HOMERIC SCHOLIA As of This Wntmg, Homeric Scholarship

GREGORY NAGY HOMERIC SCHOLIA As of this wntmg, Homeric scholarship has not yet succeeded in achieving a definitive edition of either the Iliad or the OtfySSf!)!. Ide ally, such an edition would encompass the full historical reality of the Homeric textual tradition as it evolved through time, from the pre-Classical era well into the medieval. The problem is, Homeric scholarship has not yet reached a consensus on the criteria for estab lishing an edition as 'definitive.' The ongoing disagreements reflect a wide variety of answers to the many serious questions that remain about Homer and Homeric poetry. Crucial to most of these ques tions is the information provided by the Homeric scholia. The relevance of the scholia (plural of scholion), that is, of the marginal and/or interlinear notes (also glossaries and lexica) that accompany the text of Homer in a wide variety of manuscripts, was first made manifest to the world of modem Homeric scholarship in 1788, when Jean Baptiste Gaspard d'Ansse de Villoison published the tenth-century Venetus A codex manuscript of the Iliad of Homer (codex Marcianus 454). In his Prolegomena, Villoison assesses the impact of the A-scholia on Homeric scholarship: By way of these scholia, never before published, the greatest light is shed on Homer's poetry. Obscure passages are illuminated; the rites, customs, mythology, and geography if the ancients are exp1£lined; the original and genuine reading is established; the variant readings if various codices and editions as well as the emendations if the Critics are weighed. For it is evident that the Homeric contextus, which was recited by the rhapsodes from memory and which used to be sung orallY by everyone, was alreatfy for a long time corrupt, since it would have been impossible for the different rhapsodes of the different regions of Greece not to be forced by necessity to subtract, add, and change many things. That Homer committed his poems to writing is denied by Josephus at the beginning of Book I of his Against Apion, and this opin ion seems to be shared by an unpublished Scholiast to Dionysius Thrax, who narrates that the poems of Homer, which were preserved only in men's minds and memory and were not written, had become extinct by the time of Pisistratus, and that he accordingly offered a reward to those who would bring him Homeric verses, and that, as a result, many people, greedy for money, sold Pisistratu~ their verses as if they 102 GREGORY NAGY were Homeric. The Critics left these spurious verses in the Edition, but marked them with the obelus. (Villoison [1788] xxxiv. Translation and emphases mine) I This assessment in Villoison's 1788 Prolegomena anticipated in some significant details the ultimately far more influential views of Fried rich August Wolf in his Prolegomena ad Homerum, published in 1795 (English-language edition 1985; see Turner, this volV In other de tails, however, Wolf's assessment diverged radically from that of Villoison. This divergence is crucial for weighing the importance of the Homeric scholia and, by extension, even for determining the criteria for editing Homer. The point of disagreement centers on what the scholia tell us about the ancient kritikoi or Critics, as Villoison refers to them in the passage just quoted. These critics are the scholars responsible for the textual transmis sion of Homer in the Library of Alexandria, founded in the early third century B.C., the era of Zenodotus of Ephesus, who is credited with the first Alexandrian 'edition' of Homer. There were subsequent 'editions' by Aristophanes of Byzantium, who became head of the Library around the beginning of the second century B.C., and by a later director, Aristarchus of Samothrace, the culmination of whose work is dated around the middle of the second century B.C. It is the 'edition' of Homer by Aristarchus, as frequently cited by the Homeric scholia, that constitutes the primary authority of the Homeric scholia. Here we come to the central point of divergence between Villoison and Wolf: whereas Villoison viewed the A-scholia as an authoritative witness to an authoritative edition of Homer by Aristarchus, Wolf swerved from this position by questioning the authoritativeness of the scholia and, more fundamentally, the authority of Aristarchus as an editor of Homeric poetry. This swerve away from Villoison's position is reflected in the fullest single collection of data currently I I leave untranslated Villoison's use of contextus, which conveys the metaphorical sense of 'fabric, structure' (cf. the verb con-tex8). On the rhaps8idoi or 'rhapsodes,' professional performers of Homeric and other Archaic poetry, see nn. 22 and 28 below. The obelus is a horizontal mark, placed next to a verse in the left-hand margin of a text, to indicate the editor's doubts about .the authenticity of the verse: see n. 48 below. 2 Besides translating WoWs original Latin text into English, Grafton, Most, and Zetzel have written an introduction and notes focusing on Wolf's influence on Homeric scholarship. pp. 7- 8 give their translation of the passage from Villoison (1788) xxxiv quoted above. They do not stress Wolf's fundamental debt to this specific formula tion by Villoison. On that subject, see Pierron (1869) I, xxiii; II, 509 n. I. .

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