Escorialensis Ω.I.12 introduction posted - scholars wanted!

Folio 188 recto of Escorialensis Ω.I.12

Escorialensis Ω.I.12 (= Allen E4; West F), an eleventh-century CE manuscript of the Iliad now housed in the library of the Escorial in Spain, is not a manuscript that has received much scholarly attention, despite its antiquity and despite the fact that the layout and the organization of its text and scholia set it apart from the other tenth- and eleventh-century manuscripts of the Iliad with scholia. And yet these distinctions immediately raise many fascinating questions about the manuscript’s history and sources. Where was this manuscript constructed? Why was it acquired for Philip’s library, in addition to the Iliad manuscript known as Escorialensis Υ.I.1? Are the two manuscripts related in any way, or is it simply a coincidence that they were both for sale in Venice in 1572 and both were purchased for Philip’s library? Is the unusual layout of Escorialensis Ω.I.12 reflective of a separate channel of transmission for its text and scholia? What kind of scholia does it contain and how do they relate to those of other manuscripts?

A preliminary exploration of this manuscript is now available on the Homer Multitext site. This introduction is meant to be an invitation to others to study the manuscript in more depth using the high-resolution images we acquired in 2010. We encourage you to build on this work, and let us know about any publications or presentations that result. 

Wake up! A return to Iliad 10 and the poetics of the night

At the end of this month our third annual Homer Multitext undergraduate summer seminar will take place at the Center for Hellenic Studies. This year it just so happens that we will be working on book 10 of the Iliad, otherwise known as the Doloneia. This coincidence of timing in our workflow will allow Mary Ebbott and me to revisit a book to which we have a devoted a great deal of thought, resulting in our 2010 book, Iliad 10 and the Poetics of Ambush (available for purchase here and published on-line here). As I reacquaint myself with what we have published about this particularly controversial book of the Iliad, it occurs to me that is worth stating that even though the inclusion of this book in our Iliad has been contested since ancient times, the book received no less attention from ancient commentators than any other book of the Iliad, and likewise numerous very ancient texts of the book survive (in fragmentary form) on papyrus. As a result, book 10 is just a fertile a book for exploring the multiformity of the Homeric tradition as any other. Indeed, Mary and I chose to use Iliad 10 as a starting point for exploring the poetics of oral poetry precisely because its multiformity illustrates so well how oral poetry works. We felt that the book's contested status (in fact the entire book is bracketed as an interpolation in Martin West's 1998 edition of the Iliad) gave us a wonderful opportunity to question why scholars have perceived the book to be unusual since ancient times, and to demonstrate what unites the language and poetry of Iliad 10 with other surviving archaic epic poetry, including the rest of the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Epic Cycle.

A small example serves as a good reminder of why a multitextual approach to editing and publishing the Iliad is superior to more traditional forms of textual criticism. At Iliad 10.159, the tenth-century Venetus A manuscript of the Iliad reads:

ὄρσεο Τυδέος υἱέ· τί πάννυχον ὕπνον ἀωτεῖς;

"Wake up, son of Tydeus. Why do you slumber the whole night through?"

The other surviving manuscripts are in fact divided, however, between this reading (ὄρσεο) and ἔγρεο (which also means something like 'wake up' or 'rouse yourself'). Some of our oldest manuscripts, including the Venetus B (and those in that family), the Townley, and Escorial Ω.1.12, as well as a fourth-century CE papyrus (481) read ἔγρεο, while the vast majority of other manuscripts read ὄρσεο. The scholia, moreover, indicate that Aristarchus, the premier editor of Homer in Ptolemaic Alexandria, knew both readings. In the intermarginal scholia of the Venetus A (which seem to derive from a very ancient source) we find this note:

διχῶς ὁ Ἀρίσταρχος, ἔγρεο καὶ ὄρσεο

The eleventh-century manuscript known as T likewise records that Aristarchus know both:

γράφεται καὶ ὄρσεο. διχῶς αἱ Ἀριστάρχου

As we note here in our published commentary, this is possible because two separate editions or ekdoseis of the text of Homer were attributed in antiquity to Aristarchus (= αἱ Ἀριστάρχου in the scholia), both of which were known to his student Didymus. From Didymus’ scholarly work many of the scholia derive. Rather than choose between these equally attested readings, the Venetus A itself takes a multitext approach by noting, right next to the line in question, that multiple ancient readings are known for this verse.

Moreover, if we look at these two readings from the perspective of the system of composition-in-performance that generated them, we find that both verbs are well attested in the formulaic diction. ἔγρεο occurs here and in two places in the Odyssey; ὄρσεο is attested four times in the Iliad and once in the Odyssey. Clearly, both verbs could be generated by a poet composing in performance. Here is a perfect illustration of the difficulty a modern editor of Homer faces when trying to choose between two or more equally Homeric (= formulaic) variations. When we convene in Washington, DC on the 24th, we hope to wake the students up to the advantages of exploring the history of the Iliad from a multitextual perspective, in which both readings can be understood and appreciated as witnesses to the workings of formulaic diction and in which one need not be chose at the expense of the other.

What's in a Name (of a Manuscript)?

Along with the exciting new additions (with more to come) and the reorganization of the Homer Multitext website, you may have noticed that the primary names used for our Iliad manuscripts have been changing as well.

Here are the “shorthand” designations we will use henceforth, and the other possible designations or past names we have used for our five current manuscripts:

HMT designations       [names in brackets are other library catalog designations and modern
                                                                                                 edition sigla]

Venetus A or Marciana 822    [=Marcianus Graecus Z. 454, Allen’s A, West’s A]    

Venetus B or Marciana 821    [=Marcianus Graecus Z. 453, Allen’s B, West’s B]
   
Marciana 841       [=Marciana Graecus Z. 458, Allen’s U4; West does not include]
   
Escorial Υ.1.1      [=Escorialensis 294, Escorialensis 291, Allen’s E3, West’s E]

Escorial Ω.1.12    [=Escorialensis 513, Escorialensis 509, Allen’s E4, West’s F]

Why are there so many names for each manuscript? And how did we settle on the names that we now use?

One reason why there are multiple ways to refer to each of our manuscripts is that names or other designations come from two different sources: the libraries which house the manuscripts, and modern editors’ designations or “sigla.” Within each of those sources, in turn, there are additional reasons that names or designations change over time.

