Sophocles scholia

[mwh]

Here’s the note on Ajax 1142ff. that I mentioned in the Ajax 1132 thread. It will come from a commentary, and looks as if it represents post-Aristotelian literary criticism.

τὰ τοιαῦτα σοφίσματα οὐκ οiκεῖα τραγωδίας· μετὰ γὰρ τὴν ἀναίρεσιν ἐπεκτεῖναι τὸ δρᾶμα θελήσας, ἐψυχρεύσατο, καὶ ἔλυσε τὸ τραγικὸν πάθος.
(https://play.google.com/books/reader?id ... =GBS.PA109, link courtesy of jeidsath.)

“Sophistic arguments like these are not proper for tragedy. By deciding to stretch out the play after the body is taken up for burial, he made it fall flat and dissipated the tragic passion.”

So here we see the interplay of conceptions of generic propriety (what is “at home” in tragedy), of “frigidity” (ψυχρότης, a key lit-crit term), and of “tragic πάθος.” The charge is that Sophocles weakens the play by dragging it out so; it’s a criticism that finds echoes in some modern studies of the play.

Comments, thoughts? Seems to me these scholia are worth reading. Translation of the lit-crit scholia would be a worthwhile enterprise. Anyone up for it?

[Scribo]

Very interesting, thanks for this.

[jeidsath]

I could put up a webpage similar to this one for it if you think there might be interest:

http://dcthree.github.io/harpokration/

[mwh]

Well I don’t know if there’s interest or not, but I’d hope there would be. Interest in ancient scholarship is burgeoning, as it becomes more accessible. Now I don’t actually recall whether Georgios Christodoulou’s critical edition of the Ajax scholia translates them or not; if he did, it was probably into modern Greek, but he may well not have offered translation at all, since his main concern was with sorting out the manuscript tradition. Anyway, an English translation would have wider use (especially online, obviously), and would definitely fill a need.

Crowd-sourcing is a possibility, and an obvious way to go (cf. e.g. Suda), though the results would probably be less than satisfactory. But for me personally it would most interesting if we kept this as a textkit thread, at least for now. It would be great if textkit members just took a look at a page or two of the Ajax scholia and pick out one or more of the more significant ones—or simply comment or ask questions about what they find. My eye just happened to light on the 1142 one.

A book that makes this sort of material infinitely more accessible than it used to be is Eleanor Dickie’s Ancient Greek Scholarship, an outstanding work that made good use of experts in the field. She not only gives a systematic survey of modern work on the various authors but also presents a graded set of sample scholia. How I wish the book had been available when I began to initiate myself in these things! There’s also René Nünlist’s The Ancient Critic at Work, focussing on ancient lit. crit. in scholia (largely Homeric). Both books explain terms. I think Googlebooks gives a generous amount of them.

So, how about it? Open to all regardless of experience. I think it would be both useful and a fun thing to do.

[jeidsath]

Transcription of the first six lines of commentaries, A and B scholia. There are errors, so please comment on any that you see and I will edit this post to correct them. Contra-mwh, many of the ligatures were tough for me! I was especially unsure of "οἱ κατὰ θάλασσαν κακοῦργοι." Please let me know if you can read the abbreviation.

Ἀθηνᾶ
ἀεὶ μέν, ὦ παῖ Λαρτίου, δέδορκά σε
πεῖράν τιν’ ἐχθρῶν ἁρπάσαι θηρώμενον·
καὶ νῦν ἐπὶ σκηναῖς σε ναυτικαῖς ὁρῶ
Αἴαντος, ἔνθα τάξιν ἐσχάτην ἔχει,
πάλαι κυνηγετοῦντα καὶ μετρούμενον
ἴχνη τὰ κείνου νεοχάραχθ’, ὅπως ἴδῃς
Perseus Text (lines 1-6)

