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1 Chapter 1 : Studies in the Text and Transmission of the Iliad - Google Books During the decades he spent preparing his edition of Homer, which gained worldwide repute, Martin L. West accumulated numerous interesting and new details regarding the transmission of the text. It is our hope that in this way we will make some of our preliminary findings immediately available, and invite comment and collaboration with those working on related topics. This research has shown that the Iliad and Odyssey are products of oral recomposition-in-performance, as demonstrated by the foundational work of Milman Parry and Albert Lord. But the standard commentaries, including the most recent, do not for the most part engage this scholarship. The volume we propose will consist of 1 a series of introductory essays that addresses central questions in Homeric scholarship described further below and how they apply to Iliad 10 in particular; 2 a critical text of the highly controversial book 10 of the Iliad, together with an apparatus that calls attention to the many and varying historical witnesses to the text; 3 a detailed commentary, intended to explicate the text of this book and situate it within the poetics of the oral tradition in which the Iliad and Odyssey were composed. By publishing this book both in print and on-line the latter available without charge through the Center for Hellenic Studies, we expect that we will reach the largest possible audience, and hope that our final product can be a model for collaborative research on the Homeric epics and in the humanities in general. The Doloneia in Context: Past and Future Research Our planned volume focuses on the so-called Doloneia, the tenth book of the Iliad, and will put a spotlight on this most doubted, ignored, and even scorned book of the epic. In doing so, we will demonstrate how approaching the poem as an oral traditional epic can answer questions that are particularly vexing when using a literary approach. The critical text will highlight the many witnesses to the text and the variations they offer. The accompanying commentary, a conventional form of exegesis for the Homeric texts, will demonstrate through close analysis how the unconventional Iliad 10 shares in the oral traditional nature of the whole epic, even though its poetics are specific to its ambush plot and setting at night. But by examining parallels in other ancient sources, such as the Epic Cycle among others, we will show how these poetics build a particular tradition of such episodes, using the same system of language and techniques that comprise oral composition-in-performance. The volume, therefore, will serve as a prime example of an investigation into an entire book of the Iliad through the now well-established methods and scholarship on the oral traditional background of the epic. In two expeditions to the former Yugoslavia in â 35 Parry and Lord collected 12, songs, stories, and conversations from singers of the South Slavic epic song tradition. No two of the songs collected are exactly alike, nor do any two of the singers have exactly the same repertoire. These singers composed extremely long epic poems in performance. In order to do this they drew on a vast storehouse of traditional themes and phrases that worked within the meter or rhythm of the poetry. That is to say they used what are called formulas to build each verse as they went along, instead of individual words that are static or memorized in a fixed order. This method results in each song being a new composition and is the reason why no two songs that Parry and Lord recorded were ever exactly the same. Parry and Lord applied this fieldwork to the Homeric poems by analogy, and they were able to show how the workings of the South Slavic system reveal a great deal about how the Iliad and Odyssey were composed. The work of Parry and Lord and the scholars who have built on their efforts suggests that in its earliest stages of development there was a great deal of multiformity in the Greek oral epic tradition. Countless variations on the story of the Trojan War and the episodes within it, the anger of Achilles, the returns of the heroes, and any number of traditional tales are known to have been current in different times and different places in antiquity, and were likely sung by countless poets whose names are now lost to us. The earliest textual witnesses of the Iliad and Odyssey that have survived, the fragmentary papyri from Egypt, postdate this fluid tradition by hundred of years, but nevertheless contain a great deal of variation that points to a very creative and dynamic early history of the poems. At the same time, because Greek oral epic poetry was traditional in content already in ancient times, any given audience on any given occasion of performance knew the story and the characters Page 1