Modern editors’ names
When a modern editor collates multiple manuscripts to create a modern edition, s/he might use sigla to designate the manuscripts so that s/he can use those one or two letters and/or numbers in the cramped spaces of a traditional print apparatus criticus. Even the first modern publication of the Venetian manuscripts created such sigla: Villoison in his 1788 edition of Homer’s Iliad with the Scholia called the two manuscripts “A” and “B” for ease of reference in tight print spaces when he compiled the scholia. (You can see digital photographs of Villoison's edition here.) That is the origin of the names “Venetus A” and “Venetus B” (“Venetus” is the Latinate version of “Venice”).

When we look at how two twentieth-century editors have created sigla, we see that each created his own system, resulting in further designations. Allen calls the two manuscripts from the Escorial “E3” and “E4”: he actually collated four manuscripts from the Escorial and designated them 1–4 in the same order as the Escorial’s catalog numbered them, so although these two are the oldest of the four, they end up as “3” and “4.” West, however, uses far fewer manuscripts in his edition, and chose to call these two “E” (=“E3”) and “F” (=“E4”). Allen gave to the Venetian manuscript Marciana 841 the siglum “U4”: in addition to the Venetus A and Venetus B, Allen consulted 13 other manuscripts in Venice at the Marciana, and gave them the sigla U1–13, using a Latinate consonantal “U” for “Venice” since he uses “V” for the manuscripts in the Vatican library. West does not include this manuscript, and so did not create a siglum for it.

We have written before about the problems with the traditional apparatus criticus, both in terms of the difficulties in deciphering from it what a particular manuscript actually has, and in the way it presents barriers to readers, obscuring what the editor has seen in manuscripts in a secret code, as it were. Since we will not have the constraints of a printed page, and because we want to avoid reinforcing the “outsiders not welcome” feel of using such abbreviations, we will not follow in the footsteps of these print editions by using their sigla or by creating our own for the manuscripts.

Up until now, however, we have used these sigla in our writing about the manuscripts and on the website. We have done so because they are short, and therefore handy, and because we learned to do so as part of our academic discipline. But we will avoid using most of these from now on, for the reasons just stated as well as some further considerations I will explain now.

Because “Venetus A” and “Venetus B” are both easy to say and write and widely known names, we will continue to use them as our shorthand for these manuscripts. They have become such established names (and the manuscripts are so important for our textual history of the Iliad) that both Allen in his sigla and West in his use “A” and “B” to designate these manuscripts. But in addition to the hassle of needing to include multiple equivalences any time we refer to the manuscript using the sigla of a modern editor (such as noting the Allen’s E4 = West’s F), using one modern editor’s sigla as our normal reference could imply some scholarly choices or allegiances that we are not meaning to make. So our decision is to use library names and designations rather than sigla from any one modern edition, with the exception of Venetus A and Venetus B because those are so widely known and consistently used.

Library catalogs and shelving
Deciding to use library names and designations wasn’t the end of our decision making process, however, because in these cases, too, there is more than one possible reference. We have had the habit (once again from our training in the discipline) of using Latinate forms for the library names: Marcianus and Escorialensis. But in our desire to welcome nonspecialists to the Homer Multitext, we have decided to avoid such Latinate forms, and use the actual library names, Marciana and Escorial, in our designations for their manuscripts.

Then we must locate them, as it were, within the library, since we have more than one manuscript from each. The libraries that house our manuscripts naturally catalog them, and give them catalog numbers when they do. The Marciana and the Escorial libraries have long histories as institutions, so it is not surprising that they have cataloged their manuscript collections more than once. We have at times used or included designations for the three manuscripts from Venice that were assigned in the catalog compiled by Zanetti in 1740 (http://marciana.venezia.sbn.it/fondo-antico-e-appendice). Those designations, “Marcianus Graecus Z.” plus a number (454, 453, and 458 for our three manuscripts) include the name of the library in the Latinate form, the Latinate designation “Graecus” because Zanetti cataloged the Greek manuscripts separately from the Latin and Italian manuscripts, and the “Z.” to indicate Zanetti’s catalog. So there was both a “Greek 454” (our Venetus A) and, likely, a Latin 454, requiring the specification of the language to distinguish the two. Zanetti also grouped the manuscripts within the language into genres, so the Greek poetry manuscripts all have numbers between 438 and 461.

Similarly at the Escorial, different catalogs have given the two manuscripts different catalog numbers over time: 291 or 294 for what Allen called his “E3” and 509 or 513 for what Allen called his “E4.” Because these numbers have changed over time, using one over the other complicates our designations: even if we choose to use the latest one as the most “current,” it is scholarly practice to include the older numbers so that it is clear that it is indeed the same manuscript. So, just as with using any one editor’s sigla, using one of the Escorial catalogs creates the need for citing the other (294 = 291, e.g.).

Our solution is to use the designation the library has for the shelving of the manuscripts, since that is a designation rooted in some reality about the manuscript as a physical object: namely, where they can be found. For the Escorial, those designations are a Greek letter, followed by two numbers, separated by periods: Escorial Υ.1.1 and Ω.1.12. The numbers from the Marciana of 821, 822, and 841 also refer to their physical place in the library, and are attached to the codices, as this picture of the spine of the Venetus A shows (the label toward the bottom reads “822”).

Spine of Venetus A manuscript, photo published by the Homer Multitext project

The long history of our discipline shows itself in these changing and accumulating designations. As we reinvent the critical edition, we want to use names that reflect the manuscript as a historical object and are lasting, easy to use, and easy to understand. We hope the designations we have chosen will fulfill those desires.

Manuscript Collation in the 21st Century

It seems worth restating an obvious benefit that the on-line publication of high resolution images of multiple Homeric manuscripts offers. As was made clear to us again and again during our recent two week summer seminar, when you find something in a manuscript that you don't understand, it is often illuminating to look at other manuscripts. When Martin West or Helmut Van Thiel made their editions of the Iliad, if they wanted to check the contents of the Venetus A directly, they had to make a costly trip to Venice, where they might be allowed to look at the manuscript for a few hours, perhaps, if they were very lucky, over the course of a few days. (When our team was in Venice, we were able to in fact see the handwritten log of visitors that recorded these visits.) If West or Van Thiel noticed something that reminded them, however vaguely, of something they had seen in one of the Escorial manuscripts in Spain, another costly and time consuming trip would have been required to make a comparison. (I believe Martin West was in fact able to make use of a microfilm provided by the Esorial, as have we before we photographed those manuscripts. But he almost certainly was not able to use that microfilm while looking at the Venetus A.) Last week at the seminar, we were able to make direct comparisons again and again between manuscripts that have perhaps never been in the same room. So for example, when students noticed a particular siglum in book 7 of the Venetus A that was used to connect a small subset of intermarginal scholia with the word being commented upon in the poem — a method of linking not typical in the Venetus A, which relies instead upon placement and lemmata to connect text and scholia —we were immediately able to look at Escorial manuscript Ω.1.12 (E4), which makes use of a similar siglum for a particular group of scholia in that manuscript.

