Amazingly, my local library has this too so I’ll take a look. I quite like the look of Dickey’s Ancient Greek Scholarship as well - I enjoyed her composition book so might take a punt.
Dindorf’s edition of the Odyssey scholia is notoriously bad. Filippomaria Pontani set about replacing it, and has now reached bk.6 (if not further, I’m not sure). There was a helpful review of vol.1 by Eleanor Dickey in BMCR (and another review in JHS). Her Anc.Gk.Scholarship book is very good.
And there have been a number of discussions of particular Homer scholia on this board (e.g. http://discourse.textkit.com/t/bt-sch-on-e-166/15942/1 and others with dikaiopolis).
The medievally transmitted scholia, and even more the papyrus commentaries that underlie them, are a window into how the text was approached in antiquity (authorial intention passim, btw), just as the Lexicon of Apollonius Sophista tells us what the individual Homeric words were understood as meaning.
I happen to have the first three volumes of Pontani’s scholiae. My plan was to learn how to study them, but until now I’ve had little success and even less time for it. Like Sean, I still at a loss as to what on “earth I’m supposed to do Homeric scholia”. But unlike him, I also have physical artefacts in my bookshelf to remind me every time I approach the “Homer” section that I have still no answer to the question. Anyway, here is a shot of the relevant pages (I hope I’m not too liberal with copyrights here. Take this as advertisement - the book is quite beautiful, like many things that come from Italy). Anyway, I’m much too tired to try to extract any information out of this, but maybe this is helpful for someone (and maybe someone can help me and Sean).
I think I understand now what you mean, and I agree to a point, if by parody you don’t necessarily mean something that’s supposed to make one laugh. The medium in which these poems were composed – the traditional hexameter epic – dictates that certain traditional, inherited formulas and type-scenes are bound to be used, and when the poet was faced with untypical subject matter (e.g. girls doing the laundry instead of heroes fighting), he had to adapt traditional material to a new kind situation. This doesn’t mean that was slave to his medium; I think we can say we confidence that he was in full control, and here I think you are right to see if not an outright parody of, at least an eye wink to heroic action. I think you’re right it’s supposed to be amusing, but it’s also supposed to be charming at the same time. But soon enough I think we will encounter a couple of double entendres in the Nausicaa story that were really supposed to make the male audience laugh.
A fine example of an outright parody of a traditional type scene, I think, is when Odysseus’ companions butcher the cattle of the Sun - they don’t have barley, so they replace it with leaves, and they replace libations of wine with libations of water. No wonder they were soon going to die miserably! (book 12 line 352 ff.)
ὣς ἔφατ᾽ Εὐρύλοχος, ἐπὶ δ᾽ ᾔνεον ἄλλοι ἑταῖροι.
αὐτίκα δ᾽ Ἠελίοιο βοῶν ἐλάσαντες ἀρίστας
ἐγγύθεν, οὐ γὰρ τῆλε νεὸς κυανοπρῴροιο
βοσκέσκονθ᾽ ἕλικες καλαὶ βόες εὐρυμέτωποι:
τὰς δὲ περίστησάν τε καὶ εὐχετόωντο θεοῖσιν,
φύλλα δρεψάμενοι τέρενα δρυὸς ὑψικόμοιο:
οὐ γὰρ ἔχον κρῖ λευκὸν ἐυσσέλμου ἐπὶ νηός.
αὐτὰρ ἐπεί ῥ᾽ εὔξαντο καὶ ἔσφαξαν καὶ ἔδειραν,
μηρούς τ᾽ ἐξέταμον κατά τε κνίσῃ ἐκάλυψαν
δίπτυχα ποιήσαντες, ἐπ᾽ αὐτῶν δ᾽ ὠμοθέτησαν.
οὐδ᾽ εἶχον μέθυ λεῖψαι ἐπ᾽ αἰθομένοις ἱεροῖσιν,
ἀλλ᾽ ὕδατι σπένδοντες ἐπώπτων ἔγκατα πάντα.
