾷξ, Μελπομένης καὶ Ἀχελῴου. Σειρῆνες, Πολυμνίας Τριπτόλεμος.

Rhesos by birth was Thracian, and the son of Strymon the river there and of Euterpe, one of the Muses. Being excellent among his own people in the deeds of war, he went against the Greeks, to act as an ally to the Trojans, and joining battle he killed many of the Greeks. Hera, fearful for the Greeks, sends Athena for the purpose of this man’s destruction. Coming down, the goddess made both Odysseus and Diomedes go forth on a spying mission. Those men, standing over the sleeping Rhesos, kill both him and his comrades, as Pindar gives the story. But some say that Rhesos arrived at Troy during the night, and before he tasted the water and his horses drink from the Skamandros and the pasture there, he will be utterly unconquerable. [Note: This translation reflects what actually appears in the text of the scholia, a text that others have found in need of correction because of the syntax problems in this last sentence.]

The following number are born from Muses: Orpheus from Kalliope or Kleio, Linos from Terpsikhore or, as some say, Euterpe, Rhesos from Terpsikhore or Euterpe, Thrax from Thallia, Palaiphatos from Erato, Thamyris the Thracian, from Melpomene and Akheloos. The Sirens from Polymnia, Triptolemos (also?). [Note: This version differs from that in our book, which was based on “normalized” readings, cf. Dindorf’s editions of the Venetus A scholia, and van Thiel’s edition of the so-called D scholia, a collection of scholia from several sources once (erroneously) attributed to Didymus.]

Venetus B (138v):
10.435: ἐν δέ σφιν Ῥῆσος βασιλεὺς. παῖς Ἠϊονῆος·
and among them is the king, Rhesos the son of Eioneus.

α’ (first scholion on 138v) Ῥῆσος Στρυμόνος τοῦ ποταμοῦ Θράκης καὶ Εὐτέρπης τῆς Μούσης υἱός· ἱστορεῖ δὲ Πίνδαρος ὅτι καὶ μίαν ἡμέραν πολεμήσας πρὸς Ἕλληνας, μέγιστα αὐτοῖς ἀνεδείξατο κακά· κατὰ δὲ θείαν πρόνοιαν, νυκτὸς αὐτὸν Διομήδης ἀναιρεῖ :~

Rhesos is the son of Strymon the river in Thrace and Euterpe the Muse. Pindar gives the story that having fought in battle for even one day against the Greeks, he demonstrated the greatest evils for them. And by divine forethought, Diomedes kills him at night.

E3 (133v):
10.435: ἐν δέ σφιν Ῥῆσος βασιλεὺς παῖς Ἠϊονῆος·
and among them is the king, Rhesos the son of Eioneus.

α’ (first scholion on 133v): Ῥῆσος Στρυμόνος τοῦ ποταμοῦ Θράκης· καὶ Εὐτέρπης τῆς Μούσης υἱός· ἱστορεῖ δὲ Πίνδαρος ὅτι καὶ μίαν ἡμέραν πολεμήσας πρὸς Ἕλληνας· μέγιστα αὐτοῖς ἐνεδείξατο κακά· κατὰ δὲ θείαν πρόνοιαν νυκτὸς αὐτὸν Διομήδης ἀναιρεῖ :~

Rhesos is the son of Strymon the river in Thrace and Euterpe the Muse. Pindar gives the story that having fought in battle for even one day against the Greeks, he demonstrated the greatest evils for them. And by divine forethought, Diomedes kills him at night.

E4 (90v):
10.435: ἐν δέ σφιν, Ῥῆσος βασιλεὺς παῖς Ἠϊονῆος
and among them is the king, Rhesos the son of Eioneus.

Scholia:
ἱστορία Ῥῆσος μὲν γένει μὲν ἦν Θρὰξ· υἱὸς δὲ Στρυμόνος τοῦ αὐτόθι ποταμοῦ καὶ Τέρπς [=Τερψιχόρης] μιὰς τῶν Μουσῶν διάφορος δὲ τῶν κατ’ αὐτὸν γενόμενος ἐν πολεμικοῖς ἔργοις ἐπῆλθετο Ἕλλησιν ὅπως Τρωσὶ συμμαχήση καὶ συμβαλων πολλοὺς τῶν Ἑλλήνων ἀπέκτεινε. ἡ δὲ Ἥρα δείσασα πρὸ τῶν Ἑλλήνων, Ἀθηνᾶν ἐπὶ τὴν τούτου διαφθορὰν πέμπει. κατελθοῦσα δὲ ἡ θεὰ Ὀδυσσέα καὶ Δϊομήδης ἐπὶ τὴν κατασκοπὴν ἐποίησε προσελθεῖν. ἐπιστάντες δὲ ἐκεῖνοι κοιμωμένω Ῥήσω αὐτὸν τὲ καὶ τοὺς ἑταίρους αὐτοῦ κτείνουσϊν ὡς ἱστορεῖ Πίνδαρος ἕνιοι λέγουσι νυκτὸς παραγεγονέναι τὸν Ῥῆσον εἰς τὴν Τροίαν καὶ πρὶν γεύσασθαι αὐτὸν τοῦ ὕδατος τῆς χώρης φονευθῆναι χρησμὸς δέ φησί ἐδέδοτο αὐτῷ ὅ τι εἰ αὐτὸς γεύσεται τοῦ ὕδατος καὶ οἱ ἵπποι αὐτοῦ, τοῦ σκαμάνδρου πίωσϊν καὶ τῆς αὐτόθι νομῆς; ἀκαταμάχητος εἶναι εἰς τὸ παντελές :~

[At the top of the folio] ὅσοι εκ μουσῶν τΐκτονται: ὀρφεὺς· ἐκ καλιόπης · ἢ κλειοῦς: λΐνος· τερψϊχώρης: ῥῆσος· εὐτέρπης: θράξ, θαλείας: παλαίφατος, ἐρατοῦς: θάμυρϊς ὁ θράξ· μελπομης καὶ ἀχελώου: σειρῆνες, πολυμνίας:~ [Note: as will be apparent in my observations, the look of this scholion is important for understanding it, so I have not normalized the capitalization in this case.]

Story: Rhesos by birth was Thracian, and the son of Strymon the river there and Terpsichore one of the Muses. Being excellent among his own people in the deeds of war, he went against Greeks, to act as an ally to the Trojans, and joining battle he killed many of the Greeks. Hera, fearful for the Greeks, sends Athena for the purpose of this man’s destruction. Coming down, the goddess made both Odysseus and Diomedes go against [him] on a spying mission. Those men, standing over the sleeping Rhesos, kill both him and his comrades, as Pindar gives the story. But some say that Rhesos arrived at Troy during the night, and before he tasted the water of the area he was murdered. An oracle had been given to him, they say, that if he himself would taste the water and his horses drink from the Skamandros and the pasture there, he will be utterly unconquerable.

The following number are born from Muses: Orpheus, from Kalliope or Kleio; Linos from Terpsichore; Rhesos from Euterpe; Thrax from Thaleia; Palaiphatos from Erato; Thamyris the Thracian from Melpomene and Akheloos; Sirens from Polymnia.

Observations:
—All of the manuscripts have the same reading for the line of the poetry itself, but in the scholia, we see two different versions of the “back story” of Rhesos. There is an obvious affinity between A and E4, on the one hand, and between B and E3 on the other. The close similarity between B and E3 is not surprising, since the two have long been recognized as closely related (an earlier post by Matthew Davis addressed the argument that B and E3 are even “twins”). But whether there are common sources that A and E4 share (as these scholia suggest) is something that we are starting to investigate. It hasn’t been well-recognized or explored, to my knowledge.

– The Townley manuscript (T) has a scholion similar to that of B and E3, but it has some particular features. According to the edition of Maass, here is how T reports the story:

Ῥῆσος Στρυμόνος τοῦ ποταμοῦ τῆς Θρᾴκης υἱὸς καὶ Εὐτέρπης Μούσης. ἱστορεῖ δὲ Πίνδαρος ὅτι καὶ μίαν ἡμέραν πολεμήσας πρὸς Ἕλληνας μέγιστα αὐτοῖς ἐνεδείξατο κακά, κατὰ δὲ πρόνοιαν Ἥρας καὶ Ἀθηνᾶς ἀναστάντες οἱ περὶ Διομήδεα ἀναιροῦσιν αὐτόν.
Rhesos is the son of Strymon the river of Thrace and Euterpe, a Muse. Pindar gives the story that having fought in battle for even one day against the Greeks he proved to be the greatest evils for them, and having been roused by the forethought of Hera and Athena, those around Diomedes kill him.

We see in T that Hera and Athena are explicitly named, as they are in the A and E4 scholia, instead of the less specific “divine” forethought reported in B and E3. Yet T also has the more general “those around Diomedes” rather than simply Diomedes himself named as the killer of Rhesos. Is that a way of including Odysseus (who is also explicitly named in the A and E4 versions)?

—The A scholion seems to have a copying mistake, which is made more obvious when we look at the E4 version of Rhesos’ story. It looks like the scribe picked up after the second τοῦ ὕδατος when he was only at the first, missing what appears in E4 between the two appearances of “water.” And so the word “oracle” (so crucial for understanding the importance of Rhesos) doesn’t appear in the A version. Thus, E4 is a more complete version of the “oracle” story about Rhesos (that version is also available in earlier manuscripts, according to van Thiel’s edition of the so-called D scholia).

–Although all the manuscripts name Eioneus as Rhesos’ father in the line of the Iliad, all the scholia agree that his father is the river Strymon, but none directly confronts the difference from the poetic line. Perhaps this discrepancy is due to the “two father” phenomenon among Greek heroes, according to which they are the son of both a divine father and a mortal one: for example, Herakles is both the son of Zeus and the son of Amphitryon.

—The identification of Rhesos’ mother, however, is more one of a choice between two Muses, Euterpe or Terpsichore. B and E3 name Euterpe only. A lists Euterpe in the scholion recounting Rhesos’ back story, but in the separate scholion listing offspring of the Muses, it gives the two possibilities of Euterpe or Terpsichore. E4, on the other hand, names Terpsichore in the scholion about Rhesos’ back story, but names only Euterpe in its scholion listing the offspring of the Muses. The variation is not surprising from a mythological point of view (variation is a hallmark of Greek mythology), but those differences in A and E4 raise further questions about the source(s) for these scholia, and at what point those differences occurred in their transmission.

—The E4 version of the list of the offspring of the Muses led me to rethink the way I had previously read the A version. My reading of the A version was influenced by modern editions of the scholia, such as Dindorf’s. But seeing the list in E4, with the purplish-red ink used for the names of the offspring, alerted me to a different way to read the list. In my earlier reading of the list of A, the order of mother and child switches in the middle of the list: at the beginning (e.g., Orpheus, Linos) the child is listed first, with the mother named in the genitive following; then, after Rhesos is named, it seems to switch to naming the mother first (still in the genitive) and then the offspring. The case of Rhesos then becomes even stranger, since in that reading the adjective “Thracian” (Θρᾴξ) follows the names of the two possible Muses who were his mother, Terpsichore or Euterpe. But there are two details here that raise questions about the reading: one is that Thamyris later in the list is called “Thracian” and the adjective is put in the more usual attributive position after the article ὁ. The other, as the list in E4 shows more clearly, is that there is a mythological figure named simply Θρᾴξ, who is a son of Ares and (presumably, according to this list), the Muse Thaleia (or Thallia, as A spells it).

Further complicating this question of how to read this list, though, is that in other sources, the Sirens are identified as offspring of Akheloos and Melpomene (e.g. Apollodorus 1.3.4), which would support reading them together in the A scholion, as others have done. And the list in A concludes with the name of Triptolemos: how should he be included in the list if the order of mother and offspring has not been reversed? Also as a child of Polymnia? Or was his mother’s name (mistakenly) omitted? Comparing the A scholion to the E4 version, and E4’s use of color to make the structure of the list more obvious, raises several questions about how to read the A version, questions not obvious when reading the scholion in modern editions.

–Now that we are beginning to see more affinities between the scholia in A and E4 (although there are also very different documents from one another in other ways), do E3 and E4 have a complementary nature similar to A and B as a pair? If so, that raises intriguing questions about how these Byzantine manuscripts were later collected in European libraries. Did book collectors like Cardinal Bessarion (who owned A and B and willed his personal library to the Republic of Venice) and King Philip II of Spain (who acquired E3 and E4 for his library) want to have a “complete” set of scholia to the Iliad (or some such notion) in their libraries? Was there scholarly interest at that time in having multiple manuscripts with different versions of scholia, or was prestige in owning such possessions the prime motivation?

Comparing these scholia thus raises different kinds of questions about the manuscripts themselves, including their sources and the history of their acquisition and ownership, in addition to the many intriguing subjects raised by the content of these "mythological" scholia.

Iliad 10 and the Poetics of Ambush now on-line

2012-02-03T12:43:00.000-08:00

An on-line version of Parts I and III of Iliad 10 and the Poetics of Ambush: A Multitext Edition with Essays and Commentary is now available from the Center for Hellenic Studies. Hard copies may be purchased from Harvard University Press. Part II (texts and text commentaries) will be added soon.

UPDATE 2/4/12: Part II is now available as well.

The dog of Orion

2012-02-02T17:56:00.000-08:00

In a previous post, I attempted to describe folio 188r of the eleventh-century manuscript of the Iliad known as E4, in order to make some preliminary observations about the manuscript and its relationship to other Medieval manuscripts of the Iliad with scholia. It was a difficult task, even with the help of my colleagues Christopher Blackwell, Mary Ebbott, and Neel Smith. E4 has not been well studied, and it has many features that make it unlike the other manuscripts we have digitized as part of the Homer Multitext. It became clear to me as I was working on it that I could not fully appreciate 188r without understanding its facing page on the left side, folio 187v. I have now had the chance to study 187v in detail, and it has only confirmed my initial impression of the manuscript, that it is an unusual, very likely unique assemblage of text and paratexts that span multiple lines of transmission. The scholia contained on folio 187v, which comment on the text of 188r (containing Iliad 22.1–37), are particularly indicative of the unique character of E4.

Folio 187v is taken up by a hypothesis to book 22, a large selection from Porphyry, and scholia, both with and without lemmata, including comments on the text of the Iliad that is written on 188r. It should be noted from the beginning that there are two separate hands in this manuscript, which both Allen and Erbse deem to be contemporaneous. The first hand has written the hypothesis, the scholia immediately following it, and the text of the poem and paraphrase on the next folio. The second hand has written the selection from Porphyry and the scholia in the margins.

At the top of folio 187v is the excerpt from Porphyry’s Homeric Questions. The following is a transcription, based on visual inspection of the manuscript images and Schrader’s (1880-1882) edition:

ἠγνόησαν οἱ πολλοὶ ὅτι ἡ κλίσις παρ’ Ὁμήρῳ τὴν περιοχὴν σημαίνει, καὶπάντα τὰ ἐσχηματισμένα ἀπ’ αὐτῆς ῥήματα. <ὣς οἱ μὲν κατὰ ἄστυ πεφυζότες ἠύτενεβροὶ ἱδρῶ ἀπεψύχοντο πίον τ’ ἀκέοντό τε δίψαν, κεκλιμένοι καλῇσιν ἐπάλξεσιν·αὐτὰρ Ἀχαιοὶ τείχεος ἆσσον ἴσαν, σάκε’ ὤμοισι κλίναντες> (Iliad 22.1–4)· λέγει γάρ· περιεχόμενοι τῷ τείχει οἱ Τρῶες, οἱ δ’ Ἀχαιοὶ τὰσάκη περιέχοντες τοῖς ὤμοις. Οὕτω λύσεις καὶ τὸ <οἵ δ' ἐπὶ ρὴγμῖνιθαλάσσης κυκλίατο> (Iliad 16.67–68)· λέγει γὰρ ὁτι περιεχόμενοι ὑπὸ τῶν Τρώων ἐπὶ ῥηγμῖνι θαλάσσης συνηλάθησαν. καὶ τὸ <ἠέριδ’ ἔγχος ἐκέκλιτο καὶ ταχέ’ ἵππω> (Iliad 5.356) δηλοῖπεριείχετο. καὶ τὸ <κεῖθ’ ἁλὶ κεκλιμένη ἐριβώλακος ἠπείροιο> (Odyssey 13.235), κεῖται περιεχομένη. καὶ πάλιν <ὅς δ’ἐν Ὕλῃ ναίεσκε μέγαπλούτοιο μεμηλὼς λίμνῃ κεκλιμένος> (Iliad 5.708) δηλοῖπεριεχόμενος. καὶ <ἀσπίσι κεκλιμένοι> (Iliad 3.135)· περιεχόμενοι ὑπὸ τῶν ἀσπίδων. ἀπὸ τοῦ κλείω· τὸ γὰρ ἀποκλεισθὲνπεριέχεται· <οὐδὲ πύλῃσιν εὗρ’ ἐπικεκλιμένας σανίδας> (Iliad 12.120). τὸ δ’ αὐτὸ παρίστησι καὶ τὸ <ἀλλ’ ἐν γὰρ Τρώων πεδίῳ πύκαθωρηκτάων πόντῳ κεκλιμένοι ἑκὰς ἥμεθα> (Iliad 14.739–40), ἀντὶ τοῦ ὑπὸ τοῦ πόντου περιεχόμενοι.

A shortened version of this same excerpt from the Homeric Questions appears on folio 137v of E4 (ad Iliad 16.68 κεκλίατο). The full excerpt appears in two places on the Venetus B as well: folio 214v (ad Iliad 16.68 κεκλίατο) and folio 292r (ad Iliad 22.3 κεκλιμένοι, as here). The comment is part of a larger discussion of the meaning of the word κλίσις in Homer, and Iliad 22.1-4 is cited along with several other passages. The scribe of Ε4 saw that this passage in Porphyry was relevant to the opening lines of 22 (in which the Trojans rest by “leaning” on the walls), and so he copied it here. He links the excerpt from Porphyry to the text of the poem (on folio 188v) by means of a graphical sign, or siglum, which is reproduced in the appropriate place on the other folio.

Next follow several scholia, written across the full length of the page. These too are connected to the text of the poem by means of sigla (more on which below). After these scholia, the (two) hypotheses begin, with a title written in crimson ink: ὑπόθεσϊς τῆς χι ὁμήρου ῥαψωδίας.

The hypotheses are followed by more scholia, which are contained within the same text block as the hypotheses. These scholia differ from the surrounding scholia in that they have lemmata. Very significantly, both of the scholia with lemmata recorded in this text block can also be found in A in some fashion. Let’s look at them more closely.

