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Transmission and Textual Variants: Divergent Fragments of Sappho's Transmission And Textual Variants 17 Chapter 1 Transmission and Textual Variants: Divergent Fragments of Sappho’s Songs Examined Mark de Kreij “New Philology” focuses on texts in their material and unique forms. The name comes from a movement initiated by American philologists working on medi- aeval texts, who in the 1990 issue of Speculum argued for a more systematic analysis of the many different versions of mediaeval texts that have been trans- mitted.1 This focus on the divergence of texts, as opposed to the emphasis on reconstruction of an original Urtext, had already been advocated by Zumthor and Cerquiglini in the preceding decades, but was only now applied to a range of actual corpora.2 After an endorsement by the German mediaevalist Stack- mann, “New Philology” became known to a wider audience, who realized its applicability to corpora other than mediaeval epic songs.3 The panel at the Text, Transmission, Reception conference in Nijmegen showed how New Philol- ogy may illuminate issues in textual corpora ranging from early antiquity to the twentieth century. After all, instability of texts is of all times, whether it manifests in different versions on a papyrus and in a manuscript, in multiple editions and translations of an eighteenth century novel, or in contemporary paper and digital editions. Though the approach and main tenets may be similar for each period and genre, the salient issues differ significantly. In classical studies, the strength of New Philology lies in its ability to reveal the effects of different stages of tex- tual transmission.4 This approach places the texts – that is the multiple actual- izations of a text in all possible forms – first, in a more radical way than the majority of researchers in classics tend to do. From ancient papyri and inscrip- tions to late mediaeval manuscripts and fragments quoted within other works, 1 See the introduction by Nichols on pages 1–10 for a statement of intent. 2 Zumthor (1972) and (1983), Cerquiglini (1989). 3 Stackmann (1994). 4 In the field of classics, Gentili (1984) anticipated some of the tenets of New Philology. More recently, Lardinois (2006) discusses divergent versions of Solon’s poetry transmitted in differ- ent sources. Likewise, Lardinois [forthcoming] is explicitly new-philological in its approach to texts of early Greek song. © Mark de Kreij, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004270848_003 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution- Noncommercial 3.0 Unported (CC-BY-NC 3.0) License. Mark de Kreij - 9789004270848 Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 03:51:05AM via free access 18 De Kreij the field of classical studies has a wealth of material at its disposal for this kind of research. Historically, the tendency in classical philology has been to approach its rich corpus with the intention of reconstructing original texts. Each instantiation of a certain text is thus appreciated only insofar as it is helpful to that enter- prise. However, it is almost impossible to reconstruct the original version of any text, and in the case of archaic and classical Greek texts there is no hope at all of establishing the original form; a situation that arises due to the non-exis- tence of literature (as we know it today) before the fifth century BC. If texts were written down, they were not intended for publication and reading, but rather for conservation and re-performance. The texts that we regard as the “classics” of classical literature in this period were primarily works to be per- formed; be it the Homeric epics, the dramas by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Eu- ripides, or the lyric songs composed by Pindar, Alcaeus, or indeed Sappho, who composed songs on Lesbos in the sixth century BC.5 Modern editions of Sappho’s songs have been pieced together from quota- tions in the works of other, later, authors and – more recently – from scraps of papyrus. The sources at our disposal, then, were written down no earlier than three hundred years after the supposed composition, while the majority dates from the Middle Ages. Moreover, they are no more than the textual component of a larger whole that once included music, a specific venue, and probably dance. Generally, the only residue of the songs’ original nature is their metrical pattern, and sometimes not even that.6 The texts in our possession are very fragmentary, represent only one facet of the original performance of Sappho’s songs, and are separated from the date of composition by a physical gap of at least three centuries, which raises the question: How may such inevitably com- promised sources for Sappho’s songs serve classical philologists? A tentative answer requires first a survey of the traditional philological research on the fragments of Sappho. Adducing two quotes of Sappho in second-century AD 5 See especially Andrew Ford’s “From Letters to Literature. Reading the ‘Song Culture’ of Classical Greece” in Yunis (2003) 15–37. 