2 already. There would have been nothing about the story, the language, the rhythm of the song, or the characters that was new for that audience. A poet in a traditional song culture like that of the ancient Greeks could compose poetry in performance using techniques, plots, characters, and language that he had inherited from many previous generations of singers. The material and techniques were traditional, but each performance was a new compositionâ a recomposition, in and for performance. These questions are important for the humanities as a whole, in terms of interpreting oral poetry and understanding its cultural impact, and we will continue to address them in our work on Iliad The work of Parry and Lord revolutionized Homeric studies, but there persists a strong contingent of scholars who try to minimize the impact of their work. These scholars prefer to see a single genius and a fixed point in time behind the Iliad and Odyssey as we now have them. This individual poet is sometimes conceived of as literate, and at other times imagined as dictating the poems to another literate person. We maintain that this approach is fundamentally flawed, and marred by the prejudices of our literate, text-based culture. Whereas these Homerists seek to deny or minimize the multiformity of the Homeric poetry that has come down to us in a fruitless search for a single genius poet that is responsible for our Iliad and Odyssey, our work embraces variation as a window into the flourishing oral tradition that once existed in Greece, in which there were many singers and many tales. Clearly, a full-scale commentary on the Iliad and Odyssey that takes full advantage of the latest research in the poetics of oral traditions is needed, but we have chosen to begin our work with perhaps the least understood single book of the Iliad, book Kirk, asserts that points that seem of little weight unto themselves add up to only one conclusionâ namely, that the book does not belong in our Iliad. Our use of the name seeks to reverse that implication, to show that for all its differences it is part of the same oral traditional system of epic poetry. The condemnation of the book is so universal that even a relatively recent book devoted to the theme of ambush, written from an avowedly oralist perspective, does not discuss Iliad 10, our most extensive example of an ambush in surviving Greek epic. Nevertheless, we feel that there is an entirely different way of treating this book. The following brief examples demonstrate the difference between our approach and those that have come before. First, we could make an analogy with the South Slavic tradition, where Parry and Lord documented that the most accomplished singers could expand their songs indefinitely by adding episodes paratactically, as the mood of the audience or occasion required. It is in keeping with the poetics of an oral tradition to add additional episodes to this particular night. Secondly, book 10 is the only surviving example of an extended narrative about a night raid in Homeric poetry, even though we know there were many such episodes in the larger epic tradition. To our knowledge, no scholars other than ourselves have presented the argument that the unusual nature of the book may be explained by this very straightforward fact. We have argued that the night right is a different genre or type of epic, a parallel tradition with its own traditional language, themes, conventions, and poetics, but nonetheless part of the same system of oral poetry to which the entire Iliad belongs. At almost the midpoint of the book, just as Diomedes and Odysseus head out on their expedition, there is a lengthy description of the arming of Odysseus and Diomedes Iliad The armor that they wear is in many ways atypical. Most distinctive is what they wear on their heads. In a well known article, James Armstrong shows how formulaic arming scenes are employed at climactic moments in the poem with great effect. But even more importantly, they serve to signal that the poet is moving into a different poetic register. Another way to say this is that the poet transitions by way of such scenes from one megatheme to another, and the alternative style of clothing is emblematic of not only this alternative mode of fighting but also an alternative poetics. By approaching Homeric poetry as a system, of which the Iliad and Odyssey happen to be the only two surviving examples, we can look for traditional narrative patterns that explain what may seem unusual from a literary perspective. It is possible to reconstruct a great deal of the system we have lost by studying carefully allusions to, summaries, and quotations of the lost epics of the Epic Cycle. This more inclusive approach to Homeric poetry is what we propose to adopt in our commentary, and we hope that it will be a model for future work on Homer. Related to this inclusive approach, we will also in the essays and commentary take into account the reception of Iliad 10, or at least its ambush tradition, in other ancient works. Page 2

3 One opportunity that Iliad 10 offers is a direct comparison to the presentation of the same episode in a Greek tragedy, namely the Rhesos, attributed to Euripides. The tragedy has its own controversies: Whether or not it was Euripides who wrote this tragedy does not greatly affect our analysis of it for this context, however. In a paper presented by Mary Ebbott at the Annual Meeting of the Classical Association of the Middle West and South, she has argued that some of these differences in language and style in the tragedy can also be connected to the nocturnal setting of the action within the drama. These suggestive though not exhaustive examples give an indication of the rich possibilities that ancient reception offers for ways to think about Iliad Another important factor in our approach, moreover, is that this project will be truly collaborative, with both of us working together on every part of the volume. Although we share the approach to Homeric epic that we have described above, our prior individual research allows us to bring different perspectives and experience to the project. Unlike many collaborative projects in which scholars bring individual projects together at late stages of the work for publication, this project was conceived as a