First, we find in crimson ink ὅν τε κύν’ὠρίωνα followed by a lengthy mythological note, whose content is attributed to Eratosthenes, the third head of the library of Alexandria (c. 235–c. 270). The following is a transcription of the note, for which I have workedclosely with the image of the manuscript folio, as well as the editions ofHeyne (1834) and Van Thiel (2000):

Τὸν ἀστρῶον κύνα οὕτως ἔφη. ἔνιοι δέ φασιτόνδε τὸν κατηστερισμένον κύνα, οὐκ Ὠρίωνος, ἀλλὰ Ἠριγόνης ὑπάρχειν, ὃνκατηστερισθῆναι διὰ τοιαύτην αἰτίαν. Ἱκάριος γένει μὲν ἦν Ἀθηναῖος ἔσχε δὲθυγατέρα Ἠριγόνην, ἥτις κύνα νήπιον ἔτρεφε. ξενίσας δέ ποτε ὁ Ἱκάριος Διόνυσον,ἔλαβε παρ’ αὐτοῦ οἶνόν τε καὶ ἀμπέλου κλῆμα. κατὰ δὲ τὰς τοῦ θεοῦ ὑποθήκας,περιῄει τὴν γῆν προφαίνων τὴν τοῦ Διονύσου χάριν, ἔχων σὺν ἑαυτῷ καὶ τὸν κύνα.γενόμενος δὲ ἐντὸς τῆς πόλεως, βουκόλοις οἶνον παρέσχε. οἱ δὲ ἀθρόως ἐμφορησάμενοι,οἱ μὲν εἰς βαθὺν ὕπνον ἐτράπησαν, οἱ δὲ περιλειπόμενοι νομίσαντες θανάσιμον εἶναι τὸ πόμα πλήσσοντες ἐφόνευοντὸν Ἱκάριον. μεθ’ ἡμέραν δὲ νηψάντων αὐτῶν καταγνόντες ἑαυτῶν εἰς φυγὴνἐτράπησαν. ὁ δὲ κύων ὑποστρέψας πρὸς τὴν Ἠριγόνην, δι’ ὠρυγμοῦ ἐμήνυσεν αὐτῇ τὰγενόμενα. ἡ δὲ μαθοῦσα τὸ ἀληθὲς, ἑαυτὴν ἀνήρτησε. νόσου δὲ ἐν Ἀθήναιςγενομένης, κατὰ χρησμὸν Ἀθηναῖοι τόν τε Ἱκάριον καὶ τὴν Ἠριγόνην ἐνιαυσιαίαιςἐγέραιρον τιμαῖς. οἳ καὶ καταστερισθέντες, Ἱκάριος μὲν Βοώτης ἐκλήθη, Ἠριγόνηδὲ παρθένος. ὁ δὲ κύων τὴν αὐτὴν ὀνομασίαν ἔσχεν. Ἱστορεῖ Ἐρατοσθένης ἐν τοις ἑαυτοῦκαταλόγοις.

This note is also found with some variations on the Venetus A manuscript, though it is not included in Erbe’s edition of the scholia (because Erbse excludes the mythological scholia or “D” scholia from his edition). It is also found in the Venetus B, but in the later, 12th or 13th century set of scholia on that manuscript. (Hence it postdates the construction of E4.)

A potentially very significant variation is recorded in this note on E4. What is significant about this note is not actually its content, but its lemma. The reading ὅν τε κύν’ὠρίωνα does not match the corresponding text of the poem on folio 188v of E4, nor is it found in any other manuscript, all of which read κύν’ὠρίωνος (“the dog of Orion”). In fact κύν’ὠρίωνα does not make much grammatical sense, though we could take the two accusatives, somewhat awkwardly, to be in apposition to one another (“the dog, Orion”). The Venetus Α scholia, however, record another discussion of this phrase, this one about the proper division of the words:

ὅντε κύν’ ὠρίωνος ὁ Σιδώνιος ὑφ’ ἓν ἀναγινώσκει. ἄμεινον δὲ κατὰ παράθεσιν, ὅτι οἱ κύνες πολλάκις ὀνομάζονται μετὰ τῶν κτητόρων, οἷον Κέρβερος Ἅιδου, Ὄρθρος Γηρυόνου, Ἄλκαινα Ἀκταίωνος· οὕτως κύνα Ὠρίωνος. τῷ δὲ κυνηγετικὸν αὐτὸν εἶναι καὶ πλησίον κατηστέρισαν τὸν κύνα.

“The dog of Orion”: The Sidonian reads it as one [word]. But it is better to read it as two, because dogs are often named with their owners, such as Kerberos of Hades, Orthros of Geryon, Alkaina of Aktaion; likewise the dog of Orion. Inasmuch as he was fond of hunting they also made his dog in the constellation next to him.

Dionysius Sidonius was an Aristarchean scholar who seems to have been very familiar with the methods and scholarship of Aristarchus. (See Nagy 2009: 151–152.) In this comment he seems to be arguing for a reading, perhaps known to Aristarchus, that represents κύν’ὠρίωνος as one word. The only way that such a one-word reading could work grammatically would be if the word were in the accusative case: that is to say, something like κυνωρίωνα. Is it possible that the source from which the scribe of E4 was copying his scholia with lemmata had this other reading? Could such a reading have been corrupted by the influence of the genitive in other sources, so that instead of κυνωρίωνα we find in E4 κύν’ὠρίωνα (divided into two words)? If so, E4’s lemma here would be the sole witness to preserve what seems to be an ancient variation that was being discussed in antiquity.

The other scholion recorded in this text block, also with a lemma in crimson ink, also has an interesting link to the A manuscript.

Εἶσϊ τὴν ἑώαν ἀνατολὴν. ἅνεισιν ἀνατέλλει.

A version of this comment is found in several other manuscripts of Homeric so-called D scholia, including the 9th century manuscript Z (= Romanus, Bibl. Naz. Centr. Gr. 6 + Matrit. B. N. 4626), but it is not in B, T, C, or Ge. In the Venetus A, however, ανεισιν ἀνατελλει is written here in semiuncial script above εἶσιν.

Detail from folio 282v of the Venetus A

This link is now a second indication that the scholia with lemmata in E4 are drawn from a tradition with ties to the Aristarchean scholarship that we find in the Venetus A.

In the left margin and at the bottom of the folio, surrounding the text block containing the hypothesis and these scholia are additional scholia. These scholia, like those above the hypothesis, do not contain lemmata, and are clearly drawn from other sources. The first two of these scholia are preceded by a siglum in the outer margin, while the final three are preceded by Greek numerals (in the form of letters of the alphabet). The numbered scholia correspond to the numbered scholia in B, E3, and C. The scholia connected to the text with sigla contain material from the so-called “D” scholia. These scholia can also often found in B, but in the second, later hand of B.

It is clear that the E4 brings together many different sources, which are used selectively and in combination. This is significant because it shows us that the Homeric scholia and other Homeric paratexts cannot be easily defined or placed in a neat stemma. Scribes clearly had a variety of sources available to choose from when constructing a manuscript. We should likewise assume that the text of the Iliad itself was collated in various ways as each manuscript was constructed. While many scribes may have simply copied an exemplar, we know that they often compared what they were copying to other exemplars and made changes, or else recorded variations in the margins. This practice is especially clear in the Venetus A (on which see Allen 1889). In its text and scholia E4 may well preserve vestiges of the scholarly controversies of antiquity that survive nowhere else.

References cited in this post

Allen, T.W. 1899. “On the Composition of Some Greek Manuscripts: The Venetian Homer.” Journal of Philology 26: 161-181.

Allen, T. W. 1931a. Homeri Ilias I-III. Oxford.

Dué, C., ed. 2009. Recapturing a Homeric Legacy: Images and Insights from the Venetus A Manuscript of the Iliad. Cambridge, MA and Washington, DC.

Erbse, H., ed. 1969-1988. Scholia Graeca in Homeri Iliadem I-VII. Berlin.

Heyne, C. G., ed. 1834. Homeri Ilias cum brevi annotatione curante C.G. Heyne; accedunt scholia minora passim emendata, necnon Heraclidis Allegoriae Homericae. Oxford.

Nagy, G. 2009. “Traces of an Ancient System of Reading Homeric Verse in the Venetus A.” In Dué 2009a: 133–158.

Schrader, H., ed. 1880-1882. Porphyrii quaestionum Homericarum ad Iliadem pertinentium reliquiae. Leipzig.

The Bankes Homer

2012-01-08T20:24:00.001-08:00

Thanks to the cooperation of the British Library, and particularly Claire Breay and Chris Lee, the Homer Multitext can now offer a stunning panoramic image of the Bankes Homer (BM Papyrus 114), containing most of Book 24 of the Iliad.

This image is being hosted on the project’s server, a resource provided by the University of Houston’s Center for High Performance Computing, Keith Crabb, Director.

Access to this image will allow us to continue editing the electronic edition of the Bankes Iliad, a project begun at Furman University in 2009 by David Creasey, Kylie Elliott, Talley Lattimore, and Brett Stonecipher.

Paradigm Shifts

2011-11-10T10:05:00.000-08:00

This post is inspired by an episode of The Engines of Our Ingenuity, a daily 4 minute radio broadcast produced by the University of Houston's radio station, KUHF. The episode, entitled "Revisiting Stirrups" explores the notion of the paradigm shift, as first articulated by Thomas Kuhn in his 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. As Dr. Lienhard notes in the episode, Kuhn demonstrated that "science develops, not by accretion, but by replacement -- by paradigm replacement." In other words, we can't make a scientific breakthrough unless we can somehow step out of our own paradigm and conceive of a new one. Lienhard goes on to talk about how many have attempted to point out flaws in Kuhn's bold assertions, but no one has been able to undermine their fundamental validity. In fact, "[a]s Kuhn's detractors have gone at him, and stripped him of his original hyperbole, they've left him much stronger." Finally, Lienhard compares the attacks on Kuhn's work to the criticism levied against Charles Darwin and the theory of evolution: "I'm astonished by people who try to refute natural selection by going back to Darwin himself. Never mind that we've spent a century and a half weaving the connecting tissue of evolution by natural selection. You'd think Darwin had written the last word on the subject, not the first."

As I listened to this episode, I could not help but think of the paradigm shift caused in Homeric studies caused by the fieldwork of Milman Parry and Albert Lord in the former Yugoslavia. Parry's 1928 doctoral dissertation on the traditional epithet in Homer is a brilliant demonstration of the economy and traditionality of Homeric diction, but even Parry himself did not grasp the implications of this work initially:

"My first studies were on the style of the Homeric poems and led me to understand that so highly formulaic a style could be only traditional. I failed, however, at the time to understand as fully as I should have that a style such as that of Homer must not only be traditional but also must be oral. It was largely due to the remarks of my teacher (M.) Antoine Meillet that I came to see, dimly at first, that a true understanding of the Homeric poems could only come with a full understanding of the nature of oral poetry. It happened that a week or so before I defended my theses for the doctorate at the Sorbonne, Professor Mathias Murko of the University of Prague delivered in Paris the series of conferences which later appeared as his book La Poésie populaire épique en Yougoslavie au début du XXe siècle. I had seen the poster for these lectures but at the time I saw in them no great meaning for myself. However, Professor Murko, doubtless due to some remark of (M.) Meillet, was present at my soutenance and at that time M. Meillet as a member of my jury pointed out with his usual ease and clarity this failing in my two books. It was the writings of Professor Murko more than those of any other which in the following years led me to the study of oral poetry in itself and to the heroic poems of the South Slavs." [The Making of Homeric Verse, 439]

It was only when Parry went to Yugoslavia to observe the still flourishing South Slavic oral epic song tradition that he came to understand that Homeric poetry was not only traditional, but oral—that is, composed anew every time in performance, by means of a sophisticated system of traditional phraseology and diction. For Parry, witnessing the workings of a living oral epic song tradition was a paradigm shift. Suddenly, by analogy with the South Slavic tradition, the workings of the Homeric system of composition became clear to him.

Parry planned a series of publications based on his observations and subsequent analysis of Homeric poetry which were never completed. His surviving writings have been incredibly influential, but he died at the age of 33, long before he had a chance to realize the many implications of his fieldwork. It became the work of his young undergraduate assistant, Albert Lord, to brings these ideas to the world.

Albert Lord's The Singer of Tales, was published in 1960, just two years before Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, but nearly three decades after his and Parry's initial fieldwork. In the intervening years, Lord not only went to graduate school and became a scholar in his own right, he was undergoing his own paradigm shift.

Albert Lord (1912-1991) went to Yugoslavia for the first time at the age of 22, from June 1934-September 1935. Parry described his activities as follows:

"…my assistant, Mr. Albert Lord, is shortly leaving for a month in Greece. His help has been altogether indispensable to me, and I may say that I have done twice as much work since I had his very able assistance. He has relieved me altogether of the very long labeling and cataloguing of the manuscripts and discs, has helped me with the keeping of accounts and the presentations of reports, has typed some 300 pages of my commentary on the collected texts, and most particularly he has ably run the recording apparatus while we are working in the field, this for the first time leaving me free to be with the singer before the microphone, and to oversee and take part in the putting of questions to the singers […] I myself feel the greatest gratitude to him for the help which he has given me and the expedition is under the greatest obligation to him." (From M. Parry, “Report on Work in Yugoslavia, October 20, 1934-March 24, 1935,” Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature, p. 12. )

Albert Lord took photographs throughout the trip and kept a record of his experiences with a view to submitting them to a popular magazine such as National Geographic. The essay that he wrote, dated March 1937, was entitled “Across Montenegro: Searching for Gúsle Songs” and was never in fact published. We can see already in this early essay a fascination with two singers in particular that would shape much of Lord’s subsequent professional scholarship on the the creative process of oral tradional poetry and the analogy between the South Slavic and Homeric song traditions. The first is known as Ćor Huso (“Blind Huso”), a singer of a previous generation who was credited by many of the singers Parry interviewed as being the teacher of their teacher, and the source for all the best songs. Lord recounts one of these interviews (conducted by Nikola Vujnović) as he describes their initial attempts to find singers in Kolashin:

"In Kolashin we got to work. During the last century this was the home of one of the greatest singers. The name of old One-eye Huso Husovitch was a magic one in those days, and still is among the Turks (Moslems) in the region further east where the old masters of Kolashin now dwell. We sought eagerly for every trace of his tradition. What was he like? How did he sing? How did he make his living? How did he die? And so on. We had heard of him first from Sálih Uglian [sic] in Novi Pazar. From Huso Salih had learned his favorite song about the taking of Bagdad and its queen by Djérdjelez Aliya, hero of the Turkish border. In Salih’s own words, caught by our microphone, we have a bit of the tradition of the blind singer’s way of life.

Nikola: From whom did you learn your first Bosnian songs?
Salih: I learned Bosnian songs from One-eye Huso Husovitch from Kolashin.
N:     Who was he? How did he live? What sort of work did he do?
S:     He had no trade, only his horse and his arms, and he wandered about the world. He had only one eye. His clothes and his arms were of the finest. And so he wandered from town to town and sang to people to the gusle.
N:     And that’s all he did?
S:     He went from kingdom to kingdom and learned and sang.
N:     From kingdom to kingdom?
S:     He was at Vienna, at Franz’s court.
N:     Why did he go there?
S:     He happened to go there, and they told him about him, and went and got him, and he sang to him to the gusle, and King Joseph gave him a hundred sheep, and a hundred Napoleons as a present.
N:     How long did he sing to him to the gusle?
S:     A month.
N:     So there was Dutchman who liked the gusle that much?
S:     You know he wanted to hear such an unusual thing. He had never heard anything like it.
N:     All right. And afterwards, when he came back, what did he do with those sheep? Did he work after that, or did he go on singing to the gusle?
S:     He gave all the sheep to his relatives, and put the money in his purse, and wandered about the world.
N:     Was he a good singer?
S:     There could not have been a better."
(Trans. by Milman Parry)

Lord later wrote that for Parry Huso came to symbolize “the Yugoslav traditional singer in much the same way in which Homer was the Greek singer of tales par excellence.” He continues: “Some of the best poems collected were from singers who had heard Ćor Huso and had learned from him” (Lord 1948b:40). Interestingly enough, Parry and Lord do not seem to have questioned the existence of Huso, though, as John Foley has demonstrated, he is clearly legendary or “at most… a historical character to whom layers of legend have accrued” (Foley 1998:161). So taken was Parry with the analogy between Homer and Huso that before his death he planned a series of articles entitled “Homer and Huso” which Lord completed based on Parry’s abstracts and notes.

The second singer highlighted in the essay is the one whose picture would grace the cover of The Singer of Tales, that is to say, Avdo Međedović. The Singer of Tales, which publishes the results of Parry and Lord’s investigation of the South Slavic song tradition and applies them to the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey, was Lord’s fulfillment of Parry’s own plan to write a book of that title. The singer referred to in the title is of course generic, because much of what was groundbreaking about Parry and Lord’s work was their demonstration of the system in which traditional oral poetry is composed, a system in which many generations of singers participate. But Lord’s essay makes clear (as does, to a lesser extent, The Singer of Tales) that there is also a particular singer behind the title that Parry and later Lord used to denote their work. That singer is simultaneously Avdo and Homer himself.

Just as Ćor Huso embodied for Parry the Yugoslav traditional singer, Avdo was for Lord on a practical level a living, breathing example of a supremely talented oral poet to whom Homer could be compared. Lord’s Singer of Tales is remarkable for its straightforward expostion of the practical workings of the traditional system in which poets like Avdo composed their songs; it is no surprise therefore that he found a great deal of power in the concrete example that Avdo provided. Avdo dictated songs, was recorded on disk, and was even captured on a very early form of video called “kinescope.” After their initial encounter in the 1930’s, Lord found him and recorded him again in the 1950’s. He was in many ways the test case for Lord’s theories about the South Slavic (and by extension the Homeric) poetic system.

The photograph of Avdo that was featured on the cover of The Singer of Tales was one that Lord had taken on his first trip to Yugoslavia and was included among the images that were to accompany his unpublished essay (see image above). The caption reads: “Avdo Medjedovitch, peasant farmer, is the finest singer the expedition encountered. His poems reached as many as 15,000 lines. A veritable Yugoslav Homer!”

Here is Lord’s fuller description of Avdo in the essay:

"Lying on the bench not far from us was a Turk smoking a cigarette in an antique silver “cigárluk” (cigarette holder). He was a tall, lean and impressive person. At a break in our conversation he joined in. He knew of singers. The best, he said, was a certain Avdo Medjédovitch, a peasant farmer who lived an hour way. How old is he? Sixty, sixty-five. Does he know how to read or write? Nézna, bráte! (No, brother!) And so we went for him… Finally Avdo came, and he sang for us old Salih’s favorite of the taking of Bagdad in the days of Sultan Selim. We listened with increasing interest to this short homely farmer, whose throat was disfigured by a large goiter. He sat cross-legged on the bench, sawing the gusle, swaying in rhythm with the music. He sang very fast, sometimes deserting the melody, and while the bow went lightly back and forth over the string, he recited the verses at top speed. A crowd gathered. A card game, played by some of the modern young men of the town, noisily kept on, but was finally broken up. The next few days were a revelation. Avdo’s songs were longer and finer than any we had heard before. He could prolong one for days, and some of them reached fifteen or sixteen thousand lines. Other singers came, but none could equal Avdo, our Yugoslav Homer."

In these excerpts I think we can see how important Avdo was for Lord’s earliest conception of Homer as oral poet. Whereas Parry’s never completed articles comparing the South Slavic and Homeric traditions focused on the hazy figure of Ćor Huso, Lord, when invited to give a lecture on La poesia epica e la sua formazione, entitled his talk “Tradition and the Oral Poet: Homer, Huso, and Avdo Medjedović.”(See Lord 1970.) As early as his 1948 article, “Homer, Parry, and Huso,” Lord links Avdo directly with Parry’s Huso: “During the summer of 1935, while collecting at Bijelo Polje, Parry came across a singer named Avdo Međedović, one of those who had heard Ćor Huso in his youth, whose powers of invention and story-telling were far above the ordinary.”

