Preliminary Studies on the Scholia to Euripides
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Preliminary Studies on the Scholia to Euripides CALIFORNIA CLASSICAL STUDIES NUMBER 6 Editorial Board Chair: Donald Mastronarde Editorial Board: Alessandro Barchiesi, Todd Hickey, Emily Mackil, Richard Martin, Robert Morstein-Marx, J. Theodore Peña, Kim Shelton California Classical Studies publishes peer-reviewed long-form scholarship with online open access and print-on-demand availability. The primary aim of the series is to disseminate basic research (editing and analysis of primary materials both textual and physical), data-heavy re- search, and highly specialized research of the kind that is either hard to place with the leading publishers in Classics or extremely expensive for libraries and individuals when produced by a leading academic publisher. In addition to promoting archaeological publications, papyrologi- cal and epigraphic studies, technical textual studies, and the like, the series will also produce selected titles of a more general profile. The startup phase of this project (2013–2017) is supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Also in the series: Number 1: Leslie Kurke, The Traffic in Praise: Pindar and the Poetics of Social Economy, 2013 Number 2: Edward Courtney, A Commentary on the Satires of Juvenal, 2013 Number 3: Mark Griffith, Greek Satyr Play: Five Studies, 2015 Number 4: Mirjam Kotwick, Alexander of Aphrodisias and the Text of Aristotle’s Metaphys- ics, 2016 Number 5: Joey Williams, The Archaeology of Roman Surveillance in the Central Alentejo, Portugal, 2017 PRELIMINARY STUDIES ON THE SCHOLIA TO EURIPIDES Donald J. Mastronarde CALIFORNIA CLASSICAL STUDIES Berkeley, California © 2017 by Donald J. Mastronarde. California Classical Studies c/o Department of Classics University of California Berkeley, California 94720–2520 USA http://calclassicalstudies.org email: [email protected] ISBN 9781939926104 Library of Congress Control Number: 2017916025 CONTENTS Preface vii Acknowledgments xi Abbreviations xiii Sigla for Manuscripts of Euripides xvii List of Plates xxix 1. The Scholia and the Ancient and Medieval Tradition of Commenting on Euripides 1 1.1. Editing the Scholia 1 1.2. The Development of Annotation on Euripides in Antiquity 7 1.3. The Scholia in the Middle Ages 26 1.4. Glossation 37 Appendix: The Yv Paraphrast and the Periphrastic Scholia in Arsenius 44 2. Teachers’ Scholia, Tzetzes, and Planudes 60 2.1. “Grammatical” Scholia or Teachers’ Notes 60 2.2. Tzetzes and the Teaching Tradition 77 2.3. Planudes and the Teaching Tradition 89 3. The Extra Exegetical Material in SSa and the Teaching Tradition 107 3.1. The Preliminaries Preceding Hecuba in SSa 107 3.2. The Miscellany of Notes on Hecuba in S 113 3.3. The Tip of the Iceberg? A Vocabulary List Based on Hecuba in Barberinianus graecus 4 148 4. On Venetus Marcianus Graecus 471 (Codex M of Euripides) 161 vi CONTENTS 4.1. The Problem of Dating 161 4.2. General Description and Evidence for Dating 165 4.3. Detailed Description 172 A. Scribal Tallies and Quires 172 B. Use of Majuscule 173 C. Use of Enlarged Letters 173 D. Comments on Specific Letters 175 E. Abbreviations 180 F. The Scholia Reference System 182 G. Other Oddities 182 Appendix: Numeration Sequence in Scholia References in M 186 Plates 189 5. On Vaticanus Graecus 909 (Codex V of Euripides) 199 5.1. V and Planudes? 199 5.2. The Partner Scribes of the Original Production 206 5.3. Characteristics of the Original Hands 210 5.4. Other Correctors and the Cursive Hands 214 Appendix: The Distribution of Work between Hands A and B 217 Bibliography 224 Index of Manuscripts 236 Index locorum 238 General Index 239 PREFACE When I first began in 2009 to work in earnest on editing the scholia to Euripides as a digital open-access project (EuripidesScholia.org), I believed I could work on discrete chunks in sequence and I chose to concentrate at first on Orestes 1– 500. The studies presented in this volume are intended to appear shortly before a much expanded sample of scholia on those 500 lines is to be released online. This sample will replace the initial one, available since 2010, which covered only 50 or so lines and was based on fewer witnesses. The intervening years have taught me, however, that it is not practical to limit my purview to such a discrete chunk. The process of collating and the process of interpreting scholia and de- termining how best to present them have necessitated forays into other areas of the triad. The prospect of new information about the scholia in the Jerusalem palimpsest (H) from the Palamedes Project caused me to collate the other main witnesses for old scholia for the lines of the triad plays covered by scholia in H. When I eventually realized that I would never get adequately accurate collations from the reproductions I had of Marcianus graecus 471 (M) and Vaticanus grae- cus 909 (V), I obtained