- Bryn Mawr Classical Review - Martin L. West - Homeri Ilias

Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2000.09.12

Martin L. West (ed.), Homeri Ilias. Recensuit / testimonia congessit. Volumen prius, rhapsodias I-XII continens.   Stuttgart and Leipzig:  Bibliotheca Teubneriana, 1998.  Pp. lxii + 372.  ISBN 3-519-01431-9.   Reviewed by Gregory Nagy, Harvard University ([email protected]) Word count: 14215 words

This edition of the Iliad is not, and cannot be, the last word. Still, it serves its purpose in presenting a reconstruction of what the editor deems to be the definitive text. The question remains, though: how do you define what exactly is definitive when you set out to reconstruct the text of the Homeric Iliad ? How you edit Homer depends on your definition of Homer. Martin West, the editor of this latest version of the Homeric Iliad (volume I covers the first half of the overall text), argues that Homer did not exist (West 1999b). In denying the existence of a Homer, West is not arguing that Homer the poet is a mythical construct (as I have argued in N 1996b.111-112). For West, only the name of Homer is mythical (again, West 1999b). The Praefatio of West's edition makes it explicit that the poet of the Iliad was not a mythical but a real historical figure, even if we do not know his name; this poet was the "primus poeta," and he was "maximus" (p. v). Here is West's scenario for the Iliad of this master poet. The poem was written down in the course of the poet's own lifetime ( Praefatio p. v). Even during his career, the poet had the opportunity to make his own changes in his master poem: there were major interpolations, says West, that the poet himself introduced into his written text from time to time (p. v). After the master's death, the scrolls ( volumina ) of his Iliad were abandoned to the whims of rhapsodes ( rhapsôidoi), who kept varying the text in their varied performances, much like the actors of a later era who kept varying the text left behind by Euripides (p. v: "rhapsodorum ... qui Iliadem nihilo magis sacrosanctam habebant quam histriones Euripidem"). The opportunities for introducing more and more interpolations kept widening. Meanwhile, the master's composition eventually made its debut at the Panathenaic Festival in Athens toward the end of the seventh century, but only in bits and pieces at the start (p. vi). In the late sixth century, the era of the tyrant Hipparchus of Athens, the text was formally adopted for Panathenaic recitations and divided up into 24 rhapsodies; in other words, this system of division had nothing to do with the "primus poeta" himself (p. vi n3; cf. West 1999b.382). The Athenian phase of transmission was consolidated in the sixth through the fourth centuries, with teachers playing a particularly significant role (p. vi). Throughout this period of Homeric transmission, the text suffered from Athenian accretions (p. vi). Here ends my summary of West's scenario, which serves as the premise for his edition of the Iliad . The editor's task, in terms of this premise, is relatively straightforward: West sets out to reconstruct the seventh-century Ionic text of the master poet, which needs to be purged of its Athenian accretions, its rhapsodic variations, its editorial interpolations. I will now proceed to evaluate West's premise, and his edition, against the historical background of previous editions of the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey. The very idea of establishing the definitive text of Homer was destabilized over two centuries ago when Friedrich August Wolf published his Prolegomena to his editions of

the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey ( Prolegomena 1795; Iliad 1804; Odyssey 1807).1 The ground has been shifting ever since. For Wolf, there was no Homer to recover. He argued that the Homeric text had evolved out of oral traditions, which could not be traced all the way back to some "original" single author. How far back, then, in terms of Wolf's argumentation, could we trace the oldest of ancient Greek texts, the Iliad , if not all the way back to Homer? In other words, if we work backward from the surviving medieval textual tradition of Homer, just how far back can we go in reconstructing that tradition? To paraphrase the sarcastic response of a rival editor of the Iliad , Pierre Alexis Pierron, the Iliad edition of Wolf takes us no farther back than around the third century CE, the era of Porphyry's Homeric Questions (Pierron 1869.cxl; cf. N 1999c.71). For the likes of Pierron, we could indeed go farther back, at least as far back as the era of Aristarchus of Samothrace, head of the Library of Alexandria around the middle of the second century BCE, who produced what was thought to be a definitive diorthôsis -- let us translate it for the moment as "edition" -- of the Homeric Iliad .2 Pierron's own edition of the Iliad (1869) was meant to be the closest thing to an edition of the Iliad by Aristarchus. The great Alexandrian's diorthôsis, Pierron imagined, would be the closest thing to the Iliad of Homer. So what was so special about the Homer edition of Aristarchus? As far as the ancient world was concerned, Aristarchus' diorthôsis of Homer represented an authoritative attempt to restore the original text of the Iliad and Odyssey. As far as Aristarchus himself was concerned, such a restoration depended on finding the best surviving textual evidence, which he thought would ultimately lead back to whatever it was that Homer himself had written down sometime around 1000 BCE -- if we convert the Aristarchean chronological reckoning to our own (Πρόκλου περὶ Ὁμήρου 59-62 Severyns: τοῖς δὲ χρόνοις αὐτὸν οἱ μὲν περὶ τὸν Ἀρίσταρχόν φασι γενέσθαι κατὰ τὴν τῆς Ἰωνίας ἀποικίαν, ἥτις ὑστερεῖ τῆς Ἡρακλειδῶν καθόδου ἔτεσιν ἑξήκοντα, τὸ δὲ περὶ τοὺς Ἡρακλείδας λείπεται τῶν ἔτεσιν ὀγδοήκοντα. οἱ δὲ περὶ Κράτητα ἀνάγουσιν αὐτὸν εἰς τοὺς χρόνους).3 In attempting to reconstruct the Iliad of Aristarchus, Pierron was following a tradition established by the Iliad edition of Jean Baptiste Gaspard d'Ansse de Villoison (1788), whose earlier attempt at recovering Aristarchus' edition was based primarily on the text and scholia of a tenth-century CE manuscript of the Iliad commonly known as Venetus A (codex Marcianus 454), which Villoison himself had discovered in Venice. The text and textual apparatus of the Venetus A, according to Villoison, could lead us back to the text and textual apparatus of Aristarchus' very own edition of the Iliad . For Villoison too, as for followers like Pierron, the recovery of Aristarchus' Iliad would have been the closest thing to the recovery of Homer's own Iliad . At this point, a major question emerges: how are we to deal with the historical chasm separating Homer from Aristarchus? Villoison anticipated Wolf by imagining an oral tradition, perpetuated by rhapsôidoi or "rhapsodes," which must have "corrupted" an original composition of Homer. For Villoison, as for Wolf later, the wording of Josephus Against Apion 1.12-13 could be interpreted to mean that this "original" composition of Homer had been oral, not written.4 For Villoison, the "original" oral composition of Homer had been eventually rescued from the "corruptions" of rhapsodic transmission, thanks largely to the research of scholars at the Library of Alexandria, especially Aristarchus. The text of the Venetus A codex of the Iliad was for Villoison the eventual result of this evolving rescue operation. Even if we could never recover an original Iliad , we could at least reconstruct the next best thing, that is, a prototype of the Venetus A text of the Iliad . For Villoison, such a prototype represented the recovery of the Iliad through the editorial efforts of Aristarchus in Alexandria and, secondarily, of such Alexandrian predecessors as Aristophanes of Byzantium and Zenodotus of Ephesus. The "original" composition of Homer seemed within reach. Wolf's Prolegomena changed all that. He challenged the authority of the Venetus A text and its scholia by questioning the credibility of Zenodotus, Aristophanes, and even Aristarchus as sources that could lead to the recovery of the "original" Homer text. For Wolf, most of these Alexandrian editors' readings, wherever they differed from the

readings that continued into the medieval text traditions, were mere conjectures. The historical chasm separating Homer from Aristarchus had dramatically reasserted itself. Wolf's pessimistic views on the validity of the Alexandrian editions of Homer led to a prevailing "default mentality" that relied primarily on the post-Alexandrian textual traditions (N 1997b.112). Wolf's pessimism was most unsettling for the likes of Pierron, as we have already seen from that editor's sarcastic remark: the Iliad of Wolf is the Iliad of Porphyry. The recent editions of Homer by Helmut van Thiel ( Odyssey 1991, Iliad 1996) represent an extreme case of such pessimism. This editor systematically privileges the readings attested in the medieval manuscripts at the expense of variant readings attributed to the Alexandrians, which he generally dismisses as editors' conjectures. A more moderate case is the Homer edition used up to now by most English-speaking Classicists, the Oxford Classical Text of T. W. Allen (with D. B. Monro).5 Yet another case of pessimism is the Teubner edition of the Iliad by West. He too is generally pessimistic about the Alexandrian editions of Homer. On the other hand, West is relatively optimistic about his own edition. He seems confident that he has recovered the closest thing to the putatively original Iliad . To that extent, he is like Villoison and his followers. Unlike Villoison, however, West has attained his own version of the "original" without relying on Aristarchus as a primary source of support. West's Iliad shares with van Thiel's version a general stance of diffidence about the textual variants that go back to Aristarchus -- not to mention Alexandrian variants in general. Granted, West is not as extreme as van Thiel is in this regard. Occasionally, he goes out of his way to defend a variant that goes back to Alexandrian sources, even when that given variant is weakly or not at all attested in the existing manuscript traditions. A notable case in point is Iliad IX 394, where West opts for the Aristarchean reading γε μάσσεται instead of γαμέσσεται, which is the reading transmitted by the existing manuscripts (cf. N 1998a [= BMCR 98.7.14]). As West remarks, with reference to this case and a handful of others ( Praefatio p. vii n9): "de bona traditione agitur, non de coniecturis" (also with reference to IX 397, XII 218, 412). Still, in most cases where a given Aristarchean variant is weakly or not at all attested in the existing manuscripts, West opts for a non-Aristarchean variant, as we will see later. What makes some Aristarchean readings, but not most of the others, a matter of "bona traditio" and not "coniectura"? West's approach to deciding what is good or bad tradition, what is traditional and what is conjectural, does not seem to me systematic. That is, his decisions about good or bad textual traditions are not based on external evidence. I can find no unambiguous instance where West prefers an Aristarchean variant for the simple reason that it stems from one manuscript tradition or another -- or at least on the grounds that it derives from an ancient editorial source that guarantees pre-existing manuscript traditions no longer known to us. In the end, it all comes down to whether West believes that any given variant -- Aristarchean or otherwise -- happens to recover the right wording. It does not matter for him, ultimately, whether such a variant happens to be a "coniectura," putatively deriving from some Alexandrian editor, maybe even from Aristarchus himself, or rather an authentic reading that the Alexandrians might have found preserved in a "bona traditio" no longer known to us. Ultimately, the goodness of the given tradition depends on whether West thinks that the given reading is right in the first place. He is not concerned whether a reading comes from an ancient source or from a conjecture, ancient or modern, as long as it is right. For him, a conjecture offered by, say, Richard Payne Knight (1820) can in theory be just as right as a reading found by Aristarchus in some ancient source.6 In taking a generally non-Aristarchean stance, West bypasses the neo-Aristarcheans, as represented by the so-called Königsberg school of Karl Lehrs (1st/2nd/3rd eds. 1833/1865/1882). The work of Lehrs challenged the Prolegomena and Homer editions of Wolf by undertaking a large-scale rehabilitation of the editorial methods of Aristarchus. Earlier followers of Lehrs included Pierron, who acknowledged the indebtedness of his Iliad (1869) to the neo-Aristarcheans. Among later followers, Arthur Ludwich stands out: his research culminated in a Teubner edition of the Iliad (1902; reissued 1995, three years before the appearance of West's

Teubner).7 In order to understand why West bypasses the neo-Aristarcheans, it is instructive to examine the basics of Ludwich's editorial method. Ludwich's edition of the Iliad explicitly follows the editorial method of Aristarchus himself. Essentially, Aristarchus sought to balance the internal evidence of Homeric poetry, as a system of composition and diction, with the external evidence of the Homeric texts, as a sampling of manuscripts. The Aristarchean method is most clearly documented by Ludwich himself (1884, 1885), who went on to apply that method in his own edition of the Iliad (1902). Like Aristarchus, he tried to balance two different kinds of evidence. On the one hand, he made editorial decisions based on his own sense of the internal evidence of Homeric composition and diction. On the other hand, such decisions were regulated by the external evidence of the Homeric manuscripts -- to the fullest extent of their availability. Here is where we begin to see a major difference between the editorial methods of Ludwich and West. For the neo-Aristarcheans, the question of the availability of manuscripts is essential. Obviously, the external evidence available to Aristarchus was different from what was available to Ludwich -- and what is now available to West. But the essential question remains, what exactly was in fact available to Aristarchus? The general conclusion reached by the neo-Aristarcheans is that Aristarchus himself had access to a wealth of manuscripts, containing a wealth of variant readings, and much of this evidence is no longer available to us. For the neo-Aristarcheans, the central source of this information must be Aristarchus himself. Here we come back to the question: why is it that West chooses to bypass the neoAristarcheans? An answer that now emerges is this: it is because he has also chosen to bypass the authority of Aristarchus as a reliable guardian of the Homeric textual transmission. West's reasons for this radical departure have to do mainly with his theory about Didymus. For West, as we will now see, it was not Aristarchus but Didymus who must be recognized as the central source of our surviving information about ancient Homeric manuscripts and editions. The implications of this stance are far-reaching. At stake here is the authority of Aristarchus himself as an editor of Homer. Before we consider the details of West's theory, we need to review some basic information about the methodology of Aristarchus and about the role of Didymus in reporting on that methodology. Didymus was an Alexandrian scholar who flourished in the second half of the first century BCE and the beginning of the first CE. For posterity, the primary mediator of the Aristarchean method has turned out to be this man. Didymus' commentary on the Aristarchean diorthôsis of the Iliad , as excerpted mainly in the scholia to Venetus A, has become the central source for reconstructing the editorial method of his Alexandrian predecessor, Aristarchus. Ludwich's 1884 edition of the surviving fragments of Didymus' commentary serves as an essential foundation for his 1902 Teubner edition of the Iliad (as Ludwich observes at pp. vii-viii of his Praefatio). This foundation has now been challenged by West, who offers a radically different theory about Didymus--a theory that he applies pervasively in his 1998 Teubner edition of the first half of the Iliad . West's theory, as we will see, depends on how you answer this question: what facts can we learn from Didymus about Aristarchus? In order to introduce the theory, I will now highlight two of these facts. The first fact is the more obvious of the two: the methodology of Aristarchus, as mediated by Didymus, insists on adherence to the internal evidence of Homeric poetry, as a system of composition and diction. This editorial policy is indicated by the scholia A to Iliad XVI 467c, where Didymus observes that Aristarchus would not leave anything aparamuthêton 'uncontextualized [in the mythos]', in other words, that Aristarchus' goal was to make contextual comparisons with all available internal evidence. Aristarchus' rigorous analysis of Homeric poetry as a system was monumentalized by his reputation as an "analogist," in opposition to an "anomalist" like his contemporary, Crates of Mallos, who was head of the Library of Pergamon (Varro, De lingua latina 8.23). Crates was an

editor of Homer in his own right, and his editorial judgments were frequently contested by Aristarchus (cf. Broggiato 1998.41; N 1999b.260). The antithesis between Aristarchus the analogist and Crates the anomalist is liable to various exaggerations, but the basic contrast is valid to this extent: Aristarchus as editor of Homer was more likely than Crates to reject as incorrect a given variant reading that does not fit the rest of the system as he saw it (N 1998b.219-223). Now I confront a second fact -- less obvious but more important -- about the methodology of Aristarchus as mediated by Didymus: in producing his edition of Homer, Aristarchus did not overprivilege the internal evidence of Homeric diction at the expense of the external evidence of Homeric manuscript transmission. Here I strongly disagree with West, who claims that Aristarchus did indeed prefer to concentrate on the internal evidence of Homeric diction at the expense of the external evidence of Homeric manuscripts (p. viii). It does not follow, just because Aristarchus was an analogist, that he would sacrifice the evidence of the manuscripts to his own sense of analogy. There is ample evidence to show that Aristarchus, although he was indeed an analogist, cautiously avoided mechanistic appeals to analogy at the expense of the manuscript evidence (N 1996a.129n99). Ludwich's Iliad edition consistently relies on the testimony of Aristarchus wherever an editorial choice has to be made between variant readings, on the grounds that Aristarchus adopted readings based on the external evidence of manuscripts even when he thought that some other reading was "right." Aristarchus' definitive statements on whatever he judged to be right or wrong, better or worse, were originally to be found not in the actual text of his edition but in his hupomnêmata (which can best be described as a combination of a modern apparatus criticus and a modern commentary; cf. Lührs 1992.10).8 We may compare the editorial policy of Origen of Alexandria (late second to mid-third century CE), who formatted the received text of the Septuagint as the fifth selis or "column" of his six-column Hexapla edition of the "Old Testament"; the critical signs in the margins of the fifth column (obelus, lemniscus, hypolemniscus, asterisk) would refer the reader to Origen's hupomnêmata , where the editor offered his own judgments about the available variants (N 1996a.194-195, following Allen 1924.315320). Similarly, Aristarchus' hupomnêmata kept track of variants that were signaled by critical signs in the text proper of his edition.9 West does not see things this way, as we discover from a closer examination of his theory about Didymus. He seems to be implying that Aristarchus placed his own choices of variant readings into the text proper of his edition; more important, West says explicitly that it was not Aristarchus but Didymus who collected a mass of manuscripts to be collated for purposes of tracking down any non-Aristarchean variant readings (p. vi). According to West's theory, it was Didymus, not Aristarchus, who developed such criteria as αἱ πλείους, πᾶσαι, αἱ Ἀριστάρχου ... ἡ δὲ κοινή (cf. scholia to XII 404), αἱ χαριέστεραι, and so forth; it was he, not Aristarchus, who made use of "city" editions from Chios, Argos, Cyprus, Sinope, Massalia (Marseille), and so forth (p. vi). West's theory about Didymus leaves out of consideration--and is refuted by--the explicit testimony of Didymus himself, as mediated by the Homeric scholia, concerning the methodology of Aristarchus. A most explicit statement of Aristarchus' editorial policy comes from the scholia A to IX 222, where Didymus says: ἄμεινον οὖν εἶχεν ἄν, φησὶν ὁ Ἀρίσταρχος, [εἰ] ἐγέγραπτο "ἂψ ἐπάσαντο" ἢ "αἶψ' ἐπάσαντο", ... ἀλλ' ὅμως ὑπὸ περιττῆς εὐλαβείας οὐδὲν μετέθηκεν, ἐν πολλαῖς οὕτως εὑρὼν φερομένην τὴν γραφήν . The last part of this statement, as underlined, is quoted in the apparatus criticus of Ludwich but not in that of West. The wording is crucial: we see here the most explicit testimony, coming from Didymus himself, concerning Aristarchus' practice of comparing variant readings by examining a wide range of manuscripts. I have written elsewhere about this testimony (N 1998a): "The wording assumes that some of the texts did indeed feature ἂψ ἐπάσαντο instead of ἐξ ἔρον ἕντο. I infer that Aristarchus 'changed nothing' (οὐδὲν μετέθηκεν) even though he could have made a change on the basis of manuscript attestations of a variant reading. Moreover, he is quoted as considering the

variant reading as a contrary-to-fact proposition. Accordingly, it seems unjustified to describe such readings as his own editorial conjectures." I should add that the verb metatithénai in the Homer scholia means 'emend' not 'conjecture' when applied to the editorial activities of Aristarchus (Ludwich 1885.97). Also, whenever Aristarchus did make conjectures, he did not put them into his edited text (Ludwich 1885.92). There is further evidence against West's Didymus theory, provided by the ipsissima verba of Aristarchus. Here I cite a quotation from Aristarchus himself, as preserved in the scholia A to I 423-424. The quotation, designated as the lexis of Aristarchus, is introduced this way: λέξις Ἀριστάρχου ἐκ τοῦ Α τῆς Ἰλιάδος ὑπομνήματος. The expression λέξις Ἀριστάρχου here and elsewhere seems to convey the idea that the hupomnêmata of Aristarchus were not only a commentary written down in papyrus scrolls but also, at least notionally, a commentary delivered as lectures by Aristarchus, as if they were meant to be transcribed by his students.10 As the quotation proceeds, it is difficult to determine exactly where the words of Aristarchus himself leave off, to be picked up by the words of Didymus.11 This much is certain, however: the person who is being quoted, after expressing his preference for the variant reading κατὰ δαῖτα instead of μετὰ δαῖτα, immediately goes on to say: οὕτως δὲ εὕρομεν καὶ ἐν καὶ καὶ Κυπρίᾳ καὶ Ἀντιμαχείῳ καὶ Ἀριστοφανείῳ.12 As Ludwich (1884.194-196) points out, the context of οὕτως δὲ εὕρομεν makes it clear that the subject of this verb is Aristarchus, not Didymus: the first person of εὕρομεν comes from the direct quotation of words "spoken" (notionally and I would say perhaps even literally) by the master teacher. In other words, the rhetoric of the quotation is set in the mode of a master's ipse dixit . The distinction between what was said by Aristarchus and what defaults to Didymus is collapsed in the apparatus criticus of West, who reports (and chooses for his text proper) the variant κατὰ δαῖτα at I 424 on the authority of the following (I list them in the order given by West): Antimachus, Aristophanes, Aristarchus, Callistratus, Dionysius Sidonius, Ixio, four papyrus fragments, Apollonius Sophista, manuscripts "V" (=V1 Allen) and "Z" (=Ve1 Allen). In other words, Aristarchus is represented here and elsewhere as a source, not as a collator of sources. West juxtaposes (and rejects) the variant μετὰ δαῖτα, reported on the authority of three papyrus fragments, various ancient Homer-quotations, and the "Omega" family of manuscripts (more on which later; this family approximates Ludwich's concept of "vulgate"). A casual reader of West's apparatus is left with the impression that it was Didymus, not Aristarchus, whose collation of manuscripts set the framework for choosing between the variants, and that it was Didymus who chose κατὰ δαῖτα while all along being fully aware of μετὰ δαῖτα -- to which variant West applies his ubiquitous formula: "novit Didymus." In his apparatus criticus at III 405, West applies the tag "omnes boni libri Didymi" on the basis of the following report of Didymus in the A scholia: καὶ οὐ μόνον ἐν ταῖς ἐκδόσεσιν, ἀλλὰ καὶ ἐν τοῖς συγγράμμασιν ἁπαξάπαντες οὕτως ἐκτίθενται. προσθήσειν μοι δοκῶ καὶ τὴν Ἀριστάρχου λέξιν οὕτως ἔχουσαν. [what follows here is the quotation of the ipsissima verba from Aristarchus' exegesis]. I submit that the tag "omnes boni libri Aristarchi" would be more apt. From the wording of the scholia here at III 405, I interpret the report of Didymus this way: he first refers to the external evidence adduced by Aristarchus, and then he follows up by quoting the master's exegesis of the internal evidence. West's theory about Didymus also leaves out of consideration another basic aspect of Aristarchean methodology. It concerns the criterion of numerus versuum, which has been studied extensively by Michael Apthorp (book 1980, articles 1990 and following). West's general bypassing of Alexandrian editorial methodology is most strikingly exemplified by his lack of engagement with this criterion and with the work of Apthorp, who is nowhere cited in volume I of West's Iliad . Apthorp builds on Aristarchus' criteria for establishing an "authentic" numerus versuum, that is, a fixed number of verses that the Alexandrian editor had deemed genuine in the text of the Homeric poems. These criteria have to do with the external evidence of stronger vs. weaker attestations in the available manuscripts of the Homeric text, not just with the internal evidence of Homeric diction and composition.