ΣΧΟΛΙΑ ΠΑΛΑΙ
ΕΙΣ ΤΟΝ ΜΑΣΤΙΓΟΦΟΡΟΝ ΑΙΑΝΤΑ

A ΣΧΟΛΙΑ

1. ΑΕΙ ΜΕΝ Ω ΠΑΙ. πάρεστιν Ὀδυσσεὺς ἐπὶ τὴν σκηνὴν ἀγωνιῶν καὶ πολυπραγμονῶν, μή τι ἀπὸ ἐχθροῦ πάθη· πάντα δὲ τὰ τῆς ὑποθέσεως συνεκτικῶς ἐδήλωσεν ἐν τῷ προοιμίῳ, πρὸς τίνα ὁ λόγος, καὶ ποῦ ἡ σκηνὴ, καὶ τί πράττει ὁ Ὀδυσσεύς· ἐν δὲ τῷ ΠΕΙΡΑΝ ΤΙΝ’ ΕΧΘΡΩΝ λείπει ἣ κατά. Ἤδη ἴχνος τι κατίθετο τῆς ὑποθέσεως, ὡς παρ’ ἐχθρὸν ἥκει· δεῖ δὲ τὰ τῆς ὑποθέσεως συνεκτικὰ εἶναι ἐν ἀρχῇ· ἀεὶ ὁρῶ σε, ὦ Ὀδυσσεῦ, πείρᾳ καὶ δόλῳ μετίοντα τοὺς ἐχθροὺς· πεῖρα δὲ, ἡ βλάβη, ὡς καὶ ἐν Δανάῃ·

Οὐκ οἶδα τὴν σὴν πεἶραν· ἓν δ’ ἐπίσταμαι ,
τοῦ παιδὸς ὄντος τοῦδ’, ἐγὼ διόλλυμαι.

τὸ δὲ ΑΕΙ εἶπεν, ἀναφέρουσα εἰς ἐκεῖνο, ὅτι καὶ μετὰ Διμήδους κατάσκοπος γενόμενος ἐπὶ τοὺς Τρῶας οὐκ ἔλαθεν αὐτὸν, ὡς αὐτὸς μαρτυρῶν φησι· (Ἱλ. κʹ. 278.)

Κλῦθί μοι, αἰγιόχοιο Διὸς τέκος, ἥ τε μοι αἰεὶ
Ἐν πάντεσσι πόνοισι παρίστασαι, οὐδέ σε λήθω.

δυοχεραίνει δὲ ἡ Ἀθηνᾶ τῳ Αἴαντι, ὅτι ἀπώσατο τὴν συμμαχίαν αὐτῆς. Εἰς τὸ αὐτό· ἀεὶ ὁρῶ σε, ὦ Ὀδυσσεῦ, τὴν παρὰ τῶν ἐχθρῶν σοι γινομένω βλάβην ζητοῦντα προϋφαρμάσαι· οἷον, ἐπιβουλεύει σοί τις; σπουδάζεις τὴν ἐπιβουλὴν τὴν κατὰ σοῦ γινομένην αὐτῷ τῷ ἐπιβουλεύσαντι βλαβερὰν γενέασαι· ἐκ μεταφορᾶς τῶν κυνηγῶν, οἳ τὰ μικρὰ θηρία φονεύουσι, προφυλαττόμενοι τὴν ἐξ αὐτῶν ἐσομένην βλάβην. Πεῖρα δὲ Ἀττικῶς δόλος καὶ τέχνη, ὅθεν καὶ πειρατὶ, οἱ κατὰ θάλασσαν κακοῦργοι. ΛΑ’ΡΤΙΟΥ. κτητικὸν ἀντὶ κυρίου. ΘΗΡΩΜΕΝΟΝ. ἀντὶ τοῦ ἀνιχνεύοντα· ἐπίνεγκε δὲ καὶ τὰ ἄλλα μεταφορικῶς, καὶ τὸ ΜΕΤΡΟΥΜΕΝΟΝ, ἀριθμοῦντα, ζητοῦντα, ἀκολουθοῦντα τὰ ἴχνη τὰ ἐκείνου.

6. ΝΕΟΧΑΡΑΧΤΑ. νεωστὶ κεχαραγμένα· εὐφυῶς· ὁπόταν γὰρ νεωστὶ αἱ ἀποχαράξεις τῶν ζώων γένωνται, μᾶλλον ἐπακολουθοῦσιν οἱ κυνηγέται, πρὶν ὑπὸ ἀνέμου ἀφανιαθῇ ἡ ὀδμή· προσοχὴν δὲ ἐργάζεται τῷ ἀκροατῇ προὶ τῶν δηλωθησομένων.