Lord’s comments about Avdo, especially in these earliest descriptions of him, focus on his excellence as a composer (despite the weakness of his voice), his superiority to other poets, and the length of his songs. It is not insignificant that in his unpublished essay Lord misestimates the length of Avdo’s song at 15,000 to 16,000 verses, the approximate length of the Iliad, whereas in fact the longest song that Avdo recorded was 13,331 verses long. By 1948 Lord was careful to report the accurate total of Avdo’s verses, but he was also careful to point out how extraordinary the length of Avdo’s songs were in comparison with his fellow singers, whose songs averaged only a few hundred lines. Clearly it was Lord’s first impression that Avdo provided the answer to the still hotly debated Homeric Question.

It would be easy to criticize Lord's youthful essay, and few people would find it necessary to do so. And even if we jump forward, decades later, it seems obvious that Lord conceived of the paradigm of a dictating oral poet Homer because he was imagining him in Avdo’s image. The technology used to record Avdo was cutting edge at that time, and Lord would never have been so anachronistic as to suggest that Homer was recorded on audio disk. But to assume the technologies required for writing (pen, ink, loose or bound sheets of readily available paper, skilled scribes, etc) for “Homer’s time” is an equally anachronistic projection. As much as Lord’s work is responsible for the paradigm shift in Homeric studies that has allowed many scholars to abandon the Homer as original genius genre of criticism, he himself had his blind spots on this crucial point. Lord could have his Homer and his oral tradition too.

Few people seem to be aware, however, that Lord all but retracted his dictation thesis in his 1991 collection of essays, Epic Singers and Oral Tradition. There, together with the 1953 article, he included an addendum, from which I quote here:

"As I reconsidered very recently the stylization of a passage from Salih Ugljanin’s “Song of Bagdad” that was found in a dictated version but not in two sung texts, I was suddenly aware of the experience of listening to Salih dictate… the pause interrupted neither Salih’s thought nor his syntax… One might think that dictating gave Salih the leisure to plan his words and their placing in the line, that the parallelism was due to his careful thinking out of the structure. First of all, however, dictating is not a leisurely process… I might add that not all singers can dictate successfully. As I have said elsewhere, some singers can never be happy without the gusle accompaniment to set the rhythm of the singing performance."

Lord himself as far as I am aware never, in print, discussed the implications of this important revsion of his 1953 argument. (Lord died in the same year that Epic Singers and Oral Tradition was published.) But it is also true that Lord never speculated about the historical circumstances under which the Iliad and Odyssey might have been dictated. For Lord, the question of the text fixation of the Homeric poems was not essential; rather he was concerned with the dynamic process, that is to say their on-going recomposition in performance.

Parry, on the other hand, did not get the chance to rethink his earlier work, or to conduct further fieldwork or spend decades studying the the South Slavic tradition and the Homeric poems as Lord did. His early writings on the economy of Homeric diction are a brilliant first step towards an entirely new way of conceiving of the composition of the Homeric poems, but they are only the beginning. Like Kuhn or Darwin, Parry's work has been assailed by many as mistaken in this or that particular, or not sufficiently thorough so as to have worked out all aspects of the system it seeks to describe in detail. As Mary Ebbott and I discuss in our recent book, Iliad 10 and the Poetics of Ambush, much scholarship has been devoted to refining Parry’s initial findings about the economy of Homeric diction and the nature of the Homeric formula. There is strong resistance among those who feel that Parry’s work somehow minimizes the artistry of the poems or that the principles he outlined restrict the creativity of poets composing in this medium. Thus even those who accept Parry’s findings often seek to amend significant aspects of his arguments. We feel that the scope of Parry’s and Lord’s insights has been ignored, misread or misrepresented, or dismissed too quickly. Some (though certainly not all) efforts to revise Parry and Lord are built on a misunderstanding of the principles they documented in their fieldwork and a lack of awareness of, or at least appreciation for, the kind of meaning made possible by an oral poetic tradition. That is not to say, however, that our approach and interpretations in our book have not also greatly benefited from the work of scholars who have sought to better understand such essential concepts as the Homeric formula and the complex relationship between orality and literacy in ancient Greece. There is, however, a significant difference between scholarship that expands the central insights of Parry and Lord’s work, even while modifying certain notions or definitions, and scholarship that sets out to “prove” Parry (more often than Lord) “wrong” in order to conclude, usually with no further justification, that Homer wrote, or somehow “broke free” of the oral tradition of these epics.

These criticisms, like those cited by Dr. Lienhard against Kuhn and Darwin, seem to me to react to Parry as if he had "written the last word on the subject, not the first." As Dr. Lienhard concludes at the end of the episode:

Kuhn, White, and Darwin are fine reminders that nothing is finished in its first incarnation. Did the Wright Brothers get it wrong because they put the tail in front? Was Edison wrong to record sound on a wax cylinder instead of a CD? I suppose if we need only to be absolutely right we'll shy away from any of our important progenitors. But, if we want to see creative change in full flower, we have to go to the delicious flawed beginnings.

Bibliography

Lord, A. B. 1936. “Homer and Huso I: The Singer’s Rests in Greek and South Slavic Heroic Song. Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 67:106–113.
–––. 1938. “Homer and Huso II: Narrative Inconsistencies in Homer and Oral Poetry.” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 69:439–445.
–––. 1948a. “Homer and Huso III: Enjambement in Greek and South Slavic Heroic Song. Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 79:113–124.
–––. 1948b. “Homer, Parry, and Huso.” American Journal of Archaeology 52:34–44.
–––. 1953. “Homer’s Originality: Oral Dictated Texts.” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 94:124–34.
–––. 1960/2000. The Singer of Tales. Cambridge, Mass. 2nd ed., ed. S. Mitchell and G. Nagy.
–––. 1970. “Tradition and the Oral Poet: Homer, Huso, and Avdo Medjedovic.” Atti del Convegno Internazionale sul Tema: La Poesia Epica e la sua Formazione (eds. E. Cerulli et al.) 13–28. Rome.
–––. 1991. Epic Singers and Oral Tradition. Ithaca, N.Y.
–––. 1995. The Singer Resumes the Tale. Ithaca, N.Y.

Parry, A., ed. 1971. The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry. Oxford.

Parry, M. 1928. L’épithète traditionelle dans Homère: essai sur un problème de style homérique. Paris. [Repr. and trans. in A. Parry 1971:1–190.]

Review of Poetics of Ambush

2011-09-26T08:59:00.000-07:00

An incredibly kind review of Iliad 10 and the Poetics of Ambush appeared in Bryn Mawr Classical Review today. I was particularly pleased that the reviewer commented on the multitextual aspect of the book and linked to the HMT.

Papyri · A New Edition of the Bankes Homer (B.M. Papyrus cxiv)

2011-09-15T18:25:00.000-07:00

We have published on the Homeric Papyri Canonical Text Service a new edition of the so-called Bankes Homer, a long papyrus fragment (B.M. Papyrus cxiv), containing Homer, Iliad 24.127–24.804. The work of transcription was done by David Creasey, Kylie Elliott, Talley Lattimore, and Brett Stonecipher, undergraduates at Furman University, working from facsimile images of the papyrus. The resulting text can be seen, in a human-readable format, here.

Metrical Book-Summaries on Two Byzantine Manuscripts

2011-09-12T08:17:00.000-07:00

Metrical Book-Summaries on Two Byzantine Manuscripts

Book 1 (“Alpha”) Summarized with one line of Greek in dactylic hexameter,
on the Venetus A and the Escorialensis 4

Each Byzantine manuscript of the Homeric Iliad that the Homer Multitext has digitized represents a complex juxtaposition of many complementary texts. Each contains a text of the poem, in Greek, along with other texts that contain commentaries, summaries, biographies of Homer, or other additional materials. The editors of the HMT divide these texts into two categories: primary texts, which stand alone, and secondary texts, which refer explicitly to primary texts. The text of the Iliad is a primary text, of course, but so is a biography of Homer or a summary of another, lost epic poem such as the Ilioupersis (the “Sack of Troy”). The inter-linear scholia constitute a secondary text, because each note, or “scholion”, refers to a word, phrase, line or passage in the primary text.

One of the most interesting secondary texts that appears on several of these manuscripts is the collection of one-line summaries of each book of the Iliad, from Book 1 (“Alpha”), to Book 24 (“Omega”). After some thought, we have decided to consider these a secondary text, since they accompany and refer to the poetic text. Each of the summaries is written in Greek and in dactylic hexameter, the same poetic meter as the Iliad itself. With this posting on the Homer Multitext Blog, we are pleased to announce a publication of the metrical summaries from two manuscripts, the Venetus A (Marcianus Graecus Z.454 [=822]), and the Escorialensis 4 (Escorialensis ω.I.12 [513 = Allen E⁴]).

Links:

XML version (with stylesheet for in-browser display)
HTML version
Downloadable archive containing XML, stylesheets, and associated files.

This publication consists of an XML document that contains the following fields for each book-summary for each manuscript:

a label
a CITE-URN that identifies a region-of-interest on a digital image of a manuscript page
the text of the metrical summary
a translation of the metrical summary

The CITE-URN is a canonical reference to a defined section of an image; these concise strings can be resolved to show the image data itself, which is exposed through the CITE Image Service.

Of the twenty-four pairs of summaries, no two are completely identical in every respect. The Venetus A and E4 follow different conventions for punctuation, for example. But eighteen of the twenty-four books are substantially similar from one manuscript to the next.

Six of the summaries have more significant differences in the texts preserved on the Venetus A and the E4.

For Book Γ (3), the two manuscript have:

Venetus A
Text: γάμμα δ’ ἄρ. ἀφ’ Ἑλένης. οἴοις μόθος ἐστὶν ἀκοίταις·
Translation: And then Gamma is from the point of view of Helen; the pitch of battle is only for husbands.

Escorialensis 4
Text: γάμμα δ’ ἄρ’ ἀμφ’ Ἑλένηι· οἴοις μόθος ἐστὶν ἀκοίταις·
Translation: And then Gamma is around Helen; the pitch of battle is only for husbands.

The one-letter difference between the prepositions ἀφ’ and ἀμφ’ is intentional, because the scribes used the correct case for the object-nouns (genitive in the VA and dative in the E4).

In both Books Δ (4) and Θ (8), the summaries consist of the book number (i.e. “Delta”, “Theta”), which serves as the grammatical subject of the sentence. In these two instances, the predicate of the sentence is either in the nominative or the accusative. We read the VA says that “Delta [contains] an assembly [accusative] of the gods,” while E4 says that “Delta [is] an assembly [nominative] of the gods.” Interestingly, in Book 8 this usage is reversed even though the words in 8 are the same as in 4, an “assembly of the gods” (ἀγορ- θεῶν): VA has “Theta [is] an assembly [nominative] of the gods,” and E4 has, “Theta [contains] an assembly [accusative] of the gods.”

The summaries for Book Ζ (6) are subtly different. We translate both of them:

“And then Zeta is the fond discourse of both Andromache and Hektor.”

The Greek for each is:

VA - ζῆτα· δ ὰρ. Ἀνδρομάχης τὲ καὶ Ἕκτορός ἐστ’ ὁαριστύς·
E4 - ζῆτα· δ’ ἄρ’ Ἀνδρομάχης καὶ Ἕκτορός ἐστι ὀαριστύς.

Venetus A · folio 89 verso

The most obvious difference is in VA’s τὲ καὶ … ἐστ’, versus E4’s καὶ … ἐστι. The result is equally valid dactylic hexameter. More interesting is the presentation of the word ὀαριστύς on the Venetus A.

We see what looks like an intentional space between ὁ and αριστύς, but the scribe is meticulous about using breathings, so we conclude that he intended this to be one word. The word is, as we have translated it, ὀαριστύς, “fond discourse”. It should properly have a smooth-breathing, as it does on the E4, but the scribe of VA has written a very clear rough-breathing. Did the scribe, unfamiliar with this exclusively epic word, guess wrong at the (no longer pronounced in the 10th century) breathing?

In Book Η (7), between E4 and the Venetus A, the words translated here “one-on-one” are reverse: μόνος μόνωι (in E4) versus μόνωι μόνος (in the Venetus A). The two versions are equally correct, grammatically and metrically.

Taken together, these differences, while minor, do not seem to us likely to be attributed to “scribal error”. It seems more likely that we have two different presentations of traditional material, with its own tradition that includes a certain amount of variation. The differences in Books 4, 6, 7, and 8 might suggest that the scribes were not in fact looking at a written source, but knew this material – perhaps as aids to navigating the 24 books of the poem reduced to a jingle committed to memory. This is purely speculation.

Katie Phillips, a Sophomore at Furman University, is editing the metrical summaries on the Escorialensis 3, which we will look forward to adding to our publications, and to our analysis of this interesting secondary text on the Byzantine witnesses to the Iliad.

Composition of the Venetus A: numbered similes

2011-09-07T18:34:00.000-07:00

The following guest post by Holy Cross student Christine Roughan shows how careful observation of a largely overlooked feature of the Venetus A can help us reconstruct something about both the process of creating the manuscript, and the sources available to the scribes who worked on the Venetus A.

Epic simile numerals in the Venetus A

Christine Roughan

The reader of Homer has undoubtedly encountered what is called the 'epic simile': a comparison made in the poem that is multiple lines long. One example appears early in Book 2 of the Iliad:

ἠΰτε ἔθνεα εἶσι μελισσάων ἁδινάων
πέτρης ἐκ γλαφυρῆς αἰεὶ νέον ἐρχομενάων.
βοτρυδὸν δὲ πέτονται ἐπ᾽ ἄνθεσιν εἰαρινοῖσιν·
αἱ μέν τ᾽ ἔνθα ἅλις πεποτήαται· αἱ δέ τε ἔνθα·
ὡς τῶν ἔθνεα πολλὰ νεῶν ἄπο καὶ κλισιάων
ἠϊόνος προπάροιθε βαθείης ἐστιχόωντο
εἰλαδὸν εἰς ἀγορὴν. (Iliad 2.87-93)

Just as the companies of thick bees go
from a hollow rock, always newly coming.
And fly in clusters over spring flowers;
some flit crowded together here, some there;
even so the many companies from the ships and huts
before the low shore marched
in troops to the gathering space.

In the Venetus A manuscript, we observed Greek numerals in the exterior margins of folios, starting with 1 (Α) on 26r and reaching 193 (ΡϞΓ) on 322r. They appeared consecutively (except where numerals would be missing, causing the count to skip: see below), and we found that across from wherever these numerals appeared, an epic simile was present in the main text. The extended simile above is the first to appear in the Iliad, and so it was marked in the Venetus A with the Greek number for 1.

[NB: all images are linked to interactive views of the relevant folio highlighting this area. Click to see the region in a fuller context.]

A scholion on the lines containing this particular simile comments on their content being one of the "εἰκαζομένους Ἕλληνας": Greek similes. Other manuscripts, such as the Venetus B and the E3, also have this scholion (in a slightly longer form; however, the first part discussing "εἰκαζομένους Ἕλληνας" is the same) and so acknowledge the presence of the epic simile. But neither of them, nor the U4, follow the Venetus A in numbering or otherwise marking each epic simile as it appears.

The presence of these numerals raises a few questions. When were they added to the manuscript, and by whom? Were they included by the original hand responsible for the main text and much of the scholia, or were the numerals a later addition, perhaps during something like the scribe’s second pass Thomas W. Allen described in “On the Composition of Some Greek Manuscripts: The Venetian Homer” (Journal of Philology 26 [1899])?

Furthermore, what was the purpose of marking the extended similes with these numerals? Was the numbering merely a whim of their author, or does it point to a tradition of scholarly interest in these similes? Might it perhaps suggest a lost work on Homeric similes which the scribe expected his reader to know? The numerals may have been intended to index each simile as it appeared in the Iliadic text so that the manuscript's reader could find it in the hypothesized lost work. Or perhaps they were simply intended to call the reader's attention to the simile as something worthy of note. In that case, however, why would the similes be numbered rather than marked with some sign? (Compare the manicula of Latin manuscripts, for instance.) Naturally, conclusively determining the intention behind these numerals is even trickier than the already difficult task of determining when and by whom they were added.

What we have observed about the epic simile numerals – where they appear, their ink, and where they fail to appear – does point to some answers. Furthermore, findings drawn from our examination of these numerals even suggest possible conclusions about the sources and construction of the manuscript itself. Taken together, the observations detailed below suggest an early revision process in which a scribe worked through the manuscript adding material from at least one outside source.

What can be said for certain about these numerals? In our analysis of the ink, we found alternating strengths (instead of a gradual fade) for the numerals 82 (ΠΒ) , 83 (ΠΓ), 84 (ΠΔ), 85 (ΠΕ), and 86 (Πϛ) between folios 165r and 167v. This might help answer at least one of our questions, suggesting that their author did not move through the manuscript solely marking similes. The numerals were probably added at the same time as other material was. The color of the ink also seems to match the ink of the main text and scholia.

We observed that the numerals never appeared on the replaced folios, even when an extended simile did appear in the text. Thus the numerals would date from before Bessarion’s fifteenth century restorations. A second hint regarding their date: on 90v we found a faint exterior scholion squeezed into the space between the numeral 41 (ΜΑ) and the edge of the page, which suggests that the numeral was written in first.

The Missing Numerals

While the numerals did progress in ascending order, we observed that some were missing. Of the 193 numerals expected, 35 were nowhere to be seen on the folio, though epic similes were present in the main text. The following is a description of what we observed concerning the missing numerals:

-The first break occurs after 12 (ΙΒ) on 33v; there is a gap of sixteen numerals between lines 2.488-4.434, and the sequence continues again with 39 (ΚΘ) on 60r. This first lacuna is notable for how many numerals are missing: where later gaps usually consist of one or a couple, this gap has sixteen unmarked epic similes.

-The next break occurs after 34 (ΛΔ) on 65v; there is a gap of four numerals between lines 5.186-5.760, and the sequence continues again with 39 (ΛΘ) on 77v. In this case folios 69-74 are restorations. We found that all of the unmarked similes here appear on those folios.

-A break occurs after 43 (ΜΓ) on 92r; there is a gap of two numerals between lines 7.76-8.297, and the sequence continues with 46 (ΜϜ) on 106v.

-A break occurs after 121 (ΡΚΑ) on 211r; there is a gap of one numeral between lines 16.276-16.350, and the sequence continues with 123 (ΡΚΓ) on 213r.

-A break occurs after 141 (ΡΜΑ) on 226r; there is a gap of six numerals between lines 17.151-17.653, and the sequence continues with 148 (ΡΜΗ) on 236v. Folios 229-234 are restorations, and we observed that five unmarked similes appear on those folios. One unmarked simile, however, does appear on an original folio: what would be simile 142 appears on 228v.

-A break occurs after 150 (ΡΝ) on 237v; there is a gap of four numerals between lines 17.729-18.150, and the sequence continues with ΡΝΕ (155) on 242r. Folio 238 is a restoration, and again all of the unmarked similes appear on that folio.

-A final break occurs after 190 (ΡϞ) on 311v; there is a gap of two numerals between lines 24.55-24.554, and the sequence resumes with the final numeral 193 (ΡϞΓ) on 322r.