The far-reaching implications of Aristarchus' principle of numerus versuum can be explored further by rethinking (and moderating), as Apthorp has done, the extreme formulation of George Melville Bolling (1950.1-16). For this particular neo-Aristarchean, the canonical length of the "Pi Text," which was the putative "archetype" of our Iliad and which supposedly dates from the sixth century BCE, was around 14,600 verses.13 Over the next couple of centuries -- so goes Bolling's formulation -- the Iliad grew in length to 15,600 verses; this was the accretive "Alpha Text" with which Aristarchus was forced to contend and which corresponds roughly to the Iliad that survives by way of the medieval manuscript traditions. In terms of Bolling's formulation, Aristarchus reduced the text of the Iliad from ca. 15,600 to ca. 14,600 verses by way of athetesis (that is, marking a given verse in the left margin with the critical sign known as the obelus, to indicate the editor's doubts about the appropriateness of that verse) or outright deletion. Such verses were thought to be textual interpolations, the result of "corrupting" accretion. Bolling's analysis of Homeric "interpolations" needs to be refined in terms of two related considerations: (1) the principle of numerus versuum and (2) the distinction between the editorial procedures of athetesis and deletion. As Apthorp argues (1998.187), the Homer edition of Aristarchus became the standard source for subsequent applications of the editorial principle of numerus versuum, and literary authorities like Plutarch were well aware of this principle. Apthorp emphasizes that Aristarchus in his Homer edition not only athetizes some verses (that is, marks them with an obelus but keeps them in the text proper): he also deletes ("omits") some other verses altogether. The criterion for deletion ("omission") was based on manuscript evidence. To quote Apthorp (1980.xv), "Aristarchus ... omitted only lines which he found very weakly attested."14 Such lines are "plus verses."15 Apthorp (1980.xvi) goes on to argue that "the numerous lines absent from all our mss. which we know to have been pre-Aristarchean but absent from Aristarchus's edition -- some cited by the scholia, some present in extant Ptolemaic papyri, some included in ancient quotations or discussions of Homer -- stand condemned as interpolations alongside the weakly-attested lines of the mediaeval mss." Whether or not we choose to think of these "plus verses" in terms of "interpolations," the point for now is simply this: Aristarchus' foundational research in determining the editorial principle of numerus versuum must have required a large-scale collection and collation of manuscripts -- as many and as varied as he could find.16 The question of an "original" Homeric numerus versuum now brings us to an essential point that we have not yet considered about Homeric textual variants. In fact, there were not one but two dimensions of variation in the history of Homeric textual transmission. Before I introduced the topic of numerus versuum, we were speaking exclusively in terms of "horizontal" variants, that is, where the ancient editor had to choose between different wordings that make up a single line of Homeric poetry. The point is, the ancient editor also had to contend with "vertical" variants, where he had to choose between fewer or more lines that make up a given sequence of lines (N 1996a.139-140). The vertical dimension of textual variation can best be understood by coming to terms with one of the most basic -- and elusive -- concepts in the history of Homeric scholarship, the so-called Homeric "vulgate." Elsewhere, I have studied this concept by focusing on the Aristarchean usage of the Greek term koinê in the combined sense of a "standard" and a "common" text of Homer; this combined sense, I argued, corresponds to Jerome's usage of the term vulgata (N 1997b.118-122). I confine myself here to stressing a single point in my earlier argumentation: modern editors of Homer tend to skew the meaning of the term "vulgate" by overemphasizing the sense of "common" and underemphasizing the sense of "standard," so that the expression "Homeric vulgate" is commonly understood to mean nothing more than the default text of Homer. The usage of West is illustrative: he highlights the readings of Aristarchus, as reported by Didymus, against the backdrop of the "vulgata traditio" (p. vii). I have no space here to develop my thesis that the Aristarchean mentions of the koinê or koinai texts refer to a standard Athenian version of Homer (N 1996a.117, 133-134, 152-156, 185-190, 193-195). The point to be made, for the moment, is simply that the concept of a Homeric vulgate can be applied systematically to the study of Homeric

variants, and that the vertical variations in the history of the Homeric text provide a particularly rich source for such systematic study. This point is linked to my ongoing argument that Aristarchus' editorial policy concerning vertical variants reveals his active interest in the collecting and collating of manuscripts. In order to test the concept of a Homeric vulgate, let us turn to the editorial criteria of a neo-Aristarchean like Ludwich, who systematically distinguished between the vulgate and the Aristarchean versions of Homer. For this editor, the vulgate Homer was both preAristarchean and post-Aristarchean.17 If we apply Ludwich's distinction between vulgate and Aristarchean readings to the vertical dimension of textual variation, then we can say that the pre-Aristarchean vulgate represents an accretive text that exceeded the length of the putative Homeric "original." We can also say that the work of the Alexandrian editors, especially Aristarchus, helped re-establish the "original" numerus versuum by way of deleting ("omitting") the accretive verses. We can even say, finally, that the postAristarchean vulgate represents a newly accretive textual tradition that unsystematically re-absorbed accretive verses deleted by Aristarchus. As the discussion proceeds, it will be evident that I do not agree with Ludwich's views concerning the inherent superiority of Aristarchean readings over their vulgate counterparts. I focus here simply on his systematic application of the actual distinction between Aristarchean and vulgate readings. This distinction continues to be most useful, as we will see, for studying the phenomenon of vertical -- and horizontal -- variation in the history of the Homeric textual tradition. In this context, it is instructive to contrast Ludwich's neo-Aristarchean view of the "vulgate" (1898) with such anti-Alexandrian views as represented by Marchinus van der Valk (1963.609), for whom a pre-Aristarchean "vulgate" had "preserved the authentic text," and this text "was also transmitted by the vulgate of the medieval manuscripts." The contrast has to do with the validity of the Alexandrian editions of Homer (N 1997b.114-115): "For both Ludwich and van der Valk, this 'vulgate' is distinct from the Homer 'editions' of the Alexandrians, especially that of Aristarchus. For van der Valk, however, the readings of the 'vulgate' are generally more authentic than the variant readings attributed by the Homer scholia to scholars like Aristarchus, which he generally takes to be 'conjectures'; for Ludwich, by contrast, such variants are not 'conjectures' but authentic readings preserved by the scholia from the Alexandrian editions of Aristarchus and others [cf. N 1996a.185]. For Ludwich, the Alexandrian 'edition' of Aristarchus represents a quantum leap beyond the pre-Alexandrian 'vulgate'; for van der Valk, by contrast, the preand post-Alexandrian 'vulgate' text is relatively superior to the Alexandrian 'edition' of Aristarchus, which may not even be deserving of the term 'edition.'" The negative position of van der Valk in questioning the validity of the Alexandrian editions has been influential in shaping the views of Homerists about the variants reported by Aristarchus (N 1996a.136-137). Haslam remarks (1997.87): "A newly fashionable attitude, owed to van der Valk, is to revere the vulgate and condemn the Alexandrians for tampering with it." A prominent defender of van der Valk's antiAlexandrian position has been Richard Janko (1992.21n6; cf. N 1996a.137). I should stress, however, that Janko's own negative position applies mainly to Aristarchus' treatment of what I call horizontal variants. When it comes to vertical variants, Janko's position shifts, at least in part: like the neo-Aristarcheans, he seems to approve whenever Aristarchus deletes ("omits") plus verses on the grounds that they are interpolations (1992.21n6; cf. N 1996a.139-140), though he tends to disapprove whenever Aristarchus athetizes (1992.27). I think that Janko is applying a double standard here. Further, as we will see later, I generally think that there is no need to decide whether the vertical -- and horizontal -- variants transmitted by Aristarchus are inferior or superior to those transmitted by the vulgate. For the moment, though, I simply note the importance of the variations themselves, and the conflicting inferences they inspire. There are important precedents for van der Valk's and Janko's negative positions about

the Alexandrian editions. A most notable example is the work of Hartmut Erbse (1959). Some have interpreted Erbse's negativity about the Alexandrian editions as a revolution against neo-Aristarcheans like Lehrs and Ludwich, who in turn had revolted against the 1795 Prolegomena of Wolf. Rudolf Pfeiffer (1968.215) puts it this way: "it looks to me as if by a sort of unconscious counter-revolution Wolf has now been put back on the throne from which Lehrs had driven him." For now I leave aside the question whether the work of Lehrs and Ludwich represents a revolution -- or a counter-revolution, from the standpoint of those for whom Wolf's work was the real revolution in the first place. Instead, I continue to focus on the far-reaching consequences of choosing either an Aristarchean or a "Wolfian vulgate" model in the editing of Homer.18 Pfeiffer's formulation may conceivably apply to the Odyssey and Iliad of van Thiel (1991, 1996), but surely not to the Iliad of West, who generally bypasses Wolf and the model of the "Wolfian vulgate." More important for now, we have seen that West generally bypasses the model of the neo-Aristarchean editors as well. Most important of all, he even bypasses the editorial method of Aristarchus himself. For West, there is no need to go back to the edition of Aristarchus in order to recover the text of Homer. He thinks that the closest thing to an original Iliad is his own reconstruction of the text composed by the "primus poeta." West's belief that the poet of the Iliad produced a written composition helps explain this editor's optimism about reconstructing the ipsissima verba of a prototypical poet. Aristarchus' own belief was probably similar to West's, to the extent that he too posited a written text produced by the prototypical poet. He too aimed to reconstruct the poet's ipsissima verba , relying on the external evidence of available manuscripts as well as the internal evidence of the composition and the diction. West relies on the same two kinds of evidence, but he differs from Aristarchus in how he uses that evidence. Further, he differs from Aristarchus (and the neo-Aristarcheans) in how he responds to this basic challenge confronting an editor of Homeric poetry: how is one to judge the variants of the overall manuscript tradition? In general, West's version of the Iliad has less flexibility in allowing for variation, while that of Aristarchus has relatively more. It comes as no surprise, then, that West's version of the master poet's ipsissima verba frequently differs from the version of Aristarchus. I submit that Aristarchus' ancient edition of the Iliad , if it had survived in its original format, would in many ways surpass West's present edition. It would be a more useful -and more accurate -- way to contemplate the Iliad in its full multiformity. The multiformity of Homeric poetry is an aspect of its prehistory as an oral tradition. This essential observation emerges from the research of Milman Parry (collected papers 1971, = MHV ) and Albert Lord (1960, 1991, 1995), who explained Homeric poetry as a system derived from oral poetic traditions of composition-in-performance (see Dué 2000b). Their explanation is validated by the editorial work of Aristarchus. Although this ancient editor hardly thought of Homer in terms of oral traditions, his objective study of the Homeric texts provides crucial evidence for an inherent multiformity, which is indeed typical of oral poetic traditions. As Parry asks, in criticizing the "neo-unitarian" Homerists of his day (1930 [ MHV ] p. 268): "How have they explained the unique number of good variant readings in our text of Homer, and the need for the laborious editions of Aristarchus and of the other grammarians, and the extra lines, which grow in number as new papyri are found?"19 In the Praefatio to his Iliad , West ignores altogether the work of Parry and Lord. Throughout his edition, moreover, there is a noticeable lack of engagement with oral poetics. West believes that the master poet wrote the Iliad , and that is all there is to it. In the Homeric textual transmission, we can find many signs of oral poetry, but West consistently prefers to explain such signs in terms of written poetry. For example, with reference to the mechanics of "movable nu" in the Homeric text, West adduces the evidence of the mid-seventh-century Nikandre inscription ( CEG 403): the poetry of this inscription, composed in the Ionic dialect, shows that movable nu was already being used in this early period for the sake of preventing hiatus caused by the loss of digamma in this dialect. Instead of considering the argument that the technology of writing involved in such early inscriptions was used not for the actual composition but only for the

recording of poetry (cf. N 1996b.34-37), West simply assumes that the use of movable nu in such an early poetic inscription is proof that the analogous use of movable nu in Homeric diction was likewise a matter of written poetry (West 1998a.101): "This [= the use of 'movable nu' in the Nikandre inscription] shows that by that time Ionian poets were already using movable nu to cure digamma hiatus. If one believes, as I do, that the Iliad was composed and written down at about the same period, one will take this as adequate justification for leaving such nus in the text. It is not unreasonable to suppose that the insertion of particles such as γε, κε, τε, or ῥα for the same purpose began as early as the addition of the nu." West assumes that the Nikandre inscription is a case of written rather than oral poetics, and he implies that the dating of the Nikandre inscription therefore gives him a terminus ante quem for the writing down of the Iliad . I disagree. The justification for leaving such nus in the text is to be found in the internal and comparative evidence of oral poetics, not in the fact that we can find such nus in a poetic inscription that West thinks is contemporaneous with the composition of the Iliad . It can be argued that the "insertions" of such particles and of morphophonemic elements like movable nu are part of an overall formulaic system and have nothing to do with the technology of writing. (For parallels to be found in the living traditions of South Slavic oral poetry as recorded by Parry and Lord, see the discussion of hiatus-breakers [= "bridging consonants" that prevent the occurrence of glottal stops] in Foley 1999.73-74, 85, 88, 293n28.) As I will now argue, West's lack of engagement with oral poetics has a direct effect on the actual text of his Iliad edition, especially with respect to his judgments about horizontal and vertical variants in the textual evidence. In its own way, the factor of oral poetics has a direct effect on the editing of Homeric poetry, as I have previously argued in several publications (especially N 1996a, 1996b, 1997b), none of which is cited in West's Praefatio. In terms of oral poetics, there is an important reason for keeping track of all horizontal and vertical variations in the Homeric textual transmission as attested in the medieval manuscripts, the ancient quotations, and the papyrus fragments. The reason is simple: in principle, any surviving variant in the Homeric textual transmission may represent an authentic form generated by Homeric poetry. From the standpoint of oral poetics, Homeric poetry is a system that generates the forms that survive in the texts that we know as the Homeric poems. Homeric poetry is not the same thing as the Homeric texts that survived in the medieval manuscripts, the ancient quotations, and the papyrus fragments. Still, the Homeric textual tradition stems from the performance tradition of Homeric poetry. It can be shown, by way of formula analysis, that many of the variants we find in the Homeric texts result directly from the variability inherent in the poetic system itself (see N 1998a). In other words, the textual variants in the Homeric poems stem from formulaic variations in Homeric poetry. Even from the standpoint of West's theory of a written text produced by the "primus poeta," there is an important reason for keeping track of all vertical and horizontal variations in the Homeric textual transmission as attested in the medieval manuscripts, the ancient quotations, and the papyrus fragments. Again, the reason is simple: in principle, any surviving variant in the Homeric textual transmission may represent the authentic form that goes back to the prototypical text of the prototypical poet. In terms of West's editorial stance, there can be ultimately only one authentic form in each case of variation, that is, the form that goes back to the "primus poeta." For West, the horizontal and vertical variants in Homeric textual transmission are important only insofar as one given variant in each case may be the right form, while all other variants would have to be wrong forms. Even where West is not sure whether a given variant is right or wrong, he needs at least to determine whether it has a better or worse chance of being the right reading: thus there can be better or worse variants, even where the difference between right and wrong variants cannot be determined.

Obviously, this editorial stance is necessary for those like West who espouse the theory of an original written Iliad and Odyssey by an original poet. As West says (1998a.95), "We may assume that there existed a complete and coherent Urtext of each epic, the result of the first writing down." Maybe less obviously, this same editorial stance is also necessary for Richard Janko, even though he espouses the theory of an orally composed Iliad and Odyssey. Janko actively uses the criteria of right or wrong, better or worse, in judging the variants surviving in the Homeric textual tradition (cf. Janko 1992.26). Like West, Janko needs these editorial criteria because he too needs to assume original texts from which our Iliad and Odyssey can be derived. These poems, he thinks, were written down from dictations made by Homer himself, sometime in the eighth century BCE (see especially Janko 1992.22, 26). Thus, in terms of Janko's dictation theory, the "original" Iliad and Odyssey are not only oral compositions but also, at the same time, textual archetypes. In a review of West's edition of the Iliad , Janko (2000) expresses general agreement with West's construct of an original text of the Iliad , and most of their disagreements are limited to specifics, except for the general distinction between a writing poet (West) and a dictating poet (Janko). In a review of my work (N 1996a), Janko (1998a) complains about my resisting his theory about the origins of Homeric texts. At the conclusion of his review of West, he recalls this complaint of his (Janko 2000.4): "Given that it has been claimed, by some who would have us know less than we used to, that there was no original text of Homer [here he refers to his review, Janko 1998a, of N 1996a], these disagreements [with West] are minor." I would never want to say it that way, that there was no original text of Homer. Obviously, at some point in history, there had to be a first time for textually recording what we know as the Iliad and Odyssey. But the basic problem remains: such an Iliad and Odyssey were not the same texts that we know as our Iliad and Odyssey. So I prefer to say it this way: there is no original text of the Iliad and Odyssey that Janko or West or anyone else can reconstruct on the basis of the existing textual tradition. The variations that survive in this textual tradition, many of which are transmitted by Aristarchus, prevent such a monolithic reconstruction. The significance of these textual variations has been dismissed by Janko, who follows van der Valk in claiming that most Aristarchean readings, especially those that are weakly attested in the surviving manuscript traditions, are "conjectures" and should be rejected (1998a). In his review of West's Iliad , Janko (2000.1) commends him for following this same editorial stance: "Following van der Valk, he [West] holds that Zenodotus was arbitrary and the majority of Aristarchus' unique readings are wrong."20 Elsewhere, I have called into question Janko's editorial stance by critically re-examining each one of his entries in his sample list of some thirty-three cases of Aristarchean "conjectures" in the Iliad (N 1998a). In general, I have also called into question the overall editorial stance of judging variants in terms of a hypothetical Homeric archetype. As I have argued in an earlier work (N 1996a.153), "we cannot simplistically apply the criteria of right or wrong, better or worse, original or altered, in the editorial process of sorting out the Homeric variants transmitted by Aristarchus or by earlier sources"; instead, we can ask "whether a variant is authentic or not -- provided we understand 'authentic' to mean in conformity with traditional oral epic diction." If indeed Homeric poetry, as a system, derives from traditional oral epic diction, then we can expect such a system to be capable of generating multiform rather than uniform versions, and no single version can be privileged as superior in and of itself whenever we apply the empirical methods of comparative philology and the study of oral tradition (N 1996a.117-118). In terms of oral poetics, the multiformity of variations applies to vertical as well as horizontal variants in the textual history of the Homeric poems. With specific reference to vertical variations, it needs to be emphasized that whatever appears to be an interpolation or an omission of a verse in terms of Homeric textual history may in fact be a matter of expansion or compression respectively in terms of oral poetics. (On the mechanics of expansion and compression in oral poetics, see N 1996b.76-77.) In terms of oral poetics, moreover, the compositional phenomena of expansion and

compression correspond respectively to the lengthening and shortening of the number of verses in expressing a given essential idea. In terms of textual history, such cases of lengthening and shortening could be reinterpreted as corresponding respectively to the scribal phenomena of interpolation and omission. From a diachronic point of view, however, the actual adding or subtracting of verses is basically a matter of variation, and we may think of the longer and shorter versions as vertical variants. Thus the textual phenomena of (1) interpolation/omission and (2) varia lectio are comparable to the oral poetic phenomena of (1) expansion/compression and (2) intralinear formulaic variation. In terms of oral poetics, we can even expect situations where the two textual phenomena are found together. In terms of textual criticism, we actually have an Aristarchean formulation for just such a co-occurrence. Apthorp highlights for me ( per litteras 1/26/99) this Aristarchean editorial criterion, as mediated by Didymus: "an indication of interpolation is the fact that the given line is also transmitted differently" (scholia A to XIX 327: τεκμήριον δὲ τῆς διασκευῆς τὸ καὶ ἑτέρως φέρεσθαι τὸν στίχον, "εἴ που ἔτι ζώει γε Πυρῆς ἐμός, ὃν κατέλειπον"). In terms of textual criticism, I offer this restatement: cases of vertical variation typically coincide with cases of horizontal variation. In terms of oral poetics, the varia lectio at Iliad XIX 327, εἴ που ἔτι ζώει γε Πυρῆς ἐμός, ὃν κατέλειπον, is an intralinear formulaic variant of the vulgate reading εἴ που ἔτι ζώει γε Νεοπτόλεμος θεοειδής. In this light, I offer a reformulation of Bolling's formulation concerning Aristarchus' editorial work on the "Alpha Text" of the Iliad (N 1997b.116n48): "Aristarchus reduced ca. 15,600 lines [= his received 'Alpha Text'] to ca. 14,600 [= Bolling's reconstruction of the prototypical 'Pi Text'] by systematically adding in the left margin, next to suspect lines in the 'Alpha Text' that he used as his point of departure, the editorial sign of the obelus. The obelus marks the judgment of athetesis; when a line is athetized by Aristarchus, it is not deleted from his 'Alpha Text': rather, it is simply marked as textually suspect, the result of 'corrupting' accretion. The fundamental problem with the methodology of Bolling is that he allows only for expansion, never for compression, in the evolution of Homeric poetry. If we apply the perspective of diachronic studies in oral poetics, Bolling's assumptions about a tradition that can only add, never subtract, are unjustified." Pursuing further the phenomenon of vertical variation, I stress again the fact that Aristarchus not only athetized verses he also deleted ("omitted") verses. And it was only when a verse was weakly attested in the manuscripts known to Aristarchus that he would actually consider the deletion ("omission") of such a verse from his edition (cf. again Apthorp 1980.xv). The distinction between athetized and deleted ("omitted") is relevant to my resisting West's theory that it was Didymus, not Aristarchus, who collected and collated the Homer manuscripts that yielded the variant horizontal readings tagged as "novit Didymus" in the apparatus criticus of West's Iliad . Aristarchus' procedure concerning deleted ("omitted") verses, as distinct from athetized verses, was not subjective: it depended on external evidence, and on the application of formal criteria to that external evidence. As we have just seen from my brief review of Apthorp's findings, Aristarchus systematically contrasted the stronger and weaker attestations of textual variants. In other words, the editorial criteria of Aristarchus must have required an active policy of collecting and collating manuscripts. An editorial practice of distinguishing between athetesis and deletion ("omission") simply could not work without such a policy. I submit, then, that the cumulative testimony of the scholia concerning Aristarchus' editing of vertical variations provides additional evidence in favor of rejecting West's "novit Didymus" theory -- and editorial practice.21 What I have just argued about Aristarchus' editorial policy on vertical variants applies also to his policy on horizontal variants. His evaluation of these variants must have required an active policy of collecting and collating manuscripts. In this case, however, it is more difficult for us to intuit the degree of variation, from manuscript to manuscript, since any

discussion of variants emerging from Aristarchus' study of the manuscript evidence would have been reserved for his hupomnêmata . Such Aristarchean discussions of horizontal variants, abridged by Didymus and further abridged by the Homer scholia, have reached us in a most unsatisfactory state of incompleteness. The testimony of the scholia to I 423-424, which we have considered earlier, is exceptional in showing a relatively less abridged version of Aristarchean commentary. Moreover, the actual forms of the horizontal variants, as mentioned in the Aristarchean hupomnêmata , could easily be ignored by copyists if their primary task was simply to transcribe the ipsissima verba featured in the text proper of the Aristarchean edition. From the standpoint of copyists who had no stake in the complete Aristarchean editorial legacy, hupomnêmata and all, vertical variation would have mattered far more than horizontal variation: there was far greater or less labor involved in the copying of more or fewer verses (cf. Apthorp 1980.910). Throughout this discussion, we have seen how the testimony of the Homer scholia concerning Aristarchus' editorial policy on vertical variants helps us better understand his corresponding policy on horizontal variants. To summarize both editorial policies, I offer the following template: 1) Vertical variations 1a) Aristarchus kept in his edited text the "vulgate" variant verses that he athetized, while he reserved his judgment of the wrongness of these verses for discussion in his hupomnêmata (marginal marks in the text proper would signal such a discussion). 1b) It was only when the manuscript attestation for a given verse was weak that he could delete ("omit") it rather than athetize it, perhaps justifying the deletion in his hupomnêmata . 2) Horizontal variations 2a) Aristarchus kept in his edited text the "vulgate" wording, while he reserved his judgment on the rightness or wrongness of corresponding variant wordings for discussion in his hupomnêmata (marginal marks in the text proper would signal such a discussion). 2b) It was only when the manuscript attestation for a given wording was weak that he could delete ("omit") it and allow the substitution of a variant wording, perhaps justifying the substitution in his hupomnêmata . In terms of the second part of this posited template, concerning horizontal variations, let us take another look at Iliad IX 394, where West chooses for his own text the Aristarchean reading γε μάσσεται instead of the "vulgate" reading γαμέσσεται. As I have remarked earlier, such a choice is exceptional for West. In most other cases where Aristarchean variants are reported, he tends to choose a variant reading that is nonAristarchean if the corresponding Aristarchean variant is only weakly or not at all attested in the medieval manuscripts and in the papyri (e.g. III 406). He is likely to opt for an Aristarchean variant only if he finds it strongly attested in the medieval manuscripts and in the papyri. Here we have an opportunity to compare West's general editorial stance with that of Aristarchus as I have just outlined it. Ironically, West comes closest to an Aristarchean editorial principle precisely in those situations where he has to make a choice between an Aristarchean and a non-Aristarchean variant. In other words, he resorts to Aristarchean methodology in order to reject Aristarchean variants. When he is forced to choose between an Aristarchean and a non-Aristarchean variant, he tends to rely more than usual on the external evidence -- and less than usual on the internal. In other words, in such situations he is more likely to allow the relative strength or weakness of manuscript attestation to influence his choice. If the Aristarchean variant is weakly attested, he tends to reject it. If it is strongly attested, he tends to adopt it. That is because, for West, an Aristarchean variant is like any other variant.

By contrast, if we follow the neo-Aristarcheans, then any variant reported by Aristarchus has a special status, because it may indeed come from ancient manuscripts or manuscript traditions that were known to Aristarchus and are no longer known to us. In those ancient traditions, the relative strength or weakness of manuscript attestations may indeed have been markedly different from what is available to modern editors like West. I should emphasize that West in these special situations merely tends to make choices on the basis of external evidence. Even here, as elsewhere, he is not systematic in applying the criterion of stronger vs. weaker attestation. Confronted with a choice between a weakly attested Aristarchean variant and a strongly attested non-Aristarchean counterpart, he does not always opt for the second alternative. Again I point to such salient exceptions as his choice of the Aristarchean reading γε μάσσεται instead of the "vulgate" reading γαμέσσεται at IX 394. Exceptions like this help account for the qualification built into the wording of Janko (2000.1): "[West] holds that ... the majority of Aristarchus' unique readings are wrong." With regard to choices to be made between Aristarchean and non-Aristarchean variants, Ludwich's editorial principle is more straightforward than West's: he generally sides with Aristarchus wherever a choice is available on the basis of available manuscript evidence, that is, wherever Aristarchus' own choice between variants is backed up by manuscript evidence available to Ludwich. In the apparatus criticus of Ludwich's Iliad , the most striking illustration of this principle is the ubiquitous formula "Aristarchus + Omega," that is, where the choice of Aristarchus is backed up by "Omega," designating a relatively strong attestation in the medieval manuscript tradition. West has adopted Ludwich's "Aristarchus + Omega" formula in the apparatus criticus of his own Iliad , and we find it applied with the greatest frequency.22 On the surface, then, it seems as if Ludwich and West are applying the same criterion in such situations. Underneath the surface, however, the criteria differ: for Ludwich, the "Aristarchus" component of the "Aristarchus + Omega" formula has special status, but for West it has merely equal status. Correspondingly, whenever the "Omega" drops out, that is, whenever the manuscript support is lacking or weak, the Aristarchean variant tends to be kept by Ludwich but dropped by West. To repeat, West's adoption of γε μάσσεται instead of γαμέσσεται at Iliad IX 394 is for him exceptional. From the standpoint of oral poetics, I should emphasize, such choices do not have to be made. In the case of the two variants γε μάσσεται and γαμέσσεται, for example, both actually fit the formulaic system of Homeric diction, as I have argued elsewhere (N 1998a). In other words, the internal evidence indicates that both forms are functional variants in the formulaic system of Homeric poetry. The external evidence gives further support, if we agree with Ludwich that γε μάσσεται is a variant that Aristarchus had authenticated on the basis of manuscript evidence known to him, just as γαμέσσεται is a variant authenticated on the basis of manuscript evidence known to us. Although West has a generally negative policy about Aristarchus' reliability concerning horizontal variants, he is more positive about the vertical variants. He tends to approve whenever Aristarchus athetizes or deletes ("omits") verses on the grounds that they are interpolations (as in the scholia to III 144a; cf. West 1999a.186-187). Such a double standard toward vertical and horizontal variations as mediated by Aristarchus is also evident, as I have noted earlier, in the work of Janko (1992.21n6; cf. N 1996a.139140).23 For West's Iliad , in any case, the final judgment on both vertical and horizontal variations does not depend on the external evidence of manuscript attestations. Whatever this evidence may have been in the time of Aristarchus, and whatever it is now as we contemplate the texts and quotations that do survive into our time, the ultimate criterion for West is whether a given variant does or does not fit the model built on his assumption that our Iliad and Odyssey go back to "originals" written around the middle of the seventh century BCE. I have already quoted him as saying: "We may assume that there existed a complete and coherent Urtext of each epic, the result of the first writing down" (West 1998a.95). But can we actually restore this Urtext ? West's answer is no: "we are not in the position to restore the original version" (ibid.). He goes on to ask: "Should we then be aiming to recover the Athenian text of the epics, as they were recited at the Panathenaea after Hipparchus, or at any rate as they were known to

