 |
About This Edition, Release 2, and Release 1
This edition of the scholia on the plays of Euripides is conceived as an open-ended repository of the ancient and medieval annotations in Greek found in the papyri and medieval manuscripts. It aims for a comprehensiveness that is impossible in orthodox printed editions of scholia, and it is meant to serve purposes beyond giving classicists access to the material that is believed to be most reflective of ancient commentaries in the Hellenistic and early Roman imperial period. This more complete inventory of annotation aspires, in addition, to serve the study of scholarship up the 16th century, the study of late antique and Byzantine education, and the analysis of the relations of manuscripts (including those not used in critical editions of Euripides). It takes advantage of the digital format to include details that are ignored or suppressed in traditional editions, but may have uses, unforeseen at present, that will emerge when greater quantities of similar data become available in digital form. For more on the justification for such a project and its digital form, see Prelim. Stud. 5–7.
At this stage of development, the project’s principal goal is data acquisition. An accurate inventory of the annotations, as complete as is permitted by the various degrees of legibility manifested in the manuscripts, is, of course, a prerequisite to any more traditional form of selective editing. But the inaccuracy and incompleteness of the previous print editions have made it difficult for their users to analyze adequately the context and the interrelation of individual notes. In the future, that context will become increasingly clear, as new and more comprehensive editions are prepared for other scholia (especially tragic scholia, but also those on, e.g., Oppian), as more texts reflecting the teaching and commentating of Byzantine scholars are published, and as more libraries provide online access to large collections of Greek manuscripts.
The first stage of this project has concentrated on the triad plays, Hecuba, Orestes, and Phoenissae, because these have the richest and most complicated traditions both of textual transmission and of annotation and because the gap between what has previously been published and what exists is the greatest. Most of the witnesses collated at this stage are earlier than 1350, but a few later manuscripts have been collated as well because they have featured in previous discussions for one reason or another. At the time of the publication of Release 2, collations have been carried out for all the plays extant in MBOV (first hand only in B). For the entire triad collations are complete for HCAaAbMlMnMtPPcPrRRfRvRwSSaVd and XXaXbYGGrZZaZbZmZvTGu. For Orestes 1–1100 (and in some cases for some other parts of triad) collations are complete for later hands in B and also ACrFKPlWXoYfZcZlZuOx. The argumenta of Orestes have been collated from these manuscripts (to the extent that the argumenta are present in them) and in some others. This range of manuscripts has allowed a clearer view of the different varieties of annotation that existed before the spate of revised and new annotations created in the late 13th and early 14th century.
Release 1.x covering the scholia on Orestes 1–500 is archived for viewing in a separate a separate directory on this site.
The scholia and glosses in this edition have been checked against some previous editions both to compare reports of variants and to ensure that items in those editions are not omitted here. The full display of the edition shows the location of the items that were already in Dindorf, Schwartz, or de Faveri. In the case of Dindorf, however, I do not include items that are recorded with the single siglum I (traditionally used for the editio Iuntina of Arsenius, but deprecated here), because many of them are paraphrases composed by joining into fuller syntactic units some pre-existing glosses and supplementary words, such paraphrases having been either improvised by Arsenius himself or adapted by him from Yv. In some instances, in order to carry forward items in Dindorf it was necessary to collate a few scholia from a later witness not otherwise used (such as LbLpPk). All items in Schwartz are present, including several that he confined to his apparatus criticus. For de Faveri I have been able to add more than a dozen long marks that she missed, and I have suppressed a few items where she mistook a diaeresis over iota (written without fully lifting the pen between the two dots, as some scribes do in their haste) for a long mark (231 αὖθις, 235 μάλιστα, 731 σύγγονον, 919 κύκλον—this last was mistaken for a long mark also by the scribe of Ta), and I also judged that at 763 πάσχω the apparent mark over the alpha is not ink (thus not a long mark).
