Approaches to Greek Poetry: Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, and Aeschylus in Ancient Exegesis

390 Pages·2019·3.309 MB·English

by  Marco Ercoles, Lara Pagani, Filippomaria Pontani, Giuseppe Ucciardello

Approaches to Greek Poetry
Trends in Classics –
Supplementary Volumes
Edited by
Franco Montanari and Antonios Rengakos

Associate Editors
Evangelos Karakasis · Fausto Montana · Lara Pagani
Serena Perrone · Evina Sistakou · Christos Tsagalis

Scientific Committee
Alberto Bernabé · Margarethe Billerbeck
Claude Calame · Jonas Grethlein · Philip R. Hardie
Stephen J. Harrison · Richard Hunter · Christina Kraus
Giuseppe Mastromarco · Gregory Nagy
Theodore D. Papanghelis · Giusto Picone
Tim Whitmarsh · Bernhard Zimmermann

Volume 73
Approaches to
Greek Poetry
Edited by
Marco Ercoles, Lara Pagani, Filippomaria Pontani
and Giuseppe Ucciardello
ISBN 978-3-11-062960-6
e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-063188-3
e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-062987-3
ISSN 1868-4785
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018963682
Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie;
detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.
© 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Editorial Office: Alessia Ferreccio and Katerina Zianna
Logo: Christopher Schneider, Laufen
Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck
www.degruyter.com
Contents
Foreword | 1
Part I: Homeric exegesis in antiquity 
René Nünlist 
Observations on Aristarchus’ Homeric studies | 11
Stephanos Matthaios 
Eratosthenes, Crates and Aristarchus on the Homeric dual. Rethinking the
origins of the ‘analogy vs. anomaly controversy’ | 25
Filippomaria Pontani 
Chi | 51
Daniela Colomo
Glossary to Odyssey VIII in a new papyrus fragment from the Leipzig Papyrus-
und Ostrakasammlung | 61
Part II: Homeric and Hesiodic exegesis in Byzantine
manuscripts and texts 
Lara Pagani 
The Iliad “Textscholien” in the Venetus A | 83
Fausto Montana 
The oldest textual witness of John Tzetzes’ Exegesis of the Iliad | 107
Davide Muratore 
On the sources of Lascaris’ edition of the D-scholia on the Iliad | 133
Marta Cardin and Olga Tribulato 
Enumerating the Muses:
Tzetzes in Hes. Op. 1 and the parody of catalogic poetry in Epicharmus | 161
VI | Contents
Part III: Pindar between scholia and lexica 
Claudio Meliadò
Aristarchomastix. Dionysius of Sidon between epic and lyric poetry | 195
Grazia Merro
Theon’s Pindaric exegesis: New materials from marginalia on papyri | 213
Maria Cannatà Fera
Criticism of Pindar’s poetry in the scholia vetera | 233
Giuseppe Ucciardello 
A lexicographical collection in two manuscripts of Cyrillus’ Lexicon and a new
testimonium on Pindar | 261
Part IV: Aeschylus in the exegetical tradition
Marco Ercoles
The imaginative poet:
Aeschylus’ phantasiai in ancient literary criticism | 287
Renzo Tosi
Aeschylus’ scholia in ms. Ath. Iber. 209: Two examples | 315
Caterina Franchi
Around Europe in two hundred years:
The wanderings of ms. Ath. Iber. 209 | 325
Afterword
Franco Montanari 
Ancient scholarship today | 345