In the next month we are planning to make available on a test server an all new manuscript browser. Unlike previous versions, this one will be able to display all of our data, and it will do so in a way that will make perfectly clear the relationships between all the different materials we have collected so far. So for example, you'll be able to ask for line 1.1 of the Iliad, and you'll get a page that will give you the option to also display, in addition to the Greek text of any given manuscript for which we have a diplomatic edition, the manuscript folios and papyri that contain that verse, and what scholia comment upon it. The more editions that we create and publish, the more options there will be for you to choose from. So very soon you will able to collate manuscripts from Spain and Venice (and Geneva and London and so on) side by side, something that has never before been realistically possible. The system will always be a work in progress, in that we will continue to feed it new data as we acquire or create it, but the tools themselves that will enable such browsing are elegant, simple, and flexible — not to mention open source and platform independent. We look forward to sharing this exciting new development with you soon.

The Venetus A and Escorial manuscript Ω.1.12 side by side

A discovery in the Escorialensis Ω.I.12 scholia

Detail from folio 27v of E4

This week I have begun to explore in much more depth than I have thus far the scholia in Escorialensis Ω.I.12 (otherwise known as E4, or West F) and how they relate to those of other manuscripts. In other posts I have discussed how E4 brings together several different sources of commentary and places them in different locations around the page depending on the nature of the folio. These sources include the "Homeric Questions" of Porphyry (and possibly older material of this genre), "D" scholia of the type that you find in the Venetus A, "D" scholia of the type that you find in the later hand of the Venetus B, and exegetical scholia of the type that you find in the first hand of the Venetus B and E3.

Often in my work I use Erbse's edition of the scholia to help me transcribe the exegetical scholia of E4 (Erbse's edition does not include the "D" scholia or Porphyry). But because Erbse was working with the limitations of print, his edition often condenses, abbreviates, combines, and/or separates comments that appear in multiple sources, in order to save space. As a result, Erbse is rarely a reliable guide to what is actually in E4. Usually, if E4 is particularly difficult to decipher at any given point, the most helpful comparison will be the high resolution images that we have published of the Venetus B. And indeed it has been my working assumption that the source of E4's exegetical scholia is, if not B, then something very much like B. While transcribing the scholia on folio 27v of E4 this week, however, I found evidence that the scribe(s) of E4 had access to a fuller source of the scholia than that of the Venetus B or even, in this case, of the Venetus A.

At the top of the left margin on folio 27v of E4, on which we find verses 38-76 of book 3 of the Iliad, there is a comment in reference to line 3.46 and following about whether the passage should be read as a question or not. This comment, which mentions Nicanor by name (he is the scholar whose work On Punctuation is cited in the subscription at the end of each book in the Venetus A), happens to survive in A, B, E3, and T as well as in E4. Here is the note as it survives in the manuscripts other than E4 (with each individual manuscript presenting only very minor deviations from this text):

ἢ τοιόσδε τινὲς [[τινὲς has been left out in E4, but is attested here in other manuscripts]] κατὰ πεῦσιν καὶ θαυμασμόν· τοιοῦτος ὢν δειλός, συναγαγὼν πλῆθος; διελθὼν πέλαγος, γυναῖκα ἀνδρὸς πολεμικοῦ ἤγαγες· σῷ τὲ πατρὶ· καὶ τοῖς ἄλλοις κακὸν μέγα; εἶτα ἀπὸ ἄλλης ἀρχῆς· <οὐκ ἂν δὴ μείνειας Μενέλαον> [Iliad 3.52]· ἠθικῶς μετὰ πεύσεως ἢ καὶ διαβεβαιωτικῶς· τινὲς δὲ τὸ πᾶν, οὕτως· τὸν η ἀντὶ τοῦ ει διφθόνγου· εἰ τοιοῦτος ὢν ἐπηγάγου πλῆθος· καὶ ἀπὸ ξένης γῆς γυναῖκα ἀνδρὸς πολεμϊκοῦ ἤγαγες· οὐκ ἂν ὑπομείνειας τὸν ταύτης ἄνδρα· ὃ καὶ προκρΐνει Νϊκάνωρ ὡς μᾶλλον τὴν δικαιολογίαν ἔχον. 

Some read it as an interrogative and an incredulous question: “Did you, being such a coward, cross the sea leading a multitude and bring with you the wife of a war-like man, you great evil to your father and the rest of us?” Then from another beginning [i.e., a new sentence] is οὐκ ἂν δὴ μείνειας Μενέλαον (Iliad 3.52), which would be appropriate with a question or as a statement. But some read the whole passage this way, namely reading the η the instead of the ει diphthong. “If being such a one you led a multitude and took the wife of a war-like man from a foreign land, you could not withstand the husband of that woman” is what Nicanor prefers on the grounds that it sounds more like courtroom rhetoric.

This is where the note ends in A, B, E3, and T, but in E4 it continues.

τινὲς δὲ οὐ κατὰ πεῦσιν καὶ θαυμασμὸν· οὕτω δειλὸς ὢν τοσούτων ἀρχηγὸς γενόμενος τῆ πατρΐδϊ καὶ τοῖς οἰκειοις κακὼν· ὁ η κεῖται ἀντῒ τοῦ ει· καὶ τὸ τοιόσδε ἐν παραγωγῇ. διὸ ἐβαρύνθη ὁ η : 

But some do not take it as an interrogative and an incredulous question: “Being so worthless, you being the originator of so many bad things for your fatherland and for your countrymen.” The η is there instead of the ει. And the τοιόσδε is inflected. For this reason the η is marked with a grave accent.

Interestingly, the Genavensis manuscript seems to preserve a compressed version the entire note, according to the edition of Nicole (1966). But though compressed, it contains two segments that are in E4 but not in the other manuscripts—the τινὲς δὲ οὐ and τὸ τοιόσδε ἐν παραγωγῇ. It would seem that the scribe of the Genavensis had access to the same fuller note that the scribe of E4 copied, but he must have compressed it for reasons of space. When the images of the Genavensis are published (very soon, we hope!), we will be able to test this hypothesis.

In any case, we find here just one small example of a place where E4 preserves text that is available nowhere else, text moreover that has not been published in Erbse or in any edition of the scholia. I expect many more such places to come to light in the course of studying this manuscript.