You may find Pontani’s Thoughts on Editing Greek Scholia interesting.
Here’s a more colourful version of the beginning of Book 6:
https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/cpgraec45/0102/image
This is manuscript P in Dindorf.
Note the marginal notations in Pontani’s edition, which are analytical, identifying (where possible) each scholium’s ultimate source.
Ariston(icus), Hdn. (Herodian), Nican(or): three of the four ancient scholars who wrote works elucidating Aristarchus’ (3rd cent. BCE) textual choices etc. (The fourth being Didymus. These four collectively constitute the so-called Viermännerkommentar or VMK, though they were separate works before being amalgamated and excerpted, and can quite easily be sorted out again.)
ex.: the exegetical scholia, a distinct tradition, apologetic in nature, “explaining” the Homeric text, often by proffering “solutions” to recognized “problems,” a long-standing tradition represented in Aristotle’s Poetics and earlier. (They correspond to the Iliadic bT scholia, and often tacitly rebut Aristarchus’ textual criticism.)
V for vulgate, aka the D-scholia: low-level scholia much used in the ancient education system, mainly giving the meaning of Homeric words by translating them into their everyday equivalents.
The first of the two lower registers, keyed to the verse numbers, presents comparable entries in other texts and suchlike. The second, keyed to the line numbers in the editor’s printed text, is a fairly standard app.crit., reporting minor variation among the med.mss. etc. The upper-case letters, B etc., at the end of each entry and in this apparatus, designate individual manuscripts, as in Dindorf only much more reliably and much better chosen.
What you’re supposed to do with them, if anything, is of course up to you. I find them fascinating, up to a point.
The first of the two lower registers, keyed to the verse numbers, presents comparable entries in other texts and suchlike.
This register, then would be the “apparatus comparandorum”?
Thanks very much Sean and Seneca for your comments on my translation.
I hadn’t considered how the the way I was taught to translate certain words (ancilla as handmaiden, servus as servant, to use Latin examples) glosses over the real status of the people in the text before, so that’s a new perspective for me.
I’d add an enthusiastic endorsement for both. Scribes and Scholars is one of those books like Simon Goldhill’s Who Needs Greek that really changed how I saw classical texts. Dickey’s book is good too, like everything I’ve read by her, but it made less of an impression on me than Scribes - maybe because I read the one before the other.
Ever creative in naming things, the old German scholars were. 
This week I just read the text out of the Steadmann pdf linked, but that feels a bit like cheating. Does anyone here have van Thiel’s Odyssey? It would be nice to have a one volume copy.
Aetos wrote:
This register, then would be the “apparatus comparandorum”
Yes I guess you could call it that (or Conferenda, cf. “cf.”!). He also signals relationships (e.g. “hinc”) and contrasting interpretations (“aliter”—which means “differently,” Sean; you won’t get far with scholia without Latin—and German).
You see there’s a note on the triple prepositional prefix in 87 (ὑπεκπρόρεεν), and another on the same in 88 (ὑπεκπροέλυσαν), but these scholia make no connexion between the two words; their prefixes are treated in mutual isolation. But the less jejune ancient commentators had the entire text of the Homeric poems at their fingertips (or in their heads, rather) and often compare one passage with another.
On the “handmaiden” vs. “slave” question, on which there’s been previous discussion here, I’ll simply note again that Greek has a word for “slave,” and Homer doesn’t use it.
(Conversely, anyone who translates servus as servant rather than slave deserves to be shot.)
As so often happens on textkit, I’ve woken up with a reading list as long as my right arm and two new languages to learn.
Thank you everyone for piecing together a description of the scholia - I’m going to summarise below what I’ve taken away from all of this to let people point out anything I’m still not getting.
- To start with the obvious - scholia are marginal notes in medieval manuscripts of Homer (and obviously other writing, but I’ll stick with Homer here for clarity).