Thucydides, the orators, and Plato?" (ibid.). The answer, again, is no: "the text at this period was in a far from settled state" (ibid.). West explains that "there was no single 'Athenian text'" (ibid.). And "the text" becomes only more unsettled thereafter, in the era of the early Ptolemaic papyri: now it is "characterized by so-called 'wild' variants (think of wild flowers rather than wild poets, perhaps), diverging from the medieval vulgate not in narrative substance but with substitution of formulae, inorganic additional lines, and so forth" (ibid.). So, finally, we have come all the way down to the Alexandrian editors. West now asks the inevitable follow-up question: "Should our aim, then, be to reconstruct the Alexandrian text?" (ibid.). One last time, the answer is no: "But again, there is no single Alexandrian text, even if some agreement was reached in terms of Versbestand" (ibid.). West explains: "We know of many variant readings current in the Alexandrian period, from which we must make our choice" (ibid.). So it seems that there has never been any single text, not since the Urtext . In face of all this multiformity sketched by West in his survey of Homeric textual history, we may well ask: how and even why must we "make our choice"? What kind of uniformity should an editor try to reconstruct? West's answer is guarded (1998a.95): "The answer must be some kind of compromise. Let us state our aim to be the establishment, so far as our means allow, of the pristine text of the poems in the form they attained following the last phase of creative effort. We must concede that, as the tradition passed through several centuries of 'wildness', it may be impossible to establish exactly what lies on the far side. But let that be our objective." West is eager to cross the fence and move on to that far side, where the wild flowers grow -- and far beyond that, far beyond the horizon. He leaves behind whatever we can still see on this side of the fence, the ruins of gardens once teeming with cultivated flowers tended by the Alexandrian editors. As we have already noted, West has not much use for Aristarchus, and even less for Aristophanes of Byzantium; as for Zenodotus of Ephesus, that Alexandrian editor is practically of no use at all ( Praefatio pp. vi-vii, though there are a few exceptions listed at n6).24 He concludes by asking: "Why limit our task to reconstructing an Alexandrian text, stopping five hundred years short of the originals, when we have at least a modicum of evidence that takes us further back?" The problem is, trying to go further back to "the originals," to a single text, is an impossible task, when all you have is a "modicum of evidence." To wander off on such a quest is to leave untended the evidence that is closer at hand, available from the Alexandrians. In terms of West's own reconstruction, as we have seen, there is no evidence for a "single text." For him, the last time there was any single text was the time of the hypothetical Urtext . Similarly for Janko, we need to go back to an Urtext -- this time, by way of a prototypical dictation, in terms of his own theory. As we come back to the realities of multiformity described by West in his sketch of Homeric textual history, I must repeat my question: what kind of uniformity should an editor try to reconstruct? The answer, I submit, is that the evidence of textual multiformity precludes a uniform reconstruction, a "unitext" edition of Homer. Instead, the editor of Homer needs to keep coming back, I submit, to the facts of textual multiformity. The basic source for these facts, however incompletely preserved they may be, remains Aristarchus. Revenons à cultiver notre jardin. We cannot afford to lose sight of the facts known to Aristarchus and no longer known (or known as well) to us, even if we think that his editorial judgment was impaired because he in turn did not know some other facts that we do indeed know. In comparing our own cumulative knowledge with that of Aristarchus, it is tempting for some to feel superior to him, as we see from the explanation given by Janko for his general disapproval of Aristarchean atheteses (1992.27): "The ethical and probabilistic criteria he [Aristarchus] applies are not those of Homer's society; his knowledge of epic usage is less complete than ours (based on sophisticated indices and concordances); he was unaware of IndoEuropean and Near Eastern philology, archaeology, oral poetry, ring-composition and Linear B; and, as for literary insight, he is often outshone by the later scholarship seen in

[scholia] bT." So also in the Iliad of West, as we have seen, the editorial judgments of Aristarchus are often overruled on the basis of considerations derived from current Homeric scholarship, much as they are being described by Janko. Still, there remain three fundamental facts that remain unaffected by such considerations. One, Aristarchus knew far more about the ancient manuscript evidence than we do. Two, on the basis of all his manuscript evidence, Aristarchus could not and would not produce a single unified text of Homer. He left room for choices among variants -- both horizontal and vertical -- in his hupomnêmata . Three, on the basis of all the manuscript evidence available to us, which is less extensive than the manuscript evidence available to Aristarchus, editors like West are forced to admit that they cannot produce a single unified text of Homer. The unity of their "unitext" editions is achieved by way of reconstructions and conjectures based on considerations of chronology, dialect, historical provenance, and so forth. In light of these three facts, I propose an alternative to the concept of a "unitext" edition of Homer. Instead, I advocate the concept of a multitext edition (cf. Bird 1994). Such an edition needs to account for Homeric multiforms attested as textual variants, recovered mostly through the research of the Alexandrian editors, especially Aristarchus. As I have argued extensively elsewhere, the textual multiformity of the Homeric poems indicates a heritage of oral poetics. Although the Alexandrians did not think in terms of oral poetics, their editorial work on textual variants provides evidence of this heritage (N 1996a.151-152): "Even though Aristarchus, following the thought-patterns of myth, posited a Homeric original, he nevertheless accepted and in fact respected the reality of textual variants. He respected variants because, in terms of his own working theory, it seems that any one of them could have been the very one that Homer wrote. ... That is why he makes the effort of knowing the many different readings of so many manuscripts. He is in fact far more cautious in methodology than some contemporary investigators of Homer who may be quicker to say which is the right reading and which are the wrong ones. Aristarchus may strike us as naive in reconstructing an Athenian Homer who 'wrote' around 1000 [BCE], but that kind of construct enables him to be more rigorous in making choices among variants. ... What, then, would Aristarchus have lost, and what would we stand to lose, if it really is true that the variants of Homeric textual tradition reflect for the most part the multiforms of a performance tradition? If you accept the reality of multiforms, you forfeit the elusive certainty of finding the original composition of Homer but you gain, and I think this is an important gain, another certainty, an unexpected one but one that may turn out to be much more valuable: you recover a significant portion of the Homeric repertoire. In addition, you recover a sense of the diachrony." The need for a diachronic perspective in analyzing Homeric poetry has led to my developing an evolutionary model for the making of this poetry (N 1996b.30-112). This model was designed to account for all variations that stem from the performance traditions of Homeric poetry. The multiformity of variations in the oral poetic context of composition-in-performance cannot be viewed exclusively from a synchronic perspective (N 1999a). A multitext edition of Homer could provide the needed diachronic perspective on this multiformity. A multitext edition of Homer needs to be designed in a format that displays most clearly all the surviving textual variants, both vertical and horizontal. It should have a base text ( texte à base ) that is free of arbitrary judgments, such as the choosing of one variant over another on the basis of the editor's personal sense of what is right or wrong, better or worse. In other words, the base text needs to be formatted to show all locations where variants are attested, and all the variants that can be slotted into those locations -

- without privileging any of these variants. In the format of " hupomnêmata ," the editor of the base text may then proceed to analyze the variants from a diachronic perspective, making his or her own considered judgments about differences in the chronology, dialect, historical provenance, and so forth. For such a multitext edition, the most convenient base text would be the relatively most standard and common manuscript tradition. For Aristarchus, that base text was essentially the koinê version of Homer -- what neoAristarcheans call the "vulgate" (N 1997b.118-122).25 For us, the closest thing to such a base text is the Homer of van Thiel (1991, 1996). Something much closer to an ideal, however, would be the edition of Aristarchus, if only it had survived. In fact, Aristarchus' edition of Homer would have been the closest thing to what I am describing here as an ideal multitext edition. If van Thiel's Homer were chosen as the most convenient base text for a multitext edition, where could we go from there? What models could we find for the " hupomnêmata " to accompany such a base text? The apparatus criticus of West's Homer seems a most elegant model, at least as a starting point. But there are problems, as we see from the interplay of his apparatus criticus with his testimonia, that is, his display of the ancient quotations of Homer. The testimonia take up a separate middle band on each page of West's Iliad (his edited text is of course in the upper band, while his apparatus criticus is in the lower band). This middle band turns out to be of limited value to the editor -- let alone the editor's readers. After all, West thinks that most ancient quotations are of limited value in the first place (p. x). In his 1898 book, Die Homervulgata als voralexandrinisch erwiesen, Ludwich had already published an exhaustive collection of ancient quotations, down to the Augustan period. Ludwich's mass of cross-references, now further supplemented, has been assimilated by West into the middle band of his Iliad (see again West 1998a.97). Ludwich's original motive -- and premise -- in making his 1898 collection had been simple: he thought that these ancient quotations would help further recover the preAlexandrian vulgate. Since West does not operate on this premise, his updating of Ludwich's repertoire merely exemplifies the law of diminishing returns. The ubiquitous references to "t" and "tt" ("testimonium" and "testimonia") in the lower band containing the apparatus criticus, drawing our attention upward into the middle band containing the testimonia, hardly make a difference whenever it comes to the question of what reading is finally chosen by West in the upper band containing the edited text proper. Typically, "t" or "tt" simply join the chorus of "Omega" readings in privileging the vulgate version of Homer. For West, they seldom make a difference (he lists a handful of exceptions at p. x n14; see also West 1998a.97). By contrast, wherever an ancient quotation does make a difference in Ludwich's Iliad , that editor simply confronts it directly in his apparatus criticus (his Iliad does not feature a separate middle band of testimonia, which he published separately, as we have seen, in 1898). In this respect, Ludwich's policy seems more economical -- and elegant. Although the "lower band" of West's three-band Iliad , his apparatus criticus, is a most valuable contribution to our knowledge of the Homeric textual tradition, the "upper band," his base text, is of questionable value. The text of West's Iliad contains many editorial judgments that go beyond the manuscript evidence and that flatten out the textual history of Homer. Here is where his "unitext" edition differs most radically from a multitext edition. A salient example of differences between "unitext" and multitext editorial approaches to Homer is the case of Athenian forms and themes that we find embedded in the Homeric textual tradition. From a diachronic point of view, we may expect a multitext edition of Homer to accommodate even those textual variants that are dated as late as the sixth through the fourth centuries BCE, the era of Athenian performance traditions (N 1999b.271-272). In fact, there are numerous Homeric textual variants that reflect Athenian accretions in both form and content (West p. vi; cf. N 1998a). For a "unitext" Homer edition like West's, however, the goal is to reconstruct the prototypical text of the prototypical poet. Accordingly, for all practical purposes, West's Iliad has screened out all the textual variants of Athenian provenance. In the case of horizontal variants, West consistently chooses the non-Athenian form over the corresponding Athenian one (Ionic

τεσσερ- vs. "Attic" τεσσαρ-, passim ; cf. Praefatio p. xxxv). Wherever an Athenian form occurs without the attestation of a non-Athenian textual variant, he will simply emend the transmitted Athenian form and conjecture a corresponding non-Athenian form. In the case of vertical variants, he will bracket or simply omit from his text any line that suggests any kind of Athenian cultural agenda stemming from the sixth century or thereafter (a prime example is II 547-551; cf. in general West 1999a). At one extreme, then, West's edition tends to underestimate the chronological diversity of the Homeric tradition. At the other extreme, however, it occasionally lapses into overestimations that defy credibility. In particular, the relatively older forms tend to be treated without sufficient regard for the operative system of Homeric diction. For example, West (p. xxix) claims that the Luvian particle tar (which he translates as 'usquam') is a cognate of the Homeric particle ταρ, and that the Luvian usage of tar is key to understanding the Greek usage of TAR in the Iliad , as at I 8, 65, 123, and so forth.26 In printing ταρ instead of τἄρ in these contexts, West is following the testimony of Apollonius and Herodian, according to whom the particle ταρ counts as one word, by contrast with τἄρ. The particle τἄρ counts as two words, τ' (from τε) plus ἄρ. If Homeric TAR is really cognate with Luvian tar , then it cannot be related etymologically to Homeric τἄρ. And yet, I see no convincing way of separating completely the Homeric contexts of this ταρ from Homeric contexts of τἄρ where the constituents τ' (from τε) plus ἄρ are transparently functional, as at I 93, III 398, and so forth. Moreover, the etymology of γάρ, another particle that counts as one word, can serve as evidence against the etymological separation of ταρ from τἄρ: in the case of γάρ, the constituents are transparently γ' (from γε) plus ἄρ (Chantraine DELG p. 210). Just as some usages of γάρ preserve the syntax of the constituent γε (as in the case of ὁ γάρ via ὅγε plus ἄρ: see Schywzer/Debrunner 1966.560), so also some usages of τἄρ preserve the syntax of the constituent τε (as in the case of τἄρ at III 398, where West's apparatus shows a syntactically analogous textual variant δ' ἄρ actually attested in the papyri). Further, just as other usages of γάρ no longer preserve the syntax of the constituent γε, so also it is possible that other usages of τἄρ no longer preserve the syntax of the constituent τε; whence the special status of Homeric ταρ.27 Here and elsewhere, there are problems with West's application of linguistics in the process of rewriting the received text of the Iliad .28 Concluding, I should stress that my criticisms of West's Iliad are not meant to detract from the praise he deserves. I gratefully acknowledge all his valuable contributions to Homeric scholarship. Even the size of this review can be taken as a tribute to the editor's industry and learning. West's Iliad is a most useful and important edition. Still, it cannot be considered an authoritative replacement of previous editions of the Iliad . Many of those -- including the 1902 Teubner text of Ludwich and the 1920 OCT of Monro/Allen -will continue to have their uses.29 Bibliography Allen, T. W. 1924. Homer: The Origins and the Transmission . Oxford. ---, ed. 1931. Homeri Ilias I-III. Oxford. Apthorp, M. J. 1980. The Manuscript Evidence for Interpolation in Homer. Heidelberg. ---. 1990a. "Some Neglected Papyrus Evidence Against the Authenticity of Iliad 16.381." ZPE 81:1-7. ---. 1990b. "Papyrus Evidence in Favour of Some Suspected Lines in Homer." ZPE 82:1324. ---. 1992. " Nochmals the Authenticity of Odyssey 10.475-9." Classical Quarterly 42: 270-271.

---. 1993. Review of van Thiel 1991. Classical Review 43:228-230. ---. 1995a. Review of R. D. Dawe 1993. The Odyssey: Translation and Analysis (Lewes: The Book Guild). Classical Review 45:1-2. N.B. p. 2, on Dawe's ignoring "the vital distinction between omission and athetesis." ---. 1995b. Review of J. R. Tebben 1994. Concordantia Homerica, Pars I: Odyssea. A Complete Concordance to the Van Thiel Edition of Homer's Odyssey 2 vols. (Zurich and New York). Classical Review 45:221-222. ---. 1995c. "Did Homer Give his Nereids Names? A Note on the Ancient Manuscript Evidence." Acta Classica 38:89-92. ---. 1995d. " Iliad 14.306c Discovered in the Syriac Palimpsest." ZPE 109:174-176. ---. 1996a. "New Evidence from the Syriac Palimpsest on the Numerus Versuum of the Iliad ." ZPE 110:103-114. ---. 1996b. " Iliad 18.200-201: Genuine or Interpolated?" ZPE 111:141-148. ---. 1998. "Double News from Antinoopolis on Phoenix's Parricidal Thoughts ( Iliad 9.45861)." ZPE 122:182-188. ---. 1999. "Homer's Winged Words and the Papyri: Some Questions of Authenticity." ZPE 128:15-22. Bird, G. D. 1994. "The Textual Criticism of an Oral Homer." In Nile, Ilissos and Tiber: Essays in honour of Walter Kirkpatrick Lacey (ed. V. J. Gray), Prudentia 26:35-52. Bolling, G. M. 1925. The External Evidence for Interpolation in Homer. Oxford. ---, ed. 1950. Ilias Atheniensium: The Athenian Iliad of the Sixth Century B.C. Lancaster PA. Broggiato, M. 1998. "Cratete di Mallo negli scholl. A ad Il. 24.282 e ad Il. 9.169a." Seminari Romani di Cultura Greca 1:137-143.

CEG . See Hansen. Chantraine, P. 1968, 1970, 1975, 1977, 1980. Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque I, II, III, IV-1, IV-2. Reissued 1999, with a Supplement (eds. A. Blanc, Ch. de Lamberterie, J.-L. Perpillou). Paris. Citti, V. 1966. "Le edizioni omeriche 'delle città'," Vichiana 3:227-267. Cook, B. F. 1984. The Elgin Marbles . 2nd ed. 1997. British Museum Press. London.

DELG . See Chantraine. Dué, C. 2000a. "Poetry and the Dêmos: State Regulation of a Civic Possession." Stoa Consortium, ed. R. Scaife, http://www.stoa.org/demos/camws-casey.html. ---. 2000b. "Achilles' Golden Amphora and the Afterlife of Oral Tradition in Aeschines' Against Timarchus." Classical Philology , forthcoming. Erbse, H. 1959. "Über Aristarchs Iliasausgaben," Hermes 87:275-303. ---, ed.. 1969-1988. Scholia Graeca in Homeri Iliadem I-VII. Berlin and New York. Foley, J. M. 1999. Homer's Traditional Art. University Park PA. Hansen, P. A., ed. 1983. Carmina epigraphica Graeca saecularum viii-v a. Chr. n.

Berlin and New York. Haslam, M. 1997. "Homeric Papyri and Transmission of the Text." Morris and Powell 1997:55-100. Janko, R. 1982. Homer, Hesiod and the Hymns: Diachronic Development in Epic Diction. Cambridge. ---. 1990. "The Iliad and its Editors: Dictation and Redaction," Classical Antiquity 9:326-334. ---. 1992. The Iliad: A Commentary IV (general ed. G. S. Kirk). Cambridge. ---. 1998a. Review of Morris and Powell 1997. Bryn Mawr Classical Review 98.5.20. ---. 1998b. "The Homeric Poems as Oral Dictated Texts." Classical Quarterly 48:1-13. ---. 1998c. Review of Nagy 1996a. Journal of Hellenic Studies 118:206-207. ---. 1998d. "Corrigendum." Bryn Mawr Classical Review 98.6.17. ---. 2000. "West's Iliad ." Classical Review 50:1-4. Katz, J. 1998. "Αὐτάρ, ἀτάρ, ταρ: The Poetics of a Particle in Homer." American Philological Association Abstracts 128:81. Keaney, J. J., and Lamberton, R., eds. [Plutarch] Essay on the Life and Poetry of Homer. APA American Classical Studies 20. Atlanta. Knight, R. Payne, ed. 1820. Carmina Homerica, Ilias et Odyssea: a rhapsodorum interpolationibus repurgata, et in pristinam formam, quatenus recuperanda esset, tam e veterum monumentorum fide et auctoritate, quam ex antiqui sermonis indole ac ratione, redacta. London. Leeuwen, J. van, and Mendes da Costa, M. B., eds. 1906. Ilias . 3rd ed. Leiden. Lehrs, K. 1882. De Aristarchi Studiis Homericis . 3rd ed. Leipzig; 1st / 2nd eds. 1833 / 1865. Lord, A. B. 1960. The Singer of Tales. Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature 24. Second edition 2000, with Introduction (vii-xxix), by S. Mitchell and G. Nagy. Cambridge MA. ---. 1991. Epic Singers and Oral Tradition. Ithaca. ---. 1995. The Singer Resumes the Tale (ed. M. L. Lord). Ithaca. Ludwich, A., ed. 1884. Didymi commentarii qui inscribebatur Περὶ τῆς Ἀρισταρχείου διορθώσεως fragmenta. = Ludwich 1884.175-631. ---. 1884 / 1885. Aristarchs Homerische Textkritik nach den Fragmenten des Didymos I / II. Leipzig. ---. 1898. Die Homervulgata als voralexandrinisch erwiesen. Leipzig. ---, ed. 1902. Homeri Ilias . I / II. Leipzig. Reissued 1995, Stuttgart. Lührs, D. 1992. Untersuchungen zu den Athetesen Aristarchs in der Ilias und zu ihrer Behandlung im Corpus der exegetischen Scholien . Beiträge zur Altertumswissenschaft 11; Hildesheim. MHV. See Parry 1971. Monro, D. B., and Allen, T. W., eds. 1920. Homeri Opera ed. 3 Oxford.

Montanari, F. 1998. "Zenodotus, Aristarchus and the Ekdosis of Homer. In Most 1998:121. Morris, I., and Powell, B., eds. 1997. A New Companion to Homer. Leiden. Most, G. W., ed. 1998. Editing Texts / Texte edieren. Aporemata II. Göttingen. N = Nagy. Nagy, G. 1996a. Poetry as Performance: Homer and Beyond. Cambridge. ---. 1996b. Homeric Questions . Austin. ---. 1997a. "An inventory of debatable assumptions about a Homeric question." Bryn Mawr Classical Review 97.4.18. ---. 1997b. "Homeric Scholia." In Morris and Powell 1997:101-122. This piece is replete with printing errors. For a list of corrigenda, please write the author ([email protected]). ---. 1998a. "Aristarchean Questions." Bryn Mawr Classical Review 98.7.14. ---. 1998b. "The Library of Pergamon as a Classical Model." Pergamon: Citadel of the Gods (ed. H. Koester) 185-232. Harvard Theological Studies 46. ---. 1999a. "Homer and Plato at the Panathenaia: Synchronic and Diachronic Perspectives." Contextualizing Classics (eds. T. M. Falkner, D. Konstan, N. Felson Rubin) 127-155. Lanham MD. ---. 1999b. "Irreversible Mistakes and Homeric Poetry." Euphrosyne: Studies in Ancient Epic and its Legacy in Honor of Dimitris N. Maronitis (ed. J. N. Kazazis and A. Rengakos) 259-274. Stuttgart. ---. 1999c. "Les éditions alexandrines d'Homère." Homère en France après la Querelle (1715-1900) (ed. F. Létoublon and C. Volpilhac-Auger) 63-72. ---. 2000. "Epic as Music: Rhapsodic Models of Homer in Plato's Timaeus and Critias." The Oral Epic: Performance and Music (ed. K. Reichl) 41-67. Berlin. Nickau, K. 1977. Untersuchungen zur textkritischen Methode des Zenodotos von Ephesos. Berlin and New York. Parry, A., ed. 1971. The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry . Oxford. Parry, M. See MHV . Pfeiffer, R. 1968. History of Classical Scholarship from the Beginnings to the End of the Hellenistic Age . Oxford. Pierron, P. A., ed. 1869. L'Iliade d'Homère : texte grec, revu et corrigé d'après les documents authentiques de la recension d'Aristarque. 2 vols. Paris. Porter, J. I. 1992. "Hermeneutic Lines and Circles: Aristarchus and Crates on the Exegesis of Homer," Homer's Ancient Readers: The Hermeneutics of Greek Epic's Earliest Exegetes (ed. R. Lamberton and J. J. Keaney) 67-114. Princeton Rengakos, A. 1993. Der Homertext und die hellenistischen Dichter. Hermes Einzelschriften 64. Stuttgart. Schmidt, M. 1997. "Variae lectiones oder Parallelstellen: Was notierten Zenodot und

Aristarch zu Homer?" ZPE 115:1-12. Schwyzer, E., and Debrunner, A. 1966. Griechische Grammatik II: Syntax und syntaktische Stilistik. Munich. Sherratt, E. S. 1990. "'Reading the Texts': Archaeology and the Homeric Question." Antiquity 64:807-824. van Thiel, H., ed. 1991/1996. Homeri Odyssea/Homeri Ilias . Zürich and New York. van der Valk, M. 1963/1964. Researches on the Text and Scholia of the Iliad I/II. Leiden. Villoison, J. B. G. d'Ansse de, ed. 1788. Homeri Ilias ad veteris codicis Veneti fidem recensita. Venice. Watkins, C. 1995. How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics . New York. West, M. L. 1990. "Archaische Heldendichtung: Singen und Schreiben." Der Übergang von der Mündlichkeit zur Literatur bei den Griechen (ed. W. Kullmann and M. Reichel) 33-50. Tübingen. ---. 1998a. "The Textual Criticism and Editing of Homer." In Most 1998:94-109. ---, ed. 1998b. Homeri Ilias I. Stuttgart and Leipzig. ---. 1999a. "Frühe Interpolationen in der Ilias." Nachrichten der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Göttingen I. Philologische-Historische Klasse 3-11. Göttingen. ---. 1999b. "The Invention of Homer." Classical Quarterly 49:364-382. Wilson, N. 1990. "Thomas William Allen, 1862-1950." Proceedings of the British Academy 76:311-319. Wolf, F. A. 1795. Prolegomena ad Homerum, sive de operum Homericorum prisca et genuina forma variisque mutationibus et probabili ratione emendandi . Halle. ---, ed. 1804/1807. Homerou epe. Homeri et Homeridarum opera et reliquiae . 4 volumes. Leipzig. Wyrick, J. D. 1999. "The Genesis of Authorship: Legends of the Textualization of Homeric Epic and the Bible." Ph. D. dissertation, Harvard University. Notes: 1.   Wolf's Iliad and Odyssey editions are not nearly as well known as the separately published Prolegomena : cf. Janko 1998d (= BMCR 98.6.17) correcting Janko 1998a (= BMCR 98.5.20), where he had denied the existence of these editions in the context of attempting to correct what I had to say (Nagy 1997b) about the influence of Wolf's editions on later Homer editions like the Oxford Classical Text of Monro and Allen 1920. 2.   On the concept of Aristarchus' "edition" of Homer, as expressed by words like diorthôsis and ekdosis , I find most useful the summary of Montanari 1998.11-20. 3.   Further references in N 1996a.151; cf. Pfeiffer 1968.228; also Keaney and Lamberton 1996.67n2. On the rivalry of Aristarchus and Crates as editors of Homer, see below. 4.   The relevant passage from Josephus, Against Apion 1.12-13, needs to be interpreted in its own right, aside from the interpretations of Villoison and Wolf; as far as Josephus himself is concerned, the point he is making is that the ancient Greeks, unlike the Jews, did not have a continuous written tradition going all the way back to a