The Scribe as Editor, or What the Images Can Tell Us

An on-going research question addressed by the Homer Multitext in the past two years has been the precise relationship between the manuscript known as the Venetus B and Escorialensis Υ.I.1, or E3 (= West E). As we have noted, the layout of the two manuscripts is virtually identical, the primary difference being that in the Venetus B a second set of scholia was written in the available space approximately two centuries later.

This week I have been editing the text of book 3 of the Iliad in still another manuscript, E4 (Escorialensis Ω.I.12, = West F). In the course of that research I have found several places, all in a relatively brief span of lines, where the Venetus B and E3 differ. This alone would be an interesting finding, but having access to high resolution images of the two manuscripts has allowed me to put together a more precise understanding of these differences than a traditional apparatus alone would have. (Though as we will see, West's apparatus has been very helpful to me in my research.) In fact, the images show that in each case, the Venetus B has been corrected by the scribe, who seems to have been comparing his own text to that of another manuscript. In these places the scribe has chosen to erase the text he originally copied, and insert the new reading. The implications of this practice for our understanding of the relationship between B and E3 will be considered at the end of this post.We will also see in this example that having access to the images can correct and clarify the scholarly apparatus in modern editions in important ways.

Here are some examples that I came across this week:

At 3.102, the Venetus B (folio 43v) reads διακρινθῆτε, but B looks like it has been corrected here. (Zoom up on the image as far as possible to see the evidence of correction.) If we compare it to the corresponding spot on E4 (folio 28r) we see that E4 also reads διακρινθῆτε, but records the alternate reading διακρινθεῖτε above the line.

Detail from folio 28r in E4, showing verse 3.102

The alternate reading in E4, διακρινθεῖτε, is the reading of the text in the Venetus A, T, and significantly, E3. Let us note for now simply that 1) B and E3 have different readings; 2) E4 presents both readings; and finally, most manuscripts in fact have διακρινθῆτε (the seemingly corrected reading of B).

At 3.221,  the Venetus B (folio 46r) once again appears to have been corrected. (This is the view of West, as recorded in his apparatus, presumably based on personal inspection of the manuscript.)  The corrected text reads εἵη, but the original breathing seems to have been a smooth, so that the text would have read εἴη before correction. εἵη (with a rough breathing) is the reading of several papyri and the Venetus A. E3, however, (along with Laurentianus 32.15 and the Genenavensis) reads εἴη (with a smooth breathing).

E4, along with the ninth-century manuscript Z and also Laurentianus 32.3, record still another reading: ἵει. But if we look at the image of E4 (folio 29v), we can see that it too has been corrected:

Detail from folio 29v of E4, showing verse 3.221

West's view (again recorded in his apparatus, and presumably the result of personal inspection) is that the reading of E4 before correction was εἵη (the corrected reading of B). So here is another place where 1) there is division among the manuscripts; 2) the scribe of B has changed his original reading; and 3) E3 matches the reading that B had BEFORE correction.

At 3.301, we have perhaps the most interesting case yet. Several papyri, scholia (from West’s manuscripts M, N, P), the Venetus A, E3, and T read δαμεῖεν here. E4 on the other hand reads μιγεῖεν, which is also found in the lemma of the D scholia (such as in the 9th century manuscript Ve1 [= West Z]) and is written as variant in superscript in T. μιγεῖεν is the text of most mss (except those cited above).

The Venetus B (folio 47v) AFTER correction reads μιγεῖεν, but I think you can see if you zoom up that BEFORE correction it read δαμεῖεν:

Detail of Folio 47v of the Venetus B, showing verse 3.301

(Go to the full image to see this most clearly. It can be difficult to distinguish between bleed through on the other side and the erased text, but I believe that I see the brownish ink of the delta.) Unfortunately, the apparatus of Allen in his editio maior is incorrect here: he cites B as reading δαμεῖεν.

So here is our third case of E3 reading what B had BEFORE correction. The corrections in B are in a darker ink, but they do not appear to be in another or later hand. What seems most likely is that the scribe, after copying the main text of poem from one source, collated it against another source, sometimes correcting the text he had previously written to agree with the second source over the first. I think we can also see that this is what the scribe of E4 has done as well. In addition to the examples discussed here, I have found at least six other places within this same brief span of lines where the text is divided among manuscripts and E4 has clear evidence of having been corrected.

This examination, therefore, suggests two import conclusions. First, it does not seem that E3 is a direct copy of the Venetus B, at least not in its final, edited form. It must be either a copy of B before it was collated against another source, or, what is more likely, B and E3 (which are roughly contemporaneous) were copied from the same exemplar. B's text was collated against a second manuscript, but E3's was not. Secondly, and conceptually more important is our understanding that the scribes of these manuscripts were not simply unthinking copyists, but in fact were making sophisticated editorial choices on the basis of comparison of manuscripts. It is intriguing to see that E4 often corrects to a reading that is found in most manuscripts. Might he have had several sources to look at at once? If so, our Medieval scribes in Constantinople may well have been more like the Alexandrian editors working a millennium before them than they are traditionally given credit for.

A traditional apparatus, such as those of West and Allen, can be extremely useful for comparing the readings of many different manuscripts. But those apparatus can be difficult to understand, and often contain mistakes or omissions. (See that of Allen discussed above. West does not record that at verse 3.231, where there is division among the manuscripts, E4 has been corrected, even though the original text is still quite clear to the eye.) Having access to these images has been invaluable to me as I try to work with the text and understand the relationship between E4 and that of other manuscripts. And in this case, it has given us important evidence about the connection between our "twin" manuscripts, B and E3. It is our hope that the Homer Multitext will likewise greatly aid the process of discovery for other scholars as they undertake their own investigations of the transmission of the text.

Linking poetry and scholia in medieval Homeric manuscripts

In our rationale for a digital edition of the Homeric epics, we have observed (e.g., in “Digital Criticism”) that the layout of a print edition of the Iliad or Odyssey affects the reader’s perception of the text. As Casey Dué and I say in that article: “A standard print edition will present a main text, and then record alternative readings in an apparatus (generally printed at the bottom of the page in smaller-sized font), giving the impression that there is the text — and then there is everything else. Compounding this problem and further obscuring the situation for nonspecialists, the apparatus as developed and practiced in classical textual criticism uses conventions and abbreviations that can only be deciphered by those who have received special training in these practices.” In other words, the layout of the page both assumes and projects a particular view of the text and its transmission, one that is at odds with the historical reality of the composition and transmission of the Homeric epics. Not only the conventional layout of print critical editions, but also the very limitations of print as a medium, are fundamental reasons why a digital edition is necessary to fully realize a critical edition of the Homeric epics.