In cases where replacement folios cannot explain the absence of these numerals, explanations such as ink fading, losing the edge of the folio, or human error might. The ink of 7 (Ζ) on folio 32r, for instance, is extremely faint:

it is not impossible to imagine that in some cases the ink faded even further to invisibility. On folio 60r, the loss of part of 29 (ΚΘ) shows how numerals could have been lost with trimming to the edge of the page. If neither of these are the case, the writer of these numerals was human: he may have occasionally missed some, especially if he worked with another source and did not number the similes himself.

But while these reasons might account for the occasional missing numeral, such as 122, it seems extremely unlikely that the ink faded to invisibility for all sixteen numerals absent between folios 33v and 60r.

The Sixteen Missing Numerals

The observations detailed so far help us consider answers to the questions the numerals’ presence raised in the first place. The numbers must have been a part of the manuscript before the fifteenth century, when lost folios were restored without them. Analysis of the ink hints at an early date, as its hand and color is similar to that of the main text and scholia, and its changing strengths would suggest it was added along with other material. The one example where a numeral and an exterior scholion share the same space also points to an early date. The simile numerals were certainly in place before the fifteenth century; there is nothing yet to rule out that they may be as early as the manuscript’s initial construction. Additionally, the fact that the similes are numbered rather than simply marked makes it more likely that the numerals were meant as a reference, rather than just an indication that the extended similes were worthy of note.

The sixteen missing numerals are even more informative, since this lacuna might be explained by considering how the manuscript was originally constructed.

Much of the codex is constructed from quaternions: gathers (or "quires") of four bifolios each. Folios 12-19, for instance, form the first quire. Interestingly, we observed that for the missing sixteen numerals, the corresponding unmarked similes appear between folios 39v and 59v, and thus only within the fourth, fifth, and sixth quires. None of these quires contain a numeral. The sequence ends with the last extended simile in the third quire and picks up again with the very first simile to appear in the seventh.

If the scribe completely finished adding certain material to one quire before starting to add it to the next, it might explain why entire quires are missing numerals: he accidentally neglected to add them when he was working on those quires. This would mean that while adding the simile numerals the scribe worked, not folio-by-folio or book-by-book, but rather quire-by-quire.

A clue concerning how simile numerals in these quires were skipped might be that the Catalogue of Ships begins on 34r, the end of the third quire. Throughout the Catalogue of Ships, the scribe includes numerals in the interior and intermarginal sections of the folio that mark how many ships are specified in the line. For example, where line 2.576 reads that Agamemnon brought 100 ships, a capital rho appears to the left of the line as the Greek number 100. The color of the ink and our observation that intermarginal scholia will wrap around the Catalogue numerals (see 38v) point to their early inclusion in the manuscript.

The fact that these Catalogue numerals start where the simile numerals disappear could be purely coincidental, or it could offer a reason why the scribe forgot to number the sixteen Homeric similes. A hypothesized scenario: the scribe works through his manuscript quire-by-quire, adding simile numerals, Catalogue numerals, and other material (perhaps intermarginal and interlinear scholia, as in Allen’s hypothesis). He includes simile numerals up to 33v and starts adding Catalogue numerals on 34r in the third quire. In the start of the fourth quire there are no similes to be marked, but he includes Catalogue numerals up to 39r. When he finishes the Catalogue of Ships, the scribe considers his work adding numerals finished, and accidentally neglects to resume marking similes when they start up again on 39v. He continues with whatever other material he was adding at the time, but does not remember to include simile numerals again until he begins the seventh quire.

This scenario is purely conjecture. The proximity of the Catalogue numerals to the missing simile numerals could simply be a coincidence; even the proposed link between the sixteen unmarked similes and the three quires they appear on could be a coincidence. Still, the possible explanation of adding simile numerals in a later pass during the manuscript's initial construction, quire-by-quire, does match up with other observations: the ink possibly being the same as that for the main text and scholia; the simile numerals being added at the same time as other material. And the missing sixteen numerals are difficult to explain otherwise, unless for that entire stretch the scribe either wrote with extremely faint ink, or placed the numerals at the very edge of the page.

If the simile numerals were added at the same time as the Catalogue numerals, they would date no later than the intermarginal scholia: the fact that these intermarginal scholia wrap around Catalogue numerals indicates that the scholia were added after the numerals. Admittedly, the hand changes between simile numerals and Catalogue numerals, a difference most pronounced in how the scribe writes the letter mu (compare simile 43 (ΜΓ) on 92r to forty ships marked on 34v, for example). Vertical strokes on the Catalogue numerals are often deliberately thickened and sometimes not even filled in, as in 12 (ΙΒ) on 36v. Perhaps, however, this difference in style reflects a difference in the sources the scribe drew the Catalogue and simile numerals from.

That the writer of the simile numerals did not notice when he overlooked multiple similes further suggests that he copied the numerals from another source rather than generate them himself. Otherwise, if he read through the manuscript marking similes as they appeared, when he accidentally missed one (let alone sixteen), why would he skip ahead in his numbering? The simile numerals most likely came from another source, then, either the scribe's exemplar for the manuscript (if he had one) or –the more likely option if he is adding material during a later pass– directly from a lost source on Homeric similes.

So our findings allow for a reconstruction in which the Venetus A’s scribe completed the main text and main scholia, then worked through his manuscript again, quire-by-quire, adding additional material beyond the manuscript’s exemplar. Whether this is the same pass when the scribe added intermarginal scholia, or when he added the Catalogue numerals, is difficult to determine conclusively, but it was a step likely done before exterior corrections were added in the margins. During this pass the scribe drew on new material, leading to the inclusion of the epic simile numerals in the manuscript: numbers intended to refer readers to their source. Where once the reader of the Venetus A perhaps had an entire text he could refer to when he encountered an epic simile, helpfully numbered in the margins, today we only have left the cryptic Greek numerals which hint at what is lost to us.

Updates to Homeric Papyri

2011-09-03T11:39:00.000-07:00

We have updated the Homer Multitext’s library of homeric papyri with editions of fifteen new documents. These include the Hawara Papyrus in a new edition by Amy Koenig of Harvard University. This text contains 547 lines of the Iliad, from Books 1 and 2.

The remaining fourteen documents are the results of editorial work by Alexander Loney and Bart Huelsenbeck of Duke University, and Lia Campbell, Andrew Corley, David Creasy, Kylie Elliott, Talley Lattimore, Brett Stonecipher, and Blake Williams, undergraduate students of Greek at Furman University.

In all, the Homeric Papyri Digital Library now contains 30 edited texts, containing 3,142 lines of Homeric poetry. These lines include 2,706 unique citations.

The Homeric Papyri library is exposed via the Canonical Text Services protocol (CTS). Its website offers two different human-readable presentations of each document, as well as direct access to the raw TEI XML.

Work on these papyri continues, and we are looking forward to increasing the holdings of this open-access digital library in the near future. We are grateful for the support of the Center for Hellenic Studies of Harvard University.

υπ Mystery Scholion (Stephanie Lindeborg guest post)

2011-08-27T16:19:00.001-07:00

by Stephanie Lindeborg, College of the Holy Cross Class of 2013, Homer Multitext Research Fellow summer 2011.

On 15r of the Venetus A, next to line 1.169 the scribe wrote two letters: υπ with the π written above the υ. It is one of the interior scholia. Although another interior scholion is located almost immediately below it, the two do not appear connected in any way. The letters appear to be written in the same hand as the other interior scholia, but are somewhat larger than normal. This writing is captured in neither Dindorf's nor Erbse's edition of the scholia.

We read this abbreviation as υπ instead of πυ for two reasons. First, this is the order in which abbreviations are typically read in the Venetus A (i.e. the superlinear letter(s) after the letter(s) in the line). Second, υπ looks very much like the ὑπό abbreviations we have observed in the scholia text. Our first guess is that υπ is an abbreviation of ὑπό, but is it more than just ὑπό? Perhaps something like ὑπόθεσις or ὑποθέτικος? Or are these guesses the entirely wrong direction to take? We know that there are other scholia commenting on this line. A main scholion talks about hyperbaton in lines 1.169-171. Is υπ an abbreviation for ὑπερβατόν, glossing the general idea of the main scholion?

A decent argument can be made for ὑπερβατόν simply because it is the focus of the main scholion on this line. However, if that is the focus of the main scholion, then why is it necessary to refer to it in another abbreviated interior scholion? While it is true that sometimes one scholion will continue or refer back to the idea of another scholion, this conjecture seems too unclear to be certain.

Based on what we have observed of the abbreviations, it is quite likely and reasonable to suggest that the mark is more along the lines of ὑπό. The question is whether it should be further expanded or not. If it is just ὑπό, the meaning is not particularly clear as the word has a variety of meanings. As an adverb (which is the most likely use as it is unaccompanied by any other word), it can mean under, below, beneath, behind, somewhat, and secretly (among other things). None of these meanings, however, seem to make any sense in context of the lines and the other scholia on this line.

Therefore, it seems likely that if we're on the right track with ὑπό, then it needs to be further expanded. Our possible suggestions are not entirely exhaustive, but we can guess based on our general knowledge of the scholia and ancient Greek scholarship thus far. In prior scholia, we have observed ὑπὸ abbreviations like this one. In the first Venetus A scholia on 12r there is in fact a ὑπὸ abbreviation that is part of the larger word ὑπόθεσις. The "ὑπὸ" is written out exactly like the abbreviation we find on 15r, followed by the rest of the word "-θεσις". ὑποθεσις, can mean a variety of things including proposed action, intention, suggestion, purpose, pretext, assumption, cause, etc. ὑπόθεσις is a tempting solution to our predicament. The 12r scholion discusses mainly why the first line of Iliad begins with μῆνιν. ὑπόθεσις is used here to mean "cause," saying that the poem begins with μῆνις because it becomes the cause of actions (ἤρξατο μὲν ἀπὸ μήνιδος ἐπείπερ αὕτη τοῖς πρακτικοῖς ὑπόθεσις γέγονεν·). 1.169 and the lines both preceding and following it are part of Achilles' speech/reprimand of Agamemnon for his poor behavior and treatment of his comrades. 1.169 itself begins Achilles' threat to leave the war and return home rather than continue to acquire riches for Agamemnon. It is possible then that υπ scholion on 15r is referring back to the ideas of the first scholion on 12r, namely that μῆνις is causing the action, driving the plot, and at this particular moment in line 1.169, we see this happening. If it is too much to assume that these two scholia are connected so closely, then we might suppose that υπ is still ὑπόθεσις, but is generally noting that line 1.169 establishes the circumstances around which the plot is to move forward. The word ὑπόθεσις could also refer to a plot summary of classical dramas. These were frequently copied as a prefaces in Medieval manuscripts. This idea fits at least loosely within the context of the lines.

If instead we are expanding to ὑποθέτικος, meaning hypothetical or conditional, it fits the context of the lines in a different way. Here perhaps the scholia is indicating that Achilles' claim is hypothetical or conditional. Achilles does not actually leave for home. His threat is not acted upon. There is an element of condition to his claim that he would rather go home than serve Agamemnon. His continued participation in the war is conditional based on Agamemnon's behavior.

Another possibility is that υπ is supposed to offer a multiform replacement in the line. Line 1.169 of the Venetus A reads:

νῦν δ᾽ εἶμι Φθίην δ᾽· ἐπειὴ πολὺ φέρτερόν ἐστιν

A possible substitution could be ὑπέρτερον instead of φέρτερον. If so the line would read:

νῦν δ‘ εἶμι Φθίην δ’· ἐπειὴ πολὺ ὑπέρτερόν ἐστιν

In terms of meaning there is little variation in how we read the text. φέτερον means "better" and ὑπέρτερον can also mean "better", as we can see in several other occurrences of the word in the Iliad. For example, in 11.786 ὑπέρτερον is used to describe Achilles as a greater, more noble man. There are problems with this alternate reading. First, ὑπέρτερον for φέρτερον in this line, without any additional changes renders it unmetrical. Second, alternate readings are often presented either superlinear to the main Iliadic text or in the exterior margin. This theory, by that reasoning then, seems highly unlikely.

My personal preference is to expand this abbreviation as ὑπόθεσις. It makes sense based on other ὑπὸ abbreviations we have observed and the context of the lines. It does not fit the context of the other scholia that comment on this line. However, as ὑποθέσις, it serves almost like a gloss of the 1.169 and the lines that follow as well as a reminder of the first scholion and the role of μῆνις.

Notes on Iliad 5 (2)

2011-07-17T10:57:00.001-07:00

The following guest post by summer workshop participants Amy Koenig and Annalisa Quinn implies an interesting question: is the addition of a line a 'correction' of a scribal error, or evidence of revision resulting from comparison of multiple sources?

Marginalizing Homer: An Anomaly in the Venetus A, Iliad 5

Amy Koenig and Annalisa Quinn

While inventorying and creating a digital edition of pages from the Venetus A, we came across this odd bit of marginalia:

ὤμων μεσσηγὺς δια δὲ στήθεσφιν ἔλασσεν

[NB: the image inserted above is linked to an interactive view of folio 63 recto highlighting this area. Click to see the region in a fuller context.]

What at first glance looked like another scholion appears, upon closer inspection, to be the work of the same pen and hand as the original scribe, supplying a line omitted in the main body of the text (5.57). Slightly smaller than the main text, it spans nearly the entire width of the right margin, not confining itself to the area normally reserved for the main scholia.

The line is written in a minuscule script matching the body of the text, although the scribe employs majuscule forms in writing nu, eta, and one delta.

It is possible that the initial omission of the line was due to scribal error, but we could see no obvious reason for such a slip of the eye. (There are already 25 lines in the body of the text, consistent with the number of lines on other pages of the manuscript.) In fact, this line is omitted in a number of medieval manuscripts, such as the Venetus B, as well as in P.Oxy. 223 (3rd century C.E.). An identical line appears at 5.41, earlier on the same page of the Venetus A, and this may have been a reason for scribal or scholarly uncertainty, leading to its marginal placement here.

More on the Grief of War: Mother Ajax

2011-07-16T11:55:00.000-07:00

The discussion that Casey and I had about Petry’s interview on The Daily Show and especially her beautiful consideration of the similes featuring mothers in these passages of the Iliad (see her post) has also led me to reconsider another such simile that I had previously examined in my published work. In Iliad 8, the coordinated fighting method of the half-brothers Ajax and Teucer is described, and that description includes a compressed simile of a child and his mother (Iliad 8.266–272):

Τεῦκρος δ’ εἴνατος ἦλθε παλίντονα τόξα τιταίνων,

στῆ δ’ ἄρ’ ὑπ’ Αἴαντος σάκεϊ Τελαμωνιάδαο.
ἔνθ’ Αἴας μὲν ὑπεξέφερεν σάκος· αὐτὰρ ὅ γ' ἥρως
παπτήνας, ἐπεὶ ἄρ τιν’ ὀϊστεύσας ἐν ὁμίλῳ
βεβλήκοι, ὃ μὲν αὖθι πεσὼν ἀπὸ θυμὸν ὄλεσσεν.
αὐτὰρ ὃ αὖτις ἰὼν πάϊς ὣς ὑπὸ μητέρα δύσκεν
εἰς Αἴανθ’· ὃ δέ μιν σάκεϊ κρύπτασκε φαεινῷ.

Teucer came ninth, bending back his curving bow,
and he stood under the shield of Ajax, son of Telamon.
Then Ajax was lifting his shield up and out. And then the hero
once he looked around, when he shoots someone in the crowd
and has hit him, that man falling down on the spot loses his life.
And then Teucer goes back, like a child runs behind his mother,
to Ajax. And Ajax hides him with his shining shield.

In my examination of the ways in which Teucer’s illegitimacy (his mother was the war captive of Telamon, Teucer and Ajax’s father, while Ajax’s mother was Telamon’s wife) is portrayed, I connect this simile to other images we find in Greek literature in which the nothos (‘bastard’) is pictured as a perpetual child (Ebbott 2003: 39–40) and then I explore other Indo-European myths of twins or pairs to think about how Teucer’s identity is connected to that of his brother (Ebbott 2003: 41–44). But considering this simile in conjunction with the other similes depicting mothers and their children (see Muellner 1990 for how studying the similes as a system reveals much more about their meaning), I now am wondering whether the mother-child simile here, especially in light of the obvious role Ajax is playing as his brother’s protector on the battlefield, is connected with the special relationship not only between these two, but between soldiers who fight together on the battlefield together generally. The fact that Teucer will end up as the protector when he protects Ajax’s corpse after Ajax kills himself out of shame (his suicide happens after the events of the Iliad but the audience would have been aware of it) adds poignancy to this image, but also reflects the possibility that the role of “mother” can change depending on the circumstances of battle.

We can’t know whether “real-life” ancient Greek warriors would have specifically used the analogy of being a “mother” to their comrades, but I think we can plainly see that the emotions the Iliadic warriors express about one another and the way that American soldiers feel about their comrades has much in common. As Casey mentioned, those poetics and the emotional connections they can evoke are the reasons why Homeric epic is meaningful to us still today. But the close and careful work on the epics that the Homer Multitext involves leads to a deeper appreciation of these poetics—realizing both how the poetry in its multiformity creates meaning, but also what meaning it carries in our lives and our world.

Ebbott, M. 2003. Imagining Illegitimacy in Classical Greek Literature. Lanham, MD.

Muellner, L. 1990. “The Simile of the Cranes and Pygmies: A Study of Homeric Metaphor,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 93: 59–101.

The Grief of War: Special Homeric Poetics Edition

2011-07-15T13:01:00.000-07:00

This blog is primarily devoted to new research and developments connected with the Homer Multitext project. Moved by a recent interview, however, I was inspired to revisit a poetic topic that, while not directly connected to the multiformity of the Iliad, is nevertheless a testament to why we continue to find Homeric poetry so fascinating.

In book 9 of the Iliad, Achilles uses a striking simile to describe his feelings about the situation in which he finds himself. Believing that he has been disrespected and stripped of honor by Agamemnon, he has withdrawn from battle. The Greeks, now losing without him, beg him to return. He says:

ὡς δ’ ὄρνις ἀπτῆσι νεοσσοῖσι προφέρῃσι

μάστακ' ἐπεί κε λάβῃσι, κακῶς δ’ ἄρα οἱ πέλει αὐτῇ,

ὣς καὶ ἐγὼ πολλὰς μὲν ἀΰπνους νύκτας ἴαυον,

ἤματα δ' αἱματόεντα διέπρησσον πολεμίζων

ἀνδράσι μαρνάμενος ὀάρων ἕνεκα σφετεράων.

(Iliad 9.323-327)

Like a bird that brings food to her fledgling young

in her bill, whenever she finds any, even if she herself fares poorly,

so I passed many sleepless nights,

and spent many bloody days in battle,

contending with men for the sake of their wives.

In a previously published book and article (Dué 2005 and 2006), I argued that here Achilles is drawing on the suffering of mothers in order to articulate his own sorrow, as he struggles against his mortality and the pleas of his comrades that he return to battle. By using a traditional theme of women’s lament traditions, that of the mother bird who has toiled to raise her young only to lose them, Achilles connects on a very visceral level with the women that he himself has widowed, deprived of children, and enslaved in war.