collaboration and will be carried out as a true synergy. Although the model for projects in the humanities and in Homeric research is itself most often that of the individual genius working alone, we suggest that the collaboration we are proposing will allow for a higher quality of research and analysis accomplished in a more timely manner. We believe strongly that new models for collaboration are important for progress in the humanities in general, and we expect that the commentary we produce will demonstrate how our sustained collaboration can lead to more thoughtful, thorough, and creative scholarship on the Homeric epics. The substance of our project will thus cover three major areas of study focused on Iliad The series of introductory essays, which will address central questions in Homeric scholarship from an oralist perspective, will give the necessary background, and will also give a full and systematic treatment to subjects of interest, such as the poetics of ambush, the theme of arming for a night raid, and the use of simile and metaphor in describing attacks that take place in the dark. Including a critical text of book 10, together with an apparatus that calls attention to the many and varying historical witnesses to the text, is an important component for establishing the variation in the textual tradition that gives witness to the underlying oral system. Finally, the detailed commentary will explicate the language of this book and situate it within the poetics of the oral tradition in which the Iliad and Odyssey were composed. It will demonstrate that an oralist approach illuminates not only certain portions of the epic, but also succeeds on a sustained, line by line analysis of an entire book. The whole project, then, will correct the major imbalance in Homeric studies by acting as a prime example of how an oralist approach can treat a self-contained portion of the epic, while relating it to the whole and to the reception of Homer in antiquity. The resulting volume will be published both in print and on-line. In this dual publication we will be able to reach the largest possible audience. For more on the Homeric research and scholarship cited in this narrative, please see the bibliographical appendix. See full text of this paper here. Her findings lay a foundation for further work on the oral poetics of symbolic language, including simile and metaphor. For example, her analysis has shown that metaphorical apposition, which makes Diomedes a nightmare in Iliad Diomedes does not fit neatly into the dichotomy that has been supposed to exist between Achilles and Odysseus, the respective heroes of the traditional daytime polemos and nighttime lokhos. Odysseus has long been understood to be a warrior that excels in alternative, more cunning kinds of warfare. When they are juxtaposed, we find that the Doloneia does not seem so unusual. Following in the footsteps of Neoanalyst scholars like Jonathan Burgess, we propose that we should resist the often assumed dichotomy between the Iliad and the Epic Cycle and indeed the Iliad and the Doloneia, and we submit that an awareness of Cyclic traditions helps us to better understand the heroes of the Iliad and how they were received in antiquity. What follows here is a brief overview of the Multitext, as explained on its website, and then we provide an explanation of how our commentary fits in with this project. For further information about the Multitext project, please see the project website. The Homer Multitext project, the first of its kind in Homeric studies, seeks to present the textual transmission of the Iliad and Odyssey in a historical framework. Such a framework is needed to account for the full reality of a complex medium of oral performance that underwent many changes over a long period of time. These Page 3

4 changes, as reflected in the many texts of Homer, need to be understood in their many different historical contexts. The Homer Multitext provides ways to view these contexts both synchronically and diachronically. Using technology that takes advantage of the best available practices and open source standards that have been developed for digital publications in a variety of fields, the Homer Multitext offers free access to a library of texts and images, a machine-interface to that library and its indices, and tools to allow readers to discover and engage with the Homeric tradition. This is something that has not yet been done except on an ad hoc basis. Our volume will integrate the demonstration of the system of oral poetry provided by the Multitext with a thorough explication of the poetics of that system. The Origins and Transmission. The Manuscript Evidence for Interpolation in Homer. Orality and Homeric Discourse. Pointing at the Past: From Formula to Performance in Homeric Poetics. Center for Hellenic Studies, Homer, Plato, and Alexandrian Allusion in Propertius 4. An On-line Multitext of Homer. The Greek Epic Cycle, second edition, London, Carlisle and Levaniouk, Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield,, 3â Page 4

5 Chapter 2 : theinnatdunvilla.com: Studies in the Text and Transmission of the Iliad (): Martin West: Books *Prices in US$ apply to orders placed in the Americas only. Prices in GBP apply to orders placed in Great Britain only. Prices in â represent the retail prices valid in Germany (unless otherwise indicated). Monday, July 12, 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 Some papyrus fragments predate the medieval tradition by as many as years. The texts as we now have them are the product of many singers over the course of many generations. 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 papyriâ 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 BCE that the papyrus texts begin to stabilize and present a relatively more uniform text. 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 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. 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 Page 5

