Summer 2017: Iliad 20, Multiformity, and Tradition

Ajax (Aias) fights Glaukos over the dead body of Achilles, while Paris and Aeneas look on. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

How many ways are there to tell the story of Troy? A passage from Iliad 20 makes me wonder just how flexible the Homeric tradition might be. At the beginning of book 20, Zeus calls the gods to an assembly. He tells them that they may now join the battle taking place before the walls of Troy on whatever side they wish, something that he had expressly forbidden the gods to do at the beginning of book 8. The reason he has changed his mind, he explains, is that Achilles is now preparing to return to battle for the first time since his withdrawal in book 1, and he is afraid that the Trojans will not be able to withstand him even for a little while:

καὶ δέ τέ μιν καὶ πρόσθεν ὑποτρομέεσκον ὁρῶντες·
νῦν δ᾽ ὅτε δὴ καὶ θυμὸν ἑταίρου χώεται αἰνῶς
δείδω μὴ καὶ τεῖχος ὑπερ μόρον ἐξαλαπάξῃ. (Iliad 20.28-30)

Even before now they would tremble before him when they saw him.
And now when he is terribly angry in his heart because of [the death of] his companion
I fear lest the wall [of Troy] will be sacked beyond [i.e., contrary to] fate.

Apollo, the god of prophesy and the one besides Zeus most often associated with seeing into the future, likewise fears that the Trojan walls will come down too soon at Achilles’ hands: μέμβλετο γάρ οἱ τεῖχος ἐϋδμήτοιο πόληος/μὴ Δαναοὶ πέρσειαν ὑπὲρ μόρον ἤματι κείνῳ (“For he was concerned about the wall of the well-built city, lest the Danaans destroy it on that day beyond fate” Iliad 21.516–517). Zeus’ and Apollo’s fear in these passages is remarkable, and begs questions that anyone who has read the Iliad with undergraduates will be familiar with. If the walls of Troy are destined to fall at a particular moment, how could they fall before that? Is fate something that can be changed? Is Zeus subject to fate or can Zeus alter it? But we could could also reframe these questions in terms of narrative. If the Iliad tells a traditional story, shouldn’t Zeus and Apollo know how the story ends? Would it really be possible to change the story now, and have Troy fall while Achilles is still alive, and indeed at his hands?

In his 1979 book The Best of the Achaeans, Gregory Nagy argued that the first song of Demodokos in Odyssey 8, in which the Phaeacian bard narrates a quarrel between Odysseus and Achilles, is in fact a compressed reference to an epic tradition in which Achilles and Odysseus quarreled over whether Troy would be taken by cunning [mētis] or by force [biē]. Nagy reads the scholia preserved in the manuscripts at Odyssey 8.75 and 77 as likewise pointing to such a tradition, which is otherwise not attested in our surviving sources (Nagy 1979:46). Might we find here in the fears of Zeus and Apollo another glimpse of these two rival possibilities for the fall of Troy? If so, we have to wonder if the Iliadic tradition is indeed so multiform, so flexible, that such a radically different ending could be possible. Is there (or was there) an alternative epic universe, in which Achilles really did take Troy by force? And if not, why does Zeus entertain the idea?

As it turns out, ancient commentators on the Iliad were concerned about these same questions. And so the scholia in the margins of the so-called Townley manuscript (Burney 86, folio 220v) record for us a fascinating variation on these verses from book 20:

τινὲς γράφουσιν ἀντὶ τοῦ <δείδω, μὴ καὶ τεῖχος>

οὐ μέντοι μοῖρ’ ἐστὶν ἔτι ζῳοῦ Ἀχιλῆος
Ἰλίου ἐκπέρσαι εὖ ναιόμενον πτολίεθρον.
πέρσει δουράτεός <θ’> ἵππος καὶ μῆτις Ἐπειοῦ.

πῶς γὰρ ὁ εἰδὼς “μοῖράν τ’ ἀμμορίην τε” [= Odyssey 20.76] νῦν διστάζει;

Some write instead of “I fear lest the wall”

It is not fated, however, with Achilles still alive
to sack the well-inhabited citadel of Ilium.
A wooden horse will destroy it and the craftiness [mētis] of Epeios.

For how is he [= Zeus], knowing “what is fated and not fated” [= Odyssey 20.76], now in doubt?

