Pindar, Sappho, and Alexandrian Editions Enrico Emanuele Prodi
Text as Paratext: Pindar, Sappho, and Alexandrian Editions Enrico Emanuele Prodi HAT LITTLE SURVIVES of the archaic Greek lyricists has come down to us as bare text, shorn of music, Wdance, location, ambience, occasion, ceremony.1 Our texts ultimately go back to Alexandria and the late third century B.C., when the scholars of the Museum compiled what were to become the canonical editions of those poets; and what those editions preserved and enabled to circulate anew throughout the Greek-speaking world were written words alone. But that from sung spectacle to written text, from body and voice to papyrus and ink, was not the only change of state to which lyric poetry was subjected between the archaic and the Hellenistic age. Another, equally momentous transforma- tion took place: individual compositions which were originally independent of, and unrelated to, one another became joined together in a fixed sequence as constituents of a larger unit, the book.2 Lyric was not the only kind of poetry that was affected by this 1 Fragments of Pindar are cited from Snell-Maehler, fragments of Sappho and Alcaeus from Voigt. All translations are my own. 2 G. O. Hutchinson, “Doing Things with Books,” Talking Books: Readings in Hellenistic and Roman Books of Poetry (Oxford 2008) 1–2, cf. 4–15. On ancient poetry books see also J. van Sickle, “The Book-Roll and Some Conventions of the Poetic Book,” Arethusa 13 (1980) 5–42. The interrelation between Pindaric song and the materiality of the book is now the subject of T. Phillips, Pindar’s Library: Performance Poetry and Material Texts (Oxford 2016), a volume I was regrettably unable to consult until rather late in the composition of the present article.
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