6 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. 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 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. In 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? 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. 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. Second, new papyri needed to be incorporated and assigned numbers in a systematic way. New descriptions must be written for the newly published or joined papyri and a bibliography maintained. 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. The editors of the new Homer and the Papyri faced a new dilemma. 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. 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. 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. Page 6

7 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. 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. The Origins and Transmission. Homer, Plato, and Alexandrian Allusion in Propertius 4. Rowman and Littlefield Press, Editorial Standards for the Homer Multitext. The Singer of Tales. Review of Martin L. Bryn Mawr Classical Review West â ] West, M. Stuttgart and Leipzig, â West a] Studies in the Text and Transmission of the Iliad. West ] West, Stephanie. The Ptolemaic Papyri of Homer. Page 7

8 Chapter 3 : Studies in the Text and Transmission of the Iliad - Martin Litchfield West - Google Books In den jahrzehntelangen Vorarbeiten zu seiner weltweit so beachteten Homerausgabe hat der Editor viele interessante und zugleich neue Details zur Textüberlieferung gewonnen, die er nunmehr in einer Spezialmonographie zusammengefaãÿt hat. These claims are not considered authentic today and were by no means universally accepted in the ancient world. Ancient accounts of Homer Many traditions circulated in the ancient world concerning Homer, most of which are lost. Modern scholarly consensus is that they have no value as history. The writings on the top and right side are scholia. The study of Homer is one of the oldest topics in scholarship, dating back to antiquity. Most scholars, although disagreeing on other questions about the genesis of the poems, agree that the Iliad and the Odyssey were not produced by the same author, based on "the many differences of narrative manner, theology, ethics, vocabulary, and geographical perspective, and by the apparently imitative character of certain passages of the Odyssey in relation to the Iliad. The explanations suggested by modern scholars tend to mirror their position on the overall Homeric question. Nagy interprets it as "he who fits the song together". West has advanced both possible Greek and Phoenician etymologies. Some contemporary scholars think the destruction of Troy VIIa circa BC was the origin of the myth of the Trojan War, others that the poem was inspired by multiple similar sieges that took place over the centuries. Homeric Greek shows features of multiple regional Greek dialects and periods, but is fundamentally based on Ionic Greek, in keeping with the tradition that Homer was from Ionia. Linguistic analysis suggests that the Iliad was composed slightly before the Odyssey, and that Homeric formulae preserve older features than other parts of the poems. These habits aid the extemporizing bard, and are characteristic of oral poetry. For instance, the main words of a Homeric sentence are generally placed towards the beginning, whereas literate poets like Virgil or Milton use longer and more complicated syntactical structures. Homer then expands on these ideas in subsequent clauses; this technique is called parataxis. He noted that Homer often, when describing frequently recurring activities such as eating, praying, fighting and dressing, used blocks of set phrases in sequence that were then elaborated by the poet. Parry and Lord noted that these conventions are found in many other cultures. C, B, A has been observed in the Homeric epics. Opinion differs as to whether these occurrences are a conscious artistic device, a mnemonic aid or a spontaneous feature of human storytelling. Some scholars believe that they were dictated by the poet; Albert Lord noted that, in the process of dictating, the Balkan bards he recorded revised and extended their lays. Some scholars hypothesize that a similar process occurred when the Homeric poems were first written. These divisions probably date from before BC, and may have been made by Homer. After the establishment of the Library of Alexandria, Homeric scholars such as Zenodotus of Ephesus, Aristophanes of Byzantium and in particular Aristarchus of Samothrace helped establish a canonical text. Others, such as Martin West or T. Allen fall somewhere between these two extremes. Page 8