With that pivotal significance of page layout in mind, we can then consider further questions about how the medieval manuscripts that we have digitally photographed for the HMT present a page layout and connect multiple texts on the same page. For just how the layout of the page in our medieval manuscripts presents, organizes, and links the multiple texts on each page is crucial for understanding the relationship between these texts. And, of course, a digital edition that incorporates and references the digital images of these pages does not lose that embedded information the way print editions (and electronic editions made directly from print editions) have. The aspect of layout that I will consider here in further detail is how the multiple texts on one page of these manuscripts are linked together for the reader.

In a conference presentation I gave along with HMT Associate Editor Leonard Muellner at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland last August, and now in a forthcoming article, I began examining this topic with what seems like it should be a simple question: how does a reader read a page of the Venetus A manuscript?

It is clear that each page is carefully set up to accommodate these multiple sets of texts (see also Maniaci 2006). How, then, should a page of the Venetus A be read? Where does my eye begin reading, and how does it move through all the texts on a page? Just where to start is not obvious. The expected approach of reading top to bottom, left to right, quickly proves not correct, since I then start with commentary, and lines of poetry would be interspersed with comments. In fact, such a method of reading the page would be impossible, because the comments along the right side of the page require reading down through a comment before returning to the left side of the page, where the next line of the poetry starts. If I start by reading the lines of the Iliad do I stop each time I expect a comment, and go to look for it? Do I read all 25 lines, and then start at the top of the page and read the scholia in order from top to bottom, and left to right? Or do I read all the main scholia, then go back and read each of the other sets, the intermarginal, the interior, the exterior, and then the interlinear—and in turn, or in a single pass? Should multiple comments on the same line but belonging to different sets of scholia be read together?

The seemingly simple questions of how to read the page reveal the complexities of the relationships between the texts on the page. A codex of this size and grandeur was obviously not meant to be picked up and read like a paperback novel, but the basic questions of what the scribe’s expectations of his readers were and how readers might use this codex still require further investigation: we have not yet figured out all of the reading strategies the manuscript makes possible. Now that the manuscript is available for repeated reading by means of the digital images, we (and other scholars) can begin to conduct that kind of investigation. Yet as readers of all kinds of texts and page layouts, we know that we are not bound by the author’s (or scribe’s or typesetter’s) expectations. Thus, the Venetus A’s format for multitextual reading is an elaborate case of the possibilities for multitextual reading—different orders, different combinations—that are inherent in a page:

“The page is thus that physical aspect of the book that most persistently invites our eyes to move in directions other than the forward one, that potentially asserts, visually, the synchronic (and recursive) aspects of a narrative, over and against the diachronic ones. Roll or codex, the page is a block of text that realizes, in miniature, what is true of the entire book: all of these words are here together, at the same time” (Butler 2011: 9).

The design of the complex pages of the Venetus A is self-contained, yet nevertheless offers multiple ways of reading what they contain: our eyes can (and sometimes must) move in directions other than forward. A digital edition allows us to retain these possibilities in ways that a print edition cannot. Our digital edition of the manuscript encodes the location on the page of each scholion, for example, and the digital texts are linked to the images, so that a reader can easily go back and forth between them. Thus the structured markup of the scholia, including its location on the page, helps to restore the spatial information that the manuscript assumes the reader has by virtue of looking at the page.

The page layout creates possibilities of and even the need for reading strategies. So what are the ways in which the layout and other features of the page indicate the connections between the multiple sets of texts? As we study the first five manuscripts for which we have digital photography, we are starting to see a number of different strategies that the scribes used for linking texts on the page.

Venetus A

The 10th-century Venetus A (Marcianus Graecus Z. 454 [=822]) uses a combination of spatial arrangement and lemmata, excerpted words from the poetic line(s) being commented on. In the Venetus A, the main block of the poetic text is apparent in the middle of the page—the blacker ink and larger script make it visually prominent. The commentary brackets the text in an open frame, and does so in multiple groupings, appearing also in the interior margin and even in the spaces between the lines of poetry. Even on less full, more typical pages, such as 43v or 46r, these multiple sets of writing on a single page are evident. The sets of scholia, which are distinguished by their location on the page, include: (1) the main scholia, which are written above, outside, and below the lines of the epic, in a bracketing shape (yellow in the image of 46r below); (2) the intermarginal scholia, located between the poetry and the main scholia and written in a different kind of script (green); (3) the interior scholia, written in the gutters (that is, toward the bound edge of the page) (purple); (4) the exterior scholia, written in the outer margin, toward the edge of the page beyond the main scholia (orange); and (5) interlinear scholia, written between the lines of the poetry (pink).

Scholia inventory and mapping by Melissa Browne of Venetus A, 46r

The placement of the comment in one of the five sets is already conveying some information about them, presumably about the source(s) of the comment, although there is still much to be investigated about that question. The placement of the text on the page also has a spatial relationship to the line it comments on: the scholia generally follow the order of the poetic lines. In addition, as we can see on these pages 43v and 46r, if the main scholia did not fill the page, the scribe left blank space in the main scholia area to move the later comments down the page to be closer to the line(s) they comment on.

Aiding the reader in the visual coordination of text and comment in the main scholia are the lemmata, a word or words taken from the poetic line to indicate which line is commented on. It provides the eye a means of moving more easily between text and comment. We readers can look at a line of poetry and then find the same (or similar: that will have to be the subject of another post) words introducing a comment on the line. The correspondence (or near correspondence) of words from the poetry are what the reader looks for in connecting the two texts.

The intermarginal, interior, exterior, and interlinear scholia in the Venetus A, however, rely almost entirely on location on the page to indicate their relationship with other texts. (The exceptions are the longer exterior scholia, such as those seen on 12r and 12v, which rely on content alone to link to particular lines.) But the briefer scholia (sometimes only one word) in these sets are written adjacent to, parallel to (in the case of exterior scholia), or above the line they comment on, and that spatial arrangement allows the reader to see what is being commented on. For example, the interior scholion on 43v reads simply, διὰ τοῦ α τὸ πεπασθε Ἀρίσταρχος, which means “with an ‘a’ [alpha], “πέπασθε”, according to Aristarchus.” When it is seen on the page written right next to πέποσθε at the end of the line (Iliad 3.99), its meaning, that Aristarchus read πέπασθε in place of πέποσθε on that line, is easily grasped.