Β ΣΧΟΛΙΑ

1. ΑΕΙ ΜΕΝ. ὦ ὑιὲ τοῦ Λαερτίου, ἀεὶ ὀρῶ σε μετιόντα τοὺς ἐχθροὺς πείρᾳ καὶ βλάβῃ. Τοῦτο δὲ καλῶς ἔφη, ὅτι καὶ μετὰ Διομήδες κατάσκοπος ἐγένετο ἐπὶ τοὺς Τρῶας. ἰστέον δὲ, ὅτι δι’ οὐδὲν ἄλλο δυοχεραίνει ἡ Ἀθηνᾶ κατὰ τοῦ Αἴαντος, ἣ διότι ἀπώστα τὴν συμμαχίαν αὐτῆς, ὡς προϊὼν ὁ λόγος δηλώσει. ΔΕΔΟΡΚΑ. δέρκω· ὁ μέλλων, δέρξω· ὁ παρακείμενος, δέδορχα· ὁ μέσος, δέδορκα· λαμβάνεται δὲ ὡς πλατὺς ἐνεστώς· εἰκείως ἔχουσιν οἱ παρακείμενοι ἀντὶ ἐνεστώτων λαμβάνεσθαι· οὐ μὴν πάντες παρακείμενοι οὕτω λαμβάνονται· ἀλλ’ εἰσὶ μὲν οἳ ἐπὶ σημασίας ἐνεστῶτος ἀεὶ λαμβάνονται, ὡς ὁ δέδορκα, δέδοικα, πέφρικα, καὶ ἕτεροι· εἰσὶ δὲ οἳ οὐδέποτε ἐπὶ ἐνεστῶτος λαμβάνονται, ἀλλ’ ἀεὶ ἐπὶ παρεληλυθότος, ὡς ὁ πεπόνθα, πεποίηκα, καὶ ἕτεροι· εἰσὶ δὲ οἳ ἐνίοτε μὲν ἐπὶ ἐνεστῶτος, ἐνίοτε δὲ ἐπὶ παρεληλυθότος λαμβάνονται, ὡς ὁ πεποίημαι, οἷον πεποίημαί τινα φίλον, ἣ ἀντὶ τοῦ ποιοῦμαι, ἣ ἀντὶ τοῦ ἐποιησάμην.

2. ΠΕΙΡΑΝ, προσβολὴν, ἐπιχείρησιν· πειρῶμαί σου καλοῦ, ἀντὶ τοῦ, διὰ πείρας σε καταλαμβάνω καλόν· καὶ, πειρῶμαι τῆς γνώμης σου εἰ μὴ μεταβέβληται, ἀντι τοῦ θέλω διὰ πείρας καταλαβεῖν αὐτήν· καὶ πειρῶμαι βλάπτειν σε, ἀντι τοῦ ἐπιχειρῶ· ἀφ’ ὧν πεῖρα, ἣν δίδωσί τις τινὶ, ἢλαμβάνει· καὶ ἡ προσβολὴ, καὶ ἐπιχείρησις, καθ’ ὃ λέγεται ἐνταῦηα.

3. ΕΠΙ ΣΚΗΝΑΙΣ, παρὰ ταῖς σκηναῖς· σκηνὴ, ἡ πρόσκαιρος κατοικία, ἣν Ὅμηρος κλισίην λέγει, καὶ ἡ τῶν δραματουργῶν σκευὴ, ἤγουν τὰ προσωπεῖα, οἱ ἐμβάται, καὶ αἱ τοιαῦται στολαὶ, καὶ τἄλλα· καὶ ἀπὸ τούτων σκηνὴ, πᾶσα ὑπόκρισις καὶ ὑπουλότης.

4. ΕΝΘΑ ΤΑΞΙΝ ΕΣΧΑΤΗΝ ΕΧΕΙ. ταῦτα διὰ μέσου. ΜΕΤΡΟΥΜΕΝΟΝ, στοχαζόμενον. ΝΕΟΧΑΡΑΧΘ’, νεωστὶ κεχαραγμένα, ἢ σεσημασμένα.

[Markos]

Transcription of the first six lines of commentaries, A and B scholia...

For what it's worth, Joel, your transcription is very helpful to me right now because I am doing a monolingual reading of Ajax using only Doukas, Caruso, and any readable scholia I can find (including Chad's, which are actually the most helpful of all.) I should probably take the time to learn the ligatures better, but I have a hard time with them.

