“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.
), 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.