List of Contributors |  355
Index rerum | 359
Index locorum | 371
Foreword
This volume collects papers presented at a three-day international conference
held at Bologna University (Alma Mater) on May, 23rd–25th, 2016 within the
framework of the project FIRB 2012-Futuro in Ricerca “Homer, Hesiod, Pindar,
Aeschylus: forms and transmission of the ancient exegesis” funded by the Italian
Ministry for Education, University and Research (MIUR). The conference brought
together the core members of the four research units (Bologna, Genoa, Messina,
Venice) with highly qualified scholars from Italy and abroad (UK, Germany,
Greece), some of them already engaged in a fruitful collaboration with the re-
search teams. We are grateful to all the invited speakers and the large audience.
To begin with, a few words about the project and its articulation. Reading
and studying the corpora of ancient and Byzantine scholia is not an easy task: it
requires a preliminary knowledge of the complex mutual relationships between
the different layers of these peculiar texts as well as of the interaction of the cor-
pora themselves with their direct or indirect forebears. This effort is complicated
by the fact that many works or collections pertaining to ancient scholarship are
badly or not yet fully edited. The last decades have seen a remarkable surge of
interest in this field, as is recently testified by e.g. the Brill’s Companion to Ancient
Greek Scholarship by Montanari/Matthaios/Rengakos or Eleanor Dickey’s hand-
book on the same topic.1 Fresh efforts in producing modern editions of the scholia
to Sophocles or Euripides have just gone into press or are currently ongoing.2 This
revived interest is very promising and it continues to enhance and modify our
knowledge of ancient scholarship and the way in which we are accustomed to
discuss these texts and the editorial and exegetical challenges they pose.
Within this framework, the FIRB project has been mainly aimed at covering
selected aspects of the critical re-appraisal of Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, and Ae-
schylus in Greek culture throughout antiquity and the Middle Ages. The exegeti-
cal material has been handed down in a fragmentary way and in multiple sources
encompassing inter alia corpora of scholia, lexicographical and grammatical
works, scholarly texts on papyri. Our efforts have been concentrated on some piv-
otal aspects of this daunting and complex field: the material form of the trans-
mission of the exegesis, the examination of some branches of the manuscript
||
1 Montanari/Matthaios/Rengakos 2015; Dickey 2007.
2 Merro 2008 (ed. of the scholia to the Rhesus); Cavarzeran 2016 (ed. of the scholia to Euripides’
Hippolytus), Xenis 2010a, 2010b and 2018 (edd. of the scholia to Sophocles’ Electra, Trachiniae
and Oedipus at Colonus), Mastronarde 2017 (preliminary studies towards an online edition of the
full corpus of the scholia to Euripides).
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110631883-202
2 | Foreword
evidence hitherto only partially explored, the indirect tradition and the various
ways in which the exegetical heritage was received and assimilated in grammat-
ical and lexicographical works.
Homer’s Iliad and its exegesis have been the focus of the Genoa unit. The an-
cient and Byzantine scholarly debate on the Iliad has been investigated with an
in-depth look at the genesis of the various scholiastic classes.3 Some editorial en-
terprises launched by members of the group also deserve a special mention: a
new and really comprehensive edition of the scholia to the Iliad (including also
the so-called ‘D-scholia’ and ‘h-scholia’ both omitted by Erbse’s monumental
work);4 a re-foundation of the Lessico dei grammatici greci antichi (LGGA) now
hosted at Brill’s website as Lexicon of Greek Grammarians of Antiquity.5 Moreover,
a Supplementum Grammaticum Graecum (SGG) is currently being prepared: it will
consist of critical editions, equipped with translation and commentary of ancient
grammarians in close connection with the Jacoby’s project (Fragmente der
griechischen Historiker) edited by Stefan Schorn (KU Leuven).6
The impressive amount of ancient and Byzantine scholarship on Homer’s Od-
yssey and Hesiod has been sifted by the Venice team, leading on the editorial side
to the completion of a new volume of the Scholia in Homeri Odysseam (books ε-ζ;
the following one, covering the books η-θ, is under way), and to the preparation
of the first critical edition of John Tzetzes’ Exegesis on the Erga of Hesiod, an edi-
tion which takes into account for the first time all known extant manuscripts.7
Other specific topics investigated by the team cover the scanty traces of ancient
commentaries to Hesiod on papyrus, some linguistic aspects of Hesiodic exegesis
in the lexicographical sources of the Imperial age, as well as forgotten chapters
of the Homeric exegesis during the Renaissance.8
The Messina group has been working on Pindar and his exegesis throughout
the centuries, and has pursued various lines of research: a textual reappraisal of
some papyrus commentaries and their relationship with the scholia vetera, chal-
lenging the widely held belief in the key-role played by Didymus in the develop-
ment of the scholiastic corpus;9 an in-depth exploration of the manuscript tradi-
tion of the Moschopoulean commentary to Pindar, only partially edited by Abel
in 1891, which has led to a fresh reappraisal of largely neglected fourteenth- and
||
3 See e.g. Pagani 2014.
4 Montana/Montanari/Muratore/Pagani 2017.
5 Montana/Montanari/Pagani, in progress.
6 Schorn, in progress.
7 Pontani 2015 and Cardin, forthcoming.
8 Tribulato, forthcoming; Cardin/Pontani 2017; Pontani 2018.
9 Merro 2015 and this volume.
