The Life of Texts

Evidence in Textual Production, Transmission and Reception

Carlo Caruso

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781350039070
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The textual foundations of works of great cultural significance are often less stable than one would wish them to be. No work of Homer, Dante or Shakespeare survives in utterly reliable witnesses, be they papyri, manuscripts or printed editions. Notions of textual authority have varied considerably across the ages under the influence of different (and differently motivated) agents, such as scribes, annotators, editors, correctors, grammarians, printers and publishers, over and above the authors themselves. The need for preserving the written legacy of peoples and nations as faithfully as possible has always been counterbalanced by a duty to ensure its accessibility to successive generations at different times and in different cultural contexts. The ten chapters collected in this volume offer critical approaches to such authors and texts as Homer, the Bible, The Thousand and One Nights, Dante, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Eliot, but also Leonardo da Vinci's manuscripts uniquely combining word and image, as well as Beethoven's 'Tempest' sonata (Op. 31, No. 2) as seen from the angle of music as text. Together the contributors argue that an awareness of what the 'life of texts' entails is essential for a critical understanding of the transmission of culture.

1

Editing Homer

Barbara Graziosi

Editing the Homeric poems is a demanding task. The poems are long and there are many manuscripts and papyrus scraps to consider; the latter, moreover, keep turning up from the sands of Egypt, from mummy cartonnage and even more often from libraries where they languish unedited for years, decades and even centuries after discovery.¹ Above all, however, editing Homer is a demanding task because it raises difficult issues of method, practice and aim – which are related to the fundamental question of what Homeric epic is and should be. Great as they are, the practical difficulties pale into insignificance when compared to the challenge of establishing a workable theoretical framework for the task. What I offer here is a brief outline of some of the main issues an editor of Homer needs to face, starting from uncertainties regarding authorship, methods of composition, ancient performance and ancient editing. I then offer some examples of how those uncertainties play out in practice, in the modern editing of the text. I conclude with some considerations about how we may most usefully approach the Homeric text in future, in order to improve our understanding of its meaning and history. This chapter aims to foster an interdisciplinary discussion of editorial theories and practices. For this reason, I use transliterated Greek and translations throughout, indicating in the footnotes where more specialist guidance can be found. As well as providing some orientation on current approaches, this chapter also aims to inspire further specialist work, by suggesting some lines of enquiry which, in my view, seem promising.

Authorship

The first surviving sources that mention Homer by name date to the sixth century BC: from them, we can establish that Homer was thought to be an ancient and authoritative poet – but also that nothing much was known about him. Several cities, for example, claimed to have been his birthplace, but none seems to have commanded universal authority on the matter. In fact, even the name ‘Homer’ was disputed: most ancient authors seem to have used it in straightforward manner, though some insisted that it was only a nickname meaning ‘blind’, or ‘hostage’.² As so often in Homeric studies, ancient uncertainties still reverberate in current scholarship: ‘Homer’ is not a standard Greek personal name, but it is not an obviously made-up name either, which means that some scholars accept it as the name of a real individual while others suggest that the Iliad and the Odyssey are, in point of fact, anonymous.³

As well as doubts about the name and identity of Homer, the ancient sources suggest uncertainty about which poems, exactly, this great and elusive poet Homer once composed. The authenticity of the Iliad was never questioned in antiquity, but that of the Odyssey sometimes was, and a host of other epic poems – now surviving only in fragments and plot summaries – were sometimes attributed to Homer and sometimes dismissed as inauthentic. In general, it seems that definitions of Homer’s oeuvre narrowed in the course of time. In the sixth and early fifth century BC, Greek authors tended to treat Homer as the author of whole epic sagas, and more specifically a Trojan Cycle revolving around the Trojan War, its origins and its aftermath, and a Theban Cycle dealing with Oedipus, his descendants, and the siege of Thebes. They also attributed to Homer other epic poems, such as The Capture of Oechalia (also surviving in fragments) and several hymns to the gods (which are still extant).⁴

Already in the second half of the fifth century, we know that Homer was expected to be self-consistent and that contradiction was considered a reason to doubt authenticity. Herodotus, for example, made the following observation about a specific passage in the Cypria, a cyclic poem that focused on the origin and early stages of the Trojan War:

These lines and this passage are no small proof that the Cypria is not by Homer, but by someone else; for in the Cypria we are told that, when Paris led Helen away, he arrived from Sparta to Troy in three days, enjoying a fair wind and a smooth sea, whereas in the Iliad Homer says that he wandered off course when he took her away.⁵

The technical language Herodotus uses, as well as the fact that he offers just one argument (implicitly among several) against authenticity – suggests a background of scholarly debate, which is now lost to us. What deserves attention, as part of that lost context of criticism, is the assumption that Homer never contradicts himself – unlike, say, the lyric poet Stesichorus (who offered one account of the rape of Helen, and then recanted it in a different poem) and unlike the playwrights, for that matter, who created different (and often contradictory) versions of the same myth year after year. In short, Homer was allowed to believe only one thing about Helen’s journey, and was not supposed to change his mind – not even when composing different poems.