- These are copies of earlier manuscripts, which at some unknown point collated separate ancient commentaries on Homer by the Viermännerkommentar, now lost except in the scholia.
- These commentaries were themselves responses to Aristarchus’ decisions in producing an edition/editions of Homer. These scholia are largely (purely?) responses to textual decisions rather than exegetical.
- There is also a separate tradition of exegetical scholia (of unknown authorship?) and ‘low-quality’ D-scholia surviving in these manuscripts alongside the Viermännerkommentar.
- Some scholia are common to several manuscripts, while others are only present in one manuscript.
Modern editors, such as Dindorf, Erbse and Pontani, publish collations of what they deem to be the most ‘important’ scholia from across these manuscripts. Dindorf is verboten because his scholia were very incomplete and he didn’t systematically identify the authorship of scholia.
Scholia are useful insofar as they provide an insight into the methodology of ancient textual criticism, ancient exegesis of the text and, to some extent, the use of Homer in education.
I suppose my remaining questions are:
- How certain is the attribution to ancient commentators - is this traditional (with a possibility of a later pseudo-X) or can we be fairly certain? I notice Herodian is the only one with any surviving work outside of the scholia to compare with.
- Is it pretty obvious which scholia belong to which source once you know what you’re doing?
- How useful are scholia for an editor producing an edition of Homer?
- Is there any point interacting with scholia directly (i.e. outside of those quoted in modern commentaries) for a reader (or translator) of Homer? Or are they mostly of interest in their own right as historical documents (like some biblical exegesis)?
Paul, your bookshelf is a wonder of the modern world! This was very helpful.
This the most rewarding piece of feedback I have received here for a while. It is not so important what you actually decide is your translation of these terms, but that you have thought about it. The various terms used by Homer for those who “serve” indicate to me that there is some distinction between them and the Heroic elite and their elite women. We all draw our lines in different places.
We have as you say ventilated this in another thread so no need to repeat that discussion here. I assume its δοῦλος that isn’t used, although δούλη is. I don’t find this persuasive one way or the other in deciding the status of these ancillary figures who serve. But it is an interesting point.
Their status is one thing. How Homer represents them is quite another. My point is that he does not call them slaves (so a translator who does is misrepresenting Homer).
mwh
I respect your opinion but I disagree. I don’t think its as clear cut as you present it. In the present passage we have “δμώς” which is generally translated as a slave.
As there is no evidence in the text (I stand ready to be corrected) that what some call “slaves” were in fact “free people” I am not sure this is resolvable. Slaves and Handmaidens can coexist as part of the reception of the text.
I think I have an idea why δμώεσσιν is used on 71, but a word ἀμφίπολος that doesn’t explicitly mean “slave” is used about the servant girls. It’s not clear cut you say, but maybe you also could offer us a guess please?
δμῶες and ἀμφίπολοι are quite different kettles of fish (quite apart from the gender difference), and to translate both of them as “slaves” would be badly distortive.
— But (please!) enough of that.
Sean, I could amend your take-aways (not copied here) but I’ll briefly tackle your questions instead.
We have the titles of each of the VMK works (Venetus A reports them) and can be virtually certain of our attributions to them.
With the more substantial scholia there’s not often much doubt about the source or sources, but many scholia incorporate other material and so much is cut down or cut out that it can sometimes be a bit of a muddle.
How useful to an editor of Homer? Not very (though I hate to say so). West makes good (very selective) use of them. van Thiel doesn’t. Allen (OCT) adopted many—too many—of the Alexandrians’ readings, which some have thought were “mere” conjectures rather than inherited readings and as such worthless (but that’s simplistic).
Direct interaction with scholia is not just historically illuminating (and kinda interesting) but offers perspectives beyond those of modern commentaries. For a translator of Homer they’re useless.
Bottom line: If you have no interest in the reception of the Homeric epics for the first two thousand years you can ignore the scholia. Otherwise, not.
Thank you, this is extremely helpful. That you don’t find my ignorance a pain in the arse is a great credit to you.