One of the many passages that bring together the imagery of mother birds with the grief of war (and especially the lamentation of a mother for her fallen son) in Greek literature comes from Euripides’ tragedy the Trojan Women. This play tells the story of the women of Troy after the Greek victory, and it is structured as a series of laments by the principal characters and the chorus. In Hecuba’s opening monody, she compares herself to a mother bird, screaming over her lost young (Trojan Women 138-150):

ὤμοι, θάκους οἵους θάσσω,/σκηναῖς ἐφέδρους Ἀγαμεμνονίαις./δούλα δ' ἄγομαι/γραῦς ἐξ οἴκων πενθήρη/κρᾶτ' ἐκπορθηθεῖσ' οἰκτρῶς./ἀλλ' ὦ τῶν χαλκεγχέων Τρώων/ἄλοχοι μέλεαι,/καὶ κοῦραι ‹κοῦραι› δύσνυμφοι,/τύφεται Ἴλιον, αἰάζωμεν./μάτηρ δ' ὡσεί τις πτανοῖς/ὄρνισιν, ὅπως ἐξάρξω 'γὼ/κλαγγάν, μολπάν, οὐ τὰν αὐτὰν/οἵαν ποτὲ δὴ/σκήπτρῳ Πριάμου διερειδομένα/ποδὸς ἀρχεχόρου πληγαῖς Φρυγίους/εὐκόμποις ἐξῆρχον θεούς.

Alas what sort of seat is this that I have taken, I who am seated before the tents of Agamemnon? As a slave I am led away from my home, an old woman, my head shorn piteously in grief. Ah! wretched wives of the Trojans with their bronze spears and maidens, unfortunate brides, Ilium is smoldering, let us cry out! Like some mother-bird that over her fledglings screams, so I will lead off the shout, the song and dance; not the same as that I once conducted, as I leaned on Priam’s scepter and with loud-sounding beats led the dance for the Phrygian gods.

In large part because of passages like these, I have argued that Achilles’ comparison of his own feelings to those of a mother bird would have resonated with ancient audiences as a particular kind of grief, the grief of a mother who has lost her son in war. What I did not realize when I made those arguments initially is that the emotions conveyed by Achilles in that moment are shared by our soldiers fighting today in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Last night on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Stewart interviewed a medal of honor winner from Afghanistan named Sgt. First Class Leroy Petry. Stewart asked Petry how it was possible for him, after being wounded in both legs (and later after his hand was blown off by a grenade), to be able to maintain his leadership role and continue to protect the other men and also communicate back with his commanders. In his spontaneous response he almost choked up, saying that his fellow soldiers were like brothers to him, but that it was even more than that. He said that the way he felt about the other guys is like how a bird cares for its young.

Sgt. Petry’s experience is in many ways the opposite of the situation of Achilles in Iliad 9. Sgt. Petry did not retreat, whereas Achilles has, to the extreme detriment of his comrades. But I’m fascinated that Sgt. Petry would use the same metaphor to describe war. Moreover, as my friend and colleague Mary Ebbott points out to me, Jonathan Shay has described the relationship between combat soldiers in similar terms in his book Achilles in Vietnam (p.42): “While the kin relationship of brother seems to be the most frequent symbol of the relationship between combat soldiers who are closest comrades, in our culture the powerful territory of feeling and symbolism of mother often seems to apply just as well.” He also writes (p. 49): “The terror and privation of combat bonds men in a passion of care that the word brother only partly captures. Men become mothers to one another in combat. The grief and rage that they experience when the special comrade is killed appear virtually identical to that of a child suddenly orphaned, and they feel that the mother within them has died with the friend.”

These accounts have caused me to reexamine Achilles’ words. I think what Achilles is trying to say, in his own soldierly way, is that he has experienced the same intensity of war that Sgt Petry attempts to describe, but that he has not gotten anything for it. He has been dishonored even so—he has not been awarded a medal of honor. He wants out. He wants to go home and live a normal life. Looking at it this way, we understand even better what it means for Achilles to return to battle after Patroklos’ death later in the epic. Achilles withdrew from battle, and the person who did not get protected as a result was his closest companion in the world.

Carroll Moulton has noted that the relationship between Achilles and Patroklos is several times described in the Iliad by similes that involve the parent/children motif, and Achilles is usually in the role of the protector. (See Moulton 1977, 100-104 as well as Mills 2000.) I think especially of a passage in Iliad 16, where Patroklos begs to be allowed to impersonate Achilles and return to battle, if Achilles won’t go himself. Achilles compares Patroklos here to a child:

“Why ever do you cry, Patroklos? (You are) like a

silly girl, who running along with her mother begs to be picked up,

grabbing onto her robe, and she hinders her as she is trying to go,

and tearfully she looks at her, in order that she be picked up.’

This pattern makes it all the more significant that Achilles draws on traditional imagery from women’s laments for children to describe himself in Iliad 9, given the central importance of Patroklos’ death (and Achilles’ avenging of that death) in the Iliad. As so often happens in Homeric poetry, larger themes and events of the poem are articulated by a character who should not have the omniscience to foretell them. The truncated mother bird simile of Iliad 9 foreshadows future events for an audience that knows all too well what is to come. In this way the simile unites Achilles’ grief for Patroklos with the grief of the mothers he himself has put in mourning.

The toil of the mother bird is, traditionally speaking, only half the story, however. The simile of Iliad 9 comes to an end just where we would expect it to narrate the subsequent loss of the nestlings and the bird’s lamentation. By leaving out this crucial segment of the bird’s story, Achilles does not yet seem to threaten the vengeance that is very often associated with lament. And yet I have to wonder whether the vengeance theme (that I have traced in my 2005 article and 2006 book) is any way relevant to this much earlier passage from epic about the mother bird. I believe that it is, and if you are interested in this question, I invite you to read my book (see especially chapter 5). I mention the theme of revenge because it is the next stage of grief, not only for the Homeric warrior, or for the ancient Greek mother to whom he is likened, but also today's soldiers, and it is just one more way that the grief of war transcends time or place. I mention it because I’d like to close this post by noting an incredibly moving interview that aired on NPR last year with Tim Hetherington, the creator of the documentary Restrepo.

In the interview, Hetherington describes what it was like to be an imbedded reporter in Afghanistan with a platoon of the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team. Hetherington starts sobbing when telling the story, and in fact the whole point of his documentary had been to see war through the soldiers' eyes. It became his experience too—even though, as he says, he felt protected in a way by the camera. So there was a barrier between him as a narrator and his story, but it was a permeable one—which of course makes me the think of the Homeric narrator as well.

When talking about last night’s Daily Show interview of Sgt. Petry with Mary Ebbott, she too recalled Restrepo (and she was the one who first made me aware of the NPR interview of Hetherington last year). Mary reminded me that the thing that made Hetherington cry in the NPR interview was when he began describing what it was like when one of their comrades was killed in an attack and the enemy tried to drag his body away. In fact, Hetherington said it was the one time any of the soldiers told him to turn the camera off. Mary wrote to me about the documentary:

You see how distraught one soldier becomes when he learns that his comrade has been killed, and the captain of the unit goes into a cold and quiet revenge mode (you see him saying, “kill them all”). In later interviews, they talk about how he was their “best” soldier. I have told students that it was “okay” for Greek heroes to cry and that we have to understand the cultural differences, but now that I have seen this, we instead have to realize that it is just a true reaction of soldiers facing the loss of their comrades.

When Patroklos gets killed in the Iliad, the Greeks immediately move in to protect his body. Amazingly, Menelaos is compared in this moment to a cow protecting her first-born calf (Iliad 17.4-5). In Iliad 9, Achilles has only begun to experience the grief of war. It is only when his “child” Patroklos gets killed by the Trojans that his need for vengeance takes over. He cries and mourns and then he returns to battle, full of cold fury.

Sadly, Tim Hetherington, the narrator that became so indistinguishable from his “characters” that their grief became his, is united with the soldiers he chronicled in more ways than one. This past April he was killed covering the fighting in Libya.

Dué, C. “Achilles, Mother Bird: Similes and Traditionality in Homeric Poetry.” Classical Bulletin 81 (2005): 3-18.

–––. The Captive Woman’s Lament in Greek Tragedy. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006.

Mills, S. “Achilles, Patroclus and Parental Care in Some Homeric Similes.” Greece and Rome 47 (2000): 3-18.

Moulton, C. Similes in the Homeric Poems. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1977.

Shay, J. Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character. Simon & Schuster, 1995.

Notes on Iliad 5: Comparetti and Venetus A

2011-07-13T08:34:00.000-07:00

In 2007, just over a century after Domenico Comparetti published a photographic facsimile of the Venetus A manuscript (Homeri Ilias cum scholiis. Codex venetus A, Marcianus 454 phototypice editus, Leiden: 1901), the Homer Multitext project published new digital photography of the manuscript. The text of the manuscript is, literally, more legible from the digital images than from the manuscript itself, and far clearer than in Comparetti's volume.

At the recent CHS Summer Workshop, however, we were reminded of the continuing value of Comparetti's facsimile. Participants compared the copy of Comparetti in the library at the Center for Hellenic Studies with the digital images of a folio they had edited. The scholia were dauntingly dim and small in Comparetti, but first one team, then another noticed that external scholia they had not seen in the digital images were visible in the 1901 reproduction. In a brief library session, examples surfaced on folio 68 recto (noted by Kathleen O'Connor and Melissa Browne), 76 recto (Tucker Hannah and Leah Elder) and 79 recto (Melanie Steinhardt and Katie Phillips).

In the past hundred years, the minute notes at the extreme edge of the manuscript's folios have evidently been particularly susceptible to fading and damage. Comparetti's publication gives us a chance to recover readings no longer preserved on the manuscript.

The external scholia often consist of a single word or short phrase. T.W. Allen suggested that they reflect an unparalleled editing process in three “reprises” (T. W. Allen, “On the Composition of Some Greek Manuscripts,” Journal of Philology 26 [1898] 161-181). Their proposed “corrections” to the Venetus A text may often reflect genuine Homeric multiforms, and are potentially more precious than their brevity might suggest.

One more addition to the list of projects waiting for a volunteer.

CHS Summer Workshop 2011

2011-07-13T07:48:00.001-07:00

From June 27 to July 9, students and faculty collaborators took part in a workshop on the Homer Multitext project. As part of the workshop, five teams worked on a collaborative edition of Iliad 5 in the Venetus A, with each team assuming responsibility for a section of the book. Teams prepared a diplomatic edition of the Iliadic text, and created a comprehensive inventory of the scholia with citations tying each inventory entry to visual evidence. Upon completion of the inventory, they then edited the scholia. In the span of two weeks, the participants completed nearly all of book 5; we hope to have a complete edition before the end of July.

On several occasions, the new editors noticed features of the text or manuscript that have not been published or have not been completely published before. Some of these observations raise interesting questions about the preparation of the Venetus A manuscript, the sources available to the scribe(s) of the Venetus A, and the Homeric multiforms preserved in those sources. We can look forward to seeing postings on this blog with some of their observations in the near future.

The 2011 workshop participants were:

Christopher Blackwell

Melissa Browne

Peter Collins

Matthew Davis

Casey Dué

Mary Ebbott

Leah Elder

Tucker Hannah

Francis Hartel

Amy Koenig

Katie Phillips

Lenny Muellner

Kathleen O'Connor

Annalisa Quinn

Emily Schurr

Neel Smith

Melanie Steinhardt

New Work on Homeric Papyri

2011-05-18T10:06:00.000-07:00

(above: Ὣς οἵ γ᾽ ἀμφίεπον τάφον Ἕκτορος ἱπποδάμοιο, “Such was their burial of Hector, breaker of horses.” Iliad 24.804, from the Bankes Papyrus)

Four undergraduates at Furman University have begun their summer’s work as Editors for Homeric Papyri, a project of the Center for Hellenic Studies of Harvard University. David Creasy, Kylie Elliott, Talley Latimore, and Brett Stonecipher have begun preparing a new edition of the Bankes Papyrus (B.M. Papyrus cxiv). This document, a seven-foot-long fragment from the 2nd Century C.E., contains the majority of Book 24 of the Iliad.

A description of this document in an article by E. Maunde Thompson in the 1887 issue of The Classical Review (vol. 2, p. 39) describes it thus:

This papyrus is in one piece, measuring upwards of seven feet, and containing sixteen columns of writing. It was bought by Mr. W. J. Bankes at Elephantine, in 1821, and passed into possession of the British Museum in 1879. The text is book xxiv of the Iliad, wanting the first 126 lines; well known by the collation published by George Cornewall Lewis in the Cambridge Philological Museum, in 1832. This is one of the few surviving MSS. which contain stichometrical notes, every hundred lines being numbered in the margin. From its first discovery the Bankes Homer has taken high rank as a most ancient MS., and has been quoted with veneration in palaeographical and other works. In the Museum Catalogue, however, it is assigned to the second century of our era. This later date will probably prove in the end to be much nearer the mark than the more remote century before Christ in which it has been placed. The writing is round uncials and miuch more nearly resembles the book-hand of the early Biblical Codices of the fourth and fifth centuries than the writing of the Ptolemaic period.

This papyrus figures largely in the chapter by Gregory Nagy, in C. Dué’s edited volume on the Venetus A: Recapturing a Homeric Legacy: Images and Insights from the Venetus A Manuscript of the Iliad. Center for Hellenic Studies, 2009 (link to PDF).

These students will produce two XML editions of this text. The first will present the Greek “normalized”, with conventional diacritical marks. The second will be a “diplomatic edition”, preserving only those diacritical marks that appear on the papyrus. These marks are unique among early witnesses to the contents of the Iliad, providing clues to how ancient readers experienced and understood the text.

These XML editions will be available through the project’s Canonical Text Service.

Brett, Talley, Kylie, and David will be joined in June by other collaborators, who will work on texts and images of Homeric and Biblical manuscripts.

Representing scholia in a digital edition

2011-04-01T01:11:00.001-07:00

As we start the process of creating digital editions of the scholia in the Iliad manuscripts, one of our goals is to represent what is on the page as faithfully as possible, so that readers using the digital editions will know exactly what is there and what is not. But we also want to the Greek to be not unduly difficult to read. So one editorial decision we have made is to render the punctuation and accentuation exactly as we read it on the folio page. We have noticed that when a conjunction makes it clear that a new clause or sentence is beginning (say, a δέ clause after a μέν clause), punctuation is often absent.

While I (Mary Ebbott) was reviewing yesterday with my colleagues Casey Dué and Neel Smith some of the scholia from Iliad 3 in the Venetus A (folio 42 recto) that one of our undergraduate researchers, Melissa Browne, had edited, I noticed that although punctuation was missing in these types of cases, in some places (like the two images below) the scribe had left what looks like extra space between these clauses, perhaps to aid readability. So then we were faced with the editorial question of whether we should try to represent that extra space, and if so, how. That might seems like a silly question, but it is the kind of question that crops up time and again in making a digital edition from a handwritten document. After some discussion, and considering that the determination of "extra" space might be a very subjective one, we decided that we should simply leave the digital edition without punctuation and with no indication of that space.

(The images below are linked to full-resolution zoomable images for closer viewing. Thanks to Neel for creating these!)

Example 1: Note the space between ὡς καλλίμαχος and οἱ δὲ βαρυτόνως

Example 2: Spacing between ἢ περισπᾶται ἢ βαρύνεται and πάντες δὲ οξύνονται

Are Venetus B and E3 "twins"? (Guest post)

2011-03-11T04:20:00.000-08:00

Matthew Davis (University of Houston, class of 2011)

The E3 (= West E, Escorialensis Y.I.1) has traditionally gotten less attention than its closest relative, the Venetus B (Marcianus Graecus Z. 453). As Dr. Dué mentioned in her preliminary notes, both texts were produced in Constantinople before making their way to Venice in the 15th C, where the E3 was eventually purchased for Phillip II in 1572. Allen dates both texts as 11th century, with the VB being no later than 1050, and sees them as derivatives of one branch of the manuscript family, and the more distantly related C (Laurentianus 32.3) of another. Still because of their nearly identical layout, the E3 has sometimes been considered to be a twin of the Venetus B, and in at least one case was even attributed to the same scribal hand. Fortunately, digital publication makes direct comparison of the manuscripts possible for the first time by anyone with internet access and an interest in doing so. Having been given early access to the images of the E3, undergraduates such as myself are doing just that. As it turns out, differences between the texts are numerous, and often too subtle to be fully expressed in an apparatus criticus.

A particularly strange example can be found at the end of folio 97 recto in the E3:

(Folio 97r of E3)

Line 413 above (ἄψορρον δ' Ἰδαῖος ἔβη προτὶ Ἴλιον ἱρήν) ) is the last line of the corresponding folio in the Venetus B, 101r, and the reverse sides of both of these folios (E3-97v and VB-101v) begin with line 414. The last five lines shown here, those marked with an antisigma (used to mark passages where the order has been disturbed) are actually lines 7.430-7.434, which appear again in their proper place near the bottom of E3-97v. Typically, folios in these manuscripts have 24 lines each, and E3-97r is no exception; VB-101r is missing these duplicated lines and stops short at 19 lines, using the extra space instead for a vocabulary note. This note is in the later hand that characterizes a second set of scholia that is not present in E3. Curiously, the ink of this presumably later note resembles more closely the older set of scholia which both manuscripts share (shown below).

(Folio 101r of the Venetus B)

This leaves us with two possible scenarios: they are either both ultimately derived from a text in which these lines were also duplicated (with the scribe of VB choosing to omit them) or the Venetus B was copied from the E3 or one of its derivatives. In either case, they are definitely not ʻtwins,ʼ and the E3 is definitely not a derivative of the VB.

Still, there is more evidence to consider. While in nearly every case the E3 follows the vertical differences of the VB when compared to the Venetus A (charted here), there is a plus verse in the E3, line 8.19 (E3-98r and VB-103r). If the scribe of E3 had been pulling from another family of manuscripts we should expect to find additional verses or scholia such as this, but it is far more likely for a single verse to be lost in transmission instead, especially considering these two manuscripts are overwhelmingly similar in their verse order. What makes this line even more interesting is that these two folios have the same number of lines, 21; it is only on the verso that the plus verse is accounted for in the layout. Line 8.22, the last verse on VB-103r, is the first on E3-98v, bringing the total number of lines on E3-98v to 25. For both of these changes to occur during the same copying, the scribe of the VB would have to have skipped line 8.19 accidentally, then also pulled the first line from the verso for the line count to match. (This presumes that the line was not struck intentionally. The line reads well with the one before it and is referenced as early as Plato, so I see no reason to suspect that its authenticity was in question.) This scenario seems even less likely than the previous one, where a scribe may have pulled the line from another text. The most reasonable explanation then, is that these changes occurred separately: in one branch (E3) the number of lines per page was altered when line 8.22 was moved onto the verso, and in another (VB), which must have still retained the original layout with 24 lines on the verso, a line was accidentally skipped on the recto.

These two observations support Allen then, though I suspect the split between the texts occurred a generation or more before he suggests. My own comparison was limited to books 7 and 8 (based on the chart linked above) but more systematic comparisons are surely on their way, and as more differences in layout and content come to light, further reconstruction of the manuscript family will surely follow.