So, though I imagine it is tedious for you to do (does that optical scanning software help at all?), I'd love to see you keep it up. I would actually go out of my way right now NOT to read any translation of these scholia, since I am using the Ajax as a test case for how comprehensible Sophocles can become using only mono-lingual resources, but I certainly can see the value in other contexts of producing a translation.

[John W.]

Markos - good luck with your reading of the Ajax.

One point which worries/puzzles me about the monolingual approach, at least for certain texts, is this. Most monolingual sources I see mentioned (e.g. scholia, Doukas) are based on editions of the Greek text that have generally long been superseded by subsequent centuries of scholarship, papyrological discoveries etc. How do you factor all this in using a monolingual approach? Put another way, if you are reading a modern edition of a Greek text, isn't there likely to be a disjuncture between the text you are reading, and the monolingual resources you are using, which may well be based on a much less satisfactory state of the text, and may offer no guidance on the specific readings which appear in the edition of the text you are studying?

I have no idea to what extent this applies to the Ajax; in the case of Thucydides, however, I would not consider it feasible to get anywhere near a full understanding of the text (even to the extent conceptually possible with this author!) using just rather antiquated monolingual resources.

What are your own views on this point?

Best wishes,

John

[jeidsath]

@Markos, No OCR in use. After some practice, I am just a fast typer in Greek.

Some translation follows:

1. ΑΕΙ ΜΕΝ Ω ΠΑΙ. Odysseus is present at the tent struggling and much troubled lest he receive some hurt from an enemy. All of the elements of the hypothesis have been made clear in the introduction. To whom the speech, and the location of the tent, and what Odysseus is doing. In the words ΠΕΙΡΑΝ ΤΙΝ’ ΕΧΘΡΩΝ are left the rest. Already some track of the hypothesis has been set down, that he’s come upon an enemy. The pulling together of the hypothesis needs to by in the beginning.

[Markos]

Markos - good luck with your reading of the Ajax.

One point which worries/puzzles me about the monolingual approach, at least for certain texts, is this. Most monolingual sources I see mentioned (e.g. scholia, Doukas) are based on editions of the Greek text that have generally long been superseded by subsequent centuries of scholarship, papyrological discoveries etc. How do you factor all this in using a monolingual approach? Put another way, if you are reading a modern edition of a Greek text, isn't there likely to be a disjuncture between the text you are reading, and the monolingual resources you are using, which may well be based on a much less satisfactory state of the text, and may offer no guidance on the specific readings which appear in the edition of the text you are studying?

I have no idea to what extent this applies to the Ajax; in the case of Thucydides, however, I would not consider it feasible to get anywhere near a full understanding of the text (even to the extent conceptually possible with this author!) using just rather antiquated monolingual resources.

What are your own views on this point?

Best wishes,

John

Hi, John,

I will give you my views on this point when I do a post on Doukas after I finish his Ajax. I am on line 964.

[mwh]

The idea was to pick out some of the literary-critical scholia. That’s evidently not going to work.

I certainly didn’t want to put Joel to the trouble of typing out all the scholia, or indeed any of them. I figured that if people had enough Greek to understand the scholia they’d be able to cope with the script in which they were printed. That hasn’t yet been put to the test, and it doesn't look as if it will be.

If there’s more interest in working through the initial amalgam of notes rather than fastening on ones of greater significance, then I can go along with that. There's plenty there to occupy us.

But it seems the thread is at risk of becoming yet another forum on the virtues and vices of “monolingualism” (i.e. using Greek to the exclusion of English). I really don’t want to re-engage in debate about this, so will simply say that for English-speakers to resist the use of English in discussing and elucidating ancient Greek texts is in my view sheer perversity. As is promoting a 19th-century Greek’s classicizing quasi-paraphrase as a means of access to the poetry of Sophocles.

—But this argument belongs elsewhere. So back for a moment to the Sophocles scholia.

Joel, in poor return for all your copying and translating:

The point being made in the first note that is all the elements of the plot (ὑπόθεσις—the underpinning of the play) appear in summary form (συνεκτικῶς) at the outset. And that (acc. to the schol.) is just as it should be.

