About the Current Sample

Work has been concentrated on Orestes so far for two reasons: (1) as a triad play, it provides the maximum degree of variety and complexity in the annotation tradition and therefore forces one to confront most or all of the issues that may arise as the work proceeds; (2) images were already on hand for most of the manuscripts desirable for an initial sample, and so collation could make substantial progress without waiting for ordering of images. Collations have been carried out for Orestes 1-500 and the prefatory material for that play in 20 witnesses of various kinds.

Conversion to XML format of the compiled collations and tentative edited scholia has been carried out so far only for one tenth of the available material, namely Orestes 1-25 and 401-425, with the addition of the Triclinian metrical analysis for the parodos and of the prefatory material. Initially, work on this conversion was fairly slow because the structure was under development and because it took some time to learn and customize the shortcuts in the editor that can make the conversion faster. Future work of this kind should proceed more quickly. At the same time, it was not necessary to have a larger sample to carry out the experimentation with stylesheet transformation programming.

Likewise, at this stage of development, there are types of information which are only minimally represented in the sample (to allow for experimentation with display) but can be further developed in later versions. For instance, although it is not planned to translate all scholia, the scholia that have some broader interest for topics like stagecraft and ancient literary theory and criticism will at some point be translated. There are so far very few scholia for which content has been provided in the keywords section, but fuller use of these keywords in a later version will allow indexing of topics or searching of keywords in expert view. Similarly, comments and citations of similar passages will be expanded later.

Finally, all readings are based on images, some of which are not of the highest quality (or in some cases even in a high quality image the writing is damaged or so tiny as to be hard to decipher with certainty). Checking of selected readings by autopsy is planned for the future.

Project Goals

The goals of this project are quite traditional in a philological sense, but also experimental and forward-looking in terms of format.

On the traditional side, the goal is to gain a better understanding of the scholia surviving in medieval manuscripts of Euripides and make the information widely available to scholars and students. Some of the specific issues or goals are the following:

• Improve the accuracy and completeness of the information about the most important manuscripts used in the standard edition of the old scholia by Eduard Schwartz (1887-1891). From my sample to date covering Orestes 1-500, it is evident that Schwartz’s collations of M, B, and V were quite accurate, but there are some corrections to be made; his collation of C was less accurate and less complete. He also provided insufficient information about the lemmata and he omitted some glosses (written by the same hands as the scholia blocks). The scholia in H (the Jerusalem palimpsest) were not known to him (the existence of H had been reported, but because of the nature and condition of the manuscript nothing was known of the scholia readings), and he did not report those in O, which he wrongly considered to be of the 15th century, whereas currently scholars date this manuscript to ca. 1175.
• Clarify the extent, nature, and possible stemmatic relationships of the scholia in some of the so-called recentiores (manuscripts generally dating from the very late 13th century and the 14th century and usually confined to the plays of the Euripidean triad: Hecuba, Orestes, Phoenissae). The editions of Matthiae and Dindorf reported some of these, while Schwartz limits himself to rare reports, citing only readings that he adopts from one of the recentiores when the older manuscripts he cites all present a corruption or omit the relevant word(s). The relationship of the scholia in these manuscripts to the those in the older manuscripts needs to be fully explored. Many recentiores also carry frequent glosses, and these cannot be accurately judged unless the glosses in the older manuscripts are also collected completely. The glosses in various recentiores also need to be known to provide context for judging the younger scholia (scholia recentiora) by named scholars, a very high proportion of which are glosses.
• Provide a reliable and complete edition of the scholia attributable to Manuel Moschopulus and Thomas Magister (both of whom were probably commenting on the triad plays of Euripides roughly during the period 1290-1305). Moschopulean scholia are in general known from reports of Gr in Dindorf’s edition, but Dindorf’s reporting of Gr is not complete and Gr is in any case not the most reliable witness of this set of scholia. Thoman scholia are partially known from reports of Gu in Dindorf’s edition, but Dindorf’s reporting is even less complete for this set, and Gu’s versions offer more variations and expansions than other witnesses of the Thoman set.
• Provide full reporting of Triclinius’ work on the triad in T together with information about his much sparser metrical annotation in L. Triclinius worked on this manuscript over a number of years in roughly the period 1300-1325. The Triclinian scholia on the triad have been published from T by De Faveri, but a few corrections can be provided and a few omissions repaired (her edition is also hard to obtain). For instance, only by comparison with an accurate collection of Moschopulean and Thoman scholia can one recognize a few glosses and notes that are unique to T (or to T and one or two other intriguing witnesses). In addition, information about the colon-layout that Triclinius’ metrical scholia describe can be provided to the user in a more convenient fashion. The Triclinian notations in L on other plays were partially reported in Matthiae’s edition, and are also treated by Zuntz.
• Incorporate into the corpus the few traces of marginal annotation that have been found in papyri and the scholia of P. Würzb. 1.
• Clarify the nature and extent of scholia labeled as being by Maximus Planudes or conjectured by some scholars to reflect his work.
• Include, eventually, non-Triclinian metrical scholia.

Other goals of this project are related to exploiting the possibilities of a digital format:

• The current model of traditional paper publication for classical scholarship seems to me unsustainable. The amassing of so-called intellectual property in the ownership of a few academic and for-profit presses poses a grave threat to the long-term viability of our profession, and it runs counter to all recent efforts to make classical studies more inclusive, accessible, and welcoming to students and other interested recipients. Universities and professional societies must develop funding to support permanent open-access digital repositories of scholarship rather than devote increasingly scarce resources to ever-increasing annual costs for restrictive access to proprietary scholarship. Apart from these economic and professional reasons for an open-access digital format, there are the intellectual and educational ones listed next.
• A digital format is variable. This site uses one method to provide a choice of displays of the material that is compiled in a single XML document. There are presumably other methods that could be developed. Variable display means that an advanced scholar or collator can see the full range of scholia in one place, while the user with more limited interests can see some selected portion of the data, such as just the old scholia, just the Triclinian scholia, just the scholia of some length (freed of the distraction of the numerous short glosses).
• A digital format is updatable. Printed volumes are too static for large and complex corpora.
• A digital format allows for sharing of interim stages of the work, while printed volumes would require long periods of time for substantial chunks of the corpus to be edited to a ‘final’ form.
• A digital format is expandable. The project’s initial goals for coverage are ambitious, but will leave much still undone. Further research into the 14th- and 15th-century scholia can be carried out effectively after the initial stages provide better information about the material in witnesses generally earlier than about 1350. Additional tagging of terms and links to textual references can be added later. More translations and comments and noting of similar passages can be accumulated over time.
• A digital format is searchable in a way that a printed volume is not.
• It is highly probable that a digital format will be able to be transformed fairly efficiently in the future into another digital format that can be manipulated or displayed by some other display engine yet to be developed.

Progress and Change History

Acknowledgments

I wish here to acknowledge the images provided to me by libraries for scholarly purposes. Some of these images go back to my work on many manuscripts of Phoenissae in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and many libraries are acknowledged in Mastronarde-Bremer 1982, ix-x. More recently, I have received images from Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana (Venice), Biblioteca Medicea-Laurenziana (Florence), Biblioteca Angelica (Rome), Biblioteca Nazionale Vittorio Emanuele III (Naples), British Library (London), Bodleian Library (Oxford), Herzog August Bibliothek (Wolfenbüttel), Universitets Bibliotek (Uppsala), Biblioteca Estense (Modena).