9 Chapter 4 : Iliad - Homer - Oxford University Press This shopping feature will continue to load items. In order to navigate out of this carousel please use your heading shortcut key to navigate to the next or previous heading. It was in the Spring and Summer of that the intergenerational and collaborative Homer Multitext project was first conceived. The Homer Multitext project http: We are the editors of that project, but it has been from the beginning a collaborative enterprise, involving a wide range of scholars and experts in various fields from all over the world. We two recently published a volume of essays and commentary on Iliad 10 that evolved out of our work on the Multitext. The work of Gregory Nagy has informed and influenced ours to a considerable extent, one that is impossible to quantify. The range of his work and the numerous ways in which he has broadened the understanding of Homeric poetry are also difficult to summarize. His research includes comparative linguistics and the Indo-European background to the poetry, the religious concept of the hero and how it informs the epics, the performance of Homeric epic in antiquity, the textual tradition, the reception of Homeric poetry in other genres, synchronic and diachronic approaches to the epics, and the structure of mythical narratives see Nagy,, a, b, a, b,,,, The first is how the natural multiformity of composition-in-performance, articulated by Lord in terms of what he observed in the performances of the Serbian singers, [ 2 ] is reflected in the textual transmission of the Homeric epics. Nagy has asserted the importance of the scholia for understanding this aspect of the transmission. In his evolutionary model, Nagy identifies five stages of evolution, which move from relatively most fluid to relatively most rigid over several centuries for the most recent articulation of the model, see Nagy The implications of this model are many and significant. It fundamentally rejects the model which posits that an oral tradition came to an abrupt halt sometime in the eighth century BCE when the new technology of writing was used to record the monumental epics of a single singer, who was able to transcend the limits of said tradition, which he effectively ended, and whose works we for the most part have in our textual sources dating only from the tenth century CE onwards. Under this model, the hypothesis that Iliad 10 was later inserted interpolated into a text that had been composed otherwise by a single author and was fixed at some earlier point becomes highly unlikely, if not impossible. Indeed, through the work of Parry, Lord, Foley, Martin, Nagy, and others, we recognize that this is simply not the way oral traditional poetry operates. Although these paragraphs were written with specific reference to our arguments about Iliad 10, they are equally applicable to the theoretical infrastructure on which we have built the Homer Multitext. The Multitext takes as its starting point the historical documents that transmit the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey from antiquity, including quotations in ancient authors, papyrus fragments, medieval manuscripts and their accompanying scholia. Instead of privileging one source over another, or culling from among them to produce a single authoritative text, we value each of these documents individually for the multiforms that they transmit, and the insight that they might provide into the poetics, composition, and performance of these song traditions. The Iliad and Odyssey were at one time dynamic and evolving, and the particular nature of oral epic song, as described by Milman Parry and Albert Lord, allowed layer upon diachronic layer of this poetry to be preserved within the system of formulaic language as it evolved. Albert Lord was still an undergraduate when he accompanied Milman Parry on his first trip to Yugoslavia in, where they recorded and interviewed and transcribed the performance of dozens of singers in the South Slavic oral epic tradition. In any case, we have certainly been beneficiaries of it. Grateful for the mentoring that we have received, we have sought to emulate Greg by adopting an intergenerational approach to the Homer Multitext project. Because the editors and architects of the project are all professors at institutions without a graduate program in Classics, we have focused our efforts on finding ways to involve undergraduates. And we have had great success. His work has revealed much about the editorial methods of the great Alexandrian scholars of Homeric epic, demonstrated the importance of the evidence offered in the scholia for preserving performance variations within the epics, and, as a result, made the scholia an important Page 9

10 resource to be reckoned with for understanding both the poetry itself and also its evolution and transmission. There are two interrelated procedures that our students follow for creating the digital edition of the scholia. Thus far, our students have worked mainly on the scholia of the Venetus A Marc. Using A as our example, however, the procedures involved are: Inventorying and mapping the scholia we will limit this description to the scholia since that is our focus here of one folio-side involves using the digital image of that folio. Our students have now created on their own a process for accomplishing both procedures in teams, and that collaboration helps to make the process both more efficient and more accurate, as two sets of eyes read the small, compressed writing of the scholia. The students, starting at the top of the folio, note the beginning and ending of each scholion, and use digital tools to define the space as a proportion of the folio and location of that scholion on the page, and record that space and location in an XML notebook that coordinates that location and space with a unique identifier of the scholion. Each set of scholia main marginal scholia, intermarginal scholia, interior scholia, exterior scholia, and interlinear scholia is defined within the structured mark-up. When the