Foreword | 3
fifteenth-century manuscripts;10 the discovery of some snapshots of exegetical
material on Pindar still unedited or overlooked in the repository of late antique
and Byzantine lexicography.11
Finally, the exegesis on Aeschylus has been the main concern of the Bologna
group, whose research activity has been centered on a broad range of subjects,
such as the much-discussed relationship between scholia and ancient hypomne-
mata and lexicography, and a re-assessment of the traces of metrical scholarship
and of Stoic and Epicurean exegesis lurking behind our scholiastic material and
not yet explored into detail.12 The careful evaluation of some underestimated
manuscripts such as the Ath. Iber. 209 (olim 161) with its layers of subsequent
annotations also deserves an appropriate mention, since the Athos ms. and its
history shed new light on the different ways of reading Aeschylus during the Byz-
antine age and the Renaissance.13
The aim of the project was to critically re-evaluate some strands of the ancient
and medieval scholarship by adopting an interdisciplinary methodology which
blends modern editorial techniques developed for ‘problematic’ or non-authorial
medieval texts with current trends in the history of philology and literary criti-
cism.14
The structure of the present volume reflects by and large the lines of research
sketched above. The first section deals with various aspects of the Alexandrian
studies on Homer. René Nünlist gives a flavour of his wider investigation of the
scholarship of Aristarchus of Samothrace by tackling the latter’s use of metaphor
and metonymy (against the background of the Aristotelian categorisation of
these terms), his approach to synonyms (particularly the use of the terms ἀντι-
φράζω and ἐκ παραλλήλου with respect to the mechanisms of verbal expression
and syntax), and his views on the authenticity of the Homeric Hymns. Starting
from a fresh look at the ideas of Eratosthenes, Aristarchus and Crates on the Ho-
meric dual (as transmitted in some scholia to the Iliad), Stephanos Matthaios of-
fers an overall reappraisal of the so-called “anomaly vs. analogy controversy”,
from the famous testimony of Varro through the most recent (sometimes skepti-
cal) scholarly views on this topic: he argues that the controversy did exist, and
that Eratosthenes should be considered as a forerunner of Crates in the anoma-
listic field. Filippomaria Pontani takes his cue from a largely neglected scholium
||
10 Ucciardello, forthcoming.
11 Meliadò 2015 and Ucciardello, this volume.
12 Ercoles 2015 and forthcoming.
13 Ercoles/Franchi, forthcoming and Franchi, this volume.
14 Pontani 2016.
4 | Foreword
to ζ 297 in order to discuss the idea that Aristophanes of Byzantium probably used
the χ as a critical sign in his ekdosis of the Odyssey: this incidentally suggests that
Aristophanes might indeed, as W. Slater believed, have been the first to produce
something like a critical hypomnema to Homer. Finally, Daniela Colomo provides
the editio princeps of PLips inv. 1397, a fragment of a papyrus roll of unknown
provenance (first century AD) carrying a glossary to Odyssey book 8.
The following section deals with questions related to the ancient exegesis on
the Iliad and on Hesiod, focusing particularly on the scholiastic tradition trans-
mitted by medieval manuscripts and on specific features of some important wit-
nesses. Lara Pagani addresses the issue of the “short scholia” in ms. Venetus A
and their relationship with the frame-scholia in the same codex. This juxtaposi-
tion is traced back to one and the same exegetical tradition: at a certain point it
split up into two different paths, responding to different needs, and was later re-
combined in one single book, with the aim of gathering together all the remains
of ancient scholarship and, presumably, of displaying the difference in the type
of reading aid supplied by each of the two scholiastic sets. Fausto Montana inves-
tigates some scholia penned in ff. 1rv of ms. Laur. pl. 32.3 (dated to the eleventh-
twelfth centuries on palaeographical grounds) which are not the expected scholia
exegetica on Il. 1.5–12, but rather match passages of John Tzetzes’ Exegesis of the
Iliad on the same lines: a textual comparison with the corresponding passages in
the direct tradition of Tzetzes’ work proves the anteriority of the Exegesis, thus
forcing us to date the Laurentian ms. after 1143 (likely to be the terminus ante
quem for the composition of the work). The inquiry of Davide Muratore aims at
ascertaining which manuscripts have been employed for the production of Janus
Lascaris’ editio princeps of the D-scholia: the main exemplar was ms. Vat. gr. 33
(whose use by Lascaris is also suggested by the entries in the lending registers of
the Vatican Library), whereas totally new scholia and material unknown to the
main witnesses of the D-scholia probably derive from a manuscript of the para-
phrase of the Iliad attributed to Michael Psellos, from Eustathius’ Parekbolai,
from ms. Par. gr. 2681 (owned by Lascaris himself), and, perhaps, from a codex of
the ‘h family’. This section closes on a Hesiodic note: a complex paper by Marta
Cardin and Olga Tribulato tackles John Tzetzes’ puzzling note to the first two
words of the Erga, which lists the names of the Muses as reported in Hesiod him-
self, Eumelus, Epicharmus and Aratus; a fresh analysis of the manuscript trans-
mission of Tzetzes’ commentary, combined with a meticulous linguistic analysis
of these name lists (especially Epicharmus’), yields new conclusions on their
sense and their Sitz im Leben.
The third set of papers is centered on Pindar and some strands of his exegesis
and reception in the scholia vetera and lexicography. Claudio Meliadò deals with