Detail shot of 43v of the Venetus A

The scribe of course assumed that anyone reading any particular text on the page had ready access to all the other texts on the page and also had the spatial information conveyed by their layout (such as what word πέπασθε is meant to substitute for). Because modern print editions of the scholia have seen fit to separate these texts, that easy and intuitive understanding of their relationship has been lost: when removed from the page, it is not clear why the difference of the spelling with an alpha is being noted, and the reader has to hunting through another printed text to figure it out.

Venetus B and E3

I am grouping these two 11th-century manuscripts (Venetus B is Marcianus Graecus Z. 453 [=821] and E3 is Allen’s designation for Escorialensis 291 [Υ i.1]) together because they share their main method of linking scholia to text: a numbering system. Greek numbers (that is, letters with a keraia written after to distinguish them from letters as letters) are used to link comments to lines, and even particular parts of the lines by being written both above the line being commented on and then before the corresponding comment. These two manuscripts have long been considered closely related to one another, and their similar layout and use of this numbering system contributes to that impression. The numbering system as employed in these manuscripts is also native to the codex format. (The codex is basically our normal “book” format: rectangular pages bound between covers. It differs from the earlier “roll” format: for more on this change in format, see Ebbott 2009 in Recapturing a Homeric Legacy, available in PDF for free). The lemmata system used in the main scholia of the Venetus A was useful for the earlier “roll” format. From what we know of Aristarchus’ editorial practices, he had the text in one roll, and his commentary (hupomnēmata) in another. The critical signs we see in the Venetus A (which no longer have a direct linking function in that codex, since most of the corresponding scholia do not contain the sign as well) and the lemmata helped the reader move back and forth between rolls, which could be opened simultaneously to the matching portions of text and commentary. (For more on the critical signs in the Venetus A, see Bird 2009.) But the numbering in both the Venetus B and E3 start at 1 (α’) at the top of the verso (left-hand) page, and continue sequentially down the page and then across to the recto (right-hand) page. When you turn the page, the numbering starts again at 1. Thus the layout and system of text coordination assumes a codex format, with a two-page spread visible when the book is open. One thing to note about modern print editions of the scholia from these manuscripts: when a “lemma” is cited for a scholion, it is likely the word in the text that the number is written over. Lemmata as we see them in manuscripts like the Venetus A are not used in these two manuscripts for the purposes of linking line and comment.

In addition to this numbered scholia, both the B and E3 manuscripts have additional notes written in different, later handwriting. In E3 these notes are placed in interlinear, intermarginal, interior, or exterior positions, in a much smaller quantity than those we see in the Venetus A, and, it appears, in a less systematic way (we have only just begun to investigate these scholia, which have not previously been published). These scholia seem also to depend on spatial proximity to provide connection between the poetry and the comment. In B the second set of scholia instead is connected in a way similar to the numbered scholia, but it uses symbols to make the connection: again, written both over the line and before the comment. A team of undergraduate researchers at Brandeis University, under the direction of Lenny Muellner, will be collecting and cataloguing the symbols used, and then we will be able to investigate whether the individual symbols have a particular meaning or are used in some systematic way.

E4

The manuscript that Allen called E4 (Escorialensis 509 [Ω i.12]) is also from the 11th century. As we begin to study this manuscript in earnest, we are finding that it has many unusual features, so my remarks here are only preliminary. (See also the previous posts by Casey Dué about this manuscript.) E4 uses a combination of several linking methods: numbers, symbols, lemmata, and color.

Looking at the bifolio spread of 187v–188r that Casey discussed in her “Dog of Orion” post, I see that some of the marginal scholia are linked by Greek numbers, in a manner similar to B and E3: the number is written both over the line of poetry and before the corresponding note. The numbering starts at 1 on the verso (left-hand) page and continues sequentially on the recto (right-hand) page, again like B and E3. When I turn the page to 188v, I see that the numbering starts at 1 again. The major difference on these pages, which start Book 22 and (as Casey noted) must be read together, is that the first three numbered scholia appear on 187v, and coordinate to text on the facing page, 188r, where the corresponding numbers are written about the lines of poetry. In B and E3, the corresponding text and comment are, with only a few exceptions seen so far, on the same page, even as the numbering system itself continues across the bifolio spread of the open codex.

E4 also uses symbols in manner parallel to its use of numbers, with a symbol written above the line commented on and in front of the corresponding note. Some important differences from the use of symbols to link scholia seen in B should be noted, however. In B, the scholia using symbol are in a different hand and seem to have been added to the manuscript later. They appear as though they are placed according to what space was available around the numbered scholia. In E4, the symbol scholia are written in the same handwriting as the numbered scholia, and are written within the same block of scholia as those that are numbered. The numbered scholia and those linked with symbols are not separated spatially: the scribe intermingled them according to some principle we have yet to discern. Another question that we have begun to explore is whether the numbers and symbols indicate what source the scribe was taking the comment from (if he was, as seems likely, constructing this set of scholia himself), and whether his sources already had numbers and symbols associated with the scholia.

E4 also shows the use of lemmata, similar to the linking system we saw in A. As Casey noted in her “Dog of Orion” post, a lemma is used to link a comment on 187v to a text on 188r (and, as she noted, the lemma is itself a different reading of this line from what we see in the text on 188r). On 90v, which I looked at earlier for its scholion about Rhesos, the marginal comment on 10.437, which appears on the same page as the line it comments on, uses both a symbol and a lemma to link the comment to the text. There the lemma is, in fact, the entire line. In each of these cases, the lemma, or the first part of it, is written in a red ink. Indeed, with both the lemmata and the symbols, the scribe has made use of colored ink as part of his methods of linking texts on the page. Both a purplish-red and an orangish-red are used for some symbols and some lemmata. The color certainly helps my eye to pick up the linked texts more quickly. Whether the different shades of red mean anything in terms of the source or the content of the scholia so linked is yet another question we will have to investigate further.

E4 also contains some interlinear scholia, at least some of which use symbols to connect to the lines of poetry, but not all. These interlinear scholia appear between the lines of the prose paraphrase. That placement raises questions of whether the placement was simply one of available space, or whether in some cases the prose paraphrase itself needed explaining, or whether the annotator expected at least some of his readers to be reading the prose paraphrase first (or only).

U4

For the Venetian manuscript that Allen called U4 (Marcianus Graecus Z. 458 [=841]), I will quote the description sent to me by Melissa Browne, Holy Cross Class of 2012. Browne is making a digital editio princeps (first critical edition) of this manuscript as her senior honors thesis. She has already inventoried every scholion in the manuscript, and, I would wager, knows it better than anyone else in the world.