These alternative verses make clear that Troy is not going to fall at the hands of Achilles, but rather as a result of the mētis of the wooden horse. Problem solved. But the commentator, in seeking to solve a narratological, mythological, and indeed existential problem, now presents us with a textual one. What is the source of these verses that “some write,” and how do we reconcile them with our received text?

***

Iliad 20 is a book that seems fixated on the danger of things happening at the wrong time, i.e. "beyond fate." In verses that were athetized (that is, deemed "not Homeric") by Aristrachus, Poseidon stated:

πάντες δ᾽ Οὐλύμποιο κατήλθομεν ἀντιόωντες
τῆσδε μάχης, ἵνα μή τι μετὰ Τρώεσσι πάθῃσι
σήμερον: ὕστερον αὖτε τὰ πείσεται ἅσσά οἱ αἶσα
γιγνομένῳ ἐπένησε λίνῳ ὅτε μιν τέκε μήτηρ. (20.125–128)

We all have come down from Olympus to participate
in this battle, in order that he not suffer anything among the Trojans
today. Later he will suffer in turn whatever things fate
spun for him with her thread as he was born, when his mother gave birth to him.

Poseidon seems to be suggesting that without their intervention, Achilles might have had died too soon. These verses still today bear Aristarchus' editorial condemnation: they are marked with the obelos in the Venetus A manuscript of the Iliad.

Later in the book, the two great heroes of Greek and Roman epic tradition, Achilles and Aeneas, come face to face on the battlefield, and once again, Poseidon is concerned that the mythological and poetic tradition will go awry:

ἔνθά κεν Αἰνείας μὲν ἐπεσσύμενον βάλε πέτρῳ
ἢ κόρυθ᾽ ἠὲ σάκος, τό οἱ ἤρκεσε λυγρὸν ὄλεθρον,
τὸν δέ κε Πηλεΐδης σχεδὸν ἄορι θυμὸν ἀπηύρα,
εἰ μὴ ἄρ᾽ ὀξὺ νόησε Ποσειδάων ἐνοσίχθων:
αὐτίκα δ᾽ ἀθανάτοισι θεοῖς μετὰ μῦθον ἔειπεν:
ὢ πόποι ἦ μοι ἄχος μεγαλήτορος Αἰνείαο,
ὃς τάχα Πηλεΐωνι δαμεὶς Ἄϊδος δὲ κάτεισι
πειθόμενος μύθοισιν Ἀπόλλωνος ἑκάτοιο
νήπιος, οὐδέ τί οἱ χραισμήσει λυγρὸν ὄλεθρον.
ἀλλὰ τί ἢ νῦν οὗτος ἀναίτιος ἄλγεα πάσχει
μὰψ ἕνεκ᾽ ἀλλοτρίων ἀχέων, κεχαρισμένα δ᾽ αἰεὶ
δῶρα θεοῖσι δίδωσι τοὶ οὐρανὸν εὐρὺν ἔχουσιν;
ἀλλ᾽ ἄγεθ᾽ ἡμεῖς πέρ μιν ὑπὲκ θανάτου ἀγάγωμεν,
μή πως καὶ Κρονίδης κεχολώσεται, αἴ κεν Ἀχιλλεὺς
τόνδε κατακτείνῃ: μόριμον δέ οἵ ἐστ᾽ ἀλέασθαι,
ὄφρα μὴ ἄσπερμος γενεὴ καὶ ἄφαντος ὄληται
Δαρδάνου, ὃν Κρονίδης περὶ πάντων φίλατο παίδων
οἳ ἕθεν ἐξεγένοντο γυναικῶν τε θνητάων.
ἤδη γὰρ Πριάμου γενεὴν ἔχθηρε Κρονίων:
νῦν δὲ δὴ Αἰνείαο βίη Τρώεσσιν ἀνάξει
καὶ παίδων παῖδες, τοί κεν μετόπισθε γένωνται. (Iliad 20.288-308)