prototypical authorship (see Wyrick 1999). Josephus leaves it open whether there had been an "original" Homeric text, and his wording points to a variation on the theme of the Peisistratean Recension, which I view as a cultural construct based on the mythical idea of a prototypical text that had disintegrated on account of neglect, only to be reintegrated later by an enlightened ruler (N 1998b.227-228; in this discussion I include references, with bibliography, to the alternative view that the Recension was a historical event). 5.   Monro and Allen 1920. For a defense of Allen's overall editorial work, which has been severely criticized by e.g. Wilson 1990, see Haslam 1997.89-91. 6.   A typical emendation by Payne Knight, accepted by West, is τεόν for τὸ σόν (mss) at I 185, on the analogy of τεόν at I 138; also at I 207 (in this case, both τεόν and τὸ σόν are attested as manuscript variants). The problem is, the syntax of Homeric τό etc. as article -- even though it is less archaic than the syntax of τό etc. as a demonstrative pronoun -- pervades the formulaic system of Homeric poetry and thus cannot simply be eliminated everywhere by emendation (on the "article" in Homeric diction, see SchwyzerDebrunner 1966.20-22). In general, Homeric diction is linguistically multi-layered, allowing older and newer phenomena to coexist (for example, the older forms τοί and ταί function only as demonstrative pronouns, while the newer forms οἱ and αἱ function either as articles or, by default, as demonstrative pronouns). Thus the sum total of phonological, morphological, and syntactical functions in the formulaic system of Homeric poetry cannot simultaneously be reduced to their oldest phase. Such is the problem with the efforts of Payne Knight (and West) in emending Homeric phrases into a state of conformity with a pre-existing article-free phase of their existence. This kind of effort reveals a general sense of dissatisfaction with the anomalies of existing systems -- a dissatisfaction so strong that it verges on an impulse to recover what is irrecoverable. Such an impulse can lead to an overextended idea about what is genuine -- and what cannot be so. Payne Knight is the man who told Elgin about the Acropolis Marbles: "You have lost your labour, my Lord Elgin. Your marbles are overrated: they are not Greek: they are Roman of the time of Hadrian" (Cook 1984.80). 7.   On Pierron and Ludwich, see Ludwich 1885.82, 91, 168; for more on the Königsberg School, see Ludwich 1885.199. 8.   For a persuasive reconstruction of the history of Aristarchus' Homeric hupomnêmata , see Montanari 1998.11-20. First, Aristarchus produced a set of hupomnêmata that were keyed to the Homer edition of his predecessor, Aristophanes of Byzantium: cf. the wording in the scholia to II 133a, ἐν τοῖς κατ' Ἀριστοφάνην ὑπομνήμασιν Ἀριστάρχου. Then, after he published (= made an ekdosis of) his own edition ( diorthôsis) of Homer, he produced a new set of hupomnêmata that were keyed to this new edition. Relevant are the titles of two monographs produced by Aristarchus' direct successor, Ammonius: (1) Περὶ τοῦ μὴ γεγονέναι πλείονας ἐκδόσεις τῆς Ἀρισταρχείου διορθώσεως and (2) Περὶ τῆς ἐπεκδοθείσης διορθώσεως. Montanari argues persuasively that the two titles are not mutually contradictory. The ekdosis or "edition" of Aristarchus can be viewed as an ongoing process of diorthôsis or "editorial work." Such is the idea behind the reference to a single ekdosis or "edition" of Homer rather than a multiplicity of editions, as expressed in one of the two titles of Ammonius; the same idea accounts for the reference to a "re-edition," as expressed by the wording ἐπεκδοθείσης in the other title. It seems that Ammonius preferred to think of two distinct phases in the history of Aristarchus' editing of Homer, while others thought -- wrongly, according to Ammonius -- that there were two distinct editions. Perhaps the first and the second phases of Aristarchus' diorthôsis (= D1 and D2) may be correlated respectively with the first and the second sets of hupomnêmata (= H1 and H2). According to Montanari's schema, the sequence would be H1 D1 H2 D2. But I am not sure that we need to infer, as Montanari does (p. 19), that the contents of D2 were written into the same "copy" that contained the contents of D1. In the Homeric scholia, we find ubiquitous references to sources labeled αἱ Ἀριστάρχου and ἡ ἑτέρα τῶν Ἀριστάρχου (the wording ἑτέρα makes it explicit that there were two), and it may be easiest to think of D1 and D2 in the sense of first and second copies. In West's apparatus, "Ar ab" is the equivalent of αἱ Ἀριστάρχου, while "Ar a" or "Ar b" are equated with ἡ ἑτέρα τῶν Ἀριστάρχου -- without specification of which one is which. 9.   As Montanari (1998.10) argues with reference to the procedures of Aristarchus, the margin of his edited text would not have been suitable for displaying variants; it would have been suitable only for critical signs that refer to the relevant discussion in the

hupomnêmata . To put it another way: when it comes to the transmission of editorial judgments, marginal notes would not be as useful as marginal signs that refer to an authoritative discussion in the hupomnêmata . 10.   Here are other survivals of quotations of Aristarchus by Didymus, introduced by the tag " lexis of Aristarchus": scholia to II 125, Ἀριστάρχου λέξεις ἐκ τῶν ὑπομνημάτων ...; II 245, οὕτως αἱ Ἀριστάρχου λέξεις ἐκ τοῦ Β τῆς Ἰλιάδος ...; III 406 (already cited above), προσθήσειν μοι δοκῶ καὶ τὴν Ἀριστάρχου λέξιν οὕτως ἔχουσαν ...; also II 111, ἔν τινι τῶν ἠκριβωμένων ὑπομνημάτων γράφει ταῦτα κατὰ λέξιν ... (again, a quotation from Aristarchus follows; earlier in this context, we read in the discussion of Didymus: παρ' ὃ δὴ καὶ κατά τινα τῶν ὑπομνημάτων μετειλῆφθαι τὸ μέγα ἀντὶ τοῦ μεγάλως. τὸ δὲ οὐκ ἔχει τἀκριβὲς οὕτως. εἰ γὰρ τὰ συγγράμματα τῶν ὑπομνημάτων προτάτ[τ]οιμεν, ἕνεκα γοῦν τἀκριβοῦς γράφοιμεν κατὰ Ἀρίσταρχον ...). In this last example, the expression γράφει ταῦτα κατὰ λέξιν implies that Aristarchus is "speaking" (hence κατὰ λέξιν = verbatim) the exegetical remarks that are about to be quoted, but he is also "writing" (hence γράφει) these remarks in the sense that they are now being read in the quotation. We could paraphrase in English: "he writes, and I quote from what he says." My point is, the expression κατὰ λέξιν insists on the idea of ipse dixit . 11.   See Ludwich 1884.194-196; cf. also Erbse I p. 119 footnote. 12.   The Homer edition of Antimachus seems to have been a specially prized possession of the Library of Alexandria, treated as a counterweight to the Homer edition of Euripides, a prized possession of the Library of Pergamon: see Bolling 1925.38-39. 13.   I focus here only on Bolling's reconstruction of the length of this hypothetical "Pi Text"; his reconstruction of the actual diction of the text seems to me far less useful. 14.   I use the term "delete" instead of "omit" in order to reinforce Apthorp's emphasis on the deliberateness of the editorial cancellation of such plus verses. See also Ludwich 1885.132-143 ("Athetierte und ausgestossene Verse"), especially p. 142 on the remark ἔνιοι ὑποτάσσουσι [followed by the quotation of a plus verse] in the scholia to Iliad IX 140 and 159. West's comment on both these lines, "add. quidam ante Ar" (cf. MonroAllen, "quidam ant."), does not convey the editorial implications of the expression ἔνιοι ὑποτάσσουσι. 15.   Unlike predecessors like Bolling, Apthorp avoids using the term "plus verse" with reference to verses athetized but not deleted ("omitted") by the Alexandrian editors. 16.   For more on "plus verses," see especially Apthorp 1998 on Iliad IX 458-461, with new papyrus evidence for deletion ("omission"); cf. my discussion N 1996a.139n135, where "a papyrus" should have been specified as P.Ant. III.158. Apthorp adduces P.Ant. III.158, P.Ant. III.160, and the Leiden glossary. West's apparatus does not mention P.Ant. III.160; but it adduces a new Oxyrhynchus papyrus, "1139" (West's apparatus indicates that the plus verses are omitted here as well). 17.   Ludwich 1885.192-199 ("Aristarch und die Vulgata"). 18.   For more on the term "Wolfian vulgate," see N 1997b.118-122. 19.   When Parry says "unique" in this context, I interpret it to mean "uniquely characteristic of oral poetics." For a fuller application of this quotation, with more context, see Nagy 1998a. For another application of this same quotation, see the important discussion of Apthorp 1980.110n67. 20.   On both points, Janko refers to West p. vii. In a separate work, I hope to dispute West's general dismissal of Zenodotus, as he phrases it on this page. On the value of variant readings that go back to Zenodotus, in terms of oral poetics, see N 1996a.133138; see also my p. 144n160 on Aristophanes of Byzantium (with a discussion of the numerus versuum of Aristophanes' Homer edition, on which see also Apthorp 1980.3). 21.   This is not to say that Didymus did not collate Homer manuscripts in his own right or that Aristarchus was the only collator (cf. Bolling 1925.39 for a post-Aristarchean dating of the Krêtikê ). It is only to say that the primary collator of Homer manuscripts was Aristarchus himself and that Didymus may not have had access to all the sources still available to Aristarchus (cf. again Bolling, ibid.). 22.   I should note one important difference between West's and Ludwich's usage: for West (see his p. xiii), but not for Ludwich, readings from "Omega" are regularly to be contrasted with readings from "Z" (=Ve1 Allen). 23.   For more on Aristarchus' editorial methodology in using external manuscript evidence for determining whether or not to apply athetesis, see the extended discussion in N 1996a.146-147n169. Janko 1998c.147 has asserted about my discussion: "N. also believes (146, n. 149 [should be 169]) that the Alexandrians athetised suspect verses

because of MS evidence, whereas in fact they athetised such verses, rather than omitted them, only when they lacked external evidence against them." This assertion is criticized by Apthorp 1999.19n22: "As M. Haslam correctly states, 'It is ... clear that Aristarchus did at least on occasion have manuscript authority for his atheteses' [1997.76]. The evidence for this is assembled in [Apthorp 1980] pp. 49-53, with notes on pp. 102-9. R. Janko is misleading when he writes that 'the Alexandrians athetised suspect verses, ... rather than omitted them, only when they lacked external evidence against them' [1998c.207, in Janko's review of Nagy 1996a]." Elsewhere, Janko tones down his assertion by inserting the qualification "largely" [1992.28]: "for him [Aristarchus], athetesis was largely based on internal evidence." 24.   On Zenodotus, I refer again to my defense of his editorial methods in N 1996a.133138. 25.   See especially Ludwich 1884.11-16 ("Die alte Vulgata"). 26.   West is here following Watkins 1995.150, who refers at p. 151 to an unpublished 1994 work of Joshua Katz on Homeric formulas beginning αὐτὰρ ἐπεί (for an abstract, see Katz 1998). 27.   If indeed Homeric ταρ is derived from τ' (from τε) plus ἄρ just as γάρ is derived from γ' (from γε) plus ἄρ, we still need to account for the enclitic status of ταρ in some Homeric contexts and the non-enclitic status of τἄρ in others. It may be relevant that γάρ is fully lexicalized in all its attestations, that is, it has become a single word, whereas neither ταρ nor ἄρ / ῥα (vs. ἄρα) have achieved that status in Attic/Ionic, outside of poetic diction. With reference to the arguments of Katz 1998, I see further evidence for counter-arguments. For example, not only are αὐτάρ and ἀτάρ syntactically parallel in a variety of Homeric contexts: so also are ἀτάρ and αὖ / αὖ αὐτὰρ ἄρα at II 103 and αὐτὰρ ὃ αὖτε at II 105, 107. 28.   For examples of questionable rewritings in West's Iliad , see also the criticisms of Janko 2000.1. I hope to discuss further examples in a separate piece. 29.   I thank the following for their valued advice (any mistakes that remain are my own): Michael Apthorp, Egbert Bakker, Graeme Bird, Timothy Boyd, Miriam Carlisle, Olga Davidson, Casey Dué, Mary Ebbott, David Elmer, Douglas Frame, Albert Henrichs, Carolyn Higbie, Alexander Hollman, Olga Levaniouk, Richard Martin, Leonard Muellner, Jed Wyrick, Dimitrios Yatromanolakis. Read Latest

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Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2001.06.21

Martin L. West (ed.), Homerus Ilias volumen alterum, rhapsodiae XIII-XXIV .   Munich/Leipzig:  K.G. Saur, 2000.  Pp. viii, 396.  ISBN 3-598-71435-1.  DM 69.00 (pb).   Reviewed by Jean-Fabrice Nardelli, Université de Provence ([email protected]) Word count: 18665 words

I. GENERALIA 1. Even though 'Homer' must be called fortunate to have been handed down to us in one thousand and a half ancient manuscripts and at least two hundred medieval ones, together with the most extensive and learned collection of scholia a Greek author ever knew, not to speak of the highly untidy evidence of the quotations and imitations, this state of affairs confronts the editor of the Iliad with an unusually difficult problem. Whereas, for most classical authors, it is well known that the absence of any assessment of the history of the text has not prevented the textual tradition from being surveyed and satisfactory critical editions equipped with adequate apparatus from being produced, since it was possible either to classify the manuscripts or, pending the elaboration of a stemma, to determine roughly which lines of tradition are likely to have preserved the better readings (save perhaps for 'open traditions'), in the case of the Iliad it is impossible to divorce the work on the text from the work on its history and the history of its interpretation. Actually, we have too extensive information on the ancient, mainly Hellenistic, states of the text to reduce its editing to the application of the method put forward by Paul Maas: first the establishment of what can be regarded as transmitted ( recensio), then the analysis of this material in order to prove or disprove its faithfulness to the original ( examinatio ) and the reconstruction of this original by conjecture ( diuinatio ).1 Things cannot be theoretically and practically simple when a text is in so good a state of preservation as that of the Iliad and, at the same time, so historically determined by the human element in its preservation and propagation; we are not dealing, as is the case for Plato or the tragic poets,2 with Byzantine recensions whose sources admit of no obvious reconstruction and may be but are not proved to be Alexandrian given the presence of an overwhelming random element in the preservation, but with Alexandrian scholarship at its peak with no random element at all, only deliberate choice, combination of earlier materials and refined elaboration. To us, the Homeric original is both very remote in time, at a date on which no agreement seems possible but which may well be the first middle of the eighth century, and in condition, since as a 'monumental epic'3 and an orally dictated text it experienced a certain volatility before it was transmitted through the writing process, and this original could be definitely obscured by subsequent critical work, mainly by Zenodotus and Aristarchus, the achievement of which our medieval manuscripts are the last, but not the least trustworthy, remnants. Furthermore, 'Homer' having been the basis of Athenian education from the classical period onwards, the only national poet learned by heart and read through the cities, it is quite difficult, in the oralist framework, to imagine something very different from a handful of early exemplars, each of them exhibiting dialectal and compositional variations, written in the local orthography, and descending in a flexible way from ancestors, the condition (unity or plurality?), date and geographical origin of which one can only guess (Pisistratid Athens being the favourite, as the Panathenaic text of 'Homer' is the oldest whose existence is

attested by external evidence). After the epics were copied down, 'Homer', who was formerly, in the truncated form (songs like the Ὅρκοι, the Τειχοσκοπία...) favoured by the performance, the shared property of every rhapsode able to recite it, became the common treasure of the Greeks, both the learned and the illiterate. Two more facts then seem incontrovertible. Despite the deceptive clue of the orthography we have no evidence for a kind of mainstream in pre-Alexandrian texts, even for an Athenian one. What we have are superfical Attic traits which can be accounted for as the result, in an Attic-speaking area, either of a process of redaction (textual point of view) or of a performative phase (evolutionary point of view). The question is not well settled, since the phonology of these Atticisms often bears witness to a post-classical date (a useful but seldom cited book is Sven-Tage Teodorsson, The Phonemic System of the Attic Dialect, "Studia Graeca et Latina Gothoburgensia 22" , Lund, Berlingska Boktryckeriet, 1974, especially the synopsis of orthographic changes on pp. 75-162) and since the production of Atticisms may also involve the one of artifical Ionic traits or hyperionisms, which are very poorly attested as variants and seldom, if ever, entered the vulgate. Secondly, early in the transmission, before the generalisation of the habit of possessing and handing books4 came to create the need for a specific trade with demands of its own, one should not place too great a confidence in the postulation of a widespread scholarly interest in 'Homer'. The first recorded individual to have dealt with Homeric matters is Theagenes of Rhegium, whose floruit coincides with the reign of Cambyses II (5305-522),6 and he should have been moved by an antiquarian concern in γλῶσσαι or realia , that led him to doctor the wording; so may have behaved his many successors, faced with a plurality of texts which were far from easy to understand, in the absence of living performance, but which hardly called for textual criticism in the sense the Alexandrians took it. It is debatable whether, in trying to restore a pre-Alexandrian state of the text, the vast majority of the editors are not running after a ghost, the ghost of a single archetype or some closely related ones. Though I am aware of the fixity of the transmission,7 the picture of a maze of ancient versions is not inconsiderably corroborated (among other conclusions) by scholia, whose exploration alone enables the critic to draw a line between vertical material and secondary material in manuscript variants.8 And, provided we do not question the reliability of Didymus in his handing of Aristarchean evidence, reliability documented by the occasional verbatim quotations he makes of fragments of textual criticism, such is the situation with which Aristarchus is said to have coped when he prepared his two editions and his related sets of notes. This is not to say that there is no possibility to establish a sound text, as we shall see below (IV. 1). I. 2. Once it is recognised that the pre-Alexandrian archetype as a whole is a moving target in need of serious qualification,9 Martin West's edition appears as what it claims to be: another effort towards a reconstruction of the poet's own text. The reason is plain from the opening phrase of the Praefatio:10 if 'Homer' wrote down something that became the transmitted Iliad , it is the critic's duty to approach this source and nothing else. This is a daring ambition. Up to now no scholar has succeeded in producing singlehanded a completely new critical edition of the Iliad adequately supplied with textual apparatus. Pending the appearance of an account of the ancient and medieval propagation of the text that would improve on T. W. Allen's Prolegomena to his editio maior , what one most urgently needs is an edition that would remedy Allen's major flaws: his lack of discrimination as regards the numerous weakly-attested Wolfian lines, proved by Bolling to be vulgar interpolations that ought to be removed to the apparatus, and his lack of text-critical acumen in determining which transmitted readings are sound enough to be edited. Thanks to Pierre Chantraine's unrivalled knowledge in matters orthographic and dialectal, the latter process was (partly successfully) undertaken in the Budé edition, from which Helmut van Thiel's Weidmann text is something of a regression. But the former process was never really attempted, all the more since Van Thiel was prevented by his faith in the reliability of the medieval 'vulgate' from contemplating such a discrimination. That West, on top of his explanation of the transmission, has successfully dealt with both of them is plain and need not be questioned. Nonetheless the casual reader of the Teubner Iliad must be advised that, despite its impressive layout,

this edition remains the tentative account of an opinionated author whose bibliographical covering suppresses any counter-argument one may raise against his points and whose handling of material is idiosyncratic. For all West's virtues as a critic and an editor, he lacks a spirit of charity for the solutions he did not bother to adopt, the consequence being that his whole approach to the history of the text as it is given in the Praefatio sometimes sounds disagreeably dogmatic.11 In this review I shall first examine how West accounts for the conditions of the transmission, then lay out in detail the establishing of the line-number and the text itself for books XIII-XXIV. Then I shall offer some comments on issues textual and exegetical. II. DE TEXTV TRADITO II. 1. "De traditione primitiua" (vol. I, Praefatio, pp. V-VI). Some time between the seventh and the sixth centuries BC in Ionia a genial bard called Homer composed, amended and expanded through the years both the Iliad and the Odyssey, the text of which he finally left to his fellow rhapsodes, the corporation of socalled Homeridae of Chios.12 In the course of generations this autograph being a common professional treasure was extensively performed, revised, filled with additional verses and modified so as to agree with the prejudices and tastes of its different audiences until it reached Athens at the beginning of the sixth century. Then it was further expanded in a strategic point (the Catalogue of Ships). Book-division crept in with Hipparchus, who is said to have imported the poems into Attica and to have organised their recitation in formal competitions held during the Great Panathenaia ([Plato], Hipparch, 228 b 9 ἐξ ὑπολήψεως ἐφεξῆς αὐτὰ διιέναι: each rhapsode took up the poem where the last left off. Afterwards the process of Atticization holds the ground, as 'Homer' becomes the paramount classical author, the basis of education from whose verses the child learned how to spell, before the Sophistic movement tried, if not to go beyond him, at the very least to tamper with him.13 His triumph is complete by the years 403/402, when Euclides' reform causes his texts to be transcribed in the twenty-four letters alphabet. This picture is unobjectionable save for three details, none of them minor. The less crucial one is the adoption of an early chronology for the introduction of book-division;14 since the attribution to Hipparchus, evidently as a by-product of his reorganisation of recitation contests, is no more than a personal opinion of West and so offered in footnote 3 at the back of page VI, and since it is influenced by West's opinion (prejudice?) that we are able to recover with a fair degree of certainty an early text very near 'Homer',15 I hesitate to call it a blatant misunderstanding of the tradition first represented by Cicero16 (who credits Pisistratus with the innovation)17 but I cannot help regarding such a view as entirely eccentric. A late Hellenistic, perhaps Pergamene, manipulation of the evidence designed to cast doubt on the Athenian text Aristarchus is said, in polemical terms, to have revived18 cannot be ruled out, but a far more satisfactory explanation is that the whole story is a garbled variant of Hipparchus's reorganisation.19 It follows that, if the Hellenistic attribution of the book-division to Aristarchus himself is impossible,20 and if the alternative solution put forward by Paul Collart and revived by S. R. West in her youth (an innovation of the book-trade caused by the material conditions of handling scrolls) is merely possible, though attractive,21 West should not endorse without hesitation the confusion, and perhaps doctoring, of the source of Cicero. The second controversial issue confidently adopted by West regards Hipparchus' responsibility for the entry of 'Homer' in Attica. Something clearly went wrong with this story: on the one hand I agree with Haslam, 82 that the date is too late; on the other hand, its rests on the authority of [Plato], Hipparchus, 228 b 4-9,22 a very uncertain one, to say the least. What is more, an alternative version does exist, whose central figure for the introduction of the poems is, beyond Pisistratus as the responsible for the interpolation of II, 546-556 in the Catalogue of Ships, Solon (Dieuchidas of Megara, FGrH 485 F 6 apud Diogenem Laertium I, 57),23 and another one, involving Sparta in the person of Lycurgus (Aristotle, Resp. Lac ., fr. 611, 10, 52-56 Λυκοῦργος ἐν Σάμωι ἐτελεύτησε. καὶ τὴν Ὁμήρου ποίησιν παρὰ τῶν ἀπογόνων Κρεοφύλου λαβὼν πρῶτος διεκόμισεν εἰς Πελοπόννησον). Unless we make the pseudo-Plato and Dieuchidas agree

by conjecturing ἐξ ὑπολαβῆς in the text of the former (which would be harsh), the three versions can readily and satisfactorily be seen as worthless nationalistic efforts to seize on 'Homer'. An editor who fails to make such a reservation in his preface should not necessarily be laughed out of court; but by choosing to ignore altogether the conflicting versions and their critical sifting by modern scholarship West is guilty of gross oversimplification of the evidence. The last controversial issue in his picture of the proto-historic transmission is the way it represents the manuscript's descent as being subjected to no further process than an accretive one. This generalisation of G. M. Bolling's standpoint (without his idiosyncratic terminology),24 suffers from two severe drawbacks. It does not work on the basis of variant readings; its sole purpose is to allow the editor, as did Bolling in 1950, to cancel lines which can be demonstrated to have been added since the (Athenian sixth century BC) archetype. If one adds that it is only through the testimonium of Aristarchus as mediated by the scholia that Bolling (and West) are able to guess the number of lines the archetypal text presented though both of them scorn the great Alexandrian's labours, I am afraid I cannot pronounce about this idea differently than Gregory Nagy: "the fundamental problem with the methodology of Bolling is that he allows only for expansion, never for compression, in the evolution of Homeric poetry."25 What for a conclusion, then? Pages V-VI of the Teubner Praefatio provide us with a striking if very broad picture of the first two centuries of the transmission, whose details are far less agreed upon than West chooses to say and which fails to make it clear that historical points have been cast by him in an idiosyncratic way. It does not signify the entire collapse of his construction; but by indulging here in speculation and there in uncontrolled acceptation of conflicting evidence it is plain that West leads us to know less than what we should know. And the casual reader may find the elaboration of the materials better done elsewhere. II. 2. "De traditione historica" (vol. I, Praefatio, pp. VI-XVI). West rounds off this picture by accounting for the scholarly tradition (VI-VIII); the ancient manuscripts (papyri and uncials: VIII-IX); the quotations preserved in subsequent writers (IX-X); and the medieval manuscripts (X-XVI). His bibliographical abstinence is as conspicuous as before, but only in the section on the scholarly tradition does this appear to be a major inconvenience: the intricate nature of the arguments, explicit and implicit, is such there that one is hard put to discover the source, or even the material basis, of what he says. II. 2. 1. The chapter on Alexandrian scholarship mixes well-documented observations with unwarranted speculations in a style filled with rhetorical questions, flourishes and asides. West begins with a general criticism of those scholars who viewed editorial work in Alexandria as the comparison of previous exemplars and the collecting of variant readings. and so cannot understand the true nature of the three Alexandrians' contributions, mainly those by Zenodotus. It is questionable whether West's mocking tone is justified; and his protest is, to my mind, both unnecessary and unfair since it takes the place of proper acknowledgement of scholarly debts. It deprives Marchinus van der Valk and Klaus Nickau of the merit of having provided us with a balanced account of Zenodotus and Aristarchus. Unsurprisingly enough, the better part of what West holds here is a mere adaptation of Van der Valk's conclusions.26 Zenodotus was arbitrary in his treatment of the text, he did not seek as if it were a rule earlier exemplars27 but lavished his judgement on those which were at his disposal ( non exemplaria contulit, non nouum exscripsit, uerum ueterem librum usurpauit q u e m h a b e b a t, p. VII) and he marked with the obelus every passage he deemed unworthy of his conception of 'Homer'. Such is the main core of his 'recension'; his textual ambitions were limited to a number of conjectures which found their way in Aristarchus' sets of notes.28 Aristarchus, although he agreed with Aristophanes' more rational aims and methods (save that he produced two successive sets of notes keyed to his texts: ArA, ArB), was as arbitrary as Zenodotus in his singular readings, at least those that found no hospitality in the 'vulgate' (Van der Valk, Researches..., II, 90: "so far as Aristarchus' activities with regard to the Homeric text are concerned, we can say that he was no less prolific than Zenodotus in offering