The intrusive short note inserted after πειραν τιν’ εχθρων runs λείπει ἡ κατά (sc. πρόθεσις), meaning that the preposition κατά is omitted before ἐχθρῶν. (We might prefer to say that εχθρων is an objective genitive.) Such λείπει-notes—the jargon of elementary exegesis—can serve to identify poetic usage.

Your κατίθετο is typo for κατέθετο (middle, not passive—you have too many passives in your translation. Subject is Sophocles.)
I haven’t proofread further, but yes it’s κατὰ θάλασσαν (and of course πειραταὶ not –τὶ).

—But given the dual difficulties in (a) reading the script and (b) understanding the content, it may be that this was too ambitious a thread, even before it was derailed.

[John W.]

Mwh - I was certainly not attempting to turn this into a general discussion on the virtues (or otherwise) of monolingualism, merely asking for Markos' views on a specific issue that had occurred to me as a result of reading previous posts on this thread. I am sorry if I have in any way 'derailed' it.

John

[mwh]

John,
No please don't apologize. Yours was a perfectly innocuous post. It’s just that I set up this thread to deal with the ancient scholia and what they have to say about Sophocles and his play, and quite frankly I was hoping to escape Markos’ interposition of Doukas and monolingualism, which has infected all recent Sophocles threads, most recently the one on Aj.1132 (http://www.textkit.com/greek-latin-foru ... =2&t=63501). Some of these scholia (not all that many, it's true) offer remarkably good exegesis. And good or bad, they give great insight into how scholars and teachers in antiquity set about elucidating their classics.

In a post on another thread you mentioned Sophoclean artistry. That is something (as perhaps you implied) that paraphrases and glosses and suchlike are blind to; their reductivism conceals the all-important basic fact that Sophocles composed poetry. Only the most insightful scholia touch on the tragedian’s art. (They’re in many ways comparable with the Homeric bT-scholia, it seems to me, and will have a similar source.) That’s why I proposed selectivity, pulling out the plums rather than wallowing in the stodge.

When I read scholia, or any other Greek, I do so without translating. Accurate translation is time-consuming (as you of all people don't have to be told), and I don’t see the need for it except to express my understanding of the text. But of course translation does make Greek texts to some extent accessible to those with no or inadequate knowledge of the language (and some of these scholia can be difficult to understand), and I envisaged that as one purpose of the thread. — This is merely for clarification. I know threads go wherever posters choose to take them, and that's ok by me.

Best,
Michael

[Paul Derouda]

I like the idea of this thread, although there are of course difficulties, as already mentioned by mwh. I've thought engaging with the Homeric scholia for some time already, and I've even acquired the first two volumes of the new edition of Odyssey scholia by Pontani. Until now, I've taken a look at it only very rarely. Beside the fact that there's never enough time to do anything, I've found the challenge a bit daunting. Typically, the scholia are not very difficult Greek, but the fact that there's no translation means that if I'm stuck I'm stuck for good, and for that reason I've thought that I'll need to wait until I know Greek better. Also, the language of literary criticism in Greek is foreign to me. Then, I don't feel I don't know enough about the background of these texts, where they come from, what they are (but thanks for the suggestions above, mwh!). It doesn't help either that the book's introduction is in Latin.

It might be an interesting idea to read Ajax along with these scholia. But I'm not sure if I have the time.

I don't think the font is a big deal, however. Learning a few ligatures is surprisingly easy. One google search for "greek ligatures" gave me this: http://thisismylanguageblog.tumblr.com/ ... s-tironian. Note also the use of medial beta ϐ, still in use in French editions. ϖ, seen in some ligatures, is an old variant of π.

A practical question: I can't relate these scholia to my OCT Ajax. Is the line numbering different?

[Qimmik]

ϖ, seen in some ligatures, is an old variant of π.

It appears in minuscule mss. It's formed by writing two parallel downstrokes and then a horizontal stroke on top from left to right without lifting the pen off the paper.

[jeidsath]

William Ingram's article is a wonderful article about Greek typography during the early days of printing. It includes a comprehensive chart at the end.

[Paul Derouda]

That's a great article and much, much better than the link I found with my random Google search (but my point was really to show that resources are available).

[mwh]

A practical question: I can't relate these scholia to my OCT Ajax. Is the line numbering different?