inventory and mapping is complete, one transformation of the information can result in an image of the page. The structured data allows both visual and automated checks to ensure that all scholia have been accounted for. Since the diplomatic digital edition of the scholion is then associated with this place on the page, users of the Homer Multitext will be able to move quickly and easily between the image of the manuscript and the digital text. The Multitext editions provide complete and effortless access to the primary sources, because one of our editorial principles is to make the sources as available to the reader as they were to the editor, so that the reader may easily check the evidence used to create it. Once each scholion has been given a unique identifier and its location on the page has been mapped, the students then transcribe the text of the scholia, also using an XML notebook. The digital text will not only be easier for users to read, but will also allow automated searches for names or words or other features. With such a digital edition, scholars will be able to answer questions in new ways that were not possible before, and also to ask questions that have not yet been imagined. The students themselves have formulated and pursued such research based on their creation of the edition. With the deep knowledge of the primary source gained through their work on Iliad 1, for example, Arralde, Lindeborg, and Roughan then chose individual avenues for further research, with remarkably sophisticated results. Two articles resulting from this further research have already been published on the Homer Multitext blog see http: Greg has served as a personal inspiration to us for his scholarly generosity and the value he has placed on inter-generational models of scholarship. We hope that we have honored both of these inspirations by presenting the collaborative work on the Homeric scholia that our own students have contributed to the Homer Multitext and by highlighting in this way the evidence offered by these scholia for the multitextual nature of the Iliad. Scholia Graeca in Homeri Iliadem. Recapturing a Homeric Legacy: Editorial Standards for the Homer Multitext. Iliad 10 and the Poetics of Ambush: A Multitext Edition with Essays and Commentary. The Singer of Tales. Epic Singers and Oral Tradition. The Singer Resumes the Tale. The Making of Homeric Verse. Footnotes [ back ] 1. In reality this is not so. Page 10

11 Chapter 5 : Catalog Record: Studies in the text and transmission of the Hathi Trust Digital Library Note: Citations are based on reference standards. However, formatting rules can vary widely between applications and fields of interest or study. The specific requirements or preferences of your reviewing publisher, classroom teacher, institution or organization should be applied. Scholia[ edit ] Library of St. Scholia are ancient commentaries, initially written in the margins of manuscripts, not necessarily at the bottom, as are their modern equivalents, the notes. The term marginalia includes them. Some are interlinear, written in very small characters. Over time the scholia were copied along with the work. When the copyist ran out of free text space, he listed them on separate pages or in separate works. Notes are merely a continuation of the practice of creating or copying scholia in printed works, although the incunabula, the first printed works, duplicated some scholia. The works of Homer have been heavily annotated from their written beginnings[ citation needed ]. The total number of notes on manuscripts and printed editions of the Iliad and Odyssey are for practical purposes innumerable. The number of manuscripts of the Iliad is currently approximately The inventory is incomplete, and new finds continue to be made[ citation needed ], but not all these texts contain scholia. No compendium has collated all of the Homeric scholia. Certain types, or lines, have been distinguished; scholia have lines of descent of their own. Eleanor Dickey summarizes the most important three, identified by letter as A, bt, and D. The sources of the scholia are noted at the end of each book. There are basically four. Their comments, and these scholia, are termed "critical". A-scholia are found in other manuscripts as well. Venetus A contains some bt scholia. The bt manuscripts descend from an earlier c. They are from Porphyry and Heraclitus, with some from Didymus. The D scholia, or scholia Didymi, named erroneously for Didymus, are the earliest and largest group. They occur primarily in the 9th century Z Rome, Biblioteca Nazionale, and the 11th century Q, but also in some others, such as A and T. Among the non-minor scholia are mythological allegorical aetia, plots, and paraphrases, explaining the meanings of obscure words. The order of precedence and chronological order of these Iliad scholia is D, A, bt, and other. The same scheme applies to the Odyssey, except that A scholia, mainly of the Iliad, are in deficit. There are no printed works publishing all the scholia on the Iliad and Odyssey. Only partial publications according to various principles have been possible. The first was that of Janus Lascaris in Some subsequent works concentrate on manuscripts or parts of them, others on type of scholia, and still others on books of the Iliad, or source. Larger compendia are relatively recent. One that has already become a standard is the 7-volume compendium of A- and bt-scholia by Hartmut Erbse. The last two volumes are indices. And yet, Dickey says of it. Classical scholarship[ edit ] By the Classical Period the Homeric Question