Interview with HMT Editor Mary Ebbott

The Center for Hellenic Studies research blog has posted an interview with Homer Multitext editor Mary Ebbott, in which she discusses the need to reinvent the critical edition for Homeric poetry, as well as the need for a new appreciation for the editorial role of the scribe in the creation of our Homeric manuscripts. She also speaks about the role that undergraduate researchers have played in the project. You can read the interview here. 

Identifying Aristarchean Commentary in the Venetus A Scholia

A guest post by Thomas Arralde, Class of 2013, College of the Holy Cross

The overarching philosophy behind our work in the Homer Multitext is to be as exact and as comprehensive as possible. Last summer we digitally inventoried every scholion in the entirety of Book 1 of the Venetus A manuscript, and created a diplomatic edition of all the scholia dating to the 10th century. We also make our findings accessible and searchable to facilitate our own research as well as that of others. All people and places referenced in the scholia were tagged with a unique identifier that corresponded to person and place inventories.

In our work on editing the scholia of Book 1 of the Venetus A, we noticed that the word “ὅτι” (because) often began a scholion, and that these scholia often continued “Ζηνόδοτος γράφει” (Zenodotus writes). Our consistent documentation of when Zenodotus, the first publisher an Alexandrian edition of Homer, appeared in the scholia allowed us to observe how frequently his name appeared in the context of these ὅτι scholia. Our comprehensive work on the scholia gave us results that were authoritative for the whole of Book 1, notable for being the book of the Iliad with the greatest number of scholia in the Venetus A, as well as Books 3, 4, and 5. From the statistics we compiled, we were able to form hypotheses about the significance of these scholia, and why they appear so formulaically, which leads us now to the great Homeric scholar Aristarchus.

Aristarchus of Samothrace took over the directorship of the Library of Alexandria in the middle of the 2nd century BC, after the death of his predecessor Aristophanes of Byzantium. The work of Aristarchus is seen as an important turning point in the history of the Homeric tradition, in which the works of Homer become relatively rigid and texts were studied outside the context of performance (Nagy 1996: 110). Because of his pivotal role in the textual history of the Homeric epics, identifying the comments of Aristarchus from what does survive is an important task for Homeric scholars. But doing so is not always a straightforward task, since the scholiast does not always write the name of the scholar whose work he is referring to (Nagy 1997: 117).

One way of identifying scholia attributable to Aristarchus in the Venetus A, we discovered, could be the use of the word ὅτι at the beginning of scholia. As our team was editing the scholia of Book 1, every time a name appeared we placed it in TEI markup, and provided a unique identifier for each name. In our markup, Zenodotus was given the identifier “pers15,” so that his every appearance looked as follows: 

[persName n=“pers15”]Ζηνόδοτος[/persName] (with pointy brackets for the square—the blogging software keeps reading the pointy brackets as actual code, so we had to replace them here). Because of this markup, only a simple search was required to find every reference to Zenodotus in our transcriptions. With this information it was an easy task to see in what scholia Zenodotus appeared, and how many of them were ὅτι scholia. We applied the same search to Aristarchus, who appeared in our marked-up scholia as
[persName n=“pers16”]Ἀρίσταρχος[/persName], which led to an exciting discovery. Aristarchus’ name almost never appears in these scholia, but Zenodotus’ does quite frequently. This and other observations lead to the possibility that these scholia are more or less direct quotations from Aristarchus’ lost works.

Critical signs next to lines of the Iliad on 15V of the Ven. A

Our current understanding of critical signs is that Aristarchus used them both in the scroll of the Iliad text he worked from and in the scroll of his comments to the text so that the two could be easily matched (Bird 2009). With the advent of the codex, the use of critical signs next to both became superfluous and were mostly removed from the scholia but mostly retained next to the text of the Iliad. Evidence of Aristarchus’ usage is the presence of the word “ὅτι” at the beginning of scholia, on its own meaning something like “the sign is here because”. The structure of the scholia in Aristarchus’ notes is supposed to have been sign, lemma, and then the scholion itself.

A rare scholion (from 28R of the Venetus A) that follows the sign-lemma-ὅτι comment sequence that we think Aristarchus’ commentary had

Although the signs that we believe to have been written in Aristarchus’ commentary scroll do not appear in most cases in front of the Venetus A scholia, the word that started the explanation of that sign, ὅτι, often survives as the beginning of the comment. One would expect, then, that when a ὅτι appears there was a critical sign in the scholion that is no longer there, but is retained next to the text. In Book 1 of the Venetus A, however, this does not happen as often as such a rule supposes. In this Book ὅτι begins a scholion which does not have a corresponding critical sign in the main text ~43% of the time. If the critical sign has disappeared in both locations, ought the ὅτι really be translated as “the sign is here because” when no sign exists?

Iliad 1.216, on 16R in the Venetus A, has no Critical sign placed next to it.

Yet the scholion on this line begins with ὅτι

 The absence of critical signs does not continue throughout the Venetus A, however. In Book 3 more than 95% of the scholia that begin with ὅτι are accompanied by a critical sign. What is it about the scholia in Book 1 that causes the scribe to include critical signs with ὅτι scholia 50% less of the time than in Book 3? Is it the great density of scholia that continues through the first book but subsides somewhat in later books that causes the disparity? All of these questions require further investigation, and as we continue to edit more scholia we expect to find further evidence to assist us in our inquiries.