"Touch" the Venetus A

2011-03-10T08:13:00.000-08:00

When the Homer Multitext project created digital images of the Venetus A manuscript, one argument for the project was that far fewer people would ever need to handle the codex again: the freely-licensed images could be used instead for most purposes.

In 2007 I certainly never imagined that you might interact with the images by touching a digital screen, but today you can read the Venetus A on an iPad thanks to the creative geniuses at the University of Kentucky's Center for Visualization & Virtual Environments. (Get the app from the iTunes store here.)

What everyone involved in the project certainly did recognize in 2007 was that we could not foresee what future scholars might do with our work. The images (like all the Homer Multitext project's work) are published under the terms of a Creative Commons license that explicitly allows their free reuse. Would this iPad app have been developed if the images were not freely available? Fortunately, we'll never know (or need to know). Thanks once again to the Biblioteca Marciana and everyone involved in the photography for making it possible to license our work freely.

So get the iPad app and touch all you want. (Now if I could find a budget line to get one of those new iPad 2 tablets...)

New content, new contributors

2011-02-28T13:54:00.001-08:00

Eric Raymond popularized the phrase "release early, release often" as a philosophy for software development. It works for digital scholarship, too.

We're happy to announce today an early release of a facsimile browser incorporating new material from our photography in the Escorial last summer. (The adjacent image of folio 18 recto is linked to the new browser, or see the facsimile reader home page at http://pinakes.hpcc.uh.edu/codex.)

The digital facsimile edition requires data about the manuscripts (including what folios appear in what sequence), an index aligning each folio with a canonical citation of lines of the Iliad, and an index identifying which side of which folio each image illustrates. A group of dedicated and talented volunteers (some shown in the photo below) has been meeting regularly on Friday afternoons to put this material together for the E3 manuscript, prior to beginning work on a full diplomatic edition of the text (as others are already doing for the Venetus A and Venetus B codices).

Perhaps even more remarkable than the volunteers' rapid mastery of E3's Byzantine script is the fact that all of the students are in their first year of Greek at Holy Cross. If you're not accustomed to learning about the transmission of Homer from first-year Greek students, a Friday afternoon with this group is enlightening.

You will undoubtedly see postings on this blog in the future announcing further releases of material from "Team E3." In addition to the puzzles they've had to solve to make today's release available, they are compiling careful observations that will lead to a helpful guide to the paleography of E3, and have already noted a number of unpublished or unappreciated discrepancies bewteen E3 and other manuscripts that are forcing all of us working on the Homer Multitext project to reassess the traditional scholarly views on the (b) family of manuscripts of the Iliad.

The E3 group has currently indexed more than half of the manuscript: we're including folios 1 recto - 109 recto (covering Iliad books 1-8) in today's release.

Our profound thanks to all members of the group (alphabetically):

Matthew Angiolillo (HC '13)
Neil Curran (HC '14)
Maria Jaroszewicz (HC '12)
Alex Krasowski (HC '13)
Becky Musgrave (HC '14)
Kathleen O'Connor (HC '13)
Anne Salloom (HC '14)
Megan Whitacre (HC '14)

Describing a single folio of E4: 188 recto

2011-02-15T10:41:00.000-08:00

Folio 188 recto of the manuscript of the Iliad known as E4.

In this post I will give some basic information about the Iliad manuscript known as E4 (Allen, = West F, Escorialensis Ω.I.12), and then proceed to describe a single folio in detail, folio 188 recto. (Thanks to University of Houston undergraduates Kat Dybala and Matthew Davis for their contributions to my understanding of this folio!) In this way it will be possible to see how E4 relates to other manuscripts in the Homer Multitext as well as the several features that distinguish it from them.

E4 is an eleventh-century parchment codex, thought by Allen and previous scholars to be later than E3 (also eleventh century). It consists of 216 folios, containing a complete text of the Iliad, a commentary with lemmata on Iliad 1–2.300, lives of Homer, a summary of the Cypria, an excerpt from the Batrachomyomachia (“Battle of Frogs and Mice”), excerpts from Porphyry, and other scholia with lemmata. The main text of the Iliad begins on folio 7, where a new set of scholia likewise begins. Individual books are preceded by hypotheses and a one verse metrical summary (the same one verse summaries that you find in Venetus A). The layout of E4 is quite different from Venetus A, Venetus B, and E3. On each folio there are two columns. The left column contains the text of the poem and the right columns consist of a paraphrase. According to Allen (1931:148), E4 is not related to any of the other early minuscule manuscripts. The manuscript seems to have been acquired in Venice for the price of 25 ducats, according to a subscription on the last folio (liber mei Benedicti Cornelii quem emi meis pecuniis pretio ducatorum viginti q).

Folio 188r

Folio 188r of the manuscript known as E4 (= West F, Escorialensis Ω.I.12) marks the beginning of Iliad book 22. We may compare it to Venetus A folio 282r, Venetus B folio 292r, and E3 283r. Its facing page on the left side, folio 187v, is taken up by a hypothesis, a large selection from Porphyry, and scholia, including comments on the text of the Iliad that is written on 188r.

Layout and Adornment

The folio contains Iliad 22.1-37 in the left column, and a paraphrase in the right. There are scholia in the top and outer margins and between the lines of the paraphrase. This layout differs considerably from that of the Venetus A, the Venetus B, and E3, where there is a central block of Iliad text with scholia surrounding it in the top, bottom and outer margins, as well as, to a much less extent, in the inner margin.

A large omega in red comprises the first letter of the main text of the poem in the left column. The initial omicron of the paraphrase text in right column is also in red, and somewhat larger than the rest of the paraphrase text, set in the margin to the left of the text block. Occasionally the initial letters of the line in both the left and the right columns are highlighted in a similar way.

There is a metrical summary of the book in red ink that spans the width of the two text blocks. It is placed just under a decorative border across the top, also in red ink. The summary reads: ἱλιάδος χ ὁμήρου ῥαψωδίας : χι δ‘αρα τρὶς περὶ τεῖχος ἄγων κτάν‘ Ἕκτορ‘ Ἀχιλλεύς (Rhapsody 22 of the Iliad of Homer: Chi. And leading him around the walls three times, Achilleus kills Hektor). This is the same summary as in Venetus A. There is no other subscription on the page. Note that the Venetus B has a different summary: χῖ Θέτιδος γόνος ὡκὺς ἀπώλεσεν Ἕκτορα δῖον :- ἀρχὴ τῆς χῖ ὁμήρου ῥαψωδίας :- (Chi. The swift offspring of Thetis kills brilliant Hektor. [This marks] the beginning of rhapsody 22 of Homer). E3 has the same summary as B; for this book in E3 there does not seem to be anywhere the summary of A in any hand.

We can already see that E4 has many features that distinguish it from the other manuscripts with scholia, including those of comparable date. Its layout is different, it contains a running paraphrase of the poem, and its metrical summary at the start of each book matches the tradition that we find in A, not B. The hypotheses at the start of each book of E4 are not found in A, B, or E3.

Main text

There are 37 lines of the poem on folio 188r, considerably more than would be found on a typical folio of A, B, or E3. For this reason E4 consists of only 216 folios, whereas A has 327 and B has 338.

12    E4 reads δεῦρ’ ἐλιάσθης (with A, T, and several other mss.) whereas several papyri and B read δεῦρο λιάσθης.

18    E4 and the codex Ambrosianus read ἀφείλαο where most manuscripts read ἀφείλεο.

27    E4 reads ὀπώρηις along with A (the text of A appears to have been corrected here) where most mss. read ὀπώρης.

30    E4, A, and one other manuscript read ὁ δ’ where others and the papyri read ὁ γ’.

33    E4 reads γ’ ἐκόψατο where most other manuscripts and the papyri read γε κόψατο.

36    E4 and A read ἑστήκει where most manuscripts read εἱστήκει.

Although one folio cannot be considered a representative sample, E4’s text of the Iliad on this folio seems to resemble A more closely than B.

Scholia

The scholia of E4 seem to have been collected from several different sources. There is a set of numbered scholia which corresponds to the numbered scholia in B, E3, and Laurentianus 32.3 (= Allen C and West C). There is another set of scholia in the same hand that is connected to the text with symbols, and these contain material from the so-called “D scholia” (also known as the scholia minora). This set of scholia is also found in B, but it is in the second, later hand of B. The scholia in this group are linked to the text through signs.

On folio 188r, we do find both numbered scholia and scholia linked to the text through symbols. Some scholia are written between lines of the paraphrase. The scholia that we find on E4 can all for the most part be found in B (not A), but they do not have the same layout as in B and their associated numbers and symbols do not correspond with those in B. In a future post I plan to provide a transcription of the scholia on folio 188r together with a comparison with the corresponding set on B and E3. There are definitely differences. For example, we find this comment at the top of folio 188r of E4:

ἀκέοντο: ἐθεραπεύοντο· κυρίως ἀκεῖσθαι τὸ ἄχος ἰᾶσθαι· καὶ τὸ ὃ δή ποτε θεραπεύειν· ὅθεν Φρύγες ἀκεστὴν τὸν ἰατρόν· καὶ Ἀθηναῖοι ἀκέστριαν.

Most of this comment, but not the whole, is in the numbered scholia of B and in E3 (with no lemma however in B or E3), while the whole, with the exception of ἐθεραπεύοντο, is also in T. So for this scholion, E4 resembles T more closely than B.

Preliminary observations

A preliminary study of a single folio reveals that E4 is a very unusual manuscript, both in its layout and content. Its main text seems very possibly in some way related to the tradition of A, while its scholia are related to those of B (and E3 and C). The scholia are related to those of B, but there are many differences between the two sets, most notably that the group of scholia connected by symbols are in a later hand of B (and not present in E3) while in E4 they are in the same hand and of the same date as the numbered scholia. As Allen observed, this manuscript cannot be precisely connected with any single other manuscript or manuscript family, and it would well deserve further study.

A quick update of ongoing undergraduate research

2011-02-07T16:26:00.000-08:00

It was a busy fall semester, although the lack updates here may make it seem as though nothing was going on with the project. On the contrary, progress continues with both the manuscripts and the papyri. At Furman University, undergraduate researchers continue making XML editions of the papyri. One of the 2010 summer interns at the College of the Holy Cross continues his work mapping, inventorying, and transcribing the text and scholia from the Venetus A. Other students are working on editing the Iliad text of A so that we have an electronic version of exactly what text that manuscript has (no more rooting around in apparatuses of modern editions!).

We acquired high-resolution and (in the case of E3) multispectral photographs of two more manuscripts of the Iliad in July 2010 (for more detail, see these two posts from last summer), and students at Holy Cross are indexing the photographs of the manuscript we affectionately call E3 (after Allen) according to what lines of the Iliad appear on each one, while students Furman are doing the same for E4. My colleague, Neel Smith, has been able to get students in their first-year of Greek involved in this project, and allowing students at the introductory level of the language to do research with primary sources has been phenomenal. We are just beginning to get a good idea of what these two manuscripts contain, and we will start posting small, initial findings as we get to know them better.

Editing manuscripts with text and image services

2010-08-30T14:15:00.001-07:00

An earlier post briefly illustrated one way that the Homer Multitext project is using a dynamic image service to help editors inventorying the scholia in the Venetus A manuscript of the Iliad. A post last week illustrated one way that the project's Canonical Text Service is helping automate comparison of different texts of the Iliad. Taken together, image services and automated collation of editions are a potent combination for editors.

The initial note on comparing two manuscripts used the chart linked from this thumbnail: I updated the note to use the chart linked from this thumb: Why the dramatic difference in the report on Iliad 17?

The project's initial edition of the Venetus A was created by a dedicated team of undergraduate Fellows, who worked from the apparatus of T.W. Allen's critical edition to "reverse engineer" a text of the Venetus A, before the project was able to digitize the manuscript in 2007. In 2010, as the scholia are being inventoried, this edition is gradually being checked against the direct evidence of the digital images, but book 17 is still based on Allen's printed information. In his apparatus to 17.729 (vol. 3, p. 166), Allen notes tersely "729-761 om. A". The HMT Fellows correctly interpreted this to mean that Venetus A does not include the last 32 lines of book 17, and consequently struck them from our edition. This is the basis for the first chart above.

Now, with the digital images in hand, we see somthing more interesting. Folio 237 verso is written in the familiar tenth-century hand of most of the manuscript, and includes scholia. (See the zoomable image, including scholia, linked from this thumbnail: . Folios 238 recto and verso, however, are a replacement for a lost original, perhaps in the hand of Cardinal Bessarion himself. Compare the zoomable image linked here

Evidently, in this instance at least, Allen decided that "A" was to mean "the tenth-century A only". The HMT edition prefers instead to take "A" as the entire, continuous Iliadic text, since our electronic edition and indices can distinguish the folios added later from the tenth-century originals, and leave open for any particular application the question of whether to work with tenth-century text only, later text only, or the entire text.

Allen's apparatus has no way to communicate this. The ambiguously compressed note "omisit" would most naturally suggest that the last 32 lines of book 17 were never part of A (as the HMT Fellows took it to mean). There is no hint that the manuscript, as we have it, completes A through 17.761.

The most important point is not whether or not we take issue with Allen's phrasing, however. What is significant is rather that tools like automatic collation can call our attention to passages that stand out or appear unusual; automated associations with our image service then allow us to unravel a trail of evidence that has vanished from the app.crit. of Allen's "definitive" edition. Editors are now manually collating the text of the last 32 lines of Venetus A's book 17. Among the interesting questions we will be able to consider: what source did Bessarion use for filling out the missing folio? An automated comparison with the Venetus B might be revealing — perhaps a subject for a future blog post.

A final methodological observation — all the images in this post are created dynamically. References either to Google's Chart service, or the Homer Multitext project's image service return image data that can be used as you like, including embedding in a web page.

Comparing two manuscripts with CTS

2010-08-26T05:08:00.000-07:00

A digital multitext can make it easier for readers to compare different versions of the Iliad; it can also enable new kinds of systematic, machine-assisted comparisons. For example: since we now have complete texts of the Venetus A and Venetus B manuscripts of the Iliad in the Homer Multitext project's Canonical Text Service, we can use the service's knowledge about the citation of each version to find the vertical variation between Venetus A and Venetus B (that is, what lines are present or absent in the two manuscripts).

The chart linked to this thumbnail image summarizes the variation book by book. The number of "plus" and "minus" verses are counted for each of the 24 books of the Iliad (the x axis); the dark blue section of a bar represents the number of lines that appear in A but not B; the light blue section represents the number of lines that appear in B but not A. (Phrased differently, if we are taking A as a reference text, and comparing B to it, we could say that the dark blue section represents "plus verses," and the light blue section represents "minus verses.")

Even a simple example like this creates a view of two manuscripts that would be prohibitively tedious to construct from print editions — and since there is no complete print edition of either Venetus A or Venetus B, would be impossible in any case. As we think about how to read and compare material in a digital multitext, we will have to go beyond our experience with print editions to rethink what it means to read and compare texts.

I'll reserve the subject of horizontal variation for another blog post.

Update: I've posted a slightly geekier but related discussion here.

Updates to text services

2010-08-21T17:53:00.000-07:00

This summer, the implementation of Canonical Text Services (or CTS) running on Google AppEngine has benefited from a number of updates, but one of the most important changes was added with a single line of code. An initiative of the World Wide Web Consortium now defines a new mechanism for explicitly granting permission for other sites to use data drawn from services like CTS. (For the technical documentation, see the July 27, 2010, draft of the W3C's "Cross-Origin Resource Sharing" document here. The current version of CTS for AppEngine uses the Access-Control-Allow-Origin header to permit programs from any location on the internet, without restriction, to interoperate with a CTS.

In plain English, this one-line change means that other programs can automatically talk to the Homer Multitext project's services. In isolation, this may seem a small step, but it nevertheless brings us closer to a point where lower-order scholarly activities — look this passage up, search for this term, compare these two passages — can be formally specified, and automatically carried out and evaluated, freeing scholars to focus instead on what these exercises mean.

How might our scholarship change if we could use software to assess its machine-actionable foundations? One place classicists (and humanists more generally) could profitably look for examples is software development. CTS for AppEngine takes a "test-driven" approach. In test-driven software development, tests for evaluating a program are specified first; programs are written subsequently; whether they pass the tests or not can then be automatically evaluated.

The CTS test suite defines a set of queries (ca. 100) about a sample corpus of texts, and information about the responses it expects to receive from those queries. Today, we released on sourceforge an updated version of the ctsvalidator, a program that runs the test suite of queries against any CTS with the test data installed, and reports in some detail on how well the particular installation compiles with the requirements of the CTS protocol. Development of CTS for AppEngine also reached a landmark when for the first time an installation passed 100% of the tests. (The demo of CTS at cts-demo.appspot.com now bats 1.000, with 100 correct replies to 100 queries.)

We're rapidly approaching a stage where scholarly claims about versions of the Iliad can be expressed as assertions to test against the contents of a digital multitext, and so liberate us to consider what these claims might mean.

Homeric Canonical Text Services

2010-08-11T12:49:00.000-07:00

Updated versions of two services on Google's AppEngine platform are now delivering Homeric texts:

Homeric papyri (previously blogged here).
Texts from Byzantine manuscripts. The contents currently include material from the Venetus A manuscript; texts from three other Iliadic manuscripts are nearing completion.

Both sites are running on a new, pre-release version of the Canonical Text Services developed at the Center for Hellenic Studies; we expect to release the new version this month on the project's sourceforge site, cts3.sourceforge.net.

Inventorying the scholia to the Iliad

2010-07-22T14:42:00.000-07:00

Previous publications in print both individually and collectively offer only a selection of the scholia to be found in manuscripts. As one part of a summer research internship at the College of the Holy Cross, Melissa Browne and Frankie Hartel collaborated with Profs. Mary Ebbott and Neel Smith to create the first complete inventory of scholia in the Venetus A manuscript, for books 3 and 4 of the Iliad. Each scholion has a unique identifier, and is assigned to one of the distinct groups of scholia distinguished by their placement on the folio, by orthographic features, and perhaps to a greater extent than it has been possible to appreciate from print publication by their contents.

The scholia are also indexed to the images Browne and Hartel are using to create an edition of the texts. The digital "working notebooks" Browne and Hartel developed are now being published at www.homermultitext.org/scholia-inventory.html, where references to regions of images are used to dynamically embed sections of images in the web page, and to create a color-coded overview of the contents of each folio side.

Google cites Venetus A as historic example of organizing scholarly content

2010-07-14T23:25:00.000-07:00

In recent weeks the official Google blog and Inside Google Books have linked to images of the Venetus A published via the Homer Multitext. Both posts stress Google's commitment to digital humanities research, the potential of text mining and other quantitative research techniques for the Humanities, and their interest in research on the ancient world in particular.