Aeneas would then have struck Achilles as he was springing towards him, either on the helmet, or on the shield that covered him, and Achilles would have closed with him and dispatched him with his sword, had not Poseidon lord of the earthquake been quick to mark, and said forthwith to the immortals, “Alas, I feel grief for great Aeneas, who will now go down to the house of Hades, vanquished by the son of Peleus. Fool that he was to give ear to the counsel of Apollo. Apollo will never save him from destruction. Why should this man have grief when he is guiltless, to no purpose, and in another's quarrel? Has he not at all times offered acceptable sacrifice to the gods that dwell in heaven? Let us then snatch him from death's jaws, lest the son of Kronos be angry should Achilles slay him. It is fated, moreover, that he should escape, and that the race of Dardanos, whom Zeus loved above all the sons born to him of mortal women, shall not perish utterly without seed or sign. For now indeed has Zeus hated the blood of Priam, while Aeneas shall reign over the Trojans, he and his children's children that shall be born hereafter.” (translation adapted from that of Samuel Butler)

It is clear that Aeneas cannot be allowed to die at this moment. So much of the poetic tradition will be ruined if he does! The passage reminds me of another in Odyssey 8, where Odysseus specifically requests that Demodokos sing the song of the sack of Troy by means of the wooden horse. Odysseus says to Demodokos:

αἴ κεν δή μοι ταῦτα κατὰ μοῖραν καταλέξῃς,
αὐτίκ᾽ ἐγὼ πᾶσιν μυθήσομαι ἀνθρώποισιν,
ὡς ἄρα τοι πρόφρων θεὸς ὤπασε θέσπιν ἀοιδήν. (Odyssey 8.496-498)

If you relate these things to me in accordance with destiny
Straightaway I will speak words before all men,
saying how a god readily bestowed upon you a wondrous song.

Odysseus’ words imply that there is a correct or authoritative way to perform this song, but also that other singers might perform it differently. Here again we find competing epic traditions evaluated in terms of fate or destiny (moira). What is “fated” is the traditional and hence authoritative version of the story. What is tradition for the external audience of the epic and even for the internal audience, the Phaeacians, is in fact, for Odysseus, his own life experiences, which took place only ten years prior to the current occasion of performance. He is therefore uniquely qualified to judge the authoritativeness of the current performance. His reaction, namely his tears, reveals to us that Demodokos has succeeded.

***

It is the nexus of multiformity and tradition in Iliad 20 that we will explore at this year's undergraduate summer seminar at the Center for Hellenic Studies. As we will see, the mythological and narratological questions being grappled with by the scholars of Alexandria and the later authors whose comments survive in the scholia of our medieval manuscripts can sometimes have profound implications for the textual transmission of the Iliad and Odyssey. The scholion on Iliad 20.30 with which I began is a perfect example of the interdependence of the two. In this one comment, not only can we possibly catch a glimpse of a now lost epic tradition in which Achilles and Odysseus contend to be the sacker of Troy and the “best of the Achaeans,” we also learn about three verses that do not survive in our medieval manuscripts of the poem. All we are told, in the typically compressed way of the scholia, is that some (presumably editors) write these verses (presumably in their editions). They are not a seamless replacement for Iliad 20.30, however. If we replaced 20.30 with the verses that “some write,” we would get this:

20.28 καὶ δέ τέ μιν καὶ πρόσθεν ὑποτρομέεσκον ὁρῶντες·
20.29 νῦν δ᾽ ὅτε δὴ καὶ θυμὸν ἑταίρου χώεται αἰνῶς
20.30a οὐ μέντοι μοῖρ’ ἐστὶν ἔτι ζῳοῦ Ἀχιλῆος
20.30b Ἰλίου ἐκπέρσαι εὖ ναιόμενον πτολίεθρον.
20.30c πέρσει δουράτεός <θ’> ἵππος καὶ μῆτις Ἐπειοῦ.

Even before now they would tremble before him when they saw him.
And now when he is terribly angry in his heart because of [the death of] his companion…
It is not fated, however, with Achilles still alive
to sack the well-inhabited citadel of Ilium.
A wooden horse will destroy it and the craftiness [mētis] of Epeios.

If we assume an ellipsis here (as sometimes occurs, as at Iliad 1.135-136), we can make it work, but it is more likely that the scholia here are quoting from an edition where the entire passage was substantially different from what we find in the medieval manuscripts of the Iliad. But these verses are in no way objectionable beyond the fact that they don’t survive elsewhere. There is nothing “un-Homeric” about them, they are simply an attested multiform of the verses transmitted by our medieval manuscripts.