According to Melissa: “The roughly 700 scholia of the U4 codex, as a general rule, do not follow one specific method of linking scholia to Iliad text. The scholia themselves we may divide into two distinct types: ‘graphetai’ scholia, and all other scholia.

Graphetai scholia, which consistently begin with the letters gamma and rho combined into a symbol (seen at left), usually appear directly to the left or right of the line upon which they comment, as they provide alternate readings of a line or half line which the scribe has, for some reason or another, decided not to [choose for the line itself]. Some scholia beginning with the graphetai symbol do appear to the right of the prose paraphrase passage; whether these graphetai scholia comment on the prose paraphrase or on the Iliad text will be an interesting question to consider. All other scholia in U4 we consider as one category, since there are no particular spatial patterns of placement or changes of ink/writing style/size which would distinguish certain scholia as particular ‘types’ (‘interior’ or ‘interlinear’, for example). The scribe does not use lemmata, as in Venetus A, but he does make (inconsistent) use of a system of symbols linking text and scholia, as in the Venetus B and E4. Most often, the scribe of U4 places his commentary near the horizontal scoring line of the line upon which he wishes to add notation. If there happens to be a larger number of scholia on a given recto or verso page, the scribe puts the symbol system to use. As U4 contains far fewer scholia than A, B, E3 or E4, his loose spatial system and employment of symbols, while not the most consistent, generally allows for the reader to link text and scholia without too much trouble.”

A central point I want to return to is that the scribe of each of these manuscripts constructed the page under the assumption that the reader would have the same page before his or her eyes, and therefore would have access to all of the texts on that page (or bifolio spread) simultaneously. These various systems of linking scholia were an aid to the reader’s eye, and perhaps also an aid for the scribe himself for the organization of multiple texts (perhaps from multiple sources) on the same page. As we become more familiar with the manuscripts we have had the chance to study through digital photographs, the importance of that relationship on the page becomes more and more apparent. That importance is the reason why the Homer Multitext has incorporated the photographs themselves into our digital editions though the visual inventory and scholia mapping that our undergraduate researchers have been doing, and why we insist on a complete, comprehensive accounting of the entire contents of our manuscripts. Users of the edition will be able to move from the digital text to the precise location of that text on the photograph of the page: they will thereby have easy access to the page itself, and all the important information contained its in arrangement.

Works cited

Bird, G. 2009. “Critical Signs―Drawing Attention to ‘Special’ Lines of Homer’s Iliad in the Manuscript Venetus A.” In Dué 2009:89–115.

Butler, Shane. 2011. The Matter of the Page: Essays in Search of Ancient and Medieval Authors. Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin Press.

Dué, Casey, ed.. 2009. Recapturing a Homeric Legacy: Images and Insights from the Venetus A Manuscript of the Iliad. Cambridge, MA. [Available on-line at http://www.homermultitext.org/Pubs/Due_Recapturing_a_Homeric_Legacy.pdf]

Dué, Casey and Mary Ebbott. 2009. “Digital Criticism: Editorial Standards for the Homer Multitext.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 3.1, http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/3/1/000029/000029.html.

Ebbott, Mary. 2009. “Text and Technologies: the Iliad and the Venetus A.” In Dué 2009:31–55.

Maniaci, M. 2006. “Words within Words: Layout Strategies in Some Glossed Manuscripts of the Iliad.” Manuscripta 50:241–268.

Homeric Questions

In a recent post, Stephanie Lindeborg explores certain red markings in the margins of the first few folios of the Venetus A manuscript of the Iliad. She discovers that they are in fact abbreviations. The first of these that she explores looks like ερώ άπ and seems to be an abbreviation for ἐρώτησις ἀπόκρισις ("question" and "answer," so Dindorf). Stephanie surmises that the very first scholion in this manuscript in fact comes from the Ὁμήρικα ζητήματα, Homērika Zētēmata, or in its more commonly given Latin translation, Quaestiones Homericae of the third-century CE scholar and philosopher Porphyry.

The Ὁμήρικα ζητήματα exists only in a fragmentary state; the first book survives in a single manuscript, written in 1314 and now in the Vatican Library (Vaticanus Graecus 305), and the rest of what we know of its contents comes from close reading of various scholia on Homeric manuscripts, scholia which are presumed to have been excerpted from Porphyry. (In Escorialensis Ω.I.12 [E4], such excerpts are often explicitly labeled as such, though not always.) Porphyry’s work is an example of the late-antique genre of Ζήτηματα, which is generally translated “Questions,” consisting of inquiries into various topics with (often) varying and debatable answers. Ancient works on ζήτηματα covered ethical, legal, and historical topics, and Porphyry’s work on Homer is one of the few examples of literary “Questions.” The scholiastic material that comes from this work is valuable for a number of reasons, although its value has not always been appreciated. For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, scholars have dismissed Porphyry as telling us little about Homeric poetry itself, but much about the literary “parlor games” played by intelligent aristocrats in antiquity. But these scholia preserve some observations on Homeric poetry made by Aristotle and Plato, which in turn can tell us about the particular vocabulary those ancient thinkers used when they discussed epic poetry, and thus much about the ancient experience of listening to this poetry. (See the chapter by Blackwell and Dué in Recapturing a Homeric Legacy.)

In her post, Stephanie speculates about why the scribe of the Venetus A chose to explicitly mark the "Homeric Questions" on the first few folios of A, but did not do so throughout. I recently discovered, with help from my fellow editors Mary Ebbott and Neel Smith, that the scribe of E4 has likewise marked the initial "Homeric Questions" of that manuscript with a special sign.

On folio 3v of E4, we find a hypothesis for the whole Iliad, followed by a hypothesis for book 1. After this comes a set of scholia with red lemmata on the first few lines of the poem. This combination of hypotheses and scholia with lemmata resembles what we find elsewhere in E4. Each book of the Iliad in E4 begins on the recto side of a folio. On the adjacent verso side, the scribe writes usually two hypotheses, and, in the same text block, scholia with red lemmata. These scholia with lemmata will fill the remainder of the text block, and the amount of scholia seems to be determined solely by how much space is left in the block after the hypotheses have been written. A different set of scholia is then written in the available space in the margins all around. (These scholia do not, for the most part, have lemmata, and when they do, they are not red.) Here on 3v the scribe has followed this same pattern, but while studying the folio I noticed a sign that I initially did not recognize from the other folios. This sign looks like a capital upsilon above a lambda with a slash, and we find it in four places in the text block, each time after one of the read lemmata.

The sign does not follow every single lemma, however, so my fellow editors and I immediately wondered what the notes that do have the sign have in common. Here is how each note begins:

1. ζητοῦσι, διὰ τί ἀπὸ τῆς μήνιδος ἤρξατο...