Sorry Paul I quite missed that. The note on Brunck’s verse 1142 is in fact on what the now established numeration has as 1123. Difference in the colometry of the lyrics will (I presume) be responsible for the discrepancy. So I guess the given line numbers will get a little further out of sync as the play goes along, but not troublingly so, since the discrepancy is not great and the lemmas are provided.

On the Homer scholia (a diversion, not a derailment): Pontani is very good indeed, but his insistence on including practically everything is a nuisance if you’re concerned with the major scholia. I prefer how Erbse did it with Iliad. The Iliad scholia are not only much richer than the Od. ones but also much easier to sort out, thanks to the manuscript known as the Venetus A (hence the "A-scholia") which identifies the sources of its most important set of scholia as the (named) works of four (named) prominent literary scholars working in the footsteps of Aristarchus, sometimes referred to as the Viermännerkommentar. The four are pretty easy to distinguish. The bT-scholia I referred to, sometimes known as “exegetic,” are a quite different set of unknown authorship (normally thought to be from a variety of sources, but I think they’re basically unitary, a one-man product—like the Iliad itself). Perhaps I shouldn’t have compared the major Sophocles scholia to them, since they do have rather different aims and concerns (bT are largely apologetic in nature, tacitly answering criticisms of Homer).
The major Od. scholia are very poor by comparison, but only because they have been cut down even more severely than the Iliad ones, and there is no Od. counterpart to Ven.A of Il. The Odyssey scholia-carrying MSS are much later and fewer than the Iliad ones. There are remnants of papyrus commentaries which show the scale of the loss (both in Il. and Od.). The most substantial Odyssey one, on bk.20, is no. 3710 in vol.53 of The Oxyrhynchus Papyri (P.Oxy.3710). It’s very learned, quoting any number of authorities and presenting quite a number of previously unknown readings.
The “minor” scholia are the so-called D-scholia (from when they were thought to be Didyman, which they’re not); I think Pontani labels them V for Vulgata. They're discrete from the commentary-derived major scholia, which however they've infiltrated. They’re what schoolboys used to help them with Homeric vocabulary. So very interesting in their way but very low-level.
End of diversion.

Glad you don't find the ligatures a problem. As I remarked in the other thread, I find the script not only aesthetically more pleasing but actually easier to read than the modern letter-by-individual-letter style. But please let's not debate that here, or we’ll never get to the actual scholia.

So, what next? Or is the thread really a non-starter?

Michael

[jeidsath]

Here is an edition in a (more) modern type: https://books.google.com/books?id=7ClRA ... &q&f=false

It also contains the entire play, so line numbers should not be a problem. It's a very nice edition, so if anyone asks, I can upload it to a print-on-demand website.

I personally can't just go through the scholia and pick out the important bits without reading through all of it. So I'm just going to read through both the play and the scholia, and ask questions or note things that I think are interesting. First off, a lost play of Sophocles! This would be Danae's father, Akrisios, speaking about Perseus:

πεἶρα δὲ ἡ βλάβη, ὡς καὶ ἐν Δανάῃ·

Οὐκ οἶδα τὴν σὴν πεῖραν ἓν δ’ ἐπίσταμαι,
Τοῦ παιδὸς ὄντος τοῦδ’, ἐγὼ διόλλυμαι.

[Paul Derouda]

This edition is slightly more readable, at the first sight in the very least, but the font is also uglier. Hmm...

Well, I feel tempted indeed to the same, read both the scholia and the play. I do have the play both as an OCT and a Loeb, and both volumes are almost untouched, and it's stupid to have books you don't read. On the other hand, I must find the time somewhere, probably by cutting down on Herodotus.

Thanks for the clarification, mwh, and especially for the diversion!

[Paul Derouda]

Excuse me for another diversion, but one more question about Homeric scholia: Does anyone have an opinion whether Nagy's chapter in the New Companion to Homer is any good?

[Qimmik]

"Does anyone have an opinion whether Nagy's chapter in the New Companion to Homer is any good?"

If I remember correctly, it's thorough but polemical or at least controversial, as anything written by Nagy, and anything written about the A scholia, tends to be.

A dispute has been raging among scholars since the latter part of the 19th century as to whether variant readings ascribed to Aristarchus and other Alexandrian scholars in the A scholia reflect divergent readings they found in manuscripts, or instead were just made up by Aristarchus or someone else when they didn't like the reading in the text or texts they were working from. In other words, were the Alexandrian scholars engaging in something like modern textual criticism or not? A particular point of contention is what basis Aristarchus had for athetizing specific verses--marking them as not genuine. In some cases, it's clear that he was motivated by considerations of propriety that we wouldn't consider appropriate in editing a text.