new color digital images of M, and the Vatican Library and the Polonsky Foundation kindly acceded to my request that V be digitized and made available online, and it soon became both a priority and a matter of efficiency to collate all the scholia in these witnesses, including those for non- triad plays. A trip to Madrid for the oral defence of a dissertation allowed me to visit Salamanca and see Salamanticensis 31 (S) in person, which set off my inter- est in the odd collection of annotations published in Chapter 3 of this book. Consequently, in order to understand those annotations, larger samples of scho- lia on Hecuba had to be collated. It has also been a priority to take trips to conduct autopsy examination of problematic manuscripts while I have research funding remaining after retirement and while I am still lucky enough to be able to endure the long flights from California to Europe. Thus my work has pro- ceeded in several directions simultaneously, and it seemed best to push myself, for some topics, to come to conclusions definitive enough to be presented to fellow scholars now, while continuing to work toward a more complete invento- vii viii PREFACE ry of the scholia, for my online project at EuripidesScholia.org is at this stage primarily an inventory. I have advisedly included the word “preliminary” in the title for several rea- sons. First, nobody ever collates with 100 percent accuracy, and in any case collating additional witnesses over time tends to send one back to a manuscript previously collated either to discover an omission or mistake or to solve a puzzle about a damaged or ambiguous reading. Apart from the issue of accuracy, there are many more manuscripts to collate more completely, which will provide fuller context for confirming or questioning hypotheses reached so far. Second, one must work with images of various kinds and various qualities, but the situation is constantly improving. The ideal is to have color digital images of sufficient resolution so that they can be enlarged to make the tiny script of many scholia as legible as possible and the identification of changes of ink clearer. Good- resolution grayscale scans are the second-best option, for those cases in which libraries refuse to provide color (a restrictive holdover that scarcely makes sense in the modern world of digital photography and cheap mass storage) or continue to price color images at an outrageous level (again, in digital imaging the differ- ence between the price of grayscale and color no longer has much justification). Less desirable is digitization from black and white microfilm, but even this can sometimes be adequate when the ink is uniformly dark against a light back- ground of unstained paper. Microfilms themselves are often inadequate for accurate collation of scholia, being impossible to magnify sufficiently and often unable to show clearly inks that are faint. By acquiring better images or because of new online access I have gradually eliminated my need to use the microfilms that I had accumulated. As more years pass, even more manuscripts of Euripides will become accessible in online images. Third, a lot of what interests me de- pends on a fuller knowledge of other scholia corpora and of Byzantine works that tell us about philological study and teaching in the 11th to the 14th centu- ries, but much of that material is only partially covered in the published sources and the TLG data. Thus, conclusions I reach here will undoubtedly need revision when others finally provide fuller inventories of the scholia on Sophocles and Aeschylus, or a modern edition of the scholia on Oppian, or authoritative edi- tions of more of the works of Tzetzes, Planudes, Moschopulus, and Thomas Magister. Despite these imperfections in access to the manuscript source material and in knowledge of the context of the manuscripts, it is an opportune moment for studies of this kind, even for one located so far from the European libraries. As already mentioned, great improvements have been made possible by using digi- tal images. There are many more manuscripts now available online in good images than when I began, and the number will only increase as time goes by. Furthermore, in the past few decades significant advances have been made in PREFACE ix medieval Greek palaeography and codicology and in the study of Byzantine, and particularly Palaeologan, scholars and their contexts. Ole L. Smith’s edition of the scholia on Aeschylus’ Septem set a new standard for proper attention to the annotations and glosses in the recentiores of tragedy. Hans-Christian Günther’s study of the circulation of Palaeologan annotations in a large number of 14th- century witnesses of Euripides provided essential groundwork for even more extensive study. Palaeologan intellectual pursuits have been illuminated in many studies, two notable examples being Daniele Bianconi’s Tessalonica nell’età dei paleologi.