2. διὰ τί εὐθὺς ἀπὸ τῶν τελευταίων τοῦ πολέμου ἤρξατο...

3. διὰ τί ὁ Χρύσης οὐ κατ‘Ἀγαμέμνονος  ηὔχετο τοῦ ὑβρίσαντος αὐτὸν ἀλλὰ κατὰ πάντων τῶν ἑλλήνων;

4. διὰ τί δὲ ἀπὸ τῶν κυνῶν, καὶ τῶν ἡμιόνων, ὁ λοιμὸς ἤρξατο, οὐκ ἀπὸ τῶν Ἑλλήνων δὲ, οὐδὲ ἀπ' ἄλλου τινὸς ζώου;

Each of these notes is in fact a question, which is followed by the sign and then the answer to that question. So for example question 1 asks why the poet began with the word "wrath," which is such an "ill-famed" word. We then find the sign, followed by the answer: "For two reasons. First, because..." This question and answer combination is in fact the same one that begins the scholia in the Venetus A, the very passage that Stephanie just described in her post.

The sign in E4 must be, as we have already seen in A, an abbreviation, but instead of ἀπόκρισις it must be λύσις, which is the word used in the scholia and elsewhere for a "solution" to a Homeric Question.Therefore what we see in E4 is similar to what Stephanie describes for A, a set of "Homeric Questions" and answers within the body of scholia that have been marked explicitly as such. Once I understood what I was seeing on folio 3v, I realized that we find this sign/abbreviation elsewhere in E4, including, for example, on folio 27r, where we find not only two signs for in λύσις in crimson ink, but also two examples of a crimson ἀπό alongside the accompanying Questions. The ἀπό is no doubt an abbreviation for ἀπόρημα, another common way (in addition to ζήτημα) of referring to problems of Homeric interpretation in antiquity.

Because E4 contains so many excerpts from Porphyry, it is only natural to assume that these four questions on folio 3v are derivative of Porphyry's work, but we cannot be certain, because these particular questions do not survive in the the one independent manuscript containing a portion of Porpyry's Ὁμήρικα ζητήματα. These questions may have a different source altogether. As we have seen, the first question in E4 is the very first scholion on the Venetus A (folio 12r), and also survives in the "D" scholia manuscripts, such as the ninth-century manuscript known as Z (Romanus, Bibl. Naz. Centr. Gr. 6 + Matrit. B. N. 4626). As Stephanie notes, another version of this same question and answer survives in the Venetus B, where it is attributed to Zenodotus. The second question in E4 is written in the harp that decorates the top right corner of folio 12r of the Venetus A (adjacent to where question 1 is written.) Question 3 is not in A, but is preserved in the "D" scholia manuscripts. Question 4 can be found written as part of a decorative column on folio 12v of the Venetus A, and is also preserved in the "D" scholia. It is likely that there was a tradition of composing and answering such questions in schools and/or among scholars, and there may have been multiple scholarly works in antiquity devoted to these types of questions. In fact we know that Aristotle composed such a work. (See the introduction to G. Nagy's Homeric Questions [Austin, 1996].)

As always when I think about the similarities between such manuscripts as A and E4 and Z, I begin to try to imagine the ancient exemplars from which the scribes were drawing their material. What was the ultimate source for these questions? Was it a complete manuscript of Porphyry's Ὁμήρικα ζητήματα? Or might the students of Aristotle have made a compilation of his "solutions" (λύσεις) to the ἀπορήματα of his day? Close examination and comparison of multiple manuscripts allows us to see back in time, and speculate about where all of this material came from. And once these manuscripts have been fully transcribed and edited, future scholars may well be able to test such speculations and find concrete answers.

Exegesis of the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer

Like that of the Venetus A, the front matter of the Iliad manuscript known as E4 (Allen, = West F, Escorialensis Ω.I.12) has been a source of confusion and speculation for scholars. (For the Venetus A, see Allen 1899 and Hecquet 2009 in Recapturing a Homeric Legacy). While trying to understand this odd assembly of Homeric reference material—material which includes lives of Homer, a Proclan summary of the Cypria, an excerpt from the Batrachomyomachia (“Battle of Frogs and Mice”), and an excerpt from a work of the grammarian Tryphon, among other things—I came across a text on folio 2r entitled ἐξήγησις τῆς ἰλιάδος καὶ ὀδυσσείας ὁμήρου or "Exegesis of the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer." Not knowing what this work was, I typed the whole phrase into Google, and discovered this manuscript (Harley 5601), now on-line thanks to the British Library's Digitized Manuscripts initiative (funded by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation).

Harley 5601 (= Allen's BM6) is part of a late family of manuscripts (all fifteenth century), called p by Allen. Five of the six manuscripts in this family share the same prolegomena as E4. As Allen points out in his 1931 edition of the Iliad, however, the text of the Iliad in the manuscript family p is not related to E4. They simply do not share the same unique readings. This remarkable fact shows us once again that many, if not most, of our manuscripts of the Iliad are the product of selection and combination from two or more exemplars, and so represent multiple channels of transmission at the same time.

Like E4, Harley 5601 contains hypotheses before each book of the Iliad. It is clear, however, that those of Harley 5601 are not copied from E4, because the hypothesis for book 2 in Harley 5601 is much more fuller than the corresponding hypothesis in E4 (which seems to have been abbreviated by the scribe because of lack of space). (In E4, all books of the Iliad begin on the recto side of a folio. On the adjacent verso side, the scribe writes usually two hypotheses along with scholia if there is room. In this case, the end of book 1 three quarters of the way down the page left him very little space for the hypotheses to book 2.) The actual wording of the hypotheses (that of Harley 5601 and the second hypothesis for book 2 in E4) is the same until the scribe runs out of room on E4.

Harley 5601 postdates E4 by many centuries, but it seems clear that share a partial ancestor that predates E4. That ancestor had the prolegomena that these manuscripts share, and, very likely, one set of hypotheses. Their texts of the Iliad, however, have different ancestors. Perhaps E4's had the additional set of hypotheses that Harley 5601's did not, or perhaps that other set of hypotheses in E4 came from still another source.

Many questions remain about how these two manuscripts might be related. I am grateful to the Niarchos Foundation and the British Library for making these images freely available, so that further study can now take place—by anyone that wants to. These two manuscripts have almost certainly never been, and never will be, in the same room together. But now, if you have a big screen, you can zoom up on them in great detail, side by side.

The Catalogue of Ships

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 sets 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 no 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.