6 Greek metre is based on the division of heavy and light syllables (or “long” and “short”). This fact may help our understanding of Sappho in two ways. Firstly, knowledge of the metres she used may help identify a specific metrical pattern even if we only have a frag- mentary text. Secondly, some of Sappho’s music was stanzaic, built out of repeated metri- cal – and probably melodic – patterns. If we have a large enough part of the song, it is possible to establish if the metrical pattern recurs consistently – even if we have never encountered that specific metre before. With these two tools, it becomes possible in some instances to establish the original metre, and note where the text departs from the pat- tern; these places then invite discussion. Mark de Kreij - 9789004270848 Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 03:51:05AM via free access Transmission And Textual Variants 19 sources, I will probe the possibilities offered by, and challenges posed to, New Philology in the field of classics. In Sappho’s case, while the later sources may point only minimally toward her original sixth century BC compositions, they provide tantalizing glimpses of the form of her songs in the early centuries of our era. The problems with the textual tradition for Sappho arise from the fact that unlike for Homer, for example, no manuscript edition of Sappho’s songs has survived from the Middle Ages.7 As a result we are reliant upon quotations in other texts, either transmitted on papyri or, mainly, in mediaeval manuscripts, upon fragments of papyri, which date from the third century BC to the fourth century AD, a piece of parchment (sixth century AD), and the Sappho ostrakon (or potsherd) that contains the fragment 2 V.8 The fragmentary nature of the extant texts is, however, not the only problem we face when reconstructing Sappho’s songs. Working on sixth-century BC Lesbos, Sappho probably com- posed her songs in a dialect that was far removed from the Greek of classical Athens, let alone that of later antiquity or the Middle Ages. This is reflected in the fact that the forms we find in the mediaeval indirect sources differ consid- erably from those found in early Lesbian inscriptions and in treatises by an- cient grammarians.9 Editing Sappho’s texts, then, has been a process of reconstruction for schol- ars from the outset.10 If the goal is to approach the original compositions as closely as possible, this method is indeed the only one available to us, but New Philology argues that reconstruction is not the only goal in classical philology. The reconstructive method is reliant upon later authors’ competence in copy- ing correct citations into their own texts, as well as on the accuracy of our knowledge regarding Sappho’s metres and the Lesbian dialect. These presup- positions have had the effect that the divergent forms of Sappho’s songs, as found in the great majority of sources, have been picked apart and reconstruct- 7 The same thing holds for the other Greek poets of the lyric canon, with the sole exception of Pindar. See Hadjimichael (2011) for a rich exposition on the early transmission of the early Greek lyric composers, as well as an analysis of its reception in the peripatetic schol- ars. 8 The edition referred to throughout is Voigt (1971). The original edition of the ostrakon is Papiri della Società Italiana XIII, 1300. 9 The two most recent works on the dialect of the Lesbian poets, by Hooker and A.M. Bowie, provide a framework that is based on inscriptional evidence and ancient descrip- tions of the dialect. This produces a set of rules that appears to have been followed quite closely by the ancient editors, at least as far as that is reflected in the papyrus evidence. 10 Until the late nineteenth century Sappho’s corpus was restricted to fragments transmitted in indirect sources. Mark de Kreij - 9789004270848 Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 03:51:05AM via free access 20 De Kreij ed to fit the expected form of both dialect and metre. Those “divergent” frag- ments of Sappho have thus rarely been studied in situ.11 The bulk of the fragments of Sappho’s songs are found as quotations in the works of later authors such as Plutarch (first-second century AD), Stobaeus (fifth century AD), and Athenaeus (second-third century AD), which bring with them a very particular problem for the textual critic. The relation between the host text and the quoted fragment is similar to a mise-en-abîme, and it urges us to consider the interplay between the two very closely. After all, it is one thing to attempt to reconstruct an original song by Sappho with all the knowledge of metre and dialect we have now, and quite another to assume that, firstly, the author quoting her song in the second century AD had the same knowledge and, secondly, had the intention or even the opportunity to faithfully render the original.
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