Homeric scholarship


Homeric scholarship is the study of any Homeric topic, especially the two large surviving epics, the Iliad and Odyssey. It is currently part of the academic discipline of classical studies. The subject is one of the oldest in education.

Ancient scholarship

Scholia

are ancient commentaries, preserved in the margins of manuscripts. The term marginalia includes them. Some are interlinear, written in very small characters. Over time the scholia were copied along with the work. When the copyist ran out of free text space, he listed them on separate pages or in separate works. The works of Homer have been heavily annotated since antiquity.
The number of manuscripts of the Iliad is currently approximately 1800. The papyri of the Odyssey are fewer in number but are still in the order of dozens. The inventory is incomplete, and new finds continue to be made, but not all these texts contain scholia. No compendium has collated all of the Homeric scholia.
Following the Principle of Economy for the allocation of scarce publication space to overwhelming numbers of scholia, the compilers have had to make decisions about what is important enough to compile. Certain types have been distinguished; scholia have lines of descent of their own. Eleanor Dickey summarizes the most important three, identified by letter as A, bT, and D.
A, "the Venetian scholia", are the scholia of Venetus A, a major manuscript of the Iliad, dated to the 10th century, and located in the Biblioteca Marciana of Venice. The sources of the scholia are noted at the end of each book. There are basically four. The hypothetical original text of the scholia, a manuscript of the 4th century CE, is therefore called, in German, the Viermännerkommentar, "four-man commentary", where the men are Aristonicus, Didymus, Herodian, and Nicanor. Their comments, and these scholia, are termed "critical". A-scholia are found in other manuscripts as well. Venetus A contains some bT scholia.
The bT-scholia have come down to us through two sources: the 11th century T, the "Townleian" scholia, so designated because the manuscript, Townleyanus, was once in the collection of Lord Townley, and a lost manuscript, b, whose descendants include the manuscript known as Venetus B. The bT manuscripts descend from an earlier manuscript, c. The bT-scholia are termed exegetical, as opposed to critical.
The D scholia, or scholia Didymi, named erroneously for Didymus, are the earliest and largest group. They occur primarily in the 9th century Z manuscript, and the 11th century Q manuscript, but also in some others, such as A and T. The D scholia were once thought to be the work of the 1st century BCE scholar Didymus; they are now known to go back to 5th and 4th century BCE school manuscripts, pre-dating the Alexandrine tradition, and representing “the oldest surviving stratum of Homeric scholarship.” Some are also called the scholia minora and the scholia vulgata, the former name referring to the short length of many. These are glossaries. Among the non-minor scholia are mythological aetia, plots, and paraphrases, explaining the meanings of obscure words.
The order of precedence and chronological order of these Iliad scholia is D, A, bT, and other. Material in them probably ranges from the 5th century BCE to as late as the 7th or 8th century CE. The same scheme applies to the Odyssey, except that A scholia, mainly of the Iliad, are in deficit. There are no printed works publishing all the scholia on the Iliad and Odyssey. Only partial publications according to various principles have been possible.
The first was that of Janus Lascaris in 1517, containing the D-scholia. Some subsequent works concentrate on manuscripts or parts of them, others on type of scholia, and still others on books of the Iliad, or source. Larger compendia are relatively recent. One that has already become a standard is the 7-volume compendium of A- and bT-scholia by Hartmut Erbse. Volumes 15 are reserved for a number of books of the Iliad each, amounting to some 3000 pages, approximately. The last two volumes are indices. And yet, Dickey says of it. “The seven volumes of Erbse’s edition thus represent only a small fraction of all the preserved scholia...,” from which it can be seen that the opinions, elucidations and emendations to the Iliad and Odyssey in manuscript texts far outweigh those texts in numbers of pages.

Classical scholarship

By the Classical Period the Homeric Question had advanced to the point of trying to determine what works were attributable to Homer. The Iliad and the Odyssey were beyond question. They were considered to have been written by Homer. The D-scholia suggest that they were taught in the schools; however, the language was no longer self-evident. The extensive glossaries of the D-scholia were intended to bridge the gap between the spoken language and Homeric Greek.
The poems themselves contradicted the general belief in the existence and authorship of Homer. There were many variants, which there should not have been according to the single-author conviction. The simplest answer was to decide which of the variants was most likely to represent a presumed authentic original composition and to discount the others as spurious, devised by someone else.

