Illinois Classical Studies
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LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN 880 V.2 Classics renew phaH=«= SS^S^jco The person charging this material is re- sponsible for its return to the library from which it was withdrawn on or before the Latest Date stamped below. Theft, mutilation, and underlining of books are reasons for disciplinary action and may result in dismissal from the University. UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS LIBRARY AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN m\ k m OCT IS 386 Air, 1 ? i!;88 WOV 1 5 988 FEB 19 19! i^f' i;^ idi2 CLASSICS L161 — O-1096 ILLINOIS CLASSICAL STUDIES VOLUME II •977 Miroslav Marcovich, Editor UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS Urbana Chicago London 1 1977 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois Manufactured in the United States of America ISBN :o-252-oo629- O ^ Xl^ Preface Volume II (1977) o( Illinois Classical Studies is a contribution of the clas- sicists from the University of Illinois to the celebration of the Bicentennial of the American Revolution (1776-1976). It comprises twenty-one select contributions by classical scholars from Ann Arbor, Berkeley, Cambridge (England), Cambridge (Massachusetts), Chicago, London, New York, Philadelphia, Providence, St. Andrews, Stanford, Swarthmore, Toronto, Urbana and Zurich. The publication of this volume was possible thanks to generous grants by Dean Robert W. Rogers (Urbana-Champaign) and Dean Elmer B. Hadley (Chicago Circle). Urbana, 4 July 1975 Miroslav Marcovich, Editor .. : Contents 1 The Nature of Homeric Composition i G. p. GOOLD 2. The Mare, the Vixen, and the Bee: Sophrosyne as the Virtue of Women in Antiquity 35 HELEN F. NORTH 3. Five Textual Notes 49 F, H. SANDBAGH 4. The Dynamics of Pindar's Music: Ninth Nemean and Third Olympian 54 LIONEL PEARSON 5. Ritual and Drama in Aischyleian Tragedy 70 GERALD F. ELSE 6. Synaesthesia in Sophocles 88 CHARLES p. SEGAL 7. Air-Imprints or Eidola: Democritus' Aetiology of Vision 97 WALTER BURKERT 8. Notes on the Electra of Euripides 1 10 JAMES DIGGLE 9. A Sophist on Omniscience, Polymathy, and Omnicompetence A. A. 8.1-13 125 THOMAS M. ROBINSON 10. Ancient Interpolation in Aristophanes 136 KENNETH J. DOVER 1 1 The Four Stoic Personae 163 PHILLIP H. DE LACY viii Contents 12. A New Manuscript of Babrius: Fact or Fable? 173 JOHN VAIO 13. Harpocration Panegyrista 184 GERALD M. BROWNE 14. Euclio, Gnemon, and the Peripatos 197 MIROSLAV MARCOVICH 15. Ariadne's Leave-taking : Catullus 64. 1 1 6-20 219 WENDELL CLAUSEN 16. The Grievance of L. Domitius Ahenobarbus 224 DAVID R. SHACKLETON BAILEY 17. A Question of Taste: Horace, Epistles 1. 14.6-9 229 E. J. KENNEY 18. Propertius 3.22: Tullus' Return 240 MICHAEL C. J. PUTNAM 19. Studies on the Naples Ms. IV F 3 of Ovid's Metamorphoses 255 V^LLLAM S. ANDERSON 20. Did Tacitus Finish the Annales? 289 REVILO p. OLIVER 21. Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff to James Loeb: Two Unpublished Letters 315 WaLLIAM MUSGRAVE CALDER III 1 The Nature of Homeric Composition G. p. GOOLD Sing, Goddess, of Friedrich son of Wolf, Who brought countless griefs upon the Homerists, And sent to Hades many valiant souls of professors, W'hen on a time there clashed together in strife The lynx-eyed Analysts and much-enduring Unitarians. First did one hero take up a huge, jagged hypothesis, \Vhich no two scholars of this age could believe (Though he alone believed it quite easily), And hurled it at foeman's shield of six indubitable strata; But, checked thereby, the shameless assumption glanced aside. Next did the other lift up a much larger hypothesis, And threw it, nor missed, at enemy's book: Through six editions did the missile penetrate, But the seventh stopped it, made of the hide of a calf. Then the two armies advanced with clamour unspeakable, And a chorus of Babel arose before the face of heaven. As when the South Wind sheds a mist over mountain-peaks, A mist hated of shepherd, but to robber better than night, Even so ascended a thick dust-cloud of uncertainty From beneath their feet as they went. CLCR25 (191 1) 63. The Homeric Question is an apt phrase. The difficulty of any genuine attempt to determine the process by which our texts of the Iliad and the Odyssey were composed may well lead even an optimist to despair. But the greatness of the poems inspires lasting pleasure and interest in every age and I hope will permit a hearing for my claim, however deluded, to be able to progress a little nearer the heart of the matter. Let me say in advance (though I shall do my utmost to avoid using these conclusions in argument) that I believe the poems to have been composed, more