conjectures. Since, however, his emendations are less arbitrary, more scholarly and cautious, they have been less easily unmasked"). The risk of endorsing these views without qualification is patent: Van der Valk's conviction29 that the Alexandrian critics were no less arbitrary in their establishing of the numerus uersuum30 than they are in their constitutio textus, has not gone unchallenged.31 West himself felt bound to accept the arguments for the validity of Aristarchus' criteria in establishing the number of verses deemed authentic in the text of the Homeric poems, as devised by Bolling, External Evidence..., and recast by M. J. Apthorp in a magisterial way ( The Manuscript Evidence for Interpolation in Homer, Heidelberg, Winter, 1980). Actually, the reason West partially endorses Van der Valk in the field of constitutio textus may well be that he himself has a revolutionary theory to offer: contrary to the evidence of the A scholia, the quotations of textual criticism by Didymus do not show any first-hand collation of earlier exemplars by Aristarchus, whose riches Didymus was able to extract from different versions of the Aristarchean notes he had access to. No one besides Didymus sought variant readings; he collated as much textual evidence as was accessible to him, in an unsystematic way. To him should therefore be assigned the whole body of evidence relevant to the preAlexandrian state of the text. No more than Gregory Nagy in his review of West's vol. 1 ( BMCR 00.09.12) am I able to agree with this theory.32 That Didymus nouit the thousands of readings he is credited with remains mere speculation. It would have been had West first given his proofs in a separate paper or monograph. It is unfortunate that he has weighted with his authority and the one of a Teubner edition such a highly debatable novelty. II. 2. 2. The chapter devoted to the ancient manuscripts is very cursory indeed but not vitiated by West's idiosyncrasy. Practically speaking, its most valuable device is the continuation of the numerical series initiated by Allen in his editio maior and followed since then by Collard, Mette and D. F. Sutton. The floppy disks produced by the latter formed the basis of the Teubner apparatus up to P (papyrus of text) #665, H (Homerica) #115 and W (witness) #40. One misses a reference to the more up-to-date (Homer in the Papyri dates from 1992) lists available in Sutton's website (Homer and the Papyri at http://e3.uci.edu/~papyri/homer/; last update 06/01/2001), and, perhaps, a concordance with the forthcoming repertory of Pack-Mertens, but this is a more tidy and informative procedure than that of Van Thiel in his Weidmann text. Materially speaking, the major innovation of West is the investigation of about 840 unpublished scraps of papyrus from Oxyrhynchus now in the Ashmolean Museum of Oxford. Even though no indication of date, origin and material condition are given in the Sigla breuiata for this new material (which is to be regretted, since a Ptolemaic papyrus, that can be eccentric in his text or conform, and even a Roman one, have simply not the same weight that a much later, Byzantine papyrus), this is of paramount importance for the establishing of the numerus uersuum: West's documentation throws new light on the problem of weakly-attested lines, for whose inauthenticity the papyrological evidence was proved by Bolling and confirmed by Apthorp to be the main external criterion when corroborated by internal evidence. Accordingly, the Teubner apparatus will remain for long a major tool, even if its text and collation of medieval manuscripts are superseded. The presentation of papyrological readings in each lemma has not been encumbered with the customary system of dotted letters and brackets, save for the new Oxyrhynchus papyri and only where it has been deemed necessary; the lectional signs in the papyri are generally not exhibited. Such a policy is unobjectionable, since it saves space with a minimum loss of information; but students interested in selected passages may wish to check the actual placing of lacunae and lectional signs in the original publications. For what I was able to check in the editiones principes in my possession,33 the report is highly reliable. The nature of the text provided by papyri is hastily summed up in six lines. What is said is not untrue, but hardly adequate, since it makes no distinction between eccentric Ptolemaic papyri and conforming later ones, the watershed for this radical change in the state of the text being the middle of the second century BC, and since it amalgamates without qualification matters relevant to the numerus uersuum

and to the constitutio textus. Nothing is said on how the 'vulgate' came to be what it is; the issue itself is hardly mentioned.34 These lacunae are much to be regretted. II. 2. 3. The chapter on the quotations has benefited from fresh examination, in order to update previous collections (La Roche's 1872 apparatus; Ludwich, Die Homervulgata als Voralexandrinische Erwiesen , Leipzig, Teubner, 1898, 71-115) and to cover all authors down to the ninth century AD. This was a daring ambition, since most works dated from the early Byzantine period are inadequately published at best (mainly codices A and B of the Etymologicum Genuinum ); the result is hardly worthwhile in itself, and West reminds us of what little critical moment these quotations are to the editor, being made from memory and often containing supplementary verses. Only very occasionally do the quotations preserve a better text than the direct tradition. Parodies, imitations and centos are also mentioned, but have not been studied afresh,35 though West was able to use M. D. Usher's work on so-called Homerocentones , before it appeared in the Bibliotheca Teubneriana ( Eudociae Homerocentones , Leipzig & Stuttgart, 1999). The apparatus of the testimonia in both volumes of the Teubner Iliad is very heavily abbreviated and compact, and the form can be said to lack both elegance and clarity. Since the huge majority of authors of quotations are of no help in the editing of the text, it would have been profitable to retain in the critical apparatus only those who actually do make a contribution (as did Ludwich). But this is not essential. My only serious reservation is that the references for quotations collected by La Roche and Ludwich were not updated; as a consequence, the text may be sometimes at variance with the one West took into account. For a striking illustration, see my note (below, under heading V) on XXII, 31. Last but not least, vast as it is, the collection is still far from being exhaustive. Without attempting a systematic verification, I am able to add a few more items, often trivial enough: II, 24 (or 61) = Fronto, Epistulae, p. 7, 13 Van den Hout; II, 53 = Diogenes of Oinoanda, fr. 142, II, 15-18 Smith ( Diogenes of Oinoanda. The Epicurean Inscription, La Scuola di Epicuro . Supplemento 1, Naples, Bibliopolis, 1993, 331); IV, 223 = Fronto, Epistulae, p. 7, 11 Van den Hout; V, 4 = Libanios, Epistulae, 1238, 1 (XI, 319, 1-2 Förster); V, 340 = Seneca the Elder, Suasoriae, I, 5 (p. 5, 4 Kiessling); VI, 407 = the same, Controuersiae , I, 8, 15 (pp. 137, 29-138, 1 Kiessling); IX, 97 = the same, Controuersiae , VII, 7, 19 (p. 360, 18-19 Kiessling); IX, 203 ζωρότερον...κέραιε = Fronto, Epistulae, p. 189, 7-8 Van den Hout, with κέραιρε like Plutarch, Athenaeus and Et. Magn.; IX, 204 οἱ...ἄνδρες = the same, Epistulae, p. 189, 6 Van den Hout; XV, 187-193 are extant with original variants in Ptolemagrios' monument in Panopolis, I. Milne 9267 (p. 48) = SEG, VIII, 363 + 638 = Inscriptions métriques 114 (contemporary of August's reign?), face I, lines 1-736; XVI, 21 can be found in Heliodorus, IV, 7, 4 (II, p. 11 Rattenbury-Lumb) with a fault--Ἀχιλεῦ instead of Ἀχιλλεῦ--and the reading Πηλέως [Πιλέως cod. Z] like the majority of Homeric ueteres (hereafter W*); XX, 250 is quoted by Jerome, Contra Rufinum, III, 42, 21 Lardet ( "Corpus Christianorum" 79, Turnhout, Brepols, 1982, 112) with a slightly different text for the second hemistich, ὁπποῖόν κ' εἴπηισθα ἔπος, πος τοῖόν [ἔπος τοῖόν dedit Lardet: πος τοιον codd.] κ'ἐπακούσαις, that comes from Jerome's carelessness in quoting poets (Lardet, note 228, p. 235); and XXIII, 72 can be found in Porphyry's fr. 378F Smith (p. 457, from the Περὶ Στυγός), with the temporal augment εἴργουσι like W (ἐέργουσι Bentley). II. 2. 4. The chapter on the minuscule manuscript tradition is the longest and the sole to argue in some detail for the theses held by West. I may begin by assigning at least some of the prototypes of this tradition to the beginning of the tenth century AD, the period to which belong the work of Kephalas on the Palatine Anthology and the Byzantine translitteration of Aristophanes, in the light of the epigrams by Kometas ( Anth. Pal. XV, 36-38), who says that he has "discovered, rejuvenated and written down the age-old books of Homer" (for his phraseology see especially 38, 1-3 and 4-5 εὑρὼν Κομητᾶς τὰς Ὁμηρείους βίβλους ἐφθαρμένας τε κοὐδαμῶς ἐστιγμένας, στίξας διεσμίλευσα ταύτας ἐντέχνως... Ἐντεῦθεν οἱ γράφοντες οὐκ ἐσφαλμένως μαθητιῶσιν, ὡς ἔοικε μανθάνειν). As this man, far from being a mere grammarian in whose mouth such a language may be pedantic joke, seems identical with the first Professor of Greek in the reopened University at Constantinople (from AD 863 onward), the guess of the Budé editor of the Anth. Pal.,

Robert Aubreton, that he has edited, that is translitterated, Homer is possible and ought not to be ignored (cf. Alan Cameron, The Greek Anthology from Meleager to Planudes , Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1993, 308-311). The medieval evidence presents the critic with an arduous task: on the one hand, manuscripts ranging from the ninth century AD to the late sixteenth are to be counted in the hundreds. A mere up-to-date catalogue does not even exist, in the absence of which one has still to work through the tidy but generally second-hand information collected by Allen, sometimes many years before the date of the final release (1931: Homeri Ilias , I, 11-55). On the other hand, relationships between manuscripts both individually and collectively resist analysis. We have not, for the Homeric poems, the situation found in many classical works, where the transmission offers a distinct family-tree and where each descendant manuscript perpetuates the distinctive 'errors' of its ancestors and adds fresh distinctive 'errors', without ever (or very seldom) returning to the 'truth' except by conjecture. In the case of the Iliad , proper evaluation is hampered by the considerable degree of textual uniformity the 188 manuscripts known to Allen show (number of lines, rough appearance of the text), as a consequence of their reflecting of the post-Alexandrian stabilisation which came to be the 'vulgate'. The variant readings, a very considerable galaxy, cannot easily be pressed into a recognisable path with disjunctive 'errors' and conjunctive 'errors' so as to produce a stemma owing to the absence of clear, unequivocal instances of graphical faults (those in the oldest manuscripts seldom point to a definite type of script and thus the uncial or minuscule status of their prototype) and to the extensive horizontal transmission conspicuous in the innumerable interventions of later 'hands' in all the minuscule manuscripts. This process of correcting the copy in linea by entering the readings of other manuscript(s) than the direct prototype was no doubt helped by the presence of scholia rich in alternative readings and suggestion of emendation. From the scholia an exchange of readings is very likely to have taken place, but in itself this is insufficient to account for so extensive a contamination. The instability of the constellations of variants and the extreme diffusion (that is, inconsistency) of each group of manuscripts that can be affiliated on the basis of generally no more than a handful of common significant readings, is sufficient to disprove any attempt at classification and to bar the way for proper eliminatio codicum descriptorum . Therefore, Allen's 'families' and 'independent manuscripts' ( Homeri Ilias , I, 93-193)37 show incontrovertibly that the majority of manuscripts have good claims to appear under several 'families' and so are not liable to be assigned to a fixed place in a stemma. One may dislike Allen's methods and question the text and apparatus he eventually produced, but his collations, for all their selectivity and incorporation of previous material in an uncontrolled way (from La Roche and Ludwich), remain an invaluable tool without which nearly nine tenths of the medieval tradition would remain terra incognita. Pending their (hardly feasible) replacement, subsequent editors have been faced with an uncomfortable choice: either to ignore them and make a fresh start by concentrating on the systematic exploration of the oldest manuscripts at the risk of missing much of value outside this restricted path or to incorporate them and try to prove the degree of contamination by working out their affiliations. The most influential modern fashion appears to be the first. Such is Van Thiel's standpoint: his criteria of selection are the intrinsic age of manuscripts (this led him to retain 19 codices, in rough chronological order ZADBEFTYCRWNGMHVOLI, of which 15 are representative of the ten 'families' of Allen x v o s i b e h t r--respectively A, BCE [this last added by Van Thiel], DG, F, H, I, L, MNP, O, R--and one--T--was recognised by Allen as 'independent' ) and their covering of both text and ancient scholia where some of the preceding are deficient (P z Ath). Only one of these manuscripts escaped Allen's notice, viz. Y, a Parisian torso which contains excerpta of two-thirds of the Iliad and which is interesting for its comparatively early date (eleventh century). Surprisingly, Van Thiel does not report Y fully: his apparatus furnishes the readings of the manuscripts only in the few cases where the printed text is different from their consensus or their majority (expressed by the siglum W, a device of Ludwich), or where the authenticity of the medieval tradition is doubtful. Based as the Weidmann text is on the exclusive authority

of the 'vulgate' as preserved by the medieval tradition,38 its meagre apparatus does not report adequately the evidence for ancient scholarship, save for the marginal signs of Aristarchus, and is extremely selective in its treatment of the ancient manuscripts' readings. West was then wholly justified in his plan of giving more attention to these two matters. Now, as far as the medieval tradition is concerned, he virtually reproduces Van Thiel's selection, apart from the retrieval of the comparatively late LI z Ath and the addition of X, codex Sinaiticus (850-870?), the readings of which he gives after the first publication for only IV, 367-376. Of the remaining 19 manuscripts, he constantly reports 12: Z and Omega (I write W only when there is no risk of confusion with the manuscript W) = ADBCEFTRWG plus Y where it is extant. NHMOVP are reported selectively where they appear to have independent readings; only for the local manuscript O (Bodleianus 298) did West make an exception to his rule of the non-collating of secondary manuscripts. The main advances of West in matter of recensio are the extensive report of W (which now appears as one of the most interesting and individually characterised Homeric uett.), Z (which was insufficiently collated and reported by Allen and now easily recognised as stemming from a different tradition than Omega) and of Y (a manuscript whose score of unique omitted lines and verbal variants cannot be divined from the report of Van Thiel: it omits e.g. XXIV, 116; 125 with Gac; 128 ἐμόν-131 μίσγεθ'; 141-142; 206; 208-216, which it sums up with a line of its own; 220-227 ibid.; 311-312; 321; and it reads instead of τοῖος in 182, ταμίη φέρε instead of πρόχοόν θ' ἅμα in 304, αγγελον αισιον αμμι for ἄγγελον ὅς τέ σοὶ αὐτῶι in 310, αστεος εξεφαανθη for δὶα ἄστεος. οἳ δὲ ἰδόντες in 320, ὅτε δὴ for οἳ δ' ἐπεὶ in 349). Affiliations between the twelve basic manuscripts are accounted for on pages XIII-XVI in a manner which reintroduces the problem of contamination, as none of them appears to be exclusive in his agreements with others. The task has been well performed and the results are seldom exciting but carry the conviction. West is generally content to revive points previously made, like the case for the close agreement of BCE inside Omega, and MNP outside it, already noticed by Allen, and to illustrate them with a few significant readings.39 The intrinsic importance of YW seems to have been underrated: Y, being a manuscript of extracts and fragments, is sometimes very eccentric, and, not always through carelessness, more eccentric in fact than West chooses to say, who tacitly restores many accents and breathings (I rely on my examination of the original in MayJune 2000); while W, which has fewer individual readings but is still very characterised, often exhibits peculiarities of orthography which can ultimately be tracked down to certain antique conventions of writing.40 Although not on the same scale as those by Ludwich and Allen, the Teubner apparatus is far more extensive than the one by Van Thiel and furnishes minute exhibition of the significant peculiarities of the twelve basic manuscripts. We may pass over the silence maintained by West on the physical nature and extent of his collations (for A the blackand-white reproduction by Comparetti, for O the original, I suppose; but what of the others? For all his defects Allen was able to study nearly all his manuscripts in situ, a not unimportant bonus in the discrimination of hands), but a conspicuous reservation is that, no less than Van Thiel (and Ludwich), West's use of the collective siglum W is the occasion for indulging in a one-sided negative redaction of the apparatus.41 Occasional minor variations of spelling (movable nu for manuscripts other than A, for instance, or final dative in iota) are tacite concealed by the parenthesis; this is not a great loss, but a loss indeed. A second, potentially more dangerous, objection would be that the Van Thiel-West limitation to the early path of medieval tradition does not account at all for the contamination and may appear arbitrary. It remains a possibility that ancient variants lie unnoticed in the great mass of the recentiores, either buried in the hardly accessible apparatus of Allen or having escaped his selected reading of the originals. Such a probability has every chance to be low; for contamination in manuscripts later than, say, the fourteenth century is as likely to proceed from early medieval manuscripts like the W ones as from much older manuscripts. But Pasquali's defence of the recentiores, non

deteriores principle is hard to bypass in the case of the Iliad , and I regret that West did not deem it necessary, if not to take into account this state of affairs (this was indeed bewildering after he had chosen the fermeture stemmatique at the very least to introduce a random element in his equation by checking some of the late manuscripts. Instead, when the opportunity presents itself (that is, totally unsystematically), he merely gives support to some variant readings provided by a few of his uestustiores with the testimony of Ludwich's or Allen's selections of recentiores, represented by the quite confusing heading 'rr', 'r'. Now, given the severe limitations of the similar standpoint of Van Thiel, unsupported as it is by a far too abridged apparatus, and the various deficiencies of previous editions, West has put every reader of the Iliad greatly in his debt. Only with the tidy evidence of his apparatus does the identity of the medieval and the post-Aristarchean vulgate becomes incontrovertible. For a bonus this is not inconsiderable. But the foremost advance of the apparatus in its report and classification of the evidence is to make possible something very like the approach of the authentic numerus uersuum. III. THE NVMERVS VERSVVM. III. 1. Until Jean-Baptiste Gaspard d'Ansse de Villoison had published, with a rich, if somewhat verbose, introduction, the text and scholia of the Venetus 454, discovered by him at the very end of 1778 or the beginning of 1779 ( Homeri Ilias ad ueteri codicis Veneti fidem recensita, Venice, 1788, a book by now very scarce and of which I am fortunate to possess a copy), there was no way of establishing the numerus uersuum other than from the printed tradition. Although the editorial vulgate of the text itself goes back to the celebrated Poetae Graeci Principes heroici carminis of Henri Estienne (Geneva, 1566), that is to say, to the Genauensis 44 (Ge Allen, G Van Thiel West), line numbering was inherited from the 1488 Florentine princeps of Demetrius Chalcondylas.42 The availability of Villoison's 532 closely printed pages of A scholia stirred things up, after the announcement of their riches in learned journals had produced an extraordinary expectation of the Homerus Variorum totius antiquitatis Criticorum soon to be revealed:43 it was made clear that the text from the then known manuscripts and current editions was not roughly Homer's ipsissima uerba . Only after Villoison's publication could an adequate edition be prepared.44 A major, if pedestrian, improvement on the French scholar's faithful but hastily publication came from the detailed Indices nominum to the newly published scholia as well as to the corpus of all those previously known ( Scholia Minora, scholia of C. Horneius and Wassenberg, Leipzig and Cambridge scholia) and to Eustathius that appeared in Harles' revision of Fabricius' great Bibliotheca Graeca (I, 440-501; followed by a 25-page repertory of ancient critics named by all these scholia). The method followed by F. A. Wolf in establishing his numerus uersuum at 15693 lines was nowhere clearly stated by him; when one reads the introductory material of his second edition (1804-1807) as well as the relevant part of the famous Prolegomena ad Homerum (1795) that rounded off his 1794 edition, one is faced either (in 1795) with hopelessly vague formulae of historical character filled with rhetoric or (in 1804) with reassessment of these results that culminate in considerations borrowed from others. The 1794 text had no apparatus; the proof-reading was done before the writing of the Prolegomena , where Wolf pays lip-service to Villoison before going on to relate how he himself, as long ago as his adulescentia (1779 or 1780), had lived for making a recension of Homer ( Homerum numquam diu exanimo et conspectu amisi). But, despite his self-stated Herculean labors,45 Wolf merely duplicated Villoison's conclusions as to the corrections the printed vulgate was in need of, conclusions which a single glance at the Venetus might have saved him.46 This narrative must not be accepted at face value;47 and it is strange that such a long process eventually led to an edition which, though markedly different from Villoison's (1788, pp. 1-120) in its critical pretense (contrast Wolf's own claim subtilitas sine qua historica disputatio persuadet, non fidem facit), is similar to his in nearly every respect save for a few lines culled from quotations, like the one adjusted between the first word of XVIII, 604 τερπόμενοι and the first one of 605 δοιώ (= iv, 17, after Athenaeus, V, 180 c) with the indispensable transformation in 606 of ἐξάρχοντες to ἐξάρχοντος ( Prolegomena ad Homerum , chapter XLIX, note 49 p. 263; cf. ed. 1804, praef., p. LXXXVII), and save for numerous

minute differences or peculiarities of orthography and dialect (their tendency being towards the archaizing of the text). Therefore one can take for granted that the basis of the Wolfian text of 1794 is the Venetus, both its text and scholia, with some admixture of the indirect tradition; since the disregard for the vulgar manuscripts was then fashionable,48 it is not surprising that they were of little, if any, use. In determining his numerus uersuum, it looks as if Wolf was interested in bypassing Villoison only by a more systematic use of his material. Since he has a good feeling for Homeric Greek and is sometimes successful in his orthographic novelties (for instance he consistently wrote ὕπο, ἔπι for ὑπό, ἐπί, but did not see that ἔγωγε was to be separated), I hesitate to pronounce concerning him the gross word 'plagiarism'; but I can see no other term that would describe the fallacy of an editor who in his career never published an edition without having the ancilla of a previous, major brick-and-mortar work and who never fulfilled his promises of giving his complete philological justifications. The true epoch-making editions of the Iliad were Villoison's, for his often uncritical but undeniably accurate report of the Venetus, and Heyne's (1802), for his sifting of the text and his extensive collations of many manuscripts; both of them did occasionally produce excellent conjectures. III. 2. That the attested text of 'Homer', even of the Venetus, was riddled with interpolations of all kinds apart from the occasional plus-verses Wolf incorporated into his texts, German erudition of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was quick to discover. When we discount the wild Nauck, Köchly and Fick and the undistinguished Rzach and Cauer, there are three editors whose work still repays careful attention, Ludwich, Leaf, and Van Leeuwen, who were bold enough to handle the least tolerable lines on the basis of the internal, 'literary', evidence. But there was still no sounder criterion than each critic's Sprachgefühl . It was left to Bolling to give incontrovertible proof of two facts of paramount importance: working with an eye constantly on the papyrological evidence, he showed that all lines for which the external evidence of the manuscripts is not unanimous and which can be seen on internal grounds to have been taken over from a similar, longer context to harmonize them (concordance-interpolation) are likely to be post-Aristarchean accretions for which he coined the term 'vulgar interpolations'. As a rule, they are likely to be absent from newly discovered Ptolemaic and Roman papyri. Bolling showed also that the transmitted numerus uersuum, once deprived of these additional lines, is virtually the same as Aristarchus'. It may be contested whether Aristarchus' successive 'editions' are the pre-archetype of the transmission, what Bolling called the Alpha-text, contrasting with the archetypal Pi-text; and his view of Aristarchus (and Zenodotus) as never canceling a line without very strong manuscript evidence against it has been repeatedly and justly assailed by Van der Valk. But even if it were true that the Alexandrian's methods were seldom based on manuscript evidence and more ill-judged than sensitive, as Van der Valk strongly argued, the great increase in papyrological evidence since Bolling published his Ilias Atheniensium, which sought to establish a sixth-century Athenian text, allowed Michael Apthorp in his in-depth 1982 reassessment of Bolling's model to undermine seriously these counter-arguments. Apthorp proved that Aristarchus was cautious enough to omit no genuine, unanimously attested line and that his atheteses were meant to signpost weakly attested lines in the pre-Alexandrian material he did handle. The first point has been endorsed by the great majority of scholars while the second is still the matter of some dispute, wrongly to my mind. In the following discussion, I shall discard plus-verses, which do not make great a difference whatever recent texts one consults and which are listed in West's apparatus in the most convenient and up-to-date way, and concentrate on proper interpolations. III. 3. West removes from the text 21 of what Bolling ( External Evidence... 16-23) called 'vulgar interpolations' amounting to 23 lines in books XIII-XXIV. No further comment is needed than the transcription of the critical notes which show the absence of these lines both in the papyri (at least a majority of them) and in a substantial portion (or the majority) of the W-mss. in linea; accordingly I append here a mere list: XIII, 255 (see Apthorp, Manuscript Evidence..., 38, 78); XIV, 70; XIV, 269 (Apthorp, 100); XVI, 381 (Apthorp, Some Neglected Papyrus Evidence against the Authenticity of

Iliad 16 381, ZPE 81, 1990, 1-7); XVI, 614-615; XVII, 219 (Apthorp, Manuscript Evidence..., 150); XVII, 455; XVII, 585; XVIII, 604-605 (Apthorp, 160-165); XIX, 177 (Apthorp, 100 b); XX, 312; XX, 447; XXI, 434; XXI, 480 (Apthorp, note 69 on 183-184); XXI, 510; XXII, 121; XXIII, 565; XXIII, 864; XXIV, 558; XXIV, 693; XXIV, 790. Hereafter I take for granted that, although lines presented as vulgar interpolations can theoretically nearly always be accounted for by oral poetics (even up to the point of producing sophistic arguments), they should not whenever external evidence against them is overwhelming. III. 4. Further vulgar interpolations were recognized by Bolling (External Evidence... and Athetized Lines... / Ilias Atheniensium), which are not removed by West but retained in his text between a special kind of brackets (braces). These may be but cannot be proved to be post-Aristarchean accretions, since the decisive criterion of external evidence (manuscript attestation in papyri) is either ambiguous or insufficient, so that West was justified not to delete them. In books XIII-XXIV I have counted 21 occurrences amounting to 25 lines. In 10 cases West may well be overcautious and this reviewer would have wished to see the following lines properly removed: XIII, 480 (= 94; hab. P 9 P 60 P 481 W: def. P 10 P 497 ἐν πολλοῖς οὐ φέρεται; "almost certainly a post-Aristarchean interpolation" Apthorp, 151, 2); XIII, 731 (add. Aim D2 Rim, hab. Zenodotus P 435 P 481 FG: def. P 60 p 1288 W*; "surely spurious" Janko, A Commentary ..., IV, 138); XIII, 749 (= XII, 81; add. Aim Him, hab. W*: def. P 60 A H O V; "clearly a concordance-interpolation" Janko, 140); XIV, 120 (add. Aim Wim, hab. W*: def. P 1 P 60 P 1297 P 1306 T Rpc; given that no less than four papyri now omit the line together with A T W, it was possible to relegate it to the apparatus); XV, 481 (= III, 337, XI, 42, XVI, 138; hab. Db R: def. P 48 P 60 P 1139 W*; that D R and the consensus of B C E read the line is of little weight against the omission by three papyri and the rest of the ueteres); XV, 578 (= XIII, 187 ; hab. P 48 W*, post 570 hab. P 60, i. m. add.W3 manus secunda : def. P 224 P 343 G H O V ; "its absence in three of four papyri and some codices, like the existence of a variant 'darkness covered his eyes', prove it a concordance-interpolation like V, 42, to make clear that the bow is fatal", Janko, 290); XVII, 326 (hab. P 692 W: def. P 43 P 230; "it is virtually certain that it is a post-Aristarchean interpolation" Apthorp, 152); XVIII, 200-201 (= XI, 800-801, XVI, 42-43; hab. A b, 200 hab. W*: def. P 9 P 11 P 86? P 647? P 1429 N V; the absence in so many papyri is quite overwhelming); XVIII, 441 (= 60; hab. P 9 A W*: def. P 11 P 86? P 239 G, ἔν τισιν οὐ κεῖται; Apthorp, 145 "not only is the line dispensable, but, once again, there is a good case for the aesthetic superiority of the shorter text; and once again we see that there would have been a strong temptation to concordance interpolation of that text. For these reasons, and also because there is no real homoiographic temptation to omission, I regard it as almost certain that...the line is an interpolation which was absent from the edition of Aristarchus"); XXI, 73 (hab. Didymus P 9 P 507 W: def. Aristarchus ἐν ταῖς Ἀριστάρχου; cf. Apthorp, 147-150 and 152). In 6 cases West's refusal to delete is probably sound: XIII, 316 (add. D2 Tim, hab. P 435 F G R W: def. P 10 P 36 P 60 P 481 P 1254 P 1265 W*; despite Janko, 87, Apthorp, 145146 made a good case for an accidental omission); XVI, 689-690 (add. Fim Rim Wim, hab. b T G: def. P 9 P 486a W*); XX, 135 (hab. 9 A Dim F G: def. P 435 W*; the athetesis is approved by Edwards, 307, without mentioning van Leeuwen's demonstration that the line was inscribed in the margin of A's exemplar); XX, 316-317 (= XXII, 375376; om. P 9, 317 om. V); XXII, 316 (= XIX, 383; add. Aim D2, hab. P 9 P 12 W*: def. ADH; despite Apthorp, 39 and, given the contamination of our tradition, I hesitate to valorize the omission in A D, aetate qua, up to the point of counterbalancing the attestation in two papyri and in the vast majority of the manuscripts); XXII, 363 (= XVI, 857; add. D2, hab. P 9 W*: def. P 255 P 1507 D V; but it must be said that the new papyrological evidence of West favors the athetesis). One more case admits of an indifferent choice, the medieval attestation being scanty but with no strong papyrological evidence against the line: XXI, 158 (add. Gim, hab. b F: def. P 9 W*).49