When we understand the Iliad and Odyssey to have been composed in a dynamic process of composition-in-performance over many centuries, we have no reason to necessarily privilege one formulaic variation over another, even if one is well attested in our medieval manuscripts and one is known only from another source. Both are at least potentially authentically generated performance multiforms, and both have something to teach us about the compositional process and the poetics of the system in which they were generated. Not all surviving multiforms would have been known to all singers at all times and in all places, but each has the potential to reveal something about the poetics of the tradition in the time and place in which that multiform is attested.

But just how fluid, how multiform, was the Greek epic tradition? If the tradition was, as I have claimed in my research, quite fluid in its early phases, why do our medieval manuscripts present us with a relatively uniform text? How do we get from a creative and vibrant oral epic song tradition like that which Albert Lord describes in The Singer of Tales to the seemingly fixed text of the more than 500 manuscripts of the Iliad that survive from medieval times? Conversely, when we accept that earlier forms of the Iliad were mulitform, what poetic possibilities open up for us?

Aristarchus athetized at least seven passages of three verses or more in book 20 alone. Each athetesis gives us insight into an editor who was struggling to account for a mythological and poetic tradition that was multiform and at times contradictory. But where he wanted to take away, we will take back. Building on the work of earlier scholars who have demonstrated why we should expect the Iliad to be multiform (especially Lord 1960 and Nagy 1996), our seminar will explore two basic questions: First, what kinds of multiformity are attested in our surviving sources? And secondly, what are the implications of multiformity for our interpretation of the reception and transmission of Homeric poetry? These questions and our preliminary answers to them have emerged from fifteen years of collaborative work and discussion. I have often joked that the aim of the Homer Multitext is to “unedit” the Iliad. But the joke is serious in that a central goal of the project is to present the historical witnesses of the Iliad unmediated by the interventions of editors seeking to reconstruct an hypothesized “original.” Only in this way can we gain a clear picture of the multiformity with which the Iliad has been transmitted to us. In our experience, it can be incredibly difficult, sometimes impossible, to ascertain what our historical sources actually transmit if one relies on existing publications of the scholia in print or the cryptic reporting of an apparatus criticus. The Homer Multitext allows each document to be viewed and considered on its own terms.

This summer, as we do every summer, we'll remove the bindings so to speak from the medieval manuscripts and fully examine their contents, study surviving papyrus fragments in all their multiform messiness, and try to visualize without judgment the Iliad known to Plato and Aeschines. The attested multiforms of the Iliad give us an opportunity to know and appreciate a wider range of performance traditions for this remarkable poem than most of us have been taught to do. Although our attested multiforms derive from the later stages of the evolution of the poem, even so I submit that they give us a glimpse of the very long history of the text, access to even earlier Iliads, and a greater awareness of the mechanisms by which such a poem could be composed in performance.

Works cited

Lord, A. B. The Singer of Tales. Cambridge, MA, 1960.
Nagy, G. The Best of the Achaeans. Baltimore, 1979.
–––. Poetry as Performance. Cambridge, 1996.

Variations on Briseis: Special Homeric Poetics Edition

In June the Center for Hellenic Studies will once again host the Homer Multitext Summer Seminar. Each year the seminar introduces a new generation of student researchers to the principles that underly the Homer Multitext project via a particular book of the Iliad. By the end of the seminar the students will not only have created their own edition of the text and scholia for that book as represented in the Venetus A manuscript of the Iliad, they will also know a great deal about how the Iliad was composed and the poetics of a work that was composed in performance.

Attic  red-figure skyphos (Louvre G 146) showing
the taking of Briseis by Agamemnon

This year's book is Iliad 19, which happens to feature the only words spoken in the poem by Briseis, the woman whose seizure by Agamemnon in book 1 initiates the entire plot of the Iliad. In my 2002 book, Homeric Variations on a Lament by Briseis, I used the character of Briseis as an entry point for discussing the multiformity of the epic tradition and how that affects our understanding of the poetics of the Iliad. Because Briseis only speaks ten verses in the Iliad, one might be tempted to think that she is not a traditional character, or to put it another way, that she does not have her own story. Briseis’ role in the Iliad is indeed enormously compressed from the standpoint of both the Iliad as a whole and the entire tradition of the Epic Cycle. In the Iliad she does not even have a name—her name means simply “daughter of Brises.” Yet elsewhere there are hints that her name was Hippodameia, and that she was part of another story—or other stories.  She is named Hippodameia by the A scholia at 1.392 and in Dictys of Crete. Here is what the Venetus A scholia say about her:

κούρην Βρισῆος: ἐοικεν πατρωνυμικῶς τὰ ὀνόματα αὐτῶν σχηματίζειν ὁ ποιητὴς καὶ οὐ κυρίως ὡς γὰρ ἄλλοι ἀρχαῖοι ἱστοροῦσιν. ἡ μὲν Ἀστυνόμη ἐκαλεῖτο· ἡ δὲ Ἱπποδάμεια. ὁ δὲ τρόπος ἀντωνομασία 

It is likely that the poet forms their names patronymically and not precisely. For as the other arkhaioi [poets] tell it, the one [Chryseis] was called Astynome and the other [Briseis] was called Hippodameia. The trope is antonomasia [i.e., using one name for another]. 

While it is not certain which poets or song traditions are meant by arkhaioi here, the work of Albert Henrichs has shown that the term arkhaioi in the scholia generally refers to Homer and earlier poets in contrast with more recent poets (hoi neôteroi), who include Hesiod, the archaic poets, the tragedians, and Alexandrian poets like Callimachus. The comment suggests then that in some early epic narratives Briseis had a personal name, and by extension, a story to go with it.

It is important to understand that the Iliad is a narrative about the anger of Achilles in the tenth year of the Trojan War. Much earlier as well as much later events are woven into a story that takes place in only a few days’ time. Even though at over 15,000 verses it might take as many as three days to perform, the Iliad is nevertheless a compression of the potentially full extent of epic poetry about Troy—what we might call the ultimate expansion of the Iliad. I suggest that one result of this compression is that the Iliad only gives us a glimpse of the figure of Briseis, whose role in the larger epic tradition must have been much greater.

It seems likely that there were at least two variations on the story of Briseis in antiquity, because of the two-fold pattern she fulfills in the surviving ancient references. In at least one tradition she is very much a young (or at least unmarried) girl, the daughter of King Brises of Pedasos, whom Achilles receives as a prize along with Diomedeia, the daughter of King Phorbas of Lesbos (see Chapter 3 in Dué 2002). But according to Iliad 2.688-694, 19.295-296, and elsewhere she was captured by Achilles in the sack of Lyrnessos, and in her lament for Patroklos (Iliad 19.292-302) Briseis says that she was married, and that Achilles killed her husband, who may have been King Mynes. Our Iliad alludes to multiple variations on these two basic themes.

Briseis is featured in a number of ancient vase paintings, which are similarly multiform in their depiction of Briseis' story. (See Chapter 1 of Dué 2002.) The one included above shows her being taken by Agamemnon from the tent of Achilles (a variation on the Iliad, where two heralds come to take Briseis). This event is narrated in book 1 of the Iliad, where the text says, tantalizingly, that she went “unwillingly.” In Iliad 9 Achilles proclaims that he loves her as a man loves his wife, even though he won her in war (ἐκ θυμοῦ φίλεον δουρικτητήν περ ἐοῦσαν 9.343). In Briseis’ lament for Patroklos in Iliad 19 we learn of her hope to become Achilles’ wedded wife in Phthia. And so we see that compressed but not entirely hidden within the Iliad there is also a love story. (See also Fantuzzi 2012.)

A multitextual approach to the Iliad allows us to appreciate the long history and multiformity of the tradition from which poets and vase painters told their stories. As I write in my 2002 book, Archaic vase-paintings can even make it possible for us to reconstruct variant poetic traditions to which the Iliad alludes (see Muellner 2012 for another example). It is important, however, to make a distinction between the Iliad—the fixed text as we now know it—and Iliadic or Cyclic traditional narratives. n our Iliad Agamemnon sends two heralds to take Briseis, but, according to another way of telling the story, Agamemnon comes in person. The archaic artists knew both variants of the tale, and “told the story” both ways, choosing between them like an epic poet in performance.

Because of the nature of what survives, we have only a narrow window into the larger tradition from which painters and poets composed their narratives. Reconstruction of the larger tradition can be difficult and sometimes impossible, but an examination of the sources that do survive show us that the ancient Greek artistic and epic traditions were at one time very fluid. The Iliad is one way of telling the tale of Troy, but it is by no means the only way, as the example of Briseis makes clear.