or less as we have them, by a single person in a process which I call "the progressive fixation of a text." I deliberately use this ;: 2 Illinois Classical Studies, II new-fangled expression, because I think we have to deal with a very special situation. I do not consider the composer an oral poet as defined by the scholars who employ this description, nor do I think it could be other than misleading to say without qualification that he wrote. Still, write I believe he did, and I will try to show how. For my whole position on Homer the most crucial issue is that of single versus multiple authorship, and I do not think it can ever be insisted strongly enough that the earliest tradition about the poems attributes them to one man. When Denys Page writes "the fact that tradition attached to both poems a single name, Homer, would be instructive if we knew what it meant," he is tendentiously expressing as doubtful what is on the con- trary an uncompromising assertion. I freely grant the tradition may be a mistaken one. But it was not a tradition beset by uncertainty or am- biguity. In the classical age of Greece no one questioned the unity of the Iliad or of the Odyssey, or doubted that both were the work of one poet Homer. Nor in the Hellenistic age, when the production of literary masterpieces ceased, and the Greeks diverted their great talents to subtle speculations and argumentation, not then were Homer's existence and title challenged. True, among these pieces of sophistry were attempts to prove that the Iliad and the Odyssey were put together by different authors but Aristarchus called them paradoxes and wrote a tract in refutation. Seneca referred to them as an example of that Greek perversity in seeking absurd themes for argument. Lucian satirized them. And the world at large dismissed them as the whimsical fancies of professorial cranks until in 1795 F. A. Wolf produced his famous Prolegomena. This was the age of Voltaire and the French Revolution: an age of disbelief and scepticism; an age which glorified the common man and dethroned the great; an age animated by the conviction that mankind progresses and flourishes, not principally under the leadership of genius, but under the impetus of the collective efforts of the people. For Wolf, the Iliad and the Odyssey were folk-poetry, the poetic expression of the entire people, and not the creation of any single superior genius. Wolf's main reason for doubting the unity of the Homeric poems was that writing was unknown at the time the Iliad originated or was so little known that it could not be used for literary purposes ; and without writing Wolf regarded it as impossible that a poem of such bulk as the Iliad should either have been composed or, granting that miracle, that it should have been preserved. His conclu- sions were these: the Homeric poems were originally not written at all but composed in the memory; exposed to the alterations of chance and design, they were carried abroad by rhapsodists until the technology of a G. P. Goold 3 lettered age secured for them a written form. This is essentially the view of the analysts, a view held by many scholars today : the creative poets are beyond our reach; their material took centuries to attain its present form in our written Iliad and Odyssey ; and the process was one of constant deterioration from artistic excellence. Naturally this view, utterly in- compatible with the belief of antiquity, aroused and still arouses a good deal of spirited reaction. But although the unitarians were able to con- trive some compelling arguments for adhering to ancient tradition, they must on the whole be deemed unsuccessful in their attempts to controvert, when they chose to meet, the arguments of their analytical opponents. It often happens that progress does not occur in precisely the quarter at which effort has been directed, and in some ways Milman Parry's studies of formulae and his investigations into the nature of oral poetry have diverted attention from the real issue. For Milman Parry and his successors it is axiomatic that the Iliad and Odyssey have been orally composed; composed, that is to say, without the aid of writing. But this is merely to restate the problem, for by simple definition the Iliad and Odyssey are written texts ; and in trying to solve the riddle of authorship we are forced back to regard the Homeric question, with Wolf, as funda- mentally a matter of reconciling the existence of our written Iliad and Odyssey with the features of oral composition which they allegedly dis- play, Albert Lord's theory that the poems are "oral dictated texts" is the only one to command any measure of acceptance ; and in my earlier paper on Homer I expressed my own assent.