There remain three cases in which no certainty could be reached: XVIII, 381 (add. Aim Rim W2, hab. W*: def. P 11 P 86? P 239 P 647 A R G W; Apthorp, 140 "in the light of the line's dispensability and the ἐγγύθεν difficulty, I think it is far more likely to be a post-Aristarchean interpolation... The ultimate verdict must remain non liquet..."); XVIII, 427 (= XIV, 196; hab. P 86 W*: def. P 9 P 11 P 239 G H R; despite the evidence of the Bt scholia[[50] Apthorp, 141 is to my mind on the right track: "this would give the hypothesis that 427 was accidentally omitted from an influential transcript of Aristarchus' edition a certain degree of plausibility, but my own assessment of the internal evidence leads me to regard the prima facie interpretation--that 427 is a post-Aristarchean interpolation--as far more likely"); and XXIII, 92 (hab. P 9 P 257 P 511 H 142 W: def. P 12, ἐν πάσαις οὐκ ἦν; here Bolling's criterion of attestation in papyri is balanced by the statement of Didymus, and the decision on which of these conflicting authorities has the better ground remains a matter of personal appreciation from the modern critic). It is time for less advanced students of the text to learn that in this total of 47 lines none can be genuine and that they ought not to be quoted as Homer's any longer. Those relegated to the apparatus raise no problem. But those retained in the text with braces are no less certainly spurious than the deleted ones, but West was not confident enough (or did not dare) to delete them. Now, the very typographical device of the braces is misleading. No difference is made between the lines against whose authenticity there is manuscript ground ('vulgar interpolations') and those that are mere guesses, suspected by modern critics followed by West. A more satisfactory solution would have been the use of square brackets for these 20 possible vulgar interpolations and the use of braces for speculative suggestion of interpolated lines. III. 5. One more line is bracketed, which is present in the manuscripts but against whose authenticity its absence in nearly all our papyri is a serious ground: XV, 551 (hab. P 60 W: def. P 9 P 48 P 131; could be a concordance-interpolation from XIII, 176 [Janko, 289], but Allen well explains the omission in P 48 by homoioteleuton, so that we are faced with an attestation in one papyri and a significant omission in two, and the decision to remove the line was daring). In one case West's apparatus seems to be erroneous: XV, 562 is added by Dpc and read by W*, whereas P 48 and the unpublished P 1341 lack it; but it is absent in P 60 according to Allen and Mazon, and even in O 8 [O Van Thiel West] and a dozen late manuscripts according to Allen solus 51 and has every chance to be a concordance-interpolation from V, 530 [Janko, 289-290; contra, Van der Valk, Reasearches ..., II, 517-519 is special pleading]). Accordingly the reader should be prepared to regard XV, 551 and XV, 562 as post-Aristarchean interpolations. III. 6. In his final view of the transmission, epitomized in Ilias Atheniensium Bolling went on to edit, in his own words, "the earliest stage of the tradition from which one can go on recensione aperta" in conformity with his rule that "in a reconstruction of Pi the shorter text is to be preferred" ( The Athetized Lines of the Iliad , 25 = postulate VI; the preceding quotation is from p. 25, note 4). In so doing, he indulged in three excessive novelties which, justly, found very little hospitality in West's edition. Not content with removing first all lines absent in any papyri without regard for the nature of this absence and second those lines athetized by Aristarchus, Bolling also deleted any line for whose suspicion by some ancient critic the scholia bear witness, because "neither Zenodotus, nor Aristophanes, nor Aristarchus would athetize a line unless its attestation seemed to him seriously defective.52 The first device he applied (in Ilias Atheniensium unless otherwise noted) in XIII, 46 (om. P 10, hab. P 65 P 85 P 1427 W sec. West: om. P 60, F 21 sec. Bolling; that the omission was caused by homoioarcton was seen by the Budé editors); XIV, 12 (om. P 60 Px: hab. P 9 P 1285 P 1294 W; West's new papyri prove Bolling's suspicion to be wrong); XXI, 402 and 405 (om. P 12; both lines can be seen as dispensable, but their absence in one papyrus is precarious ground against their unanimous attestation; Bolling is misguided); XXII, 133-135 (om. P12, sed post u. 316 rest.; the omission is accidental and repaired in the wrong place; Bolling is perverse); XXIII, 359-361 ("om. (P 13 [ 1a]); hab. P 254 ( 5/6 p), cf. ad 757 a-c", Bolling; there is no such indications in West and the Budé edition, but as 359-361= 757a-c, which are extant in the P 13im, Bolling's suspicion that both groups of lines are interpolated is worth

noticing). The second device he applied in XIII, 350 ( Athetized Lines... [hereafter A.L. ], 133); XIII, 658-659 (ath. Aristophanes, haesitabat Aristarchus: A.L., 134-136); XIV, 95 (ath. Aristophanes, Aristophanes); XIV, 114 (om. Zenodotus, ath. Aristophanes); XIV, 213 (ath. Aristophanes, Aristarchus); XIV, 304-306 (ath. Zenodotus, Aristarchus); XIV, 317-327 (ath. Aristophanes, Aristarchus 53); XIV, 376-377 (ath. uel om. Zenodotus, ath. Aristophanes Aristarchus: A.L. , 139-140); XV, 56-77 (ath. Aristophanes, Aristarchus); XV, 147-148 (ath. Aristophanes, Aristarchus: A.L. , 144); XV, 166-167 (ath. Aristarchus: A.L. , 144-145); XV, 212-217 (ath. Aristarchus, cf. A.L., 146-147; West suspects only 214); XV, 231-235 (ath. Aristophanes, Aristarchus: A.L. , 147); XV, 449-451 (ath. Aristarchus: A.L. , 148-149); XV, 668-673 (ath. Aristarchus: A.L. , 149-150); XV, 712 (ath. Aristarchus: A.L. , 150); XVI, 97-100 (ath. Zenodotus, Aristarchus; Aristarchus s o l u s sec. Bolling: A.L., 150-152); XVI, 237 (om. Zenodotus, ath. Aristophanes Aristarchus); XVI, 261 (ath. Aristophanes, Aristarchus: A.L. , 153); XVI, 613 ('om. Aristarchus 1, ath. Aristarchus 2' Bolling, or better West 'om ArA, ἄλογον siglum appinxit ArB'); XVII, 420 (ath. Aristarchus: A.L. , 157); XVIII, 39-49 (the Catalog of the Nereids is omitted by the editio Argolica, athetized by Zenodotus and Aristarchus, cf. External evidence ..., 177-178); XVIII, 444456 (ath. Aristarchus: A.L., 159-160); XVIII, 597-598 (om. Aristophanes--plus P 239ac--, ath. Aristarchus); XIX, 94 (ath. Aristarchus: A.L. , 162-163); XIX, 388-391 (ath. Aristarchus: A.L.,165); XIX, 407 (ath. Aristarchus: A.L. , 165-166); XIX, 416-417 (ath. Aristarchus); XX, 125-128 (ath. Aristarchus: A.L. , 167); XX, 180-186 (ath. Aristarchus: A.L. ,167-168); XX, 195-198 (ath. Aristarchus: A.L. ,168); XX, 205-209 (ath. Aristarchus: A.L. , 168-169); XX, 251-255 (ath. Aristarchus: A.L. , 169-170); XX, 322-324 (ath. Aristarchus: A.L. , 170); XXI, 290-292 (om. editio Cretica, ath. Seleucus; 290 ath. Aristarchus: A.L. , 171-172); XXI, 475-477 (ath. Aristarchus: A.L. , 173-174); XXI, 570 (ath. Aristarchus: A.L. , 174-175); XXII, 199-201 (ath. Aristarchus: A.L. , 175-176); XXII, 329 (ath. Aristarchus: A.L. , 176); XXII, 393-394 (ath. Aristarchus: A.L. , 177); XXII, 487499 (ath. Aristarchus, cf. External Evidence..., 189-190 and A.L., 172); XXIII, 259-261 (ath. Aristophanes, Aristarchus: A.L., 180-181); XXIII, 405-406 (ath. Aristarchus: A.L., 181); XXIII, 471 (ibid.); XXIII, 479 (ath. Aristarchus: A.L. , 181-182); XXIII, 581 (ath. Aristarchus: A.L. , 182); XXIII, 757 (ath. Aristarchus: A.L. , 182-183); XXIII, 772 (ath. Aristarchus: A.L. , 183); XXIII, 810 (ath. Aristarchus: A.L. ); XXIII, 824-825 (ath. Aristophanes, Aristarchus); XXIII, 843 (ath. Aristarchus?: A.L., 183-184); XXIV, 6-9 (ath. Aristophanes, Aristarchus: A.L. , 184); XXIV, 20-21 (ath. Aristarchus: A. L. , 186-187); XXIV, 23-30 (ath. Aristarchus sec. Bolling, cf. A.L. , 188-189, at uide West, 334); XXIV, 45 (ath. Aristarchus: A.L. , 189); XXIV, 71-73 (ath. Aristarchus, obelos appinxit P 656: A.L. , 189-190); XXIV, 86; (ath. Aristarchus: A.L. , 190); XXIV, 130-132 (ath. Aristarchus: A.L. , 191-192); XXIV, 304 (ath. Aristarchus: A.L. , 192); XXIV, 476 (ath. Aristarchus: A.L. , 193); XXIV, 514 (ath. Aristarchus: A.L. , 193-194); XXIV, 556-557 (ath. Aristarchus: A.L. , 194); XXIV, 594-595 (ibid.); XXIV, 614-617 (ath. Aristophanes, Aristarchus, "fortasse recte" West; cf. A.L. , 195).54 The third device he applied in XIII, 637 (τινές apud schol. bT); XIII, 657 (ath. aliquis apud scholia bT: A.L., 134-136); XIV, 142 (ath. aliquis apud scholia T: A.L. , 137); XV, 18-31 (om. Zenodotus) + XV, 33 (om. Zenodotus Aristophanes 55); XV, 206 (ath. Zenodotus: A.L., 145); XVI, 89-94 ("sic W; ut in textu Zen." Bolling; 89-91 med. om. Zenodotus); XVI, 140 (ath. Zenodotus) + XVI, 141-144 (om. Zenodotus), cf. A.L., 152; XVI, 432-458 (om. Zenodotus); XVI, 467-470 ("sic Aristarchus apud scholia T legisse dicitur" Bolling); XVI, 666-683 ("ath. Zenodotus, u. 677 omisso" Bolling, cf. A.L. , 154156); XVII, 134-136 (134-135 Bolling; om. Zenodotus, Chian edition); XVII, 260-261 (ath. Zenodotus, defendit Aristarchus: A.L. , 156); XVII, 364-365 (ath. Zenodotus: A.L. , 156-157); XVII, 404-425 (om. Zenodotus: A.L., 157-158); XVII, 545-546 (ath. Zenodotus, τινὲς οὐδὲ γράφουσιν scholia T: A.L., 158); XVIII, 10-11 (om. Rhianus, Aristophanes); XVIII, 176-177 (om. Zenodotus); XVIII, 483-608 or 609 (ath. Zenodotus, 479-609 om. Fick; cf. A.L., 160-162); XIX, 327 (ath. Aristophanes, Aristarchus; Didymus has the alternative text εἵ που ἔτι ζώει γε πυρῆς ἐμὸς ὃν κατέλειπον; cf. A.L. , 163-164); XXI, 195 om. Megaclides Zenodotus Rac, hab. Aristarchus; XXI, 287 ("fortasse non habuit Seleucus" Bolling, cf. External Evidence..., 189-190 and A.L., 171-172; West's apparatus is silent and records only the athetesis of Payne Knight); XXI, 538-539 (ath. Zenodotus: A.L. , 174); XXIII, 332-333 (pro his uu. legit Aristarchus ἠὲ σκῖρος ἔν. νῦν αὖ

θέτο τέρματ' Ἀχιλλεύς);56 XXIV, 269 (om. Zenodotus). There remain the unclassifiable passages XXIII, 626 (add. P 13pc: om. P 13ac V, ignorasse uidetur Aristarchus: Bolling's claim that the line was added by a second hand is wrong, but its ignorance by Aristarchus is significant) and XXIV, 528 (Plato has a text of his own--δώρων οἷα δίδωσι κακῶν, ἕτερος δὲ ἑάων the 'vulgate', κηρῶν ἔμπλειοι, ὁ μὲν ἐσθλῶν, αὐτὰρ ὁ δειλῶν Plato--, both being quoted by Plutarch). Two passages are exemplary of the degeneration of Bolling's critical faculties:57 XIV, 278-279 where I simply cannot understand the reason for the deletion (that an alternative version of these two lines is extant in the T scholia and Eustathius does not prove that the vulgar text is inauthentic), and XVII, 74 which is omitted only by T (as if this bare fact were sufficient to prove the line to be badly-attested!). Finally two more cases are exemplary of Bolling's biased standpoint: for the vulgar text in XVIII, 155-156 Zenodotus reads something very different, together with the plus-verse 156a, which need not bear witness to the authenticity of the 'vulgate' here but nonetheless cannot be used as evidence for the spuriousness of 155-156 themselves in both versions. And on the authority of Aristonicus he rejects XVIII, 444-456 (429-456 Fick), with no justification ( Athetized Lines..., 159). I should add that if Bolling were to be wholly in agreement with his system he should have deleted XVIII, 356-368, condemned by Zenodotus and himself ( Athetized Lines..., 158-159). III. 7. A further 41 passages (105 lines) are marked as spurious in the Teubner edition on partly external,58 partly internal grounds. In this respect, West is more suspicious than any previous editor in this century, Bolling excepted; this very suspicion of lines which, in their great majority, are easily accounted for in the oralist framework, is nothing more than guesswork and has the flavor of an a priori refusal. By so doing West is coherent with himself since he refuses the critical consequences of the Parry-Lord theory,59 but one may surmise that he treats the evidence one-sidedly to support his vision of the transmission, instead of reporting what may be archetypal. First I list the lines the authenticity of which has been questioned in antiquity; these, and only these, have a chance to be spurious and were deleted as such by Bolling, Ilias Atheniensium: XIV, 40 (ath. Aristarchus; the internal ground is very strong: πτῆξε is quite out of place here, as is ἀχαιῶν applied to only three chiefs; and why should Nestor's appearance cause alarm? Perhaps the line was interpolated so as to introduce the name of Nestor; the solution can hardly consist in emending πτῆξε and Ἀχαιῶν); XV, 214 (damnauit Heyne, post Aristarchum qui ath. 212-217; for sure Hera, Hermes and Hephaistos do not count among Troy's most active divine enemies; and, though wellattested, Ἑρμείω seems alien to the Kunstsprache [so Leaf]; but, as the whole athetesis of Aristarchus here can be proved to be subjective, without manuscript grounds against 214 it is unsound to discard the external evidence); XV, 265-268 (ath. Aristarchus, 266268 om. Zenodotus; it is a pity to cut short the major simile, giving as a pretext that it already occurs in VI, 506-511; these lines are at least as cogent here, where Hector, aided by two gods, has some motives to exult; 266-268 are not repetition, but oral amplification--Janko, A Commentary ..., IV, 256 -); XV, 610-614 (om. Zenodotus, ath. Aristarchus; "the athetesis spoils the ring-structure of 592-614" Janko, 295; see also Van der Valk, Researches..., II, 408 "Aristarchus cancelled the lines among other reasons...because he preferred a concise diction...and accordingly considered the lines to be superfluous"60 and Oliver Taplin, Homeric Soundings. The Shaping of the Iliad , Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1992, 186 note 8); XVI, 689-690 (= XVII, 177-178; add. Fim Rim Wim, hab. b G T: def. P 9 P 486ac W*; "omitted in papyri and some good codices, are a concordance-interpolation ..., unless the omission arose from error (both 689 and 694 opens ὅς...καὶ)" Janko, 398); XIX, 365-368 (ath. Aristarchus; but things are not so simple--he later came to admit the 'poetical' character of lines which he first found 'absurd'--, and on the internal ground they are unobjectionable; see M. W. Edwards, A Commentary ..., V, Cambridge, C.U.P., 1991, 278, and, for a sensible account of Achilles' behavior, Taplin, 220); XX, 269-272 (ἐν ἐνίοις non erant, ath. Aristarchus; whatever authority one is ready to entrust to many ancients' perplexity - the most outstanding being Aristotle, Poetics , 25, 1461 a 33--,61 Edwards ad loc. is right to speak of the whole passage 268-272 as an "improbable and impractical artifact" and I cannot but agree with his conclusion: "whether this undesirable elaboration should be

attributed to the monumental composer or some other remains a matter of taste"); XXI, 128-135 (damn. Payne Knight, 130-135 ath. Aristophanes Aristarchus; the neglect of the digamma in 128 κιχείομεν Ἰλίου is the sole incontrovertible clue for a condemnation that seems to rest on subjective impressions--that we miss a reason for the river's anger, that the expression is morally shocking--; contra, see Bolling, External Evidence..., 23); XXI, 471 (ath. Aristarchus, as unnecessary and for that reason probably an excellent illustration of the logic of the superflua demere; pace Bolling in his last period, it does not automatically follow that, because a line can be excised without injuring the sense, it is intrusive: what seems a gloss in his final view is for Parry a mark of oral-formulaic composition); XXIII, 806 (ath. Aristarchus; formulaic verse, liable to be taken as a gloss but no more offensive in the context than the preceding one); XXIV, 29-30 (ath. quidam apud [Plut.] De Homero, 1, 6 et scholia in Euripid. Troad . 975, damn. Bekker; the external evidence against the authenticity is not what I would call overwhelming, and one should go to Taplin, 261-262, for a justification on internal grounds). The remaining suspicions are modern critics' idiosyncratic findings, save for the more 'conservative' of them (Ludwich, Allen, the Budé editors). I append comments on the first ones, in order to show the mixture of good, bad and indifferent in West's selection: XIII, 114-115 (del. Bekker, 115 Christ Fäsi; the suspicion of 114 I do not understand; as for 115, it is clearly misguided in my view and the more so with οὐκέτι in 116--better οὐκ ἔτι Janko, A Commentary ..., V, 58--; ἀκεστός, though an hapax, is unobjectionable since it goes with φρένες); XIII, 832 ('seclusi' West, = VIII, 380 and, for the expression, XVII, 241; could be a case of concordance-interpolation; a spurious expansion of Hector's plea at the close of his reply to Aias may have remained undetected--only, one imagines, if it was pre-Aristarchean and well-attested--; yet a formulaic variation on XVIII, 241 is at least as good an explanation for the unanimous manuscript attestation of the line); XIV, 49-51 (del. Hentze; the unusual position of ὦ πόποι is paralleled--Janko, 56 ad XIII, 99101--, the similes being not, as Leaf claimed, "mostly of a doubtful character"; it can however be argued that these lines were added so as to smooth the uneasiness produced by XIV, 40; since those who excise 40 generally do the same with 49-51, though in my view the athetesis of 49-51 resorts to a misguided systematizing); XV, 6471 (del. Hentze, "absolutio erat puto τῆς Διὸς ἀπάτης" West; see Leaf ad loc; actually, neither the prophecy of the close of the war nor its self-styled factual errors are unHomeric; Homeric summaries are often imprecise, and it is one of the poet's favorite devices to present important events in more than one focus, in prospect and retrospect); XV, 291-293 (ath. Fick, 291 Leaf; at first sight looks like an amplification: why repeat Hector's name and recall his exploits and Zeus' favor? as Leaf remarks, ὡς...ἔσσεσθαι in 291 is not clear; but it was worth insisting on the very fact that Hector would not be easy to defeat, and, on the whole, it would be safer to excise only 291); XVI, 158-164 (susp. Leaf, del. Wilamowitz) plus 165 (del. West); XVI, 242-245 (damn. Hentze); XVI, 591 (damn. Leaf); XVI, 661-662 (damn. Paley); XVII, 244 (damn. Payne Knight); XVII, 273 (damn. Köchly); XVIII, 26-27 (damn. Düntzer); XVIII, 34 (damn. Bothe); XVIII, 272 (damn. Bekker, 272-276 susp. Leaf); XVIII, 461 (damn. Düntzer); XVIII, 535-538 (+/- = pseudo-Hesiod. Scutum, 156-159; damn. Düntzer); XIX, 326-337 (damn. Payne Knight); XIX, 374 (damn. Heyne); XX, 82 (damn. Payne Knight); XX, 316-317 (damn. Bekker, post 317 Bentley); XXII, 81 (damn. Bekker); XXI, 436 ('seclusi' West); XXIII, 628 (susp. Franke); XXIII, 878 (susp. Nauck); XXIV, 54 (ath. Köchly); XXIV, 232 (damn. Christ); XXIV, 466-467 (damn. Kammer, 465-467 iam Düntzer cume 464); XXIV, 519-521 (damn. Köchly); XXIV, 586 (damn. Leaf, 584-586 iam Payne Knight); XXIV, 763-764 ('seclusi' West).62 IV. THE CONSTITVTIO TEXTVS. By incorporating in his apparatus the evidence for ancient scholarship, indirect tradition and antique manuscripts and by establishing his text throughout by methodical comparison of what the medieval manuscripts and these three sources of information offer, West rightly escapes the conspicuous pitfall of Van Thiel, whose undocumented textual ambition is to restore the 'vulgate' in its early medieval form, the good one according to him. Independently of its material realization, Van Thiel's seems a procedure which could pass muster only if the aim were to produce a readable rather than an authentic text. Now, it is naturally impossible for any review, even of unprecedented

compass as the present one, to sketch in detail the variety and complexity of matters relevant to the textual criticism of books XIII-XXIV of the Iliad . Instead what I propose to do is to set out roughly what West considered to be important in the questions of editing, dialect and orthography. IV. 1. In his preface West is hardly less pessimistic than was Van Thiel about the archetypal character of Alexandrian readings in general, and Aristarchus' ones in particular. However his criteria in deciding which individual scholarly readings could stem from an earlier tradition, whatever it may be, and which ones are more likely to result from what he considers, after Van der Valk, to be bold rewriting, have no coherence and are left unsaid in the preface (where we only learn, p. VII, note 9, that, occasionally, apropos of them "de bona traditione agitur, non de coniecturis"). It is not sufficient to remark, like Nagy in his review, that as far as the printing of the text is concerned, all the toil embodied in the making of the apparatus came to nothing since the external evidence is nearly always discarded in favor of the internal. I am sympathetic with his view that for West there is hardly any difference between a reading found by Aristarchus in a previous source and a conjecture of so irresponsible an emender as Payne Knight, and I cannot but reproduce here Nagy's statement that "underneath the surface, however, the criteria differ: for Ludwich, the 'Aristarchus' component of the 'Aristarchus + Omega' formula has special status, but for West it has merely equal status. Correspondingly, whenever the 'Omega' drops out, that is, whenever the manuscript support is lacking or weak, the Aristarchean variant tends to be kept by Ludwich but dropped by West" (an instance like XXI, 611 "σαώσαι Ar: σάωσαν (nou. Did.) 9 W* Rsl..." is very rare indeed in vol. II). But all this apparently powerful argumentation is misleading, biased as it is by Nagy's faith in what he calls an 'Hypertext'. What actually concerns West less the origin and putative vertical character of each reading in the tradition than their congruence, dialectal, morphological or orthographic, to his own idea of what the Kunstsprache tolerates in each case and of what the context of each passage allows. This promulgates the taste of the modern editor, the liberty of which is limited only by his freely consented obedience to some established principles, applied in a pro et contra consideration each reading. But the counterpart would be Bolling's mechanical application of manuscript evidence, which led to an impossibly fanciful text. West's exceptionally lucid assessment of the tradition in his apparatus is not completed by the mastery of the only tools that would have enabled him to pick out the wheat from the chaff in the ποικίλια of transmitted readings: he has a keen feeling for Homeric Greek but no sound command in oral linguistics. He cannot be well acquainted with Parry's principle that rhapsodes would modernize their diction wherever meter does not prevent it since it is his contention that 'Homer' wrote. This stance leads him to postulate an important degree of fixity early in the textual transmission, the very nature of which is seldom reconcilable with what Parry pronounced. The consequence is clear: for the dialect, it is the restoration of forms known to be early (preferably Aeolic); for the composition, it is the tendency towards the regularization of verbal echoes in the similes. This attitude shows up on almost every page of vol. II. IV. 1. 1. Passages where West is prejudiced in adopting a scholarly reading: XIV, 400401 ὅσση ἄρα Τρώων καὶ Ἀχαιῶν ἔπλετο φωνή δεινὸν where ὅσση is read by Zenodotus, Aristophanes, Aristarchus in his two texts and A b G, meanwhile τόσση is Nicanor's reading, extant in P 9 P 60 P 438 P 1306 Bgr and W*: the epic form of the pronominal adjective ὅσος which West adopts in the relative clause, ὅσσος (with Aeolic and Western Greek duplication), is to be found in the simile XVII, 23 ὅσσον πανθόου υἷες φορέουσιν without alternative in the tradition. As ὅσσος would regularize the construction in XIV, 400-401 and make the two similes agree, it does not matter for West whether its origin is vertical or secondary. That it may well be a refined conjecture of Zenodotus, designed to clear up a slight, oral anacoluthon, is positive ground for preferring τόσσος (so Janko, A Commentary ..., IV, 211). See also XIII, 107 "δὲ ἑκὰς Zen Arph 60: δ' ἕκαθεν Ar 1253 Z W. Cf. ad E 791"; there δὲ ἕκας is given by Z W (save for D which has δ' ἕκας) with P 400 P 908 and t, meanwhile H reads δ' ἕκαθεν. That the variation has oral shape and that the latter reading is to be preferred here is clearly stated by Janko, 57: early in the