(Image courtesy of the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Creative Commons Non-Commercial Share Alike 3.0 license)

Homeric Papyri and the Homer Multitext

2010-07-12T15:13:00.000-07:00

The publication of ancient papyrus texts has always been central to the goals of the Homer Multitext project. The Homeric papyri are, with the exception of some ancient quotations, the oldest surviving witnesses to the text of Homer. The medieval manuscript tradition of Homer begins with the tenth century CE manuscripts of the Iliad known as D (Laurentianus 32.15) and Venetus A (Marcianus Graecus 454). Some papyrus fragments predate the medieval tradition by as many as 1200 years. In a 2001 article [Dué 2001a; on-line version], I argued that the multiformity of the Homeric texts, as evidenced by the earliest quotations of Homer and the Ptolemaic papyri, calls for a new approach to editing the texts of Homer. Building on the work of Gregory Nagy (especially Nagy 1996a), who was himself building on the insights of Parry and Lord into the oral traditional nature of Homeric poetry, I suggested that a web-based, “multitext” edition would be truer to the complexity of the transmission of the Homeric poems, which are oral-derived texts composed in performance. The texts as we now have them are the product of many singers over the course of many generations. What Parry and Lord’s work shows us most essentially is that there is not one original text that we should try to reconstruct. Instead of reconstructing an “original text,” the aim of the Homer Multitext, now at last becoming a reality after a decade of research and planning, is to present a series of complete, historically contextualized texts, together with images, and a variety of tools with which users can compare and analyze these historical documents.

The Homeric papyri are all fragmentary, and range in date from as early as the third century BCE to the seventh century CE. The vast majority of the fragments were discovered in Egypt, and now reside in collections located all over the world. They give us an otherwise irrecoverable picture of the Iliad and Odyssey as they were performed and recorded in ancient times. When taken altogether, Homeric papyri reveal a state of the Homeric texts in antiquity that can be quite surprising. There are numerous verses in the papyri that are seemingly intrusive from the standpoint of the medieval vulgate. These additional verses, the so-called plus verses, are not present in the majority of the medieval manuscripts of the Iliad and Odyssey. Other verses that are canonical in the medieval manuscripts are absent from the papyri—these may be termed minus verses. Also prevalent is variation in the formulaic phrasing within lines. In other words, it seems from this most ancient evidence that the poems were performed and recorded with a considerable amount of fluidity in antiquity. It is not until about 150 BCE that the papyrus texts begin to stabilize and present a relatively more uniform text.

The early Homeric papyri are the vestiges of a once vibrant performance tradition of the Iliad and Odyssey (see especially Nagy 1996a and Dué 2001a). In such a tradition no poem is ever composed, performed, or recorded in exactly the same way twice. In the earliest stages of the Iliad and Odyssey, each performance would have resulted in an entirely new composition. By the time of the first papyrus fragments, the oral composition and performance tradition of Homeric epic poetry had died out. But variation in the ancient textual tradition, the reflexes of this once oral and performative tradition, persisted for several more centuries. These variations, preserved for us in the Homeric papyri, are a unique window into the oral tradition that we have lost.

And yet in Homeric textual criticism, the papyri are not always attributed the weight that their antiquity should bestow on them. The variations are dismissed by a variety of strategies, including the often cited assertion that the variations are banal and uninteresting, and the labeling of the Ptolemaic papyri as “wild” or “eccentric” (for counter arguments, see especially Dué 2001a and 2001b and Dué and Ebbott 2009). In several publications I have suggested that the Medieval transmission is given more authority than the papyri precisely because modern editors find the multiformity of the papyri and early quotations disturbing (see especially Due 2006 as well as Dué 2001a and 2001b, Dué and Ebbott 2009). The seeming fluidity of these earliest witnesses conflicts with a basic desire (among Classicists at least) to find a single text and a single author behind our Iliad and Odyssey. The Medieval transmission, while by no means reducible to a single “vulgate” text, is more uniform, and offers the mirage of a reconstructable original that is just beyond the reach of our sources. This mirage has enticed many an editor to attempt to reconstruct what “Homer” actually composed (see especially Dué 2006).

Neither I nor my co- editors of the Homer Multitext are seeking to privilege the papyri in any special way over the Medieval transmission; rather we seek simply to make them available to scholars and anyone interested in the transmission of the Homeric poems over the course of three millennia or more, and to suggest that they have great historical value in the picture they present of the state of the Homeric texts in the earliest state in which we have it. Modern editions of the Iliad and Odyssey report papyrus readings only very selectively. The nature of a critical apparatus, moreover, necessarily obscures the context from which these readings arise. Not only can it be hard to locate the date or geographical origin of a particular papyrus when it is cited (in a highly abbreviated form) in an apparatus, it is also nearly impossible to reconstruct the character of the papyrus text that is being cited as a whole. In other words, is a particular reading one isolated variant, or is the papyrus as a whole quite multiform from the point of view of the Medieval transmission? Is the text preserved on the papyrus short or long? Is what survives a few letters per verse, whole verses, or something in between? Is the papyrus a deluxe edition of the text, a school text, a commentary? These are just a few of the questions that are almost impossible to answer by studying a critical apparatus alone. The limitations of the printed page of course prohibit including such information in a typical printed edition of the text.

But a web-based edition need not be limited in the same way, and can present complete historical documents side by side, as transcribed texts and as images. While the physical experience of touching the paper or parchment may be difficult to convey in digital form, metadata conveying such information can be easily included in the digital image files and precise scholarly descriptions can be linked. The editors of the Homer Multitext plan to do exactly this with the Homeric papyri. It is our goal to build a library of TEI XML-encoded diplomatic editions of the papyri, and to cooperate with scholars, libraries, and collections to put images, descriptions, and metadata for these papyri on-line. An initial set of editions, now available here, has been created by a group of graduate students. These students are now scholars in their right. It is our hope that they and other interested scholars will contribute more such editions as the project develops, and help us to develop the standards for such editions. The initial set referenced here is really, we hope, just the beginning of a collaborative effort that will include contributions from many people.

The idea of publishing the variations present in papyrus texts in digital form long predates the Homer Mutltitext. Homer and the Papyri was a project first created and edited by Professor Dana S. Sutton of the University of California, Irvine, who published it on CD-rom and later on the web. Homer and the Papyri, as it was established by Professor Sutton, was a website consisting of a) lists of published papyri and related items for the Iliad and the Odyssey, and b) a repertoire of the textual variants presented by this body of material, hypertextually linked to the lists of papyri. In 2001 Professor Sutton handed Homer and the Papyri over to the Center for Hellenic Studies, with a view to its continuation and incorporation into the publications of the Center, including a multitext edition of Homer. (Dana Sutton’s introduction to his original web-based edition may be found on the CHS website.) At that time Casey Dué, Mary Ebbott, and Dimitrios Yatromanolakis were appointed as editors, and a team of advisors selected. In 2005 we asked John Lundon to join our team of editors, and Alexander Loney became a contributing editor. Since then, Bart Huelsenbeck has also been a frequent contributor to the project.

When Professor Sutton first handed over Homer and the Papyri to the CHS team, the Homer Multitext project was in its infancy, and many questions immediately presented themselves. How could the data that Sutton had amassed be sustained over the long term? How could this data become interoperable within the architecture of the Homer Multitext? These somewhat technical questions raised more theoretical questions. Homer and the Papyri was an html list of variants, not complete texts of the papyri. How, then, to define a variant? What is the “original” from which the variants deviate? As I have noted, even the term “variant” fundamentally clashes with the findings of Parry and Lord that are the foundation on which the Homer Multitext project has been conceived. Sutton himself used a number of modern printed editions as points of comparison, and acknowledged some of the problems involved in doing so, including a lack of an equivalent for the Odyssey of T. W. Allen’s editio maior of the Iliad (see Sutton’s introduction to Homer and the Papyri).

The new editors quickly realized that a new approach to the project would be necessary, one that required a number of interconnected and labor intensive action items. First, Sutton’s data needed to be converted to TEI-XML, for its long term stability and so that it could be interoperable with other projects. Second, new papyri needed to be incorporated and assigned numbers in a systematic way. Not only are new papyri published every year (with new “variants,” however those are defined), often old papyri are joined, and so no longer require separate numbers. New descriptions must be written for the newly published or joined papyri and a bibliography maintained. Thirdly, we decided that we could expand the project’s utility by incorporating the data into a fully searchable relational database. Such a database was created by Michael Jones, with the cooperation and supervision of the Stoa Consortium, at that time edited by Anne Mahoney and Ross Scaife. This database allows the user to search in one of six fields, such as title (Iliad or Odyssey), book number, and line number. There are also fields for variants, witnesses, and a more general description field, in which the user may search for special features (such as material, location, or editor). The database, however, is flawed, for reasons that I will discuss further below. Our more theoretical concerns, moreover, were not solved.

These first three action items were our initial goal, and occupied several years of work on the project. But by this time, Martin West’s (1998-2000) Teubner edition of the Iliad had appeared. Not only did this edition track more papyrus readings than had been done by previous editors, it included a list of all Iliad papyri (including the papyri Sutton called “witnesses” and “Homerica”), and this list contained nearly 800 additional unpublished papyri in the Bodleian library, thereby doubling the previously known number. (This list was also published as chapter 4 of West’s Studies in the Text and Transmission of the Iliad [West 2001a].) The editors of the new Homer and the Papyri faced a new dilemma. If we continued to assign numbers and incorporate new papyri as they were published, our list would conflict with West’s. Our initial decision was to track the differences in a “comparatio numerorum” table. We have since had cause to reevaluate this decision, and are still debating the best solution, even as we continue to compile a master list of published papyri. (My co-editor on that project, Dimitrios Yatromanolakis, is overseeing the registration and initial description of all papyri published since the CHS took over Homer and the Papyri.)

But we faced a far greater dilemma in our continuation of the practice of reporting variants. Should the publication of West’s new edition affect what variants we report for the Iliad? Even as most papyrologists were beginning to make use of West’s edition for their own supplements when publishing new fragments, we wrestled with the idea of making it our default, notional text. Might not the Venetus A, the oldest complete text of the Iliad, make a better, more historical point of comparison? Yet the Venetus A is itself in its own way just an arbitrary edition. In fact, any one version of the text, whether historical or constructed in modern times, is simply one version. Providing only the “variants,” in isolation from their context (as Sutton’s method had been), is misleading, because it suggests that there is an historical “original” from which the variants are varying. For the Homeric poems, that’s simply not the case.

We realized that we wanted to undertake something quite different than what the founding editor, Dana Sutton, had originally envisioned when the internet was still quite new and few standards existed. Moreover, as we continued to test the new database, its problems became increasingly glaring. As is inevitable with a large amount of data entered manually in an unstructured way (I mean by using HTML, which is a descriptive mark up system, rather than XML, which is far more structured), we found numerous errors and contradictions in the data. These errors and a general lack of uniformity, despite the XML structure we attempted to impose on it, to this day prevent the database from working properly. Though it does have some functionality, few users have been able to use it regularly and successfully.

It soon became clear that in order for Homer and the Papyri to become current, useful, and fully integrated within the Multitext, we needed to conceive of the material in a new way. Therefore, just as we had begun to do for the Medieval manuscripts and their scholia, we began to commission new TEI-XML encoded diplomatic editions of the Homeric papyri. These papyri will be published as part of the Homer Multitext by means of the same services and tools that have been developed in conjunction with the manuscripts.

The editors of the Homer Multitext feel that this new vision is true to Dana Sutton’s project, whose aim was to make accessible to interested people and scholars the multiform texts that survive on papyrus. Not only will users be able to access these papyri as complete, diplomatic texts, they will also be able to view them side by side with other historical documents, including other papyri and Medieval manuscripts.

Accomplishing what we envision - a complete library of TEI-XML encoded diplomatic editions of all published Homeric papyri - will require a great deal of work. We very much welcome contributions from other editors, and such contributions will be properly attributed and given recognition. (All contributions must be openly licensed under a Creative Commons license.) We also very much hope to include images from collections who will allow publication under a Creative Commons License, and plan to link to those existing images on-line that have stable URLs. If you are interested in contributing diplomatic editions and/or images to the Homer Multitext please contact Casey Dué (casey at chs.harvard.edu) and Mary Ebbott (ebbott at chs.harvard.edu).

Works Cited and Further Reading

[Allen 1924] Allen, T. W. Homer: The Origins and Transmission. Oxford, 1924.
[Allen 1931] Homeri Ilias. Oxford, 1931.
[Dué 2001a] Dué, C. “Achilles’ Golden Amphora in Aeschines’ Against Timarchus and the Afterlife of Oral Tradition.” Classical Philology 96 (2001): 33-47.
[Dué 2001b] “Sunt Aliquid Manes: Homer, Plato, and Alexandrian Allusion in Propertius 4.7.” Classical Journal 96 (2001): 401-413.
[Dué 2002] Homeric Variations on a Lament by Briseis. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield Press, 2002.
[Dué 2006] “The Invention of Ossian.” Classics@ 3 (2006).
[Dué and Ebbott 2009] Dué, C., and M. Ebbott. “Digital Criticism: Editorial Standards for the Homer Multitext.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 3.1 (2009).
[Haslam 1997] Haslam, Michael. "Homeric Papyri and Transmission of the Text." in I. Morris and B. Powell, eds., A New Companion to Homer. Leiden, 1997.
[Lord 1960] Lord, A. B. The Singer of Tales. Cambridge, Mass., 1960. 2nd rev. edition, 2000.
[Lord 1991] Epic Singers and Oral Tradition. Ithaca, N.Y., 1991.
[Lord 1995] The Singer Resumes the Tale. Ithaca, N.Y., 1995.
[Nagy 1996a] Nagy, G. Poetry as Performance. Cambridge, 1996.
[Nagy 1996b] Nagy, G. Homeric Questions. Austin, TX, 1996.
[Nagy 2000] Nagy, G. Review of Martin L. West (ed.) Homeri Ilias. Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2000.09.12.
[Nagy 2002] Plato’s Rhapsody and Homer’s Music: The Poetics of the Panathenaic Festival in Classical Athens. Cambridge, Mass., 2002.
[Nagy 2004] Homer’s Text and Language. Champaign, IL, 2004.
[M. West 1998–2000] West, M., ed. Homeri Ilias. Recensuit / testimonia congessit. Stuttgart and Leipzig, 1998–2000.
[M. West 2001a] Studies in the Text and Transmission of the Iliad. Munich, 2001.
[M. West 2001b] “West on Nagy and Nardelli on West.” Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2001.09.06.
[M. West 2004] “West on Rengakos (BMCR 2002.11.15) and Nagy (Gnomon 75, 2003, 481–501) on West: Response to 2002.11.15.” Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2004.04.17.
[S. West 1967] West, Stephanie. The Ptolemaic Papyri of Homer. Köln, 1967.

* Papyrus image courtesy of Wikimedia.org

Digitizing Homeric Manuscripts at El Escorial

2010-07-11T07:08:00.000-07:00

This post will describe, briefly, the technology for digitization of two Iliadic manuscripts in the collection of the Real Monasterio de El Escorial, outside of Madrid, Spain.

Casey Dué has provided some initial notes on these in the previous post. The two manuscripts were created in the 11th century CE. Their catalogue numbers are: Escorialensis ω.I.12 (513 = Allen E4) and Escorialensis y.I.1 (294 = Allen E3).

For this digitization work, we are collaborating closely with Dr. Brent Seales of the University of Kentucky’s Center for Visualization and Virtual Enviornments. Aspects of this work have been funded by the National Science Foundation.

We see this as an exciting opportunity both to advance our humanist scholarship on oral poetry and the history of Homeric texts, and the integration of technologies for multi-modal imaging of cultural heritage objects in the field. For these manuscripts, we hope to capture multi-spectral images and 3-dimensional surface maps, and ultimately to integrate these by means of the networked infrastructure developed by the Homer Multitext.

The manuscript rests on the Conservation Copystand built for the CHS by Manfred Meyer. The camera is a medium-format bellows-camera with a digital back. The digital sensor is monochromatic, and 38 megapixels. The resolution is a good thing, and the lack of color is also a good thing. In a normal, color, digital camera of, say, 24 megapixels, there is a color filter laid over the sensor. Of the 24 million pixels, 8 will be filtered through red, 8 will be filtered through green, and 8 will be filtered through blue. So each full color "pixel" will consume three pixels of resolution. The software in the camera will merge the three pixels into one, full-color pixel, at the cost of some softness to the image.

Our black-and-white camera has no color filter in front of the sensor. This does not mean that we won’t have lovely color images of these manuscripts, however.

The lights for this photography consist of banks of LED lights, with each bank bank of LEDs emitting a specific frequency of light. There are thirteen banks, ranging from ultraviolet, through the visible spectrum (blues, greens, oranges, reds) down to several levels of infrared. The camera and lights are controlled by a computer, which will automatically cycle through the spectra of light, taking a picture for each one.

The result is thirteen monochromatic images, each showing particular features of the page, as different kinds of ink and different kinds of stains or damage reflect differently.

At the end, the thirteen images can be merged to create full-color images that take advantage of the full resolution of the sensor. Other “false color” images can be generated to suit particular kinds of analysis.

In addition to this digital photography, the team is capturing structured light data using a custom-programmed projector tied to the camera. The projector uses a laser, rather than a bulb, which allows it to maintain perfect focus across an uneven surface. By projecting a series of images onto the surface of a page, and by processing the resulting pictures of that page, the team can create a 3-dimensional model of the surface. This model, in turn, can be used to remove distortions from the text, or to make a vividly realistic digital reconstruction of the page and its text.

This project relies heavily on the talents of many people. Brent Seales provided the vision of integrating this technology with humanist inquiry, and raised the funds that made the project possible. Matt Fields, Ryan Bauman, and Dan Staley are our indefatigable experts on the computer-and-imaging systems. David Jacobs protects the books with his expertise as a conservator. Juan Garces provides liaison and his professional skills as a Greek scholar and curator. Chris Collins provides high-tech environmental monitoring equipment. Amy Blackwell oversees the video team and works with David on handling the manuscripts. Casey Dué, Mary Ebbott, Neel Smith, and Christopher Blackwell stand by to see what discoveries these manuscripts may reveal.

The staff of El Escorial, particularly Director José Luis del Valle Merino, and his assistant, Padre Fabian, have been warmly welcoming, enthusiastic, and generous. It is a great privilege to collaborate with these professionals and to work in such an exalted space.

The raw data from this work will be archived, and available for use, at the Homer Multitext’s data archive at the University of Houston. Human interfaces to the data will emerge as we conduct post-processing, indexing, and linking during the late summer and autumn of this year.

Some preliminary notes and bibliography for Escorial Iliad manuscripts E3 and E4

2010-07-06T09:58:00.000-07:00

(Updated 1/6/2011) As work begins in Madrid, I thought it would be helpful to gather here some preliminary notes and bibliography for the two manuscripts of the Iliad that are being digitized over the next few weeks. Once we have had a chance to study the images, I or others on the team should be able to improve upon these initial notes, which were taken before arriving in Spain.

E3 (= West E, Escorialensis Υ.I.1) is an 11th century parchment codex consisting of 336 folios, containing Iliad 1.1–24.717 with accompanying scholia.The first seven folios have been restored by later hands (folio 1 in the fifteenth century, folios 2–7 in the thirteenth century). Individual books are preceded by a one verse metrical summary, (the same one verse summaries that you find in Venetus B, but occasionally the one from A is also added in a later hand - see, e.g., folio 40r, the beginning of book 3). There are no hypotheses, subscriptions, or critical signs. The text and scholia in this manuscript are closely related to the ones in the Venetus B, which is also from the eleventh century; Maniaci (2006) has argued that Venetus B and E3 are “twins,” in that every folio matches the layout and content of the corresponding folio in the other manuscript. (As Bethe first noted, it is only the oldest, numbered set of scholia from B that is found in E3.) According to the catalogue, the manuscript was purchased in Venice 1572 by Guzmán de Silva for Philip II, which supports the connection between the two manuscripts—though of course all three were almost certainly produced in Constantinople not Venice, ca. 400 years before coming to Venice. Venetus A, Venetus B, and E3 all have the same style of binding.