Furthermore, Aristarchus is rarely cited in scholia which begin with ὅτι; his name appears in such scholia only twice in Book 1. This is astounding considering in Book 1 there are 136 ὅτι scholia and 61 occurrences of Aristarchus’ name and little overlap between the two. More frequently citations of Aristarchus appear “thus Aristarchus” or simply “Aristarchus” followed by the comment. What we find instead is that Zenodotus’ name more often follows after ὅτι (30% of the time in Book 1, 28% in Book 3). When Zenodotus appears in the scholia of Book 1, ~85% of the time it is in a ὅτι scholion. If the ὅτι follows Aristarchus’ method of writing his commentary, why is Zenodotus so often cited in these scholia? It could be that the scribe of the Venetus A is quoting directly from Aristarchus (or someone else quoting directly from Aristarchus) in the ὅτι scholia since Aristarchus would not refer to himself in the 3rd person, and would be commenting on the edition of his predecessor, Zenodotus. In fact, there is scarcely ever a mention of any scholar later in date than Aristarchus found in these scholia.

We know that the system of Critical signs used in the Venetus A comes from Aristarchus’ edition of the Iliad. The fact that the ὅτι scholia virtually never name Aristarchus or scholars later than him, and name Zenodotus with an unusual frequency, leads us to believe that they are authentic Aristarchean commentary. Work is ongoing and findings in Book 2 have already yielded tantalizing results. As further evidence comes to light we hope to come closer to answering the critical question of where the information in our scholia comes from.

Bird G. 2009. “Critical Signs - Drawing Attention to ‘Special’ Lines of Homer’s Iliad in the Manuscript Venetus A,” 89–155 in Recapturing a Homeric Legacy, ed. C. Dué, Washington DC.

Nagy G. 1996. Poetry as Performance. Cambridge.

Nagy G. 1997. “Homeric Scholia,” 101–122 in A New Companion to Homer, ed. Morris and Powell. Leiden & New York.

New technical documentation system

While the Homer Multitext project continues to experiment with new methods and new technologies, essential parts of our digital infrastructure (such as the CITE architecture for canonical reference to scholarly resources) have now matured to the point that we are beginning to organize our scattered technical documentation in a single system.  The documentation is written in markdown;  an automated build system generates a web site from the markdown source.  One stable URL where the web pages are available is http://www.homermultitext.org/hmt-doc/.


In addition to automatically generated API documentation for our source code, we are interested in expanding our collection of guides, tips, and how-to documents.  If you have ideas or would like to contribute, please don't hesitate to get in touch with us.

Summer 2012 Homer Multitext Seminar to Begin Next Week

Next week four teams of undergraduate researchers and faculty mentors will convene at the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, DC for the 2012 Homer Multitext summer seminar. The seminar will provide an introduction to fundamental ideas about the oral composition and transmission of the epics, and basic training in editing digital texts. The seminar will focus on manuscripts of the Iliad with scholia that have been photographed as part of the Homer Multitext project.

During the two weeks of the seminar, student-faculty teams will work on manuscript material not fully published previously, and will be expected to continue to work as a team after returning to their home institution. Successfully completed work will be reviewed and published as part of the Homer Multitext project's digital publication program.

Each student-faculty team will take responsibility for leading the work on one section of a manuscript. Teams will be trained in the full cycle of editing a digital facsimile edition:

- indexing a collection of digital photographs to a citable folio of a code
- creating a visual inventory cataloging where passages of texts appear on images
- creating a visual inventory cataloging where non-textual features of interest appear on images (critical signs, and other graphic features)
- editing a diplomatic edition of the Iliadic text
- learning to read and edit a diplomatic edition of the scholia

Each phase of the work is collaborative. At least two members of each team will review material prior to jointly submitting work for review and publication. All contributors will be credited in publication.

Stay tuned over the summer to hear more about what the students discover!

HMT Collaborator Interviewed for Ars Technica's Coolest Jobs in IT

Ryan Bauman, a researcher at the University of Kentucky's Center for Visualization and Virtual Environments, has been interviewed by Ars Technica for their series on the Coolest Jobs in IT. In the article Bauman discusses his work on the Homer Multitext Project, including multispectral and 3-D imaging of ancient manuscripts. He talks about how gratifying it is to do research that benefits both humanists and computer scientists at the same time: "The most interesting part is finding research questions that touch on both sides," he said. "Finding something that a humanities scholar is interested in that we can help them answer using some kind of digital approach that is also challenging enough on the digital side that it pushes computer science forward as well." 

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 Homer Multitext on Capitol Hill

Earlier this week, on April 24, one of our undergraduate researchers, Christine Roughan, Holy Cross Class of 2014 (yep, that means she’s a sophomore), presented at the Council on Undergraduate Research’s Posters on the Hill 2012 event the work that her team produced last summer. The team, which also included Thomas Arralde, HC ’13 and Stephanie Lindeborg, HC ’13, produced a digital edition of Book 1 of the Iliad in the Venetus A manuscript. (See past blog posts of their findings based on their edition here, here, and here.) The poster sessions were held in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill and were open to members of Congress, their staffs, and staff from federal funding agencies. We also had the honor of meeting with Congressman James McGovern to tell him about the team’s research and thank him for being a stalwart supporter of federal funding for academic research. Congratulations to the team for being chosen for this highly selective and prestigious event, and to Christine for representing and communicating their work so well. 

Neel Smith and Christine Roughan at CUR's Posters on the Hill with Christine's poster

Meeting with Representative James McGovern: (l-r) Neel Smith, Christine Roughan, James McGovern, Mary Ebbott