transmission the diction of our passage was not modernized while in V, 791 it was (save for an ancestor of H). XVI, 21 (cf. XIX, 216) "Πηλῆος 'οἱ ὑπομνηματισάμενοι'· --λέως Ptol 60 t W*: --λέος Plut. C R W Gs. V. Praef. XXXIV". Πηλέως υἱέ after the first dactyl ὦ Ἀχιλεῦ should be accepted, not only since Πηλῆος is either badly attested (in XIX, 216 by P7corr. V4 V27) or likely to be a scholarly conjecture (XVI, 21; also in Bm8 L18 Mo1 O7 P7 U3 V4 V25 Vi1, what West does not say), but since the word group can be paralleled six times at the same metrical place (Janko, 318, cf. his discussion of the simile Μηκιστέως υἱός ad XV, 339, p. 264). XIX, 107 is no less exemplary: "ψεύστης εἰς quidam ante Hdn--E)SS' L. Meyer, cf. Chantr. I 286--: ψευστήσεις Ar Hdn t schD W. Cf. Soph. Ant. 1195; Eur. Or . 1609; Wack. KS 1604". It does not follow that, since ψευστέω is not attested elsewhere, the future tense here is liable to be a conjecture of Aristarchus; actually, its familiar shape and oral congruence are fit uneasily with a more literary idiom construed with the substantive. ψεύστης εἰς could possibly be an early alternative worddivision (see XXI, 261), but, given West's parallels, it has more chance to be the fancy of some critic familiar with later poetic idiom and eager to make the text agree with it. Finally XIV, 474 "κεφαλὴν 10 (cf. a 208): γενεὴν Ar ? 60 1312 W: ῥα φυὴν Arph (cf. B 58)" with Janko, 219. I hope these passages will be sufficient to prove that West in his acceptance of scholarly readings is a great deal more generous than oral poetics would have allowed him to be and than his own presentation of the general nature of this textual source seems to warrant. IV. 1. 2. Passages where West restores an early orthography, either unlikely (contradicted by Parry's principle) or likely but harsh (he introduces reconstructed forms without asterisking them in the apparatus). To the second class belong examples such as XIII, 358 "ὁμοιΐοο Ahrens:63 --ΐου 9 10 60 274 tt Z W. V. Praef. XXXIII sq.": the diversity of derivations proposed for the uox homerica ὁμοίος (sanscr. amiva, aerumna according to Fick; = ὁμόfιος for Christ; better written ὀλοίιος = ὀλοός for Nauck) together with the lack of attestation for its 'regular' genitive -οο (on which more below and under IV. 2) do not render it difficult to accept its restoration by Ahrens but make the absence of asterisk the more regrettable. See II, 325 "ὅο Buttmann...: ὅου Hdn 3 851 h136 w12 Hsch. W". One may remark here that by analogy with ὅου and ἑός, ὅς so intriguing a form as ἕης was produced out of ἧς. Cf. XV, 554 ἀνεψιόο Payne Knight Ahrens for ἀνεψιοῦ which was Herodianus' preference; XV, 670 ὁμοιΐοο Ahrens: ὁμοιίου P 60 W (after the transmitted πτολέμοιο) with XXI, 294...No wonder that this tendency to archaize the epic diction eventually lead West to commend inadequate emendations: in XVI, 208 the feminine relative ἕης can indeed be artificial and late but is better explained, according to Parry's principle, as improvised since it nears ἐράασθε, a form of imperfect undeniably later than the usual ἔρασθε (so Janko, 346). Save perhaps for Van Leeuwen and Mendes da Costa's φέργον μεγάλης, τοῦ πρίν περ ἔρασθε, all the proposed emendations are far too violent to carry any conviction (ὅlongο τὸ πρίν γ' ἐράεσθε Payne Knight, ὅο πρίν γ' ἠράσσασθε Nauck, ὅο πρόσθεν γ' ἐράασθε Christ...). Instead of ὅου the regular derivation should have been ἧς (Janko). Similarly, in IX, 189 and 524, for κλέα ἀνδρῶν, West suggests κλεῖ' which is more complicated than κλέε' ἀνδρῶνfirst guessed at by Payne Knight, which entails an error of transcription from an original sequence ΚΛΕΑΝΔΡΩΝ. To the first class can be assigned instances like XXII, 322 τεύχεα cett. (Allen, whose critical note, III, 283, is far too elliptical to be informative): τεύχεη P 9 Z W, τεύχη old editions. That in XXIV, 7 most W manuscripts and two papyri agree with Aristarchus in reading ἄλγεα η codd. R W) is no evidence for preferring τεύχεη: in one case the termination has been modernized to Ionic-Attic η after ε, ι, ρ, in the other it has not and so conserved Aeolic long α. The philological temptation to restore elided finals long α (= long αο) in the genitive of masculine nouns in long α ought accordingly to be resisted. See also VIII, 139 δὴ αὖτε Bekker: δ' αὖτε P 1099 W; XIII, 448 ἵστα' West: ἵστασ' P 1280 W, cf. XVII, 31; XIII, 818 ἀρήσεαι West: ἀρήσῃ aut -SH P 9 P 481 W; XVII, 178 ἵσταο Wackernagel: ἵστασο P 48 W (but in XVIII, 178 West rejects κεῖο of the same critic for KEI=SO of P 9 P 239 P 1432 and W; cf. also XX, 389 κεῖσαι] κεῖαι Wackernagel; XXI, 122 κεῖσο] κεῖο id.; XXII, 85 ἵσταο id.: ἵστασο P 9 W); XXII, 336 ἀικέως West: tt* W*, ἀεικῶς P 9 Z R. I refrain from quoting more instances where his quest for consistency in composition joined with the refusal to apply Parry's principle led West astray. The Aeolic color of the Kunstsprache , in whose conjectural restoration West has indulged in many

places, following the guideline of Payne Knight and Fick, would be another instance of what may well be artificial archaizing of the text; yet it cannot be condemned, since his practice seldom degenerates into wholesale a priori rewriting and in a handful of cases has some probability to near the original: West restores passim ἠ' or ἦ' instead of ἢ and Πανθόου, -όωι for Πάνθου, -ωι in XVII, 9, XVII, 23, XVII, 40 (after the recentiores in XV, 522), but he justly maintains, against Van Leeuwen, Enchiridium Dictionis Epicae , paragraph 73, Πα ατροκλῆος against Πατρόκλεες, Πατροκλέεος ( Praefatio, p. XXV). IV. 2. Save for this drawback West's account of Homeric Greek as presented on pages XVI-XXXVII of the Praefatio and applied in his editorial policy represent a major improvement, which shows Van Thiel's conservatism in this area for what it is: the attribution to 'Homer' of the ποικίλια transmitted by medieval manuscripts. For the first time since the arbitrary attempts of Fick, Christ and Nauck towards a restitution of the original spelling and dialect a text is presented with hardly any late form which cannot be justified on internal grounds or by Parry's principle. Of course the average contemporary reader knows that metrical study combined with linguistic analysis has shown that many forms preserved in the 'vulgate' must be regarded as either modernisation or corruption of an earlier text. For instance the optative plural μαχέοιντο in I, 344, being Attic and comparatively late for original -οιατο, is easily emended to μαχεοίατ' (West) or μαχεόνται (Ludwich); a surface corruption is equally possible. Allen bis and the Budé editors, who maintain--οιντο, are not confident about this spelling. The reader is also aware that two forms of the genitive of ο-nouns are transmitted, -οιο and -ου; but a third, -οο resolved from -ου, can be restored in some passages with a fair degree of certainty since the line scans only if we restore -οο from which -ου was contracted. Consequently, unless one is ready to make a special pleading by appealing to Parry's principle, West is justified to read κακομηχάνοο κρυοέσσης in VI, 344 and ἐπιδημίοο κρυόεντος in IX, 64 (both Payne Knight for respectively κακομηχάνου ὀκρυοέσσης ανδ ἐπιδημίου ὀκρυόεντος). It does not follow that, because genitives in -οιο, -οο and -ου constitute a chronological series, one of the first two ought to be restored where the last one is attested and does not raise any internal difficulty (contrast pp. XXXIII-XXXIV). And many more forms, less easily recognized, may still delude a casual reader, or even a trained Homerist, knowing what should be tolerable Homeric Greek only from what they read in standard editions. Both categories of readers will learn from West's presentation of the evidence, as this reviewer did. Now, for all the progress of linguistics embodied in this admirably lucid chapter, it does not completely replace the sensible summary by Chantraine ("Note sur l'Orthographe et l'Accentuation adopteés dans cette Édition", in Paul Mazon (dir.), Introduction à l'Iliade, Paris, Belles Lettres, 1943, 124-136). If one is in need of a rough estimation of the merits and limitations of each of these two doctrines, I would say that Chantraine is more the historian, drawing essentially on La Roche and his own Grammaire Homérique in order to establish some principles which can hardly be proved to be wrong but which to some extent are conventional, while West, who has had the benefit of Leslie Threatte's splendid Attic Grammar , is more the philologist and seems to be too preoccupied with the promulgation of consistent rules to adopt an orthographic system other than one of his own device (that is quite an idiosyncratic one). The reader should be told that the doctrine of both West and Chantraine is rooted in Parry's explanation of the striking dialectal mixture of the transmitted text ( Les Formules et la Métrique d'Homère, Paris, Belles Lettres, 1928 : an Achaean original state of the epic diction suceeded, through modernization, by an Aeolic phase than by the Ionic phase), which is roughly in agreement with the findings of Paul Wathelet, Les Traits Éoliens dans la Langue de l'Épopée grecque, "Incunabula graeca 37", Rome, Ateneo, 1970, 63-362, and the not-unchallenged, but still standard, theory about the relationship of the Achaean with the linguistic evidence from Linear B. On the contrary, many earlier editors did draw either on the reaction against the pan-Aeolic conception of Fick (excessive indeed, and not only because he was not afraid to incorporate elements from Arcado-Cypriot) which was initiated by Monro and Van Leeuwen,whose Homeric grammars reconstruct the epic diction as a series of Ionic facts of different ages where the so-called Aeolisms are nothing but very archaic Ionisms, or the affirmation that there have been an Attic phase, postulating uneliminable Atticisms and finally discarding the

Aeolic phase, the remnants of which were to be viewed as Achaean traces or preserved archaisms. On must go to Chantraine for this kind of contextual information, or, for more recent trends, to Wathelet's account of the status quaestionis , pp. 44-60 of his book, not to West's preface, whose information seriously lacks background. With many principles adopted by him I have no quarrel: it is perfectly right e.g. to write with Blass μέζον in XIII, 120 (μεῖζον P 60 W), cf. XV, 121, XXIII, 551 and 593..., and κρέσσων in XIX, 217 (κρείσσων P 9 tt W), cf. XX, 334, XXI, 190-191, XXIII, 578..., since both transmitted readings show the fourth-century Attic spelling for Κρέζων, Μέζων (but compare Sappho fr. 90 b Voigt, line 20] κρέσσον γὰ[ρ); to restore the accusative τρῖς against Ionic-Attic τρεῖς (*treyes > τρέες (Cretic) > Doric and Aeolic τρῆς, Old Ionic even though P 1461 reads τρισχειλ[ιαι in XX, 221); to prefer τέσσερες over τέσσαρες (e.g. XXIII, 705 τεσσεράβοισιν Bolling: τεσσαράβοισιν P 9 P 13 W); or to deal with the temporal augment as exposed on p. XXVII (but to restore ηὐ-, εἰ- everywhere, whatever the form in the 'vulgate', is perhaps a trifle heavy-handed). Some devices are of indifferent quality,64 like the suppression of tmesis in composed adverbs and prepositions (ἀποπρο, διάπρο, πάρεκ and so forth, which are less archaic than what one may estimate:65 pp. XVIII-XIX; differently Chantraine, 132, 4) and many peculiarities of accentuation. And some are in my view unconvincing. West's long-standing attempts (since his Studies in Greek Elegy and Iambus , 80) to show that -EU for abridged εο is not earlier than the Attic transcription are not made more convincing from being reiterated: systematic change is somewhat too bold a procedure to contemplate without reservation (the more so since, unlike the IEG, the Teubner Iliad has no synizesis mark) and the epigraphic argument, being e silentio (ευ is not attested before the beginning of the fourth century BC: pp. XXII-XIII), is not incontrovertible. See S. R. Slings, first in J. M. Bremer et alii , Some Recently Found Greek Poems , "Mnemosyne Suppl." 99, Leiden, Brill, 1987, 33-34, and lastly in his BMCR review of Most, Editing Texts / Texte Edieren (Göttingen, Vandenhöck & Ruprecht, 1998: see BMCR 99.05.27). Schulze, Quaestiones Epicae , note 4, pp. 144-145, collects many references, to which add forms unanimously attested in the medieval tradition of Herodotus like βασιλεός, κοπρεόων, φεόγει, φεογέτω, εὀργέτην, λεοκοῖς, Εὀνομίδης and the tendency of these manuscripts to preserve ευ instead of εο, εου after ι, η, ο and οι. Insecure though it may be, this material apparently points the way to a more satisfactory solution of the debate: around the sixth century, and possibly before, the difference between ευ and εο would have been not so much of spelling than of orthography. Anyway the phonological case for the suppression of ευ in early poetry ought not to be ignored, no more than the one for restoring ει out of εε, εει, forms which are markedly favored by the papyri of Ionian lyricists. West's drastic policy in both cases could be excessive and misguided, but must be called courageous insofar as it does not conceal the difficulty of retaining ευ. In so vexed a field as the editing of the Iliad , where nearly every professional reader of any modern edition, working only with La Roche in one hand, Bernhard Laum in the other, would find in these works much to agree with and much more to disagree with, it would be unfair to assess the value of the Teubner text on the basis of its orthography and dialect. Suffice it to say that, on the whole, West's contentions are more logical and scientific that those of any previous editor. That they are more convincing (or, not necessarily the same thing, more archetypal), only the course of time and everyday experience will teach us. IV. 3. In the apparatus West hazards further conjectures, apart from the changes in orthography and dialect he directly printed in the text. As he admits too few, and proposes too many, an overwhelming impression of competence and intelligence abides. Most of them are clever but unnecessary, not being diagnostic of a true, insufferable difficulty but being only possible, p u r e r Homeric Greek guessed at either by fancy or by instinct (those which I deem diagnostic are marked with the glyph @): XIII, 264 δούρατ' ἔασι for δούρατά τ' ἐστι; XIV, 482 μὴ μοι (ἵνα μή P 60 P 1310 W); XV, 43 αὐτοῦ W); XV, 72 πρόσθεν πρὶν P 60 W); XV, 297 αἴ (εἴ P 60 Agr Aim W*); XVI, 86 ἀποδώωσιν (ἀπονάσσωσιν); XVI, 208@ γε ἔρασθε (γ' ἐράασθε P 9 P 435 Z W); XVI, 589 τ' (δ' P 1376 Alem W); XVIII, 202 τείνεται (γίνεται P 11 W); XVIII, 231 τί καλοῦσ' ἀμενηνὰ κάρηνα). The son's answers are no doubt so tricky, he is so insolent that the father soon proclaims (fr. 237) his intention to fly immediately to the ναυτοδίκαι and pronounce the son's foreign birth. 14.   The following remarks are not designed to review the question, even roughly; the reader is urged to consult the rich polyphonic documentation of M. S. Jensen et alii , "Dividing Homer: When and How were the Iliad and the Odyssey divided into Songs?", Symbolae Osloenses 74 (1999), 5-91. 15.   Martin and S. R. West, in their reply to Jensen (pp. 68-73), imagine the process of creation as a succession of written drafts. Even though, as they recall, no doubt justly, both the term ῥαψωιδία and its use are unlikely to be Alexandrian, and, though the epigraphic ground for thinking that the poems were written down before the Pisistratids is plain, I am not shaken by their argumentation and cannot consider very seriously that it is fatal to the oralist approach. 16.   De Oratore, III, (34), 137 "quis doctior isdem temporibus (sc. of the Seven Sages) illis aut cuius eloquentia litteris instructior fuisse traditur quam Pisistrati? Qui primus Homeri libros confusos antea sic disposuisse dicitur ut nunc habemus?". 17.   Janko, A Commentary ..., IV, 29-32, has a full treatment of the evidence for Pisistratid recension which surveys ancient texts and modern conclusions in the most useful way. 18.   So J. A. Davison, "The Transmission of the Text", in A. J. B. Wace & F. H. Stubbings (ed)., A Companion to Homer, London, Macmillan, 1963, 240. On p. 220, he rightly recalls this story as a clue for the prejudiced nature of the belief in the Pisistratid recension (or first reduction to writing) of 'Homer'. This penetrating insight seems to have been forgotten. 19.   So M. W. Haslam, "Homeric Papyri and Transmission of the Text", in Ian Morris & Barry Powell (ed.), A New Companion to Homer. "Mnemosyne Supp. 163" (Leiden, Brill, 1997) 82. 20.   [Plutarch], De Homero, II, 4 εἰσὶ δὲ αὐτοῦ ποιήσεις δύο, Ἰλιὰς καὶ Ὀδύσσεια, διηιρημένη ἑκατέρα εἰς τὸν ἀριθμὸν τῶν στοιχείων, οὐχ ὑπὸ αὐτοῦ τοῦ ποιητοῦ ἀλλ' ὑπὸ τῶν γραμματικῶν τῶν περὶ Ἀρίσταρχον; Eustathius, I, p. 9, 4-5 Van der Valk. Like Aristophanes of Byzantium Aristarchus seems to have regarded xxiii, 296 as the end of

the Odyssey and simply could not be the author of the separation between xxiii, 371 and xxiv, 1. See further Rudolf Pfeiffer, A History of Classical Scholarship ..., I, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1968, 116 and 175-177. 21.   More references in my Éditer l' Iliade I, note 12. Haslam, 84-85 has some cogent objections against placing too much a confidence in the book-trade's impact on the constitution of the 'vulgate'. But as he gives no proof and suggests no alternative explanation this can be no argument. 22.   Πολίτηι μὲν ἐμῶι τε καὶ σῶι, Πεισιστράτου δὲ ὑεῖ τοῦ ἐκ Ἱππάρχωι, ὃς τῶν Πεισιστράτου παίδων ἦν πρεσβύτατος καὶ σοφώτατος, ὃς ἄλλα τε πολλὰ καὶ καλὰ ἔργα σοφίας ἀπεδείξατο, καὶ τὰ Ὁμήρου ἔπη πρῶτος ἐκόμισεν εἰς τὴν γῆν ταυτηνί, καὶ ἠνάγκασε τοὺς ῥαψωιδοὺς ἐξ ὑπολήψεως ἐφεχῆς αὐτὰ διιέναι... 23.   Τά τε Ὁμήρου ἐξ ὑποβολῆς γέγραφε [sc. Solon] ῥαψωιδεῖσθαι, οἷον ὅπου ὁ πρῶτος ἔληξεν, ἐκεῖθεν ἄρχεσθαι τὸν ἐχόμενον. Μᾶλλον οὖν Σόλων Ὅμηρον ἐφώτισεν ἢ Πεισίστρατος, ὥς φησι Διευχίδας ἐν πέμπτωι Μεγαρικῶν. Ἦν δὲ μάλιστα τὰ ἔπη ταυτί. "οἳ δ' ἄρ' Ἀθήνας εἶχον" καὶ τὰ ἑχῆς (text as in Jacoby, except that I have excised his exempli gratia supplement ὃς ἔπη τινὰ ἐνέβαλεν εἰς τὴν ποίησιν αὐτοῦ after Πεισίστρατος; following Miroslav Marcovich in his recent Teubner edition [1999, I, p. 39], it is possible, by adding ἐμβολαῖς between Ὅμηρον and ἐφώτισεν, to dispense with the hypothesis of the lacuna). The text is well explained by Jacoby (FGrH, vol. III b. Kommentar zu nr. 297-607 [Text], 392, 12-36). 24.   The Athetized Lines of the Iliad , Linguistic Society of America, Baltimore, Waverly Press, 1944, Part One, 7-42, especially 10-24 (on the Alpha text) and 24-25, 3041 (on the Pi text), cf. the useful summary of pages 41-42; Ilias Atheniensium. The Athenian Iliad of the Sixth Century B.C., Lancaster & Oxford, Lancaster Press & Blackwell, 1950, 6-7 ("the procedure in continuing Pi was like that in the handing down of the Alpha text and the Mahabharata: additions but no subtractions", p. 6). 25.   "Homeric Scholia", in Morris & Powell, A New Companion to Homer, 101-122, on 116 note 48. The quotation continues as follows: "if we apply the perspective of diachronic studies in oral poetics, Bolling's assumption about a tradition that can only add, never subtract, are unjustified". 26.   Researches on The Text and Scholia of the Iliad , II, Leiden..., Brill, 1964, 183 (Zenodotus) and 84-263 (Aristarchus). These studies had been called, with some reason, "astute if sometimes arcane" by G. S. Kirk, The Iliad. A Commentary , I, Cambridge, C.U.P., 1985, 43. See note 29. 27.   This seems to be directed against two contentions of Bolling, Athetized Lines..., 32-33: First, "Zenodotus' chief problem was the problem of the lines. He solved it I believe not eclectically (so Wolf and many others), but by deciding to include in his text the lines upon which his manuscripts agreed; and also--but with a mark (obelus) in front of them--a selection from the lines about which the testimony of his manuscripts fluctuated" (p. 32, last paragraph). Secondly, "What then did Zenodotus' obelus mean? ...For his obeli I can find no reasonable meaning except 'Here the tradition is not a unit'. At least such must have been their primary meaning. For in the absence of a commentary it must have been something true of all marked passages, something that could be stated once for all; and--the only alternative--a meaning 'These verses are to be judged spurious for various unstated reasons' would have offered to his readers nothing but a series of placita" (p. 33). 28.   My use of ὑπόμνημα (and my translation of it) are explained in Éditer l'Iliade I, note 132. 29.   This is made explicit by Pfeiffer in the Addenda to his History of Classical Scholarship ..., I, 287: "...his opinion that 'the Alexandrian critics had no correct idea of the significance of a diplomatic text', which is now openly expressed (pp. 565 ff.), was the unspoken assumption behind his Textual Criticism of the Odyssey (1949) and the first volume of hisResearches on the Text and Scholia of the Iliad (1963), and must unfortunately be regarded as a preconceived idea, not the result of historical inquiries". A similar observation was implicit as soon as 1950 in Bolling's presentation of the Alexandrian's methods ( AJPh. 71, 306-311). See note 30 below and my Éditer l'Iliade, note 133. 30.   Researches..., II, 370-477 ("Atheteses of Aristarchus") and 477-530 ("so-called Additional Lines"). These chapters are rashly, but not unfairly, assessed by Apthorp, Manuscript Evidence..., XV when he goes on to explain that Van der Valk refused to accept that the evidence put forward by Ludwich and Bolling, External Evidence...

"shows conclusively that omitted only lines which were absent in the vast majority of his manuscripts". Such a negation of the case which can be made in favor of Aristarchus' conservatism in this area stems from the ardent oralist faith of the Dutch critic. In this precise sense his book is misleading. 31.   Antonios Rengakos, Der Homertext und die hellenistischen Dichter, "Hermes Einzelschriften" 64, Stuttgart, Steiner, 1993, argues at some length (197 pages) for systematically validating the editorial standards of the Alexandrians. His position holds good on a few points of detail, generally referred to in West's apparatus, but the uncertainty of such an approach remains a major deterrent (it can fairly be said that it does little more than make a system out of Erbse's demonstration of Apollonius Rhodius' incontrovertible dependence on Homeric scholarship: "Homerscholien und hellenistische Glossare bei Apollonios Rhodios", Hermes 81 [1953], 163-196). This wild element of speculation is compounded by the somewhat too large focus of Rengakos' approach (it applies to Zenodotus and Aristophanes as well as Aristarchus, and to their choice of variant readings no less than to their counting of the lines). 32.   I am sanguine enough to consider that, given the evidence both external and internal, the reasons for my skepticism ( Éditer l'Iliade I, 8 and 28) and Nagy's will not be easily refuted. The systematic device of the apparatus "nou(it) Did(ymum)", being undocumented, throws no light at all on the transmission and deprives Aristarchus of one of his main merits. Now, if really he did not use manuscripts as the basis of his recensions, why on earth did he undertake his successive sets of notes explaining his texts and why did he produce polemical treatises on particular points? Such a reductio ad absurdum is probably mere surmise, but I cannot help suspecting that West has been led astray by the anti-Aristarchean current prejudice, of which Van der Valk and Hartmut Erbse are the main supporters. The burden of the proof lies with him. Finally, for Didymus as a collator, Nagy argues a not unimportant point: "this is not to say that Didymus did not collate Homer manuscripts in his own right or that Aristarchus was the only collator...It is only to say that the primary collator of Homer manuscripts was Aristarchus himself and that Didymus may not have had access to all the sources still available to Aristarchus" (his note 21). 33.   See Éditer l'Iliade I, 19. 34.   As W. S. Barrett remarked (Euripides. Hippolytos, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1964, p. 56 note 1), "we are dealing with different versions of what once was an oral poem, so enormously discrepant that once commentaries were keyed to one version other versions became unusable". To profit from the great storehouse of learning available in Aristarchus' sets of notes, it was necessary to follow the layout of his versions of the text. Hence the post-Alexandrian numerus uersuum. But popular texts may not have felt much immediate effect, and they seem to have compromised in following him, by way of a selection, competent and incompetent. 35.   It would have been possible to mention here at least the genre of Homeric arguments in Greek or Latin ( Periochae ), like those attributed (wrongly) to Ausonius, each of which begins with the quotation of the first verse(s) of the Greek book and a metrical Latin translation. They are conveniently edited (without commentary) by R. P. H. Green, The Works of Ausonius, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1991, 677-695, and for what they reveal of the text out of which lemmata and analyses were taken they may deserve closer attention. 36.   For improvements on the text of the inscriptions métriques, see W. Peek, "Griechische Vers-Inschriften aus Ägypten", ZPE 10 (1973), 230-248, on 239-245. 37.   I summarize here the reconstruction of the aims and methods of Allen I have proposed in my review of the Sandpiper reprint of his editio maior (2000), that is to appear in Gaia 5. Unfair judgments are quoted with approval by Bolling, Athetized Lines..., p. 8 note 4, and the current prejudice colored even the obituary notice of Allen by such an expert as Nigel Wilson. 38.   It is interesting to see how he himself describes the basis of his edition ( Homeri Ilias Recognouit Helmut van Thiel , Bibliotheca Weidmanniana 2, Hildesheim, Zürich & New York, Olms, 1996, VIII): "von den p. XIV [sc. the Conspectus siglorum ] verzeichneten Handschriften habe ich folgende neun durchgehend benutzt: ADTEFHM (und N) OV. Sie sind nach den Kriterien des Alters, der Vollständigkeit und der Unabhändgigkeit des Textes ausgewählt". 39.   I have to refer once more to my Éditer l'Iliade I, 23-26, where I have illustrated some important points for the grouping of the manuscripts (b = BCE, h = MNP, and the