The A scholia present material that is apparently drawn from a commentary (the VMK, or Vier-maenner-kommentar) that was compiled from treatises on various aspects of Homeric language by four post-Alexandrian scholars who in turn drew on the work of Alexandrian scholars including Aristarchus.

Again, if I remember correctly, Nagy thinks that Aristarchus consulted manuscripts and didn't wantonly make up variant readings. This fits in with his view that the text remained to some degree fluid down to the Alexandrian era, reflecting a process of progressive stabilization of an originally oral Iliad existing in multiple versions, and for this reason Nagy and his followers make something of a fetish of the Venetus A codex in which the A scholia are found (that's why they're called the "A scholia").

West, of course, thinks that the Iliad was textualized very early, and that the variants ascribed to Aristarchus in the A scholia are essentially worthless. This is the substance of their clash in the BMCR 15 or 20 years ago.

The issue of the reliability of the Aristarchus readings transmitted by the A scholia is not a new one, and I don't think there's a consensus on the issue, even among scholars who aren't necessarily in one camp or the other. So almost anything you read about the A scholia is bound to be somewhat tendentious one way or the other. The bT scholia are more literary comments and the D scholia are more or less glosses for reading the Iliad in schools.

Incidentally, most of Aristarchus' variants and athetizations apparently didn't make it into the Alexandrian "vulgate," and this is part of the puzzle of how the Iliad as we have it came into existence. I don't think that for the most part these issues make a substantial difference in reading and responding critically to the Iliad, at least at my unsophisticated level, and I'm not comfortable, from what I've read, that it's possible to resolve these issues definitively in any event.

Maybe mwh can set me straight on some of this, which is off the top of my head, based on material I haven't read recently.

[cb]

hi, a good e.g. of this from homeric scholia (which links back to the original post), criticising verses not based on manuscript evidence but on their dramatic weakness (or however you want to put it), is the scholion on iliad A.29: see pg 7 of my old iliad A notes here:
http://mhninaeide.webs.com/IliadANotes.pdf

there's also a particularly nasty one against zenodotus on iliad A.68, see pg12 of the same link. there's some interesting thoughts of martin west on this in his book accompanying his teubner iliad. he thinks (if i remember the details from a book i read 15 years ago or so, i could be wrong) that maybe zenodotus was merely editing an existing copy which had some variant spelling in it - he was just noting which lines to delete etc. and then the other commentators lashed out at these spellings against zenodotus himself as if he was responsible for them himself...

re the project in the original post, i think it would be useful to collect the scholia, or at least references to scholia, that make lit-crit type comments. the translation into english part isn't necessary for that although people could if they wanted to. i'll look out for these type of comments as i read the scholia going forward as part of general reading. cheers, chad

[Markos]

Here is an edition in a (more) modern type: https://books.google.com/books?id=7ClRA ... &q&f=false

Thanks, Joel, that's just what I was looking for. I imagine the only edition with a more readable font would be G.A. Christodoulou's 1977 book, but I haven't been able to find that anywhere.

It's a very nice edition, so if anyone asks, I can upload it to a print-on-demand website.

You can already get it from Espresso Book Machine and Amazon. Do you know of a website that would improve on these in price or format? I've thought about taking one of these Google books to a local printer to get a better (larger font) edition, but have never followed through.

[Paul Derouda]

Thanks. I have read of course about West's and Nagy's clash and I have a sort of idea of their respective positions on Aristarchus, Zenodotus etc. Until now I've been pretty much dependent on how these scholars represent the material (although I have a facsimile of Venetus A on my iPad, I have had little use of it ), but I'd like to go and see the evidence for myself to be able to read these scholars with some more context, and I wonder whether Nagy's article will help me to do that. Basically, I'd like start with the basic stuff: the transmission of the manuscripts, how the scholia have been sorted out and assigned names etc. -- basically exactly the sort of thing mwh said above but a bit more in detail. I'm ok with Nagy's idiosyncrasies, if he also provides this basic information and doesn't just make it a show of his own theories.