Works Cited

Dué, C. 2002. Homeric Variations on a Lament by Briseis. Lanham, MD.

Fantuzzi, M. 2012. Achilles in Love. Oxford.

Henrichs, A. 1993. “Response.” In Images and Ideologies: Self-definition in the Hellenistic World, eds. A. W. Bulloch, E. S. Gruen, A.A. Long, and A. Stewart. Berkeley.

Muellner, L. 2012. "Grieving Achilles." In Homeric Contexts: Neoanalysis and the Interpretation of Oral Poetry, eds. F. Montanari, A. Rengakos, C. Tsagalis, pp.197-220. Berlin.

Articles on the multiformity of Homeric poetry now on-line

The Center for Hellenic Studies has published on-line two articles by Associate Editors of the Homer Multitext that directly address the multiformity of Homeric poetry.

The first of these, "Homeric Poetry and Problems of Multiformity: The 'Panathenaic Bottleneck'," by Gregory Nagy, was one of the works of scholarship that originally inspired this project. Nagy argues that the text fixation of Iliad and Odyssey occurred not through writing but in the context of the increasingly limited performance tradition at the Panhellenic festival of the Panathenaia in Archaic and Classical Athens. As the poems passed through this “bottleneck” the degree of variability became increasingly limited. The article offers an explanation for how the Iliad and Odyssey came to be crystallized into the relatively un-multiform versions in which we now have them. Nagy suggests that the highly regulated performance context of the Panathenaic Festival provided the mechanism by which multiformity was gradually screened out and a relatively fixed, "Panathenaic" text emerged for the two poems. Nagy's arguments also account for the fact the Iliad and Odyssey (which were performed at this festival) survive, whereas the poems of the Epic Cycle do not.

Leonard Muellner's article, "Grieving Achilles," explores Archaic vase paintings that depict Achilles in a silent gesture of mourning (veiling his head) and suggests that they are drawing on an variation of the epic tradition of the taking of Briseis and the subsequent embassy to Achilles that we find in Iliad 9. As Muellner writes, his work shows that these "vase paintings are not illustrations of epic poetry, or ad hoc inventions, or mistakes that intentionally or unintentionally disregard or misrepresent the putatively uniform Homeric versions of epic tales that served as their supposed models. Instead, the vase painter, just like a singer of tales, is engaged in a traditional, creative effort to select among myths that are by nature multiform." For more on the relationship between the multiforms of myth, vase paintings, and the Homeric epics, see also "Briseis and the Multiformity of the Iliad" (Chapter 1 in C. Dué, Homeric Variations on a Lament by Briseis.)

 Embassy to Achilles — Phoinix, Odysseus, Achilles veiled, and unnamed youth. Athenian red-figure hydria, Staatliche Antikensammlung, München 8770. Photo Bibi Saint-Pol, Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

Multiforms of Iliad 10.306

A guest post by Laurel Boman (Gustavus Adolphus) and Leonie Henkes (Leiden).

During the summer seminar of the Homer Multitext Project, we did research on folio 132r of the Venetus A. We found many interesting things on this folio, including some doodles, many abbreviations, and a scholion to 10.306 that illuminates the multiformity of the text.

Hector, having asked for a volunteer to spy on the Greeks, promises that this volunteer will receive the horses of Achilles in return. At 10.306, these horses are described. The main text of the Venetus A reads:

urn:cite:hmt:vaimg.VA132RN-0304@0.1722,0.2772,0.3934,0.0639
View this in context.

305 δώσω γὰρ δίφρόν τε δύω τ᾽ ἐριαύχενας ἵππους
306 οἵ κεν ἄριστεύωσι θοῇς ἐπὶ νηυσὶν Ἀχαιῶν

307 ὅς τίς κε τλαίη, οἷ τ᾽ αὐτῷ κῦδος ἄροιτο,

305 For I will give a chariot and two horses with strong necks,

306 whichever are best at the swift ships of the Achaeans.

307 to him, whoever should dare —and he would win radiant glory [kudos] for himself—  

(Translation of Dué and Ebbott)

At the top of the folio is a scholion on line 306:

urn:cite:hmt:vaimg.VA132RN-0304@0.1802,0.1375,0.6376,0.0293
View this in context.