independent line of tradition represented by Z). Here I refrain from discussing West's presentation of the evidence; yet the reader should know that many details of his account are still controversial (for instance, the palaeographical date of Z and A; see Éditer l'Iliade, note 76), and in need of further reexamination. 40.   Apropos of the assimilation of initial consonants the reader is urged not to rely on heading III. 6 of the Praefatio. For an exhaustive palaeographical and phonological account of this phenomenon, see my treatment ( Éditer l'Iliade I, 25) of what I judge to be the most important separative error of our tradition: III, 207 ἐνιμμεγάροις Z, ἐν μεγάροισι W. 41.   Against the dangers of which Albert Severyns powerfully warned ( Texte et Apparat. Histoire Critique d'une Tradition Imprimée , "Mémoires de l'Académie Royale de Belgique. Classe des Lettres et des Sciences Morales et Politiques" LXI fasc. 2, Bruxelles, 1962, 245-248). Variants or readings assigned to W are a great source of trouble in Ludwich and Van Thiel, the manuscript covering of the siglum being subject to change; the same is less true for West, who gives neat equivalents for W both in his preface and at the end of his Sigla breuiata (indications not repeated at the beginning of vol. II), but whose W manuscripts are occasionally not extant (lacunae, parts written by very late copyists). Let us listen to Severyns (p. 246): ? le lecteur, comme avant lui l'auteur, doit effectuer de continuelles et périlleuses 'remises à l'endroit': du bloc des manuscrits dépouillés il soustrait ceux que mentionne l'unité critique avant de savoir ou\ se trouve attestée la graphie admise in textu. Supposé que l'éditeur n'ait commis aucune erreur de soustraction..., il est certain qu'un lecteur même attentif bronchera plus d'une fois. Il le ferait certainement moins si, au lieu d'avoir à chercher la réponse dans une lointaine préface, il trouvait à chaque page, en tête de l'apparat critique, un relevé des sigles symbolisant les manuscrits dépouillés pour la partie du texte en cause: mais bien peu d'éditeurs ont cette bonne habitude". When you work, as is the case for the Teubner Iliad , with 12 to 19 manuscripts the absent portions of which one is forced to remember each time one wants to consult the apparatus, it is very easy indeed to err in the subtraction of the divergent components of W. An indication printed on the top of the apparatus (def. A, def. E, and the like) would have been welcome, instead of mentions buried in the apparatus like "post h.v. def. A". 42.   A remark on the badness of its apograph (τῶν ἀντιγράφων διαφθοράν) by Demetrius himself, who claims elsewhere to have made use of Eustathius (προσχρησαμένοις καὶ τοῖς τοῦ Εὐσταθίου ὑπομνήμασι), bears witness to the inferior character of this source. A closer analysis of the textual agreements of the princeps shows a clear affinity with Allen's families e and t, but disproves any debt to Eustathius' παρεκβολαί. I have not seen the princeps and take these indications from Allen; but for all books cited in this section my information is at first-hand, based on actual reading of these titles (in the original, save for the Olms reprint of Harles-Fabricius). 43.   See Wolf in the preface to his 1785 Halle school edition (= Kleine Schriften, I, 178): "Homerus is auctor est, in cuius contextu multis adhuc modis a genuina formula nos abesse constat et in quo ad maiorem integritatem ut perueniri possit, uaria restant magno doctrinae apparatu mouenda; egregie nuper in summa breuitate hoc argumentum tractauit is, cuius manibus utinam tandem poeta ornatior prodeat. Homeri rectius legendi praestantissimus auctor, Heynius, in epistola ad Tyschenium...". 44.   As is more than implied by G. C. Heyne, sternly rebuking Wolf's negation of his lifelong interest in the editing of Homer (Göttingische Anzeigen, 1795, II, 1858): "da der Rec(ensor), wie H(er)r Prof. W(olf) selbst weiss, sich seit mehrern zwanzig Jahren, freylich sehr unterbrochen und nur erst seit der Erscheinung von Villoisons Homer mit Ernst, mit einer neuen Recension Homers beschäftiget und manche bessere Begriffe von Homer erst in Umlauf zu bringen das Seinige beygetragen hat: so ist er im Stande das was geleistet ist zu schätzen". 45.   After having collected the grammatical evidence and variant readings extant in Eustathius, he had worked through the published scholia, adding some notes obtained by two unnamed friends on the Leipzig codex Paullinus, the reliability of whose collation by Ernesti was questionable. On top of his other commitments, Wolf had acquainted himself with what the whole Greco-Roman antiquity was able to contribute to the knowledge of both the Iliad and the Odyssey, lexicographers, scholiasts, grammarians, authors and sources of quotations, without forgetting the Hellenistic poets with their keen feeling for erudition, when the Venice Iliad reached him and compelled him to reassess afresh his collections. He read two more times (!) Eustathius, the scholiasts and the others,

together with new researches on the printed secondary sources from Stephanus down to Ernesti. 46.   Prolegomena , 21: "qua in re saepe mihi usu uenit ut longo circuitu peruenirem ad eas correctiones quas eximii libri primus adspectus frustra obtulerat; nam quae magna est huius mei ac Veneti textus conuenientia, eam sponte natam habui, non quaesiui". I take this occasion to warn the reader against the unreliability of the 1985 translation by Grafton, Most and Zetzel: although by no means undistinguished, to judge by current standards, the editors' command of Latin is insufficient to deal adequately with an author whom Heyne rightly called a rhetorician (contrast his own Latin or Villoison's); often Grafton et alii do not translate what Wolf actually says, which is often far from being clear and straightforward, but convey the meaning of what he s h o u l d have said. 47.   It was shown to be fake, with good arguments but scurrilously enough to render its demonstration untrustworthy to subsequent critics, by Victor Bérard in his pamphlet Un Mensonge de la Science Allemande. Les Prolégomènes à Homère de Frédéric Auguste Wolf , Paris, Hachette, 1917, 239-259. I hope to prove Bérard right in a subsequent publication. 48.   Cf. Harles-Fabricius, Bibliotheca Graeca..., I, 413: "quanquam immensa fere uis est codicum manuscriptorum homericorum, hi tamen parum ualent ad poetam ipsi reddendum; nam neque Iliada, neque Odysseam, prouti ex ingenuo oreque aut a manu Homeri profectae sint, ex illis codd. accipere possumus; neque secundum prima exempla quomodo primum, litteris nondum perfectis, necdum plenis, fuerunt aratae, possunt restitui...". 49.   Bolling, Ilias Atheniensium, ad loc.: "om. Scholia, A S N G1 H1 T Px Yg; hab. sB (ex Eudoxo), B M G2 H2 J Yb L2 Hb P2 X Y Z". 50.   Ad 424-427 ἐπαινετὸς ὁ ἄρχων τοῦ λόγου καὶ μὴ περιμείνας τὴν αἴτησιν, καὶ τὸ σύντομον τοῦ ἐπειγομένου ἀποδοῦναι καὶ τὸ σῶφρον τῆς ἐπαγγελίας ὡς δυνατὰ ἐ παγγελλομένου. 51.   They are contradicted by Bolling, Ilias Atheniensium, ad loc.: "om. P 48 ( 5p.), S1 N T Ub1 P C1 U Y Z; hab. (sed post vm. 530) P 6O ( 3/4p.) A Zp W, et im. S3 Ub2 C2". 52.   Athetized Lines..., 30 (= postulate VII). The justification for many of his verdicts can be found in Athetized Lines..., 43-195, where the reader will also found the position of the major editors previous to Bolling, making this the more useful of his books. One deterrent to the use of Ilias Atheniensium is that the decision to relegate lines whose a n o n y m o u s athetesis was recorded in Athetized Lines... is now silently attributed to Aristarchus (e.g. XXI, 471; XXI, 475-477; XXI, 570). The possibility that wherever the A scholia report an anonymous athetesis they are speaking of Aristarchus is a very serious possibility, but not one which ought to be transformed without qualification into a consistent rule. 53.   "Pro his uersibus Plato (Rep. 390 c): οὐδ' ὅτε τὸ πρῶτόν περ ἐμισγόμεθ' ἐν φιλότητι εἰς εὐνὴν φοιτῶντε φίλους λήθοντε τοκῆας" (Bolling, ad loc.). Cf. also External Evidence..., 187, and A.L. , 139 (which concludes: "the passage is a clear example of an interpolation that had not gained a secure foothold in the tradition"). 54.   I have not included under this heading XXIII, 804 where Bolling's "om. Aristarchus" is erroneous. From the very redaction of the critical note ("om. Ar., P 13 ( 1a.), A1 S G1 T1 Px U Ud; hab. B M N W, et im. A2 G2 T2") it is conspicuous here that Bolling's preference for Ludwich instead of Allen leads him to weaken his case (see Homeri Ilias , III, 329 where many more manuscripts which omit the line are cited). 55.   "Suspexit Aristarchus" West; possible, but a trifle excessive for what Didymus actually reads: οὔτε παρὰ Ζηνοδότωι οὔτε παρ' Ἀριστοφάνει ἦν. Καὶ μήποτε περιττός ἐστιν. I am better acquainted with A.L. , 142-144. 56.   "Sic aliquis, nunc male dictus Aristarchus" (Bolling, who quotes the reading of T absent in Erbse's apparatus; see the Budé edition, IV, 111 ἄνθετο). Although ἠὲ seems better (Allen, the Budé editors, Bolling, West read it), Erbse, V, 422, edits the text of Eustathius ἢ τό γε. 57.   One should not place on the same footing his adoption of some of Zenodotus' individual readings (occasional but still more than would command assent; e.g. XXIV, 550 ἑοῖο· ἑῆος Aristarchus W). This was vindicated by Rengakos (cited note 31), whose arguments are not always more convincing than Bolling's absence of justification (see West ad XIX, 76-78). The less unhappy justification of this belief is Bolling, Athetized Lines..., 32-34.

58.   These grounds are generally weak. I take the occasion to mention XIII, 131 which is omitted by P 1255 and therefore bracketed by West. The line can seem tautological (outside an oralist framework), since ἀσπὶς ἄρ' ἀσπίδ' ἔρειδε adds little but vivid expression to φράξαντες...σάκος in 130. Yet the omission in only one papyrus of unknown date, which is not available for checking, is precarious external evidence and weakens the case for bracketing. 59.   See note 15, together with Janko's noble comment ( BMCR 00.1.25). The fanciful accusation that anyone who believes that Parry opened a new approach for the text would be 'imprisoned' by it need not be taken seriously. 60.   The Dutch critic rightly compares XXII, 214-223, where Achilles, even though his superiority over Hector is conspicuous, nonetheless has the further benefit of Athena's help. 61.   Not 1461 a 31 (pace M. W. Edwards, A Commentary ..., V, Cambridge, C.U.P., 1991, 323): in its context the text runs δεῖ δὲ καὶ ὅταν ὄνομά τι ὑπεναντίωμά τι δοκῆι σημαίνειν, ἐπισκοπεῖν ποσαχῶς ἂν σημήνειε τοῦτο ἐν τῶι εἰρημένωι, οἷον τὸ 'τῆι ῥ' ἔσχετο χάλκεον ἔγχοσ' τὸ ταύτηι κωλυθῆναι ποσαχῶς ἐνδέχεται ὡδὶ ἢ ὡδί, ὡς μάλιστ' ἄν τις ὑπολάβοι (1461 a 31-35). Ingram Bywater, Aristotle. On the Art of Poetry, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1909, 342-343, has much illustrative material; further elaboration in, e.g., D. W. Lucas, Aristotle. Poetics , ibid., 1968, 245-247, and Jean Lallot & Roselyne Dupont-Roc, Aristote. La Poétique , Paris, Seuil, 1980, 397-398. 62.   Add XXIII, 670-671 (damn. Franke, retinuit West, sed "ἦ οὐχ ἅλις non aptum uidetur "). 63.   Confirmed, I may add, by Wilhelm Schulze, Quaestiones Epicae , Gütersloh, Bertelsman, 1892, 21-22, here on 22. 64.   For what it is worth, I shall mention another arbitrary unessential change: West refuses the metaphorical use of Ἄρης for 'war, violence'. Thus he prints without capitalization a score of relevant occurrences (XIII, 630; XIV, 149; XVI, 42; XVI, 245; XVIII, 134; XVIII, 264; XVIII, 304; XIX, 142; XIX, 189; XIX, 237; XIX, 275; XIX, 318; XXIV, 260). 65.   This use may not be very ancient for Euripides has seven instances of ἀποπρό: cf. J. T. Allen & Gabriel Italie, A Concordance to Euripides , Groningen, Bouma, 1970 (second ed.), p. 70 col. 2. For a further score of conjectural restorations, see James Diggle, Euripidea, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1994, 184-185. 66.   All these materials were already put forward by R. A. Neil, Aristophanes. The Knights , Cambridge, C.U.P., 1901, 33. On p. 34, ad 205, he refers to Athenaeus, XV, 667 B ἀγκυλοῦντα δεῖ σφόδρα τὴν χεῖρα πέμπειν τὸν κότταβον. 67.   I shall quote Van Leeuwen's critical note ad Knights, 197 ( Aristophanis Equites cum Prolegomenis et Commentariis edidit J. V. L. , Leiden, Sijthoff, 1900, p. 40): "ἀγκυλοχείλης...Quae apud Homerum quidem (P 428 = x 302) uera uidetur esse forma, 'curuirostrum' igitur significans; sed Batrachomachiae poeta, qui cancros dixit ἀγχυλοχήλας vs. 296, eorum 'crura' hoc epitheto pinxit, et nostrum idem uoluisse clare docent vs. 205 et Aves 1180". 68.   The only instances one may cite are Theocritus XI, 54 ὤμοι, ὅτ' οὐκ ἔτεκέν μ' ἁ μάτηρ βράγχι' ἔχοντα and 79 δῆλον ὅτ' ἐν τᾶι γᾶι κἠγὼν τις φαίνομαι ἧμεν, where the elision of ὅτι is refused by Gow (II, 217 ad 54 ) and similarly by P. E. Legrand in the section on prosody of his Étude sur Théocrite (Paris, De Boccard, 1898, reissued 1968, 314-329, on 326 with the note 3) but is admitted by K. J. Dover ( Theocritus. Select Poems , London, Macmillan, 1971, 178) as the lectio difficilior. 69.   Δὲ ῥαδαλῆις is a palmary emendation by Isaac Voss (δ' ἐραδαλῆις Palatinus 398, an evident instance of a wrong word-division during the μεταχαρακτηρισμός of uncial script). 70.   This point I do not intend to be a naughty critique. West is not guilty of printing here what could well be a uox nihili. I think I have demonstrated, in this review, that I am well aware of the difference between a readable text and an authentic text: despite Van Thiel, the 'vulgate' may often not be archetypal. But nonetheless I can see no reason why the very text an editor deems authentic would resist translation; it should be his duty to provide brief annotations wherever what he prints has serious chances to puzzle the reader (this has be done, in the O.C.T. series, by Murray for his Aeschylus--textual comments, rare notes on the exegesis--and by Henry and Schwyzer for their joint editio minor of Plotinus--mainly notes on the meaning of vexed passages). 71.   I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Professors Richard Janko, who was

instrumental in the making of this review and who saved me from blunders too numerous to remember, and Michael Apthorp, for our friendly correspondence and his willingness to decrypt some features of West's apparatus which otherwise may have escaped my notice. Ἀλλ', ὦγάθ', ἔτι καὶ νῦν πιθοῦ πάσηι τέχνη...Readers interested in checking my French paper are welcome to contact me for offprints. Read Latest

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Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2001.09.06

West on Nagy and Nardelli on West.   Response by Martin L. West, All Souls, Oxford The two volumes of my Teubner edition of the Iliad have been honoured in BMCR with reviews of exceptional length, totalling over 31,000 words (2000.09.12, by Gregory Nagy; 2001.06.21, by Jean-Fabrice Nardelli). I am grateful to the reviewers for their pains, and for the generally positive character of their evaluations. There are many points of detail on which they disagree with me, and the reader will not need to be explicitly advised that on these same points I disagree with them. But it may perhaps be of interest to some observers (whether or not they have digested the reviews) if I comment on certain matters of principle and attempt to dispel some misapprehensions. My critics are both (though it takes them in different ways) devotees of the Oralist faith, and they reproach me for not paying sufficient regard to the Good News. Thus Nagy remarks disapprovingly that in my Praefatio I "ignore altogether the work of Parry and Lord", and that throughout my edition "there is a noticeable lack of engagement with oral poetics". Nardelli finds that I "refuse the critical consequences of the Parry-Lord theory"; I show this by marking as spurious a number of verses "which, in their great majority, are easily accounted for in the oralist framework". I have "a keen feeling for Homeric Greek but no sound command in oral linguistics." "He cannot be well acquainted with Parry's principle that rhapsodes would modernize their diction wherever meter does not prevent it since it is his contention that 'Homer' wrote." Let me take up the last point first. I do not actually commit myself as to whether the poet wrote with his own hand or used an amanuensis, but I do make him responsible for the writing down. Both reviewers imply that there is something controversial, even extreme, in this view. But it is an inescapable fact that we are dealing with a written poem, a text fixed in the course of the writing process (in Parryist theory it could not be otherwise). It cannot be treated as the transcript of a series of oral performances, for even if the poet was capable of creating our Iliad in performance, the means to capture it were not available in antiquity. (I have exposed the inadequacy of the "oral dictated text" theory in a recent paper in Acta Antiqua Academiae Hungaricae 40 [2000], 479-88.) Nardelli declares: "That 'Homer' ... wrote is a mere guess depending on another unconventional belief of West's, that 'Homer' is post-Hesiodic." But it does not depend in the least on the relative date of Hesiod; and it is by no means "a mere guess" but a logical necessity. As Adam Parry pointed out, if the poet had not written (or caused to be written), we could not have his poem. But we do have it, because "he" is by definition the author of the poem we have. Once the text was written down ("the text" being by definition the original of the Iliad we have), there began a written tradition, vulnerable to corruption by interpolation, modernization, and misunderstanding. My Praefatio is concerned with the history of this written tradition; that is why it is not adorned with references to Parry and Lord (and Nagy). If it sounds dogmatic, it is because its purpose is to explain succinctly to the user the presuppositions on which the edition is based and to give an indication of the reasons for them. It is not meant to be a history of Homeric philology, and the accusation that I have failed to cite this or that scholar, or suppressed views with which I do not agree, is thus beside the point. If we want to get back to the original--and that is what I want--we must endeavour to identify the corruptions of the written tradition. "Oral poetics" is a red herring. Yes,

constant modernization is characteristic of the oral poetic tradition; but that does not mean we have to accept all the modernizations we find in the written tradition, because written traditions also modernize. How do we distinguish modernizations of the tradition from those of the original poet? When the tradition itself is inconsistent as between an older and a younger form, the likelihood is that the poet more consistently used the older, and that the other has crept in subsequently. When the tradition shows no trace anywhere of a theoretical older form, we shall work on the assumption that it was already obsolete in the poet's time, unless there is some special reason to think otherwise (as in the case of the genitives in -oo). Again, how do we decide, in the absence of external evidence, whether a redundant verse, repeated from another context, is due to the poet or is a later intrusion? Not, at any rate, by preaching that such repetitions are typical of oral poets and therefore to be accepted; for they are no less typical of noncreative rhapsodes, and of Homeric copyists down to the Middle Ages. The question is which of these was responsible in the given instance. Of course the ancient variants are predominantly oral (or mnemonic) in origin. That does not mean, as Nagy thinks, that they all have equal validity. He fails to see the difference between a genuine creative oral tradition and the reproductive tradition of the Homeric rhapsodes, whose business was to perform excerpts from speciÞc poems recognized as Þxed entities. Their interpolations and "oral" variants may be valid and interesting as manifestations of their art, but they have a quite different and inferior status to the original, normative text that the rhapsodes were supposed to be presenting--the Iliad that is the object of my edition. Nagy calls for a "multitext" edition that would display all the variants without "privileging" any one version. That amounts to denying that "Homer's" Iliad was any better or worthier of our attention than subsequent rhapsodes' perversions of it. Nagy's position is well criticized by Margalit Finkelberg in Classical Philology 95 (2000), 1-11. Admittedly, it is not always easy to decide which version is the original. But there it is the editor's right, and indeed duty, to exercise his best judgment on behalf of the public, drawing on whatever knowledge and experience he may have accumulated in the course of his life. This does not seem to be a familiar concept to Nagy, who complains that "the text of West's Iliad contains many editorial judgments that go beyond the manuscript evidence and that þatten out the textual history of Homer." Nor does he appreciate that an editorial decision reflects a judgment of probability, not necessarily an assertion of certainty. Thus when he speaks of my "optimism about reconstructing the ipsissima verba of a prototypical poet", or writes that "he seems confident that he has recovered the closest thing to the putatively original Iliad", or that "for West, there is no need to go back to the edition of Aristarchus in order to recover the text of Homer. He thinks that the closest thing to an original Iliad is his own reconstruction of the text composed by the 'primus poeta'", he is imputing to me a kind of arrogance that I repudiate. Naturally my text consists of what I think is the closest attainable to the original; that is what editing a text is about. But I am not saying it must be so, I am simply offering my best efforts. When Nardelli calls my edition "the tentative account of an opinionated author", I will accept the description, provided that "opinionated" is understood to mean "having decided views" and not "bigoted". However, I am afraid that Nardelli intends the more negative sense. Elsewhere he writes: "What actually concerns West is less the origin and putative vertical character of each reading in the tradition than their congruence, dialectal, morphological or orthographic, to his own idea of what the Kunstsprache tolerates in each case and of what the context of each passage allows. This promulgates the taste of the modern editor..." That sounds bad, does it not? Only it is not a matter of taste, but of informed judgment, not derived from some private revelation about the norms of the Kunstsprache but from the empirical data; a judgment not imposed without regard to the evidence of the transmission in each place, but deployed in conjunction with it. I do not know what leads Nardelli to think that I have a special preference for Aeolic forms; his reference to "the Aeolic color of the Kunstsprache, in whose conjectural restoration West has indulged in many places, following the guideline of Payne Knight and Fick," will give the innocent reader a very misleading impression of my practice. My

choice of uncontracted τεύχεα at line-end in 22.322 has nothing to do with Aeolic: a bizarre misunderstanding of my apparatus here and at 24.7 has led Nardelli to suppose that the manuscripts give τεύχεη and ἄλγεη (so accented), and he informs us that these are the Ionic equivalents of Aeolic -εα (with long alpha). I confess to some bemusement at seeing my Iliad reviewed by someone who can be prey to such a fantastic misconception. His blood will surely run cold when he realizes what he has done. Confusion in linguistic matters appears also in his remarks about my rejection of the graph ευ for the contraction of εο or εου. The epigraphic argument is not ex silentio; it is that before the fourth century BC these contractions were normally written EO in Ionic, as if they were uncontracted. There may be one or two earlier instances of EU, but the norm was EO. We must assume it was also the norm in poetic manuscripts and that EU is a modernization. To judge otherwise is to show irrational faith in the sincerity of the tradition. Nardelli muddles the issue further by referring to Ionic spellings of the inherited diphthong EU as EO, which is a separate matter. (The seven such forms which he lists as "unanimously attested in the medieval tradition of Herodotus" in fact come from other sources.) Given the brevity of my account of the early tradition (Praefatio V-VI), it is remarkable in how many details Nardelli contrives to misrepresent it. I said nothing of "a bard called Homer" who "composed...both the Iliad and the Odyssey" "sometime between the seventh and the sixth centuries BC"; nor did I mention "the Homeridae of Chios". I did note that a few corruptions in the text seem to have their origin in copies written in the Attic alphabet, but I did not, as Nardelli implies, suggest that all copies were written in that script down to 403/2. On the contrary, I believe that the Iliad was written from the start in an Ionian alphabet of 25 letters (with qoppa). When I synchronize the division of the poem into 24 rhapsodies with the organization of the Panathenaic recitations in the time of Hipparchus, I am not in the least influenced by "the tradition first represented by Cicero" (De Oratore 3.137: Pisistrati, qui primus Homeri libros confusos antea sic disposuisse dicitur ut nunc habemus). The argument is that that was the moment when a division into "recitations" was needed, no earlier and no later. In the Praefatio I could only state summarily my finding that the readings of the "city editions" and other early copies cited in the scholia were accumulated by Didymus and not by Aristarchus. As the arguments had not yet been presented, Nagy and Nardelli may be forgiven for cleaving to the conventional view, which I regard as mistaken. I can now refer those interested to my Studies in the Text and Transmission of the Iliad (Munich & Leipzig: K. G. Saur, 2001). There they will also find ample and reasoned presentation of my views on the pre-Alexandrian tradition, on the nature of Zenodotus' text (where my position is by no means "a mere adaptation of Van der Valk's conclusions", as Nardelli has it), and on numerous textual questions. Even without these fuller explanations, however, my two critics might have taken my point (to which they give short shrift) that when Didymus reports the reading of Aristarchus, he does so because the reading is somehow at issue; in other words, he must be aware of a different one, with which Aristarchus' is tacitly contrasted. We can usually identify this different reading, and then it is appropriate to say of it "novit Didymus". This should be obvious, and it is not dependent (as my critics seem to suppose) on my view of Aristarchus' use of manuscripts. The deployment of "novit Didymus" does not throw up new variants, because we have to know the reading from somewhere else before we can label it in this way. But it does provide a guarantee of antiquity that may not otherwise be available. This is also the principal value of the ancient quotations that I have collected in such numbers. I am sorry that Nagy and Nardelli are not more appreciative of their utility. To the latter I am grateful for a few addenda, though three of the items he claims I have overlooked are actually there in my apparatus, and it is not true that "the references for quotations collected by La Roche and Ludwich were not updated". A further misunderstanding on Nardelli's part concerns my bracketing of lines. He lists a number of these lines and speaks of my "refusal to delete" and of cases where "West

may well be overcautious and this reviewer would have wished to see the lines properly removed" ... "those retained in the text with braces are no less certainly spurious than the deleted ones, but West was not confident enough (or did not dare) to delete them." My list of sigla says plainly enough, "{ } interpolata videntur". The choice between bracketing and omission is not an index of my confidence, but simply reflects the lines' status in terms of the transmission. The ones I omit from the text are those that appear in only a few sources and are absent from the main tradition; they are not part of the paradosis. The ones I bracket are well attested, though not necessarily in all sources. When it comes to my choice of readings in the text, both critics hold it against me that I do not formulate or follow some mechanical criterion. Thus Nagy: "West's approach...does not seem to me systematic. That is, his decisions about good or bad textual traditions are not based on external evidence... Ultimately, the 'goodness' of the given tradition depends on whether West thinks that the given reading is 'right' in the first place. He is not concerned whether a reading comes from an ancient source or from a conjecture, ancient or modern, as long as it is 'right'." Of course! That is what textual criticism is about: rightness! Which does not mean treating the external evidence in a cavalier fashion, but treating it critically, not giving systematic preference to some particular source or type of source. This brings us back to the axiom, which my critics find so disconcerting, that the editor should be a thinking being, not a puller of levers. Read Latest

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