Homeric Questions by Gregory Nagy

Author:Gregory Nagy
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: -
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 2013-11-19T05:00:00+00:00

In the end, then, West’s model does not differ all that much from Allen’s, which rejects altogether the idea of a standard Alexandrian edition. In West’s own words, “The Alexandrian scholars did not impose a single specialist’s version on the tradition, but effected a general purge of extraneous material and an increase in knowledge which afforded some permanent protection.”113

Still, I do not even see any compelling reason to infer, as does West, that such a “purge” depended on the authoritativeness of a given edition promulgated by Aristarchus. The very technology of the scriptorium, I submit, could easily promote the kind of leveling process where additional lines found only in some manuscripts but not in others tended to be omitted. The editorial minimalism espoused by Aristarchus, whose practice was to question the authenticity of lines that were missing in those manuscripts that he specially valued, could be matched by a pragmatic minimalism in the scriptorium. As West concedes, even the papyri dated after 150 B.C.E. “offer too wide a range of variants to allow the hypothesis that they might all be copies of a single edition.”114

It seems to me, then, that the new degree of textual “standardization” in the era after 150 B.C.E. reflects not the authority of Alexandrian scholarship but other factors—including the advances being made in the kind of minimalist quasi-editing techniques that would be needed for large-scale commercial copying of manuscripts.115 In this connection, we may note Sealey’s observation that “one could achieve multiple production on a small scale by setting one slave to read a text aloud while many slaves sat around him and wrote down what they heard.”116 A successful publisher in the Roman era, T. Pomponius Atticus, is said to have employed men described as anagnostae optimi et plurimi librarii ‘the best readers and the greatest number of scribes’ (Nepos Life of Atticus 13.3).117 This mode of manuscript production may be appreciably different from that of earlier times, if we accept the following description of manuscript production in the era before 150 B.C.E. or so:

A scribe copying the whole of Homer, having been taught in school how to read and write from the text of Homer, living in an age where rhapsodic recitals were still common [highlighting mine], must have had his mind crowded with epic lines and half-lines. If he found himself introducing an extra line he would hardly [worry about it]; deliberate additions cannot be excluded either. And the next scribe copying this exemplar would have no chance of noticing anything unusual.118

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