Scholion ad 306: οὕτως αρίσταρχος οἵ κε ἄριστοι ἔωσι. ὁ δε ζηνόδοτος αὐτὸυς ὃι φορέουσιν  ἀμύμονα  πηλειωνα ἀριστοφάνης. καλοὺς οἳ φορέουσι

“Here Aristarchus has ‘οἵ κε ἄριστοι ἔωσι.’ Zenodotus gives ‘αὐτὸυς ὃι φορέουσιν  ἀμύμονα  πηλειωνα,’ and Aristophanes ‘καλοὺς οἳ φορέουσι.’”

At this point, we have four different readings of this line. First, we have the main text’s reading ἄριστεύωσι. Second, the reading of Aristarchos: οἵ κε ἄριστοι ἔωσι. Third, the reading of Zenodotos: αὐτὸυς ὃι φορέουσιν ἀμύμονα πηλειωνα. The fourth reading is the one of Aristophanes: καλοὺς οἳ φορέουσι.

Besides the main scholion on top of the folio, there is an internal scholion next to line 306.

urn:cite:hmt:vaimg.VA132RN-0304@0.1131,0.293,0.0551,0.0233
View this in context.

ἐν αλλω οἱ κὲν ἀριστοι ἔωσιν

"In others, ‘οἱ κὲν ἀριστοι ἔωσιν’

In this scholion, the reading is κὲν instead of κε, which brings the number of forms of this line to five.

A scholion to line 323 offers more readings of this text. Line 323 is a near replica of Aristophanes’ and Zenodotus’ readings of line 306. At this point in the narrative, Dolon has volunteered to spy on the Greeks and now demands Hector to swear that he will give him Achilles’ horses.

urn:cite:hmt:vaimg.VA132RN-0304@0.1572,0.6198,0.4084,0.0293
View this in context.

323 δωσέμεν, οἳ φορέουσιν ἀμύμονα Πηλεΐωνα

323 [swear to me the horses that] you will give me, those which carry the faultless son of Peleus 

(trans. Dué and Ebbott)

This is the scholion to line 323:

urn:cite:hmt:vaimg.VA132RN-0304@0.1021,0.6213,0.0641,0.024
View this in context. 

γράφεται καὶ ποδώκεα καὶ ἀμύμονα

“It is written both ‘ποδώκεα’ and ‘ἀμύμονα.’”

Here, we have yet another reading of ὃι φορέουσιν ἀμύμονα πηλειωνα:

ὃι φορέουσιν ποδώκεα πηλειωνα.

Overall, when we consider the readings of the scholia to lines 306 and 323, there are 7 multiforms for line 10.306. In a traditional edition of this text, one version would be selected for the main text and the others, if included at all, resigned to the apparatus criticus. All 7 forms, however, are metrically sound and represent a line that a bard may well have used in performance. The Homer Multitext allows students to see all forms and thereby better understand the tradition from which this text arose.

Albert Lord Centennial

Albert Lord would have turned 100 tomorrow (September 15, 2012). The Center for Studies in Oral Tradition has published a variety of commemorative resources. For our part, I would like to link to a blog post I wrote last year. No scholar's work has influenced the methodology of the Homer Multitext more. As Lord wrote in his 1995 book, The Singer Resumes the Tale: "the word multiform is more accurate than ‘variant,’ because it does not give preference or precedence to any one word or set of words to express an idea; instead it acknowledges that the idea may exist in several forms." (Lord 1995:23). See also The Singer of Tales (1960), p.101:

The truth of the matter is that our concept of the "original," of "the song," simply makes no sense in an oral tradition. To us it seems so basic, so logical, since we are brought up in a society in which writing has fixed the norm of a stable first creation in art, that we feel there must be an "original" for everything. The first singing in oral tradition does not coincide with this concept of the "original."... It follows, then, that we cannot correctly speak of a "variant," since there is no original to be varied! ... Our greatest error is to attempt to make "scientifically" rigid a phenomenon that is fluid.

If you would like to learn more about the work of Albert Lord and his teacher, Milman Parry, I highly recommend the 40th anniversary edition of the Singer of Tales, edited and introduced by Gregory Nagy and Stephen Mitchell. You can also read more about Lord's work and see some video clips from lectures given by Lord at the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature. 

Homeric Papyri and the Homer Multitext

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.

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