Peisistratean edition

reports an account by Hereas accusing Peisistratos, tyrant of Athens, r. 561-527 BCE, or Solon, sometime eponymous archon and lawgiver, starting 594 BCE, of altering the Iliads Catalogue of Ships to place the 12 ships from Salamis in the Athenian camp, proving that Athens owned Salamis in the Trojan War. Others denied the theory, Strabo said. The story implies that Peisistratos or Solon had some authority over a presumed master text of the Iliad, and yet Athens at the time had little political power over the Aegean region. Strabo was not the only accuser. Plutarch also accuses him of moving a line from Hesiod to λ630.
Diogenes Laërtius relates that in the time of Solon the Iliad was being “rhapsodized” in public recitations. One of Solon's laws mandates that, in such performances, one rhapsode was to pick up where the previous left off. The involvement of a state official in these rhapsodizations can be explained by their being performances at state-sponsored sacred festivals.
Cicero says that previously the books of Homer were “confused”, but that Peisistratos “disposed” them as they were then. A scholion on Iliad, Book K, in manuscript T, says that they were “arranged” by Peisistratos into one poem. Apparently the impromptu composition of shorter poems on a known theme was forced into a continuous presentation by Solon, and edited by Peisistratos.
A number of other fragments testify to a written edition by Peisistratos, some credible, some not. A few mention the establishment of a Peisistratean school. In others, Hipparchus published the edition and passed a law that it must be read at the Panathenaic Games, which began in 566 BCE, before the tyranny of his father, from 561 BCE. Peisistratos was succeeded by his sons in 527 BCE.

Academic connection

According to Monro, based on Ludwich, Plato is the most prolific quoter of Homer, with 209 lines. Next most is Aristotle, with 93 lines. Of the 209, only two differ from the Vulgate, in Iliad Book IV, which Ludwich termed Kontaminiert, “corrupted.” Several were marked as spurious by the Alexandrians. There was only one instance of four lines not in the Vulgate, From Iliad IV. Monro asserts “... whatever interpolated texts of Homer were then current, the copy from which Plato quoted was not one of them.” Aristotle's quotations do not have the same purity, which is surprising. For about 20 years they were at the same school, the Platonic Academy.
The Platonic view of Homer is exceptional for the times. Homer and Hesiod were considered to have written myths as allegory. According to J.A. Stewart, "… Homer is an Inspired Teacher, and must not be banished from the curriculum. If we get beneath the literal meaning, we find him teaching the highest truth." In the Republic, however, Plato denies that children can distinguish literal and allegorical truth and advocates censoring the myth-makers, including Homer. The Republic expresses a concept of a society established according to the Platonic ideal, in which every aspect is monitored and controlled under the guidance of a philosopher-king drafted from ascetic poverty for the purpose. It was not a popular view.

Peripatetic connection

The archetype of Hellenistic libraries was that of the Lyceum in classical Athens. Its founder, Aristotle, had been a student, and then an associate, at Plato’s Academy. He was Plato’s star student, but as a metic, or resident foreigner, he could not own property or sponsor the other metics. Consequently, after the death of Plato, not having been appointed director, he departed Athens for an educational opportunity in Mysia, which fell through when Mysia was captured by the Persians. He was subsequently hired by his boyhood companion, now Philip II of Macedon, to tutor the latter’s teen-age son, the future Alexander the Great, on whose behalf he built a school, the Nymphaeum, at Mieza.
Alexander became an enthusiastic member of Aristotle’s inner circle. Immediate association was terminated within a few years when Alexander assumed the duties of monarch after the assassination of his father in 336/335. His main duty was to lead a planned invasion of the east to settle the rivalry with Persia. During it he kept by his bedside a manuscript of Homer personally emended by Aristotle, a gift of the latter. He later placed it in an expensive casket captured from the Persian king, Darius, from which it was called "the Casket Homer". The anecdote, if true, reveals a belief by Aristotle's circle in an authentic text, as well as editorial activity to recapture it. Alexander was a Homer enthusiast.
Aristotle's approach to Homer and statesmanship was different from Plato's. Politics and Poetry were two of his research topics. His theoretical treatise, Politics is not a presentation, like Plato's, of an ideal state according to some philosophy, but is a presentation and classification of real states as they were then, discovered by research. Similarly, Homer does not play a role in any censorial evaluation of Aristotle as a critic, but appears in a professional study of poetry, the Poetics, with regard to the difficulty with some of his language. Aristotle's main study of Homer did not survive. It is listed in Diogenes Laërtius' Life of Aristotle as "Six books of Homeric problems".
Of the 93 quotations, Mitchell Carroll says: “Aristotle’s hearty veneration for Homer is shown by the numerous citations of the Iliad and the Odyssey in his works, and by the frequent expressions of admiration occurring in the Poetics; ….”, Despite this enthusiasm, Monro notes that the “poetical quotations are especially incorrect,” with regard to the errors and additional lines. This is not the expected result if Aristotle had received the pure edition from which Plato had quoted. Monro's solution is to adopt the view of Adolph Römer, that the errors can be attributed to Aristotle personally, and not to variant manuscripts. This was obviously not history's final verdict.