[jeidsath]

@Paul -- This has some of what you're looking for, the early chapters are very good:

Homer's Text and Language by Nagy.

Some of later chapters are very bad. δοκεῖ γὰρ ὅτι ἐν τῇ πολυλογίᾳ αὐτοῦ εἰσακουσθήσεται.

I recommend looking through the online library at that site (CHS).

Books
Articles

Some of the highlights are Parry's articles and a Nagy article about the Bacchylides Papyri.

[mwh]

Paul, I’m afraid Nagy’s New Companion chapter on the scholia will not provide what you’re after. It hardly even pretends to be an introduction to the Homeric scholia. Nagy has no interest in the scholia as such, only in the readings reported for the early Alexandrians, and that only for the purpose of accommodating them to his well publicized views on the Homeric text and its editing. Much of the time he speaks of “the Homeric scholia” when what he means is the text-critical A-scholia of the Iliad, or even more narrowly those that mention Alexandrian readings, as recorded by Didymus in one of the four works that feed into the A-scholia. (These were the preoccupation of 19th- and early 20th-century Homeric scholars too, Lehrs, Ludwich, etc.) The bT scholia get barely a look-in, and he doesn’t give even as much of the basic information that I offered above. It’s a terribly unbalanced treatment. The term monomania was recently applied to “Isaac Newton” on another forum. If it’s really Aristarchus you’re interested in, Francesca Schironi is the one to look out for.

Janko responded to the chapter in his review of the book: http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/1998/98.5.20.html.
But In allowing Nagy to set the terms of the debate he neglected to criticize the chapter’s inadequacy as a general account of the scholia.

Nagy’s book linked by jeidsath is I think even less you’re looking for, but you can be the judge of that.

We should be able to discuss the scholia without getting entangled in the perennial question of the status of the Aristarchean readings and the establishment (or non-establishment) of the Homeric text. I’ve had my say on that, and am sick to death of it.

If you can get hold of it, you’d be much better off with René Nünlist’s well-informed entry on Scholia in Finkelberg’s Homer Encyclopedia, a wonderful resource.

We could look at Homer scholia in a separate thread if there’s interest in that. Chad points to one which has some interesting affinity with the Soph.Aj. one that I started with.

End of diversion?

[Qimmik]

I've read, or rather skimmed, a few pages of the Ajax scholia that Joel posted a link to. Most of them seem to be explanatory or to address linguistic questions, explaining older Greek forms to post-classical readers. I'm not finding any lit-crit comments yet. I don't think I've ever read the Ajax. I have a number of editions at hand, and one (Finglass) on order. I think I'll have to read the play itself before trying to winnow the wheat from the chaff in the scholia.

One thing the scholia do seem to evidence is the difficulties that later Greeks had reading Sophocles. They seemed to need a lot of hand-holding if the scholia are any indication. Maybe the scholia are targeted at adolescent students. But I guess the users of the scholia were separated from Sophocles by at least as much time as we are from Shakespeare.

[mwh]

Thanks as ever to jeidath for linking to Lobeck’s edition of the Ajax scholia. A much better edition (the first truly critical edition) is Christodoulou’s, whose text is taken over by the TLG. But without institutional access to that it will cost you an arm and a leg. I could maybe put a bit of it up here.

[mwh]

It does seem more than a little perverse to be reading the scholia when we could be reading Sophocles. And Finglass’s Ajax commentary, which I haven’t yet read myself, will certainly teach us far far more about Sophoclean tragedy than the ancient scholia will. Sophocles’ language is far from easy, as Finglass rightly insists, and needs better exegesis than scholia can be expected to provide. My interest in scholia (and more especially in ancient commentaries) is more historical-cultural.

I’m going to have to withdraw from Textkit for a while. I just have too much on—finishing Finglass’s excellent Stesichorus for one, but more pressingly a host of domestic affairs and other commitments. I’ll look in now and again.

[Paul Derouda]

It might be a bit pervert, but on the other hand I hope getting some first experience (or at least a glimpse) of the scholia will help to put modern commentaries into perspective. Of course, it would be nice if someone had picked out the most interesting ones beforehand, like the ones mwh and Chad have pointed out. But as it is, reading the scholia along the play is only possible way I think.

Thanks for all the Homer stuff, I promise to start a new thread if feel the urge for a diversion again.