Multitextuality in Homer's "Iliad" the evidence of the Ptolemaic papyri
All works of ancient Greek and Latin literature that we read today have come down to us through centuries of copying and recopying by scribes and others; along the way manuscripts have been damaged or destroyed, and no original author's document, or autograph, has survived. From those documents...
Gespeichert in:
| 1. Verfasser: | |
|---|---|
| Format: | UnknownFormat |
| Sprache: | eng |
| Veröffentlicht: |
1997
|
| Ausgabe: | [Mikrofiche-Ausg.] |
| Schlagworte: | |
| Tags: |
Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
|
Tag hinzufügen | Zusammenfassung: | All works of ancient Greek and Latin literature that we read today have come down to us through centuries of copying and recopying by scribes and others; along the way manuscripts have been damaged or destroyed, and no original author's document, or autograph, has survived. From those documents which do survive, it is the task of the textual critic to "reconstitute the text." Generally this task includes an examination of the surviving manuscripts, including an estimation of their age, relationship to each other, and quality of text. If possible a family tree or stemma is created, which shows which manuscripts have been copied from which, and hence which are older and closer to the original. Finally an attempt is made to produce an edition of a text, one as close as possible to what the author wrote In certain cases, where manuscripts disagree with each other, the editor will make a choice between readings; in others, where none of the surviving documents appear to be correct, he or she may be forced to make a conjecture in order to produce an intelligible and likely text. In the case of Homer, I claim that the manuscript evidence is so varied that the assumption of a single original text is thrown into question. This situation is consistent with the conclusions of Milman Parry and Albert Lord, who stress repeatedly that because of the oral nature of Homeric poetry, one should be prepared to find more than one version of a particular portion of Homer; thus no one version can be considered to be the "original." Hence I argue that our varied manuscript evidence reflects different performances of Homeric epic, rather than just being a mass of badly copied documents I examine in particular the Ptolemaic papyri, the oldest surviving manuscripts of Homer, and the ones which show the greatest "deviation" from our traditional text of Homer. I analyze a selection of variant readings from the first book of the Iliad, showing that in many cases there are strong grounds for accepting more than one version as "authentic," rather than choosing one as "right" and the others as "wrong." I also include in an Appendix examples from the scholia which reinforce this conclusion |
|---|---|
| Beschreibung: | Cambridge, Mass., Univ., Diss., 1997 |
| Beschreibung: | II, 174 S. |