M. L. West's edition of the Iliad

Greek Homeric Greek and Early Greek Poetry
41

But, in context:

πρὸς μὲν οὖν τοὺς οἰομένους μόνων εἶναι τῶν εὐπαιδεύτων ἀναγνῶναί τε καὶ συνεἷναι τὴν Θουκυδίδου διάλεκτον ταῦτα λέγειν ἔχω, ὅτι τὸ τοῦ πράγματος ἀναγκαῖόν τε καὶ χρήσιμον ἅπασιν “οὐδὲν γὰρ ἂν ἀναγκαιότερον γένοιτο οὐδὲ πολυωφελέστερον” ἀναιροῦσιν ἐκ τοῦ κοινοῦ βίου, ὀλίγων παντάπασιν ἀνθρώπων οὕτω ποιοῦντες, ὥσπερ ἐν ταῖς ὀλιγαρχουμέναις ἢ τυραννουμέναις πόλεσιν: εὐαρίθμητοι γάρ τινές εἰσιν οἷοι πάντα τὰ Θουκυδίδου συμβαλεῖν, καὶ οὐδ᾽ οὗτοι χωρὶς ἐξηγήσεως γραμματικῆς ἔνια. πρὸς δὲ τοὺς ἐπὶ τὸν ἀρχαῖον βίον ἀναφέροντας τὴν Θουκυδίδου διάλεκτον ὡς δὴ τοῖς τότε ἀνθρώποις οὖσαν συνήθη, βραχὺς ἀπόχρη μοι λόγος καὶ σαφής, ὅτι πολλῶν γενομένων Ἀθήνησι κατὰ τὸν Πελοποννησιακὸν πόλεμον ῥητόρων τε καὶ φιλοσόφων οὐδεὶς αὐτῶν κέχρηται ταύτῃ τῇ διαλέκτῳ, οὔθ᾽ οἱ περὶ Ἀνδοκίδην καὶ Ἀντιφῶντα καὶ Λυσίαν ῥήτορες οὔθ᾽ οἱ περὶ Κριτίαν καὶ Ἀντισθένη καὶ Ξενοφῶντα Σωκρατικοί.

To those thinking that only the well-educated read and understand Thucydides’ speech I have these things to say: it is something necessary and useful to all “for nothing could be more necessary, nothing more helpful” they are plucking from the common life, making it for the 1%, just as in cities oligarchized or tyrannized. It’s easy to count those capable of all of Thucydides together, and nobody without a (learned, grammatical) commentary in parts. But to those placing Thucydides’ speech in ancient life, as if the men of that time were familiar with it, this short wise argument suffices me: Of the many Athens produced during the Peloponnesian war, rhetoricians and philosophers, not one customarily used this speech, none of the orators Andocides, Antiphon, or Lysias, none of the Socraticians Critias, Antisthenes, or Xenophon.

42

Jeidsath - I’m glad you took my “jab” about oral reading in good part. It was just to make the point that all of us aim at getting things right even if we necessarily fall short. And you and I, and no doubt others, share a common goal: to become fluent readers—and I most definitely agree that does mean reading, not translating. Translating just gets in the way, runs interference. Myself, I read silently, but vocalize internally (except when I’m speed-reading, and even then it somehow comes through). That makes it easier to pick up on things like rhythm and hiatus not just in verse but in prose too. Sounds matter, as ancient authors and critics were well aware.

You’re right there are academics who cannot read well without resorting to translations. But believe me it really is not at all difficult to read hexameters metrically, without needing to mark quantities or to work out the scansion beforehand. People are not pretending when they say they can do this. Understanding them as you read can be harder, at least if they’re post-Homeric. It’s the same with other meters. In one of Thucydides’ famous speeches, he has Pericles say καὶ ἐγὼ μὲν ὁ αὐτός εἰμι καὶ οὐκ ἐξίσταμαι. An alert reader will recognize that this is an iambic trimeter.

Conversation is another matter. Whether I could follow a real conversation I really don’t know. Without native speakers, who can tell? Since our texts are all written, and none of them transcripts of real conversations, I don’t bother too much about this. I’m certainly nowhere near C2 level. I’m not sure I could even claim A1. How could anyone be, when there are no native speakers? There was a time a group of us read Cicero’s letters and tried to talk in Latin. Some of us got fairly good at it, in the sense that we could communicate pretty much what we wanted to say without too much difficulty. But I found it did our Latin more harm than good. Much better to spend the time getting to know the language properly, by reading and yes by consulting dictionaries and grammars and commentaries. I have no interest in writing or speaking bad ancient Greek.

As to critical editions, I think you’re under a misapprehension. Anyone producing a critical edition has to use her or his own judgment.
You say
“A critical edition is good and useful when it is about presenting the evidence of the textual tradition.”
Agreed, a good edition will present the evidence of the textual tradition. West’s Iliad does this, far better than any previous one. But if that’ s all it does, it’s not a critical edition at all, it’s an uncritical one. If that’s what you want, go ahead and produce one, making use of West’s data to do so. I expect you’ll do it much better and quicker than the Homer Multitext project, which costs American taxpayers millions of dollars.

PS on Thucydides. There’s a nice little booklet by Kenneth Dover in the Greece and Rome series, Thucydides, with a little chapter on his language and style. I found that (in addition to Dion.Hal.) illuminating and immensely useful in coping with the undeniable difficulties of reading Thucydides. It may be hard to get hold of.
Incidentally, αναιρουσιν means they destroy, remove. He’s making the point that everyone stands to benefit from Thucydides, even though his Greek is so devilish hard.

