These are very difficult questions and I don’t have absolutely formed views. Also, this particular case of suspected “concordance” interpolation is not as obvious as some others.
At present I’m on trip in France and the only Homer-related book I have with me is van Thiel’s Odyssey. What I’m saying are my own impressions, I’m not sure where I got which idea and so on.
I think here we have to differentiate between the numerus versuum and the actual content of the verses. The number of verses was stabilised with the advent of the vulgate, but the content these verses (i.e. of the verses that remained in the vulgate) displays the same variance as before. Someone, I don’t remember who, proposed that basically when some Alexandrian scholar had established what verses he considered spurious and which not, book traders used his “critical edition” as a model to mark into their own “inferior” texts which lines were “original” and which ones were not, but without editing their own text; afterwards, they would have copied from their own texts only those “original” lines into the books they were going to sell – thus the books they were selling afterwards were substantially copies of the books they were selling before, but with the line count reduced to match with the “critical edition”. I find this theory very attractive, whatever we should think about the rest. And why would book sellers do that? Well, they could claim they were selling a “critical” text while actually having less text to copy, i.e. at lower costs.
Anyway, it looks like the actual content of the vulgate, the “intralinear” variants, is one question, and the numerus versuum of the vulgate is another, and they have to be accounted for separately.
But surely the fact that the line fits very well here can’t be grounds for rejecting it! And if it was a conscious choice on the part of an individual composer to omit the line here, why is it included when Menelaus gets up and in the other dressing passages, too?
I mean that if it wasn’t originally part of the narrative in book 2 but was there in book 4 – not for any special reason, but just because things aren’t done the same always – there are obvious reasons why it would have crept into the narrative in book 2 as well, and once it was there, it was likely to contaminate the tradition.
I think when lines are removed on the ground that removing them improves the story, there’s a risk of inposing modern critical judgments on an ancient Greek text. The original audiences and readership may well have preferred to experience a more expanded version of the text, and the original composer (whatever that means) might have catered to his customers. (On the other hand, maybe my own preference for including the line is based in part on being immersed in a literary culture of realistic novels, in which irrelevant details like this enhance the reader’s sense of realism.)
I was mostly thinking about places where interpolations create incongruities in the story. Sometimes it’s more like they make the story more banal. But I agree you should be careful about this kind of thing. I think you usually have to have some positive manuscript evidence, modern critical judgement isn’t enough alone.
the fact that there seemed to be one verse missing compared to other similar passages would have led to some copyist adding it, either consciously or, especially if he was very well acquainted with the Odyssey, unconsciously.
Couldn’t the exact opposite process occur, too? A copyist who was very familiar with the text, working very quickly and relying on memory as much as on the ms. he was copying from (he had previously copied the Odyssey 20 times), could have forgotten to include the line, even without any apparent reason for mechanical omission.
It must be possible, but the idea I have gotten is that the reverse is more likely, that there is good positive evidence in general that “type scenes” of this sort tend to get more similar with time. In individual cases anything is possible of course.
I don’t have access to Janko’s review. Do you know whether he rejects 2.4?
I don’t have it right now but I think he does. It’s a very good review, I recommend it.