We can reconstruct at least two other expectations of Homer in the classical period (fifth and fourth centuries BC). First, the poet was thought to be a good imitator of character. In Plato’s Ion, for example, a rhapsode (a professional performer of epic) claims that Homer knows ‘the kind of things that a man says, or what a woman might say, or a slave, or a freeman, or someone receiving orders, or someone giving them’.⁶ In Aristotle’s Poetics, this ability to imitate character is expressed in terms of a distinction between main narrative and character speech:

Homer deserves praise for many things but especially for this, that alone of all poets he does not fail to understand what he ought to do himself. The poet should speak as seldom as possible in his own character, since he is not representing the story in that sense. Now the other poets play a part themselves throughout and only occasionally imitate a few things, but Homer after a brief prelude at once brings in a man or a woman or some other person, never without character, but all having characters of their own.⁷

The emphasis, in Aristotle, is not just on what the poet says, but on what he omits, or lets his characters say for themselves. This ability to select and arrange is the third quality attributed to Homer in the late classical period which I would like to discuss here. Aristotle differentiates between the Iliad and the Cypria not in terms of factual consistency, as Herodotus did in the fifth century, but in terms of design, focus and, explicitly, omission. In his discussion of the Odyssey, he likewise comments on what the poet leaves out:

whether out of natural instinct or poetic technique … Homer did not put into the Odyssey all that ever happened to Odysseus, his being wounded on Parnassus, for instance, or his feigned madness when the army was assembled – since these events did not necessarily or probably led one to the other; but rather constructed his Odyssey around a single action in our sense of the phrase. And the Iliad the same.⁸

The three qualities attributed to Homer in classical sources, namely consistency, good imitation of character and the ability to select, are of course crucial skills for the orator – and it can be no coincidence that, in this period, the study of Homeric epic was considered foundational for a good rhetorical education.⁹ Still, these three qualities expected of Homer continued to shape ancient approaches to the poems attributed to him even when these became the focus of intense scholarly attention in their own right – rather than as a means of training future public speakers.¹⁰

In the Hellenistic period, after the conquests of Alexander the Great and the foundation of Alexandria, the Homeric poems became the object of intense scholarly work in the library attached to the Museum, an institution devoted to the cult of the Muses, as the name suggests. In the third and second centuries BC, scholars working in the library of Alexandria applied ever more stringent criteria in order to establish what was truly Homeric. They analysed in detail the diction and grammar of the Iliad and the Odyssey, on the basis of several different manuscripts they collected in different Greek cities, and kept to their great library.¹¹ They placed a special sign – a long dash called the obelos – next to lines or passages whose authenticity they doubted, and then had full discussions and explanations in separate commentaries called hypomnemata. These commentaries are lost, as are the Alexandrian editions. However, some papyri preserve texts with signs of scholarship on them, and even snippets of commentary (Fig. 1.1).

As well as trying to establish exactly what Homer had composed, scholars working in the Alexandrian library speculated about the poet’s ‘character’ (ēthos), ‘habit’ (ethos) and ‘persona’ (prosōpon). Homer, they insisted, had to be ‘clarified with reference to Homer’ (Homēron ex Homērou saphēnizein).¹² In short, the process of editing was, in ancient Alexandrian practice, intertwined with the attempt to establish what Homer would have said and, more specifically, with the assumption that he would have been consistent across his oeuvre. When contradictions were detected, scholars sometimes explained them by claiming that they arose out of Homer’s talent for characterization. In fact, they established the ‘solution from character’ (lysis ek tou prosōpou), namely the idea that characters could contradict each other, the poet and even themselves.¹³

The clearest statement of this ancient approach to textual contradiction is found in a discussion about Homer’s views on wine consumption before battle. In Iliad 6, Hecuba and Hector disagree on the subject: she offers her son some wine, claiming that it will give him the strength required to face the battlefield; he refuses, stating that, on the contrary, wine would weaken him. Here is what Porphyry (third century AD) had to say on the matter, on the strength of earlier, Alexandrian discussions:

Figure 1.1 In this papyrus fragment dated to the second century BC (University of California 2390, P.Tebt. 4), we see in the margin between the two columns an obelos in correspondence with the first line, and below the letter beta, β, which marks line 200 in book 2 of the Iliad. The sign is only one line off with respect to medieval manuscripts and modern editions.

The question here is why the poet contradicts himself, since, after saying ‘When a man is tired … [wine greatly increases his strength]’ he now states ‘Do not … [offer me mind-cheering wine and] sap my limbs of strength’. According to many, the solution to this problem is as follows: one thing is Hecuba’s character, who says that wine is useful; and another is Hector’s, who denies that; and it is not surprising if, according to the poet, contradictory things are said by different characters. All the statements he makes in his own character need to be consistent and not self-contradictory; whereas all those he ascribes to characters are not his own, but are thought to belong to those who speak them; for this reason, he often allows dissonance, as also in these verses.¹⁴

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Foreword
• Introduction: Conceiving the Life of Texts Richard Gameson
• 1 Editing Homer Barbara Graziosi
• 2 The Canon and the Codex: On the Material Form of the Christian Bible Francis Watson
• 3 Wandering Nights: Shahrazād’s Mutations Daniel L. Newman
• 4 A Text in Exile: Dante’s Divine Comedy Annalisa Cipollone
• 5 Textual Metamorphosis: The Manuscripts of Leonardo da Vinci Carlo Vecce
• 6 Montaigne: The Life and After-Life of an Unfinished Text John O’Brien
• 7 Rescuing Shakespeare: King Lear in Its Textual Contexts David Fuller
• 8 Textual Evidence and Musical Analysis: Once More on the First Movement of Beethoven’s Tempest Sonata, Op. 31, No. 2 Julian Horton
• 9 Fragments Shored against Ruin: Reassembling The Waste Land Jason Harding
• Notes
• Index of subjects and themes
• Index of manuscripts and annotated printed copies
• Index of names
• Copyright