I was struggling with a passage in first Alcibiades 113E for about 20 minutes before I decided to turn to the Stephanus Version of the text to find that the Stephanus version had a form of the word that made way more sense.
The offender was: τὸ πρότερον λόγου. In Stephanus it is τὸ πρότερον λόγον. Which was just nice to see…
That being said. Does anyone know where I could get print editions of the Stephanus Editions of the Platonic Corpus?
I’m not talking fascimile grade but just some crapy print version like on Lulu.com. If not I guess I could do it. But to be honest I’m kinda hoping there are editions in non-Byzantine cursive. If not this may be the push I need to finally master the cursive forms…on a LARGE tablet.
Originals sell for thousands in auction houses and with private book dealers around the world. I know of facsimile editions for manuscripts, but not for first editions. If your library doesn’t have them for consultation - and even then you’d need to justify the consultation, at least most of the time - then your best bet would be to print it yourself.
For the ligatures (Byzantine cursive and Humanistic printing fonts are two completely different things) you can consult W. Wallace, The Journal of Hellenic Studies 43, 1923, pp. 183-93. For paleography in general the Vatican has a great website: https://spotlight.vatlib.it/greek-paleography.
Even so, I would strongly advise against going fishing for more seductive readings in older editions. Henri Estienne, like all Humanists and scholars before Lachmann’s famous Propertius (yes, Poggio Bracciolini and Lorenzo Valla included), although geniuses, worked without any real philological methodology, and too often these “nice to see” variae lectiones are no more than Humanist conjecture which have nothing to do with the constitutio textus. If they can’t be found in the apparatus of good edition (a sign of some manuscript authority), they should be ignored.
Indeed, in this case, a colpo d’occhio, I would say we have an example of textual banalisation either via scribal interpolation or via Humanist conjecture. There’s bound to be a discussion of the passage somewhere in some commentary or other which, judging by the universal acceptance of your “offender” in modern editions, will justify the reading (which appears to be the lectio difficilior).
I don’t really understand what λογον would mean there while the genitive looks perfectly clear to me. (I don’t know if you were thinking otherwise, but τὸ πρότερον is neuter and adverbial. If it were supposed to agree, the article would be τον.) The last bit was confusing, but looking it up, I see that the quote cuts off in the middle of a sentence.
For Stephanus, I’d download one of the public domain versions from Hathi Trust using the Hathi Download Helper, and then stitch the images together with img2pdf (don’t use the pdf creator within HDH or you’ll get one that is far too large).
Let me know what large tablet you wind up using, I’ve been pretty happy with the Sony Digital Paper, but it has a lot of limitations, as it’s not a real tablet.