had advanced to the point of trying to determine what works were attributable to Homer. The Iliad and the Odyssey were beyond question. They were considered to have been written by Homer. The D-scholia suggest that they were taught in the schools; however, the language was no longer self-evident. The extensive glossaries of the D-scholia were intended to bridge the gap between the spoken language and Homeric Greek. The poems themselves contradicted the general belief in the existence and authorship of Homer. There were many variants, which there should not have been according to the single-author conviction. The simplest answer was to decide which of the variants was most likely to represent a presumed authentic original composition and to discount the others as spurious, devised by someone else. Part of the Parthenon Frieze, depicting the Panathenaic Festival. Elgin marble, located in the British Museum. Strabo reports an account by Hereas accusing Peisistratos, tyrant of Athens, r. The story implies that Peisistratos or Solon had some authority over a presumed master text of the Iliad, and yet Athens at the time had little political power over the Aegean region. Strabo was not the only accuser. A number of other fragments testify to a written edition by Peisistratos, some credible, some not. A few mention the establishment of a Peisistratean school. In others, Hipparchus son of Peisistratos published the edition and passed a law that it must be read at the Panathenaic Games, [12] which began in BCE, before the tyranny of his father, from BCE. Peisistratos was succeeded by Page 11

12 his sons in BCE. He based his theory on the partial substitution of Ionic words for Aeolic ones; i. Fick uses the device to date the transformation. The opposition, therefore, dates to after BCE, corresponding to the period of the Peisistratean edition. Proving it, however, is another issue. Search for the classical vulgate[ edit ] Between the hypothetical Peisistratean edition and the Vulgate recension of the Alexandrines is a historical gap. Moreover, some of the D-scholia redated to the 5th century BCE indicate that some sort of standard Iliad existed then, to be taught in the schools. These broad events are circumstantial evidence only. There had been, in other words, a master copy, but it had been lost. The variant manuscripts seen by the Alexandrines were not corruptions, but rhapsodic variants, as is attested by Flavius Josephus in Against Apion. The latter had to have had precedents. The problem was to prove it. Ludwich assembled a list of all the lines put forward as quotations from Homer in pre-alexandrine authors: Monro used this database to compare the percentage of non-vulgate lines in the quotes with a control group, the non-vulgate lines in the fragments of the papyri known to him then. The number is only 12, from which Monro concludes: According to Monro, [18] based on Ludwich, [17] Plato is the most prolific quoter of Homer, with lines. Next most is Aristotle, with 93 lines. For about 20 years they were at the same school, the Platonic Academy. The Platonic view of Homer is exceptional for the times. Homer and Hesiod were considered to have written myths as allegory. Stewart, "â Homer is an Inspired Teacher, and must not be banished from the curriculum. If we get beneath the literal meaning, we find him teaching the highest truth. The Republic expresses a concept of a society established according to the Platonic ideal, in which every aspect is monitored and controlled under the guidance of a philosopher-king drafted from ascetic poverty for the purpose. It was not a popular view. Peripatetic connection[ edit ] Site of the Lyceum in Athens. The archetype of Hellenistic libraries was that of the Lyceum in classical Athens. Consequently, after the death of Plato, not having been appointed director, he departed Athens for an educational opportunity in Mysia, which fell through when Mysia was captured by the Persians. His main duty was to lead a planned invasion of the east to settle the rivalry with Persia. During it he kept by his bedside a manuscript of Homer personally emended by Aristotle, a gift of the latter. He later placed it in an expensive casket captured from the Persian king, Darius, from which it was called "the Casket Homer". Alexander was a Homer enthusiast. Politics and Poetry were two of his research topics. Similarly, Homer does not play a role in any censorial evaluation of Aristotle as a critic, but appears in a professional study of poetry, the Poetics, [21] with regard to the difficulty with some of his language. Of the 93 quotations, Mitchell Carroll says: This is not the expected result if Aristotle had received the pure edition from which Plato had quoted. Hellenistic scholars and their aims[ edit ] Many ancient Greek writers discussed topics and problems in the Homeric epics, but the development of scholarship per se revolved around three goals: The first philosopher to focus intensively on the intellectual problems surrounding the Homeric epics was Zoilus of Amphipolis in the early 4th century BCE. His work Homeric Questions does not survive, but it seems that Zoilus enumerated and discussed inconsistencies of plot in Homer. Examples of this are numerous: These have been humorously described as points where Homer "nodded off," from which comes the proverbial phrase " Homeric Nod. Critical editions of Homer discuss three special steps in this process. First is the hypothetical "Peisistratean recension". There is a long-standing, but somewhat old-fashioned, tradition in modern scholarship which holds that