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It is telling how much we are forced to appeal to the paradosis, in the same vein as we would to the textus receptus, when talking about critical editions of the Iliad. This is because we might really not be interested only in the Iliad as it was produced: even assuming we could access such a text, we still would print the wolf simile, still would print the Doloneia, for the same reason that people today still might want to consult the Clementine Vulgate rather than the Nova Vulgata which as a translation is objectively better: the Nachleben of a text most often than not merits a reading, as someone earlier in this thread said about the fact that “an interpolation doesn’t mean it is worse”.

It’s not as if the only reason the editor might have for printing the athetized verses is to abstain from being radical in his critical choices and leave instead to the reader the task of applying his or her critical judgement: I would hope that even if we were sure we would still print it. And yet bracketing means one thing, dropping to the apparatus means another, in this also the Alexandrine critics knew best.

44

Amen to that!

45

I think Miguel and Qimmik and mwh are writing very little that I disagree with. But there is one small thing that I want to express more clearly.

Before I get to that, I will say that it is the printing press that has confused all of us. Our expectation is a perfect text. There is a lot that can be written about about what this expectation has done to how we think of modern works (the word “work” itself, or the word “auteur,” or our general pretending away the work of editors in the modern novel). And before printing, of course, nobody had perfect texts of anything. A normal text had gaps and problems and editorial accumulations and all sorts of flaws. That was the standard reading experience.

Our quest for the original Iliad is a quest to pretend that the Iliad was a document from the age of printing. A document without flaws, the work of a single author, just like a modern novel. Even if we could produce such a thing (found in a cave somewhere, perfectly preserved), it would look very little like the Iliad that has obsessed human beings for thousands of years. And to the extent that the Iliad is not a “work” of an “auteur,” but is an accumulation (like a fairy tale or a folk song), we have lost that too.

I am very happy with editors attempting to make the best text that they can, basing their work on standards of taste and judgement, and saying that is what they are doing. That is what got us what we have, after all! They are doing a good work, and I am overjoyed to receive the good product of their labor. But the lie can enter in and spoil everything.

What am I saying? That if West wants to perform the good work of being an editor, then he should make the best edition of the Iliad he can – an edition to be read and enjoyed. It would contain few brackets and little apparatus. Marginalia, if present, would have to be chosen based on criteria of interest, etc., using his own taste and judgement. The world needs more of this! I can’t tell you how much better it is to read Greek texts on my Kindle, without apparatus (and in the case of Bible texts, without verse numbers). It’s an entirely different experience. The fact that I generally have to waste my time making these for myself (I have been reading the SBLGNT Mark on my Kindle all morning, with everything stripped like this) is a shame. Readers have been demanding the wrong sorts of things, likely because they don’t understand themselves better.

If West wants to present the textual tradition and so forth, that is a good work too. But an entirely separate one. The puzzle of what’s original and what’s late and who wrote what is terribly fascinating to me; I love diving into the apparatus of a text. I often spend large amounts of time delving into manuscript tradition problems. But what is useful to me there are precision and rigor, not taste and judgement.

In fact these qualities are not just separate, but fundamentally opposed. Judgement and taste require freedom. Precision and rigor require mechanical devotion. Mixing them destroys the work.

So I’d argue that West’s problem is not trying to be “popular" editor, nor is it in trying to be a critical scholar. It’s in trying to mix the two.

[NOTE: I edited this post at 1:45pm, for grammar and punctation. A semicolon was added and “Wests” was corrected in the last line. It was also considerably editing during composition, which entire passages removed, appended, or changed. A full list of changes is unfortunately impossible to reconstruct at this point.]

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But if someone wants a plain text without apparatus, it’s easy enough to read an OCT or Budé, say, and simply ignore the apparatus altogether; or a Loeb, or the TLG, or Perseus. That’s what I do most of the time. Less easy with editions of the NT that add little numbers within the text to key it to the apparatus, but there’s no lack of NT editions which leave the text free of such distracting clutter. (Admittedly they all still have those pesky chapter and “verse” numbers, invaluable for reference purposes but interfering with continuous reading, so I too would prefer them stripped out for reading purposes.)

But reading a text with an app.crit. at the foot of the page, even if the app.crit. is not consulted, is a salutary reminder that “the text” is a product of the editor’s judgment in choosing among what the various manuscripts offer and in deciding whether or not there’s been transmissional corruption in all of them. As you point out, until the age of print, every individual text was imperfect, and every one different from every other. (That’s still the case, of course, in the sense that every edition is imperfect and different from every other.) If you read a text without apparatus, you’re relying on the editor’s judgment, without any means of assessing whether it’s good or bad. (I’m not saying there’s necessarily anything wrong with that. Most of us are not in a position to make that assessment even with an app.crit.)

I can’t agree with your opposition between judgment and rigor. Judgment is not “free” (nor is it simply a matter of “taste”). It’s constrained—by the textual evidence, by understanding of the transmissional process, by knowledge of the author’s style, etc. etc.

West has produced a scholarly critical edition. That entails judgment, informed judgment. We’re free to dissent from his judgment, and he’s provided us with data that are essential if we are to do so without making complete fools of ourselves. The same goes for van Thiel, to a lesser degree. I can’t agree with your attempt to define “West’s problem.” He’s not aiming to be a “popular” editor. What I want in an editor is iudicium. Which is where West excels.