Notes on Iliad 5 (2)

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.

Notes on Iliad 5: Comparetti and Venetus A

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.