in the mid-6th century BCE the Athenian tyrant Peisistratus had the Homeric epics compiled in a definitive edition. It is known that under Peisistratus, and later, rhapsodes competed in performing Homer at the Panathenaic festival ; and a scholion on Iliad Like Zenodotus, Aristarchus did not delete passages that he rejected, but fortunately for us preserved them with an annotation indicating his rejection. From the scholia a great deal is known about his guiding principles, and those of other editors and commentators such as Zenodotus and Aristophanes of Byzantium. The chief preoccupations of the Alexandrian scholars may be summarised as follows: This principle apparently pursues the work of Zoilus. Zenodotus is known to have applied this principle rigidly, Aristarchus less so; it is in tension with the principle of "consistency of style" above. Page 12

13 Chapter 6 : Martin West's Studies in the text and transmission of the Iliad PDF - Casa Lou Library Studies in the Text and Transmission of the Iliad and a great selection of similar Used, New and Collectible Books available now at theinnatdunvilla.com Bryn Mawr Classical Review West, Studies in the Text and Transmission of the Iliad. The first part, "an amplification of the first twelve pages of the edition", as the author calls it includes an overview of the pre-alexandrian transmission of the Homeric text, W. The second part includes textual discussion of various Iliadic passages There is also a bibliography and indices Greek Words, Passages discussed, General Index, Therefore in this review I will not discuss W. The main issue in the study of the ancient tradition of the Homeric text has been the nature of Alexandrian readings: In recent years a fair number of scholars have very enthusiastically espoused a theory put forth mainly by Martinus van der Valk according to which the Alexandrian scholars offered mere conjectures and, therefore, their arbitrary and worthless readings could be safely brushed aside main exponents: VI; ; meanwhile, some other, methodologically sound, contributions K. Two scholars in particular have recently made important contributions toward a fairer assessment of Alexandrian Homeric criticism: Montanari ; ; The latter has brought noteworthy new arguments to bear on the aforementioned main issue as a whole and various important parts of it, e. He is in favor of a conciliatory solution to the problem, repeatedly advocated also by the present reviewer ; ;, namely that Alexandrian Homeric criticism is a mixture of conjectural criticism and selection between textual variants. In this debate W. He is convinced that "it is time to challenge this assumption, inherited from Wolf, that collation of different copies was a normal and essential part of what Aristarchus and his predecessors did He also suggests that the Aristarchean readings that differ from both the vulgate known to Didymus and the medieval vulgate are rarely correct However, in a few instances he claims that some Alexandrian readings arose from diplomatic considerations. Let us examine his arguments more closely, beginning with his theory about the Homeric text of the first diorthotes, Zenodotus. This text is labelled "eccentric": According to this view Zenodotus did not select among variants, i. This line of argument leads to the formulation of W. I will begin with W. Montanari has very recently addressed and correctly rejected the latter assumption: Much more weighty is W. Years ago I turned to the Hellenistic poet-scholars in my attempt to determine whether the Alexandrians relied on manuscript authority Rengakos ; cf. On the testimony of Hellenistic poets a considerable number of Alexandrian readings can be shown to be of a documentary character. Conjunction errors pointing to the older Homeric tradition, use of a Homeric variant common to a Hellenistic poet, an early Ptolemaic papyrus and an Alexandrian edition, simultaneous occurrence of a vulgate reading and of a variant departing from the vulgate, clear anticipation of readings which had hitherto been known under the name of later Homeric critics -- all this cumulative evidence points to the conclusion that the Alexandrians must have compared different copies of the Homeric text available to them and must have chosen among variae lectiones. Apart from the indirect clues provided by the Hellenistic poets, there is also direct evidence that the great Alexandrian philologists relied on manuscript authority. The situation is similar in the early Ptolemaic papyri: It is not clear whether the latter all come from a single text, or are a selection from various texts, a kind of primitive apparatus criticus". The original scribe appears to have had two MSS. Is it plausible, then, that the three most significant Alexandrian Homeric critics did not collate manuscripts and that the practice was initiated by a minor Alexandrian Homeric critic such as Callistratus? Or, to quote Montanari again This is a fundamentally different portrait of Zenodotus from that sketched by W. Years ago Rengakos I discussed the so-called "free use" of reflexive pronouns, i. I reached the following conclusion: Brugmann established it in his pioneering study, that Aristarchus was the first to purge the Homeric text from this widespread free use, which may reach back to the Indo-European past and to which Zenodotus did not object. In other words, the forms in question appeared in the contemporary, early Alexandrian vulgate and the Hellenistic poets as well as Zenodotus simply followed the vulgate". Wilamowitz, Wackernagel and Pasquali put forth views similar to Page 13