E4 (= West F, Escorialensis Ω.I.12) is another eleventh-century parchment codex, thought by Allen to be later than E3,5 consisting of 216 folios, containing a complete text of the Iliad, a commentary with lemmata on Iliad 1–2.300, hypotheses, lives of Homer, a summary of the Cypria, an excerpt from the Batrachomyomachia (“Battle of Frogs and Mice”), excerpts from Porphyry, and other scholia with lemmata. The main text of the Iliad begins on folio 7, where a new set of scholia likewise begins. Individual books are preceded by hypotheses and a one verse metrical summary (the same one verse summaries that you find in Venetus A), and the right columns consist of a paraphrase. According to Allen (1931:148), E4 is not related to any of the other early minuscule manuscripts. The scholia seem to have been collected from several different sources. There is a set of numbered scholia which corresponds to the numbered scholia in B, E3, and Laurentianus 32.3 (= West C). There is another set of scholia in the same hand that is connected to the text with signs, which contain material from the so-called “D scholia” (also known as the scholia minora). This set of scholia is also found in B, but it is in the second, later hand of B. The scholia in this group are linked to the text through signs. The manuscript seems to have been acquired in Venice for the price of 25 ducats, according to a subscription on the last folio (liber mei Benedicti Cornelii quem emi meis pecuniis pretio ducatorum viginti q).

[The image is of folio 124 recto of manuscript E3, showing the beginning of book 10 of the Iliad.]

Bibliography (in order of publication)

Tyschen, T. C. “Beschreibung der Handschriften des Homer in der Escurial.” Bibliothek der alten Litteratur und Kunst VI (1789): 134–144.

Bekker, I., ed. Scholia in Homeri Iliadem. Berlin, 1825-1827.

Miller, E. Catalogue des Manuscrits Grecs de la Bibliotèque de l’Escurial. Paris, 1848.

Dindorf, W., ed. Scholia Graeca in Homeri Iliadem. Oxford, 1875-1888.

Bethe, E. “Zwei Iliashandschriften des Escorial.” Rheinisches Museum für Philologie Neue Folge 48 (1893): 355–379 and 484.

Allen, T. W. Homeri Ilias. Vol. I–III. Oxford, 1931.

Revilla, A., ed. Catálogo de los códices griegos de la biblioteca de el Escorial. Vol. I. Madrid, 1936.

de Andrés, G., ed. Catálogo de los códices griegos de la Real biblioteca de el Escorial. Vol. II–III. Madrid, 1965–1967.

Erbse, H., ed. Scholia Graeca in Homeri Iliadem. Berlin, 1969-1988.

West, M. L., ed. Homeri Ilias. Stuttgart and Leipzig, 1998–2000.

Digitization of 2 Iliad manuscripts in the Escorial to begin next week

2010-07-01T12:08:00.000-07:00

Next week Mary Ebbott, Christopher Blackwell, Neel Smith, and I will travel to Madrid, where we will meet up with David Jacobs and Juan Garcés of the British Library and Brent Seales and a team of researchers from the University of Kentucky's Center for Visualization and Virtual Environments. Our goal is to capture the best possible images of two important Iliad manuscripts in the collection of the Escorial monastery in San Lorenzo. Subsequent posts will give more information about the imaging process, and the significance of the text and scholia in these manuscripts.

Geneva Iliad to provide exciting challenges for HMT

2010-07-01T10:29:00.000-07:00

I had the opportunity to visit the Genavensis 44 manuscript of the Iliad last week during my trip to Switzerland for the E-codices workshop. The manuscript is undergoing an extensive restoration and has been completely unbound. I was able to see that the manuscript is indeed in need of extensive restoration, and I learned a great deal about the manuscript by seeing it in person. For example, although I knew that there is an interlinear paraphrase that runs through approximately the first half of the poem, I was not aware that this paraphrase is of the same size and same hand as the main text. It raises the question, for me at least, as to how to characterize this text from the point of view of transcription and identification of text groups. Line numbers are of course modern editorial additions, but when we transcribe this document we will have to make some choices about what to put where. I assume we will separate out the paraphrase from the text of the poem, but having access to the images of the manuscript itself will allow users of this transcription to appreciate that the paraphrase was originally written to be an organic part of the reading of this manuscript. When we separate it out, we lose something of that experience.

C.I.T.E - The Infrastructure of the Homer Multitext (Part 1 - Introduction)

2010-06-15T10:58:00.000-07:00

The Infrastructure of the Homer Multitext

C · I · T · E

The Homer Multitext (HMT) is a project of the Center for Hellenic Studies of Harvard University (CHS). It is best described in the words of its editors, Casey Dué and Mary Ebbott:

“The Homer Multitext project, the first of its kind in Homeric studies, seeks to present the textual transmission of the Iliad and Odyssey in a historical framework. Such a framework is needed to account for the full reality of a complex medium of oral performance that underwent many changes over a long period of time. These changes, as reflected in the many texts of Homer, need to be understood in their many different historical contexts. The Homer Multitext provides ways to view these contexts both synchronically and diachronically.” (From the CHS website)

Dué and Ebbott, in collaboration with the Director of the CHS, Gregory Nagy, and the CHS’s Head of Publications, Leonard Muellner, initiated research toward this project with an eye to advancing particular arguments about the nature of Homeric poetry. But anyone interested in epic poetry, Greek poetry in general, and the intellectual history of the Greco-Roman world, the cultures that came into contact with it, and those that succeeded it, stand to profit from the project.

Overview

The HMT aims to collect, as comprehensively as possible, all of the sources for our knowledge of the Homeric epics, and to publish these online, freely accessible to any interested reader.

These sources include versions of the Iliad and Odyssey, and the surviving pieces of lesser-known epic poems born in the Greek Bronze Age. These versions may be fragments of papyrus found in the sands of Egypt or manuscripts produced under the Byzantine Emperors of Constantinople. These sources also include texts of later Greek and Roman writers who quote from Homer, writers such as Plato, Aristotle, Herodotus, and Thucydides. A particularly rich body of evidence comes from the writings of the literary scholars who worked in the Libraries of Alexandria and Pergamum; the works of these writers do not survive intact, but thousands of excerpts from them and references to them do survive, as comments written in the margins of manuscripts.

Dué and Ebbott are committed to providing the most useful access possible to these sources. This means offering texts of those sources in the original Greek and translated into modern languages where possible. It also means providing high-quality digital facsimiles of the actual manuscripts wherever possible.

It is impossible to overstate the value of digital facsimiles. The Greek and Latin texts that we can check out of libraries, or find online, are highly processed documents. Editors will compare different manuscripts of a work – which always differ – and produce a uniform text that is identical to no single medieval or ancient “witness” to the work. Responsible editors will provide notes explaining in what ways their edited text differs from particular manuscripts, but these notes – even the most meticulous – fall far short of providing the depth of information that can be gleaned from direct access to good images of the manuscripts themselves.

Scholarship based entirely on edited texts is fundamentally handicapped. However brilliant the scholars working from these texts may be, their insights will be limited by the absent editors of their source-texts, by their assumptions, and by the innumerable details that disappear on the journey from the hand-written manuscript, through generations of editions, to the shelves of the library.

For the past century, scholars of Greece and Rome have been content for the most part to work from edited texts. There were justifiable reasons for this – practical, technological, and economic reasons. None of those justifications survived the turn of the 21st Century.

In addition to texts and images, other kinds of data might shed light on Homeric poetry: morphological and lexical data, lists of persons, geographic information (where is "Sandy Pylos” or “Horse-rolling Thessaly”, is a reference to Thebes pointing to Seven-Gated Thebes, or Hundred-Gated Thebes in Egypt?), and so forth.

The Challenge

To bring these disparate materials online in a useful way posed a challenge. The collaborators on the HMT wanted an all-purpose infrastructure that would both contribute to end-user applications for browsing, searching, and reading, but would also make the raw data available for discovery and retrieval.

Some kind of digital library infrastructure was necessary, but the complexity of the anticipated contents of that library posed another problem. A digital library containing highly diverse data, which is expected to expand indefinitely must be exposed through protocols that define requests and responses. Those requests and responses should allow discovery of contents, access to objects, retrieval of parts of objects – passages of texts, data elements, parts of images – and querying, manipulation, and other kinds of processing.

Since the data is highly varied and the possible uses of the data potentially infinite, should the protocol become correspondingly complex, then the infrastructure would become, essentially, an end-user application, useable only to its creators, fragile and difficult to maintain, and increasingly vulnerable to obsolescence as time goes by.

Almost a decade of thinking and experimentation went into defining a generic, scaleable protocol that enables scholarly access to and use of these materials in a networked environment, as simply as possible.
This was mainly the task of the HMT’s Project Architects, Neel Smith and me, Christopher Blackwell.

Our answer is C.I.T.E., that is, Collections, Indices, Texts, and Extensions.

This looks like four things, but it is really only three: texts, collections, and indices. In our conception of the requirements of the Homer Multitext, we have reduced scholarship to these three kinds of digital object, have defined protocols for working with each, and have working code that implements each.
In the next installments of this series of postings, I will describe each element in the C.I.T.E. architecture in some detail. Finally, I will describe how they can be brought together to build rich applications for sholarship.

A Final Note

Any discussion of a “generic infrastructure for scholarship” will inevitably sound like the beginning of an evangelical spiel about how everyone needs to adopt the speaker’s pet approach to data. That is not our intention here.

Our dear friend, the late Professor Ross Scaife, was once playing advocatus diabli as I was describing our protocol for texts. “How many other projects need to adopt this protocol for it to be useful?” My colleague Neel had the answer: “One, ours.”

We have developed C.I.T.E. because we needed something like it in order to do what we want to do with the history of Homeric texts. I am describing it here because it is the foundation for much of the ongoing research of the HMT team, which we will also document here, and it might be of interest to other scholars working on similar projects.

All computer code developed for the HMT is free and open-source; all data published by the project is open-content under a Creative Commons or similar license.

Next… Part 2 - Texts

Ongoing Research, Summer 2010

2010-06-15T10:54:00.000-07:00

Christopher Blackwell here:

I have begun a series of blog posts aimed at describing and narrating one corner of the constellation of research that surrounds the Homer Multitext. These posts will appear on my blog: http://nobleswineherd.blogspot.com .

They will focus on the work of this summer, 2010, both the projects in Europe, and what my undergraduate collaborators are doing in Greenville, SC.

I am hoping to use these as tools for recruiting good students to study Classics at Furman University, so they wil tend to have a local focus.

However, I also want to give an overarching view of how the Homer Multitext is progressing, what we have done, and what we hope to do in the near term. I will post those pieces here, and link to them from my “Eumaeus, the Noble Swineherd” blog.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

UH High Performance Computing hosts Homer Multitext data

2010-06-15T09:35:00.000-07:00

The Homer Multitext is a publication of Harvard's Center for Hellenic Studies. The project has been from the beginning, however, a collaborative one between colleagues with various strengths and abilities and from a variety of different kinds of institutions all over the United States and Europe. My own particular research focus has always been the Homeric epics and the oral tradition in which they were composed, but our team includes computer scientists, conservators, and photographers, philologists, art historians, codicologists, papyrologists, and historians. I would like to record my appreciation here for the constant assistance and support of the University of Houston's Research Computing Center, its director Keith Crabb, and especially staff member Alan Pfeiffer-Traum. All image data for the Homer Multitext Project is also hosted by the UH RCC, and can be found at http://amphoreus.hpcc.uh.edu/.

The Homer Multitext and undergraduate research

2010-06-04T08:46:00.000-07:00

The Homer Multitext is a large, collaborative research project, and will require the contributions of many researchers to achieve its goals. We have therefore developed ways for undergraduate researchers to be involved in producing original research, published and credited as their own but contributing to the larger endeavor. This summer five undergraduates will be contributing to the project. At Furman University, three undergraduates are working on digital diplomatic editions of Homeric papyri, some of our oldest witnesses to the Homeric epics. At the College of the Holy Cross we have two students working with the high-resolution digital photographs of the Venetus A manuscript that we acquired in 2007 (see the images via the Manuscript browser here) to create digital texts of its text of the Iliad, the scholia (marginal commentary) and all other features of each page of the manuscript. The texts will all be linked through structured mark-up to the images themselves. The goal for the summer project is to complete this task for two books of the Iliad. In future posts I will give updates on their progress.

Homer Multitext to collaborate with E-codices of Switzerland

2010-05-13T09:00:00.000-07:00

As part of a Mellon funded project, the Homer Multitext will collaborate with E-codices of Switzerland to publish the thirteenth century manuscript of the Iliad known as the Genavensis. For several years Neel Smith has been working on creating electronic editions of ten sets of scholia in which individual scholarly notes are coordinated so that we can, for the first time, systematically analyze their distribution across the manuscripts where they are attested. Cluster analysis identifies clearly distinct groups of comments that appear together in particular sets of scholia, and suggests that, far from slavishly reproducing a single archetype, scribes could combine material from multiple, distinct sources. An initial methodologically independent measurement of vocabulary similarity isolates precisely the same clusters of scholia: the obvious historical conclusion is that scribes drew on different sources for their differing scholarly content.[1] This completely overturns traditional attempts to construct a single stemma, or “family tree,” of manuscript scholia, and means that we urgently need to reassess the relation of the important scholia in the Codex Genavensis 44 to the other scholia we have already studied.

The goal of the e-codices project is to provide access to all medieval and selected early modern manuscripts held in Switzerland via a virtual library At the moment, the virtual library contains 605 manuscripts from 25 different libraries. We are grateful for the opportunity to collaborate with E-codices to bring this manuscript on-line with high resolution images. The manuscript is being carefully restored in preparation for imaging. We anticipate that the imaging will take place in Spring 2011.

[1] Preliminary results have been presented at the conference "Text Mining Services" (Leipzig, 2009) and are forthcoming forthcoming in the conference proceedings (Springer Verlag, 2009) as Gabriel Weaver and Neel Smith, "Applying Domain Knowledge from Structured Citation Formats to Text and Data Mining: Examples Using the CITE Architecture."

Vatican to digitze its manuscript collection

2010-04-29T10:34:00.000-07:00

See the blog post by Juan Garcés of the British Library.

Rediscovery of Homer thwarted by Iceland's Vesuvias

2010-04-19T08:10:00.000-07:00

This week I had planned to travel to Germany to present the Homer Multitext at a conference organized by Teuchos – Zentrum für Handschriften- und Textforschung. Unfortunately, Iceland's volcano has prevented me and no doubt several others from attending. The text of the presentation, entitled "Rediscovering Homer: Manuscript Digitization and the Homer Multitext Project," and a PDF of the accompanying slides (66MB) can be found here and here. Thank you to Daniel Deckers and his colleagues for inviting me to the conference. I am sure it will be very productive and illuminating for those who are able to attend, and I very much regret that I will not be among them.

Homeric Papyri Service Online

2010-01-22T10:14:00.000-08:00

Homer and the Papyri, was first created by Professor Dana Sutton of the University of California, Irvine, to be a database of fragments of the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey that survive on papyrus from Graeco-Roman Egypt.

The Center for Hellenic Studies inherited this valuable data, and the project is now under the editorship of Casey Dué and Mary Ebbott, as part of the ongoing Homer Multitext project.

We are pleased to announce the first publication of a new service for scholars and readers interested in Homeric papyri: The Homeric Papyri Canonical Text Service. This is an application hosted on Google AppEngine. While the service is intended primarily to allow other online applications to discover and retrieve texts and passages of text, it does provide a human-readable interface to these papyri.

The texts as delivered by this service include full editorial markup, in TEI-P5-compliant XML. The human-readable form (visible by default) intentionally hides any text that is not physically present on the papyrus. Future versions of the user-interface to this service may give the option to show or hide editorially supplied text at the user’s discretion.

For more information on the Canonical Text Services Protocol (“CTS”), see the project’s Sourceforge site.

— Christopher W. Blackwell

Multitext related articles from Google Books

2010-01-21T12:11:00.000-08:00

Allen, T. W. 1899. “On the Composition of Some Greek Manuscripts: The Venetian Homer.” Journal of Philology 26: 161-181.

Monro, D. B. 1883. “On the Fragment of Proclus’ Abstract of the Epic Cycle Contained in the Codex Venetus of the Iliad.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 4: 305-34.

I'll post more as I come across them. Dindorf's editions of the scholia are available as well.

New, forthcoming, and older Multitext related publications

2010-01-21T07:50:00.000-08:00

In May of last year, the Center for Hellenic Studies and Harvard University Press published Recapturing a Homeric Legacy: Images and Insights from the Venetus A Manuscript of the Iliad. This book consists of seven essays and a variety of high resolution images of the Venetus A, the oldest complete text of the Iliad in existence, meticulously crafted during the tenth century ce.

In Spring 2010, the Center for Hellenic Studies and Harvard University Press will publish Iliad 10 and the Poetics of Ambush: A Multitext Edition with Essays and Commentary. In this book Casey Dué and Mary Ebbott use approaches based on oral traditional poetics to illuminate many of the interpretive questions that strictly literary approaches find unsolvable. The introductory essays explain their textual and interpretive approaches and explicate the ambush theme within the whole Greek epic tradition. The critical texts (presented as a sequence of witnesses, including the tenth-century Venetus A manuscript and select papyri) highlight the individual witnesses and the variations they offer. The commentary demonstrates how the unconventional Iliad 10 shares in the oral traditional nature of the whole epic, even though its poetics are specific to its nocturnal ambush plot.

In early 2009 Digital Humanities Quarterly published a special issue in honor of Ross Scaife, founder of the Stoa Consortium. See Casey Dué and Mary Ebbott, "Digital Criticism: Editorial Standards for the Homer Multitext," Neel Smith, "Citation in Classical Studies," and Christopher W. Blackwell and Thomas R. Martin, "Technology, Collaboration, and Undergraduate Research."

See also Homeric Questions by Gregory Nagy, Homeric Variations on a Lament by Briseis by Casey Dué, and Imagining Illegitimacy in Classical Greek Literature by Mary Ebbott, together with a variety of other publications on the CHS website. Coming soon to the CHS website and the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature: Albert Lord's The Singer of Tales.

Philology in the Age of Corpus and Computational Linguistics

2010-01-17T15:40:00.000-08:00

I'd like to begin this blog by thanking Greg Crane and Anke Lüdeling for the workshop they organized at Tufts this past week (http://www.linguistik.hu-berlin.de/institut/professuren/korpuslinguistik/events-en/nehdfg/). This workshop brought together classicists, linguists, and computer scientists. It gave us the opportunity to learn from one another and discuss best practices and new possibilities for Digital Humanities projects. We are grateful for the opportunity to present the Homer Multitext to such a distinguished and innovative group of scholars. Stay tuned to this blog for updates about new and forthcoming developments for the HMT, as we acquire more images, add various texts and transcriptions to the site, and develop new tools for interacting with them.