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.
“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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
@Markos, No OCR in use. After some practice, I am just a fast typer in Greek.
Some translation follows:
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.
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.
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,
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://discourse.textkit.com/t/sophocles-ajax-1132/13493/1). 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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?
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:
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!
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?