Release 2 contains (apart from the argumenta) 18,767 annotations (a little more than twice as many as Release 1), an average of 17.09 annotations per line (recall that Orestes 1–1100 is only 1098 lines because of an error in numeration in modern editions, where both 499 and 719 are skipped). Of these 18,767 items, 3502 were present in previous editions, and 15,265 were not. Strictly speaking, however, this latter figure is too high, since a certain number of the glosses were actually incorporated within longer paraphrases printed in Arsenius (and thus in Dinforf). For tables with other breakdowns of the items, see the Preface sections Classification of the Scholia by Date or Authorship and Classification of the Scholia by Content.
Some of the limitations of Release 2 may be noted here, and users should also be aware of the conventions, policies, and limitations described in the Preface:
- It is a continuing cause of consternation that public availability of the results of the multispectral imaging of H by the Palamedes Project has been repeatedly delayed. My reports of the readings of H will have to be revised, and presumably improved, when the Palamedes Project finally publishes it results.
- The pandemic of 2020– prevented me from taking at least two trips to conduct autopsy inspection to clarify points in various manuscripts. On the other hand, it has been very helpful that during the same period there have been many additions to the number of Euripides manuscripts available online in modern high-quality color images, and it has been possible to resolve some doubts and uncertainties by recourse to them.
- Generalizations drawn at this point apply mainly to Orestes 1–1100, although collations since 2020 have given more confidence that such generalizations will largely carry over to all other sections of the triad plays. For instance, I am now more confident that in the end it will turn out that, at least for the Euripidean triad, when Moschopulus and Thomas share glosses they are normally drawing on older sources or agreeing in a very common gloss and that Thomas himself wrote his scholia without knowledge of the work of Moschopulus, whereas the continuators of his circle, Triclinius and others, did make use of the Moschopulean commentary.
- The sources upon which Arsenius drew in his compilation of scholia on the triad are still insufficiently explored. It has become clear that for the old scholia of the B-tradition, the readings in which Arsenius differs from B are very often to be found in the manuscripts of ca. 1500 that descended from B, as has been shown to be the case for several non-triad select plays. Wherever I have been aware that Arsenius had a variant not in B itself, I have checked MuMePh and a few other late manuscripts and recorded the relevant information in the apparatus. But when Arsenius conveys scholia that are now recognized to be Moschopulean, Thoman, or Triclinian, the possible manuscript sources are not yet clear, since determining this would require extensive review of 15th and 16th century manuscripts. At present, I know of one instance (sch. 977.05) where Arsenius is close to a modified form that is found in Tb but not in any other Triclinian copy that I have been able to check (contrast sch. 578.03, where the variant appears to be due to Arsenius himself).
- Ideally, for accuracy of reports every witness should be collated by two sets of eyes, or by the same set of eyes with some interval in between. I have indeed done some rechecking of selected witnesses for certain scholia. The volume of material to be collated, however, and the difficulty of rechecking the more damaged and obscure passages (some of which depend on viewing the manuscript in situ with an ultraviolet lamp) have made it impractical to do this more exhaustively. Therefore I have no doubt that future researchers will be able to find errors or omissions in my reports. Likewise, an author proofreading their own work will rarely be able to spot every typographic error. I am sure errata will be found. Fortunately, they can be fixed in an online edition like this.
As to the future, corrections to Release 2 will be incorporated periodically, with revisions recorded in the Revision History. After initial release, effort will be devoted to completing the collation of the triad in the witnesses listed above as still only partially collated, and then to preparation of the remaining Orestes scholia (on 1101–1693) with the hope of release in 2025 or 2026.
Linking to Scholia in the Edition
To create a hyperlink directly to an individual scholion in this edition, use https://EuripidesScholia.org/Edition/OrestesScholia_all.html, adding after .html (without a space) the anchor in the form #Or0006.13, #Or0067.03, #Or0432.07, #Or1087.16. That is, add leading zeroes, if necessary, to the item number as displayed in the edition so that there are four digits between Or and the decimal point.
To create a hyperlink directly to an individual item among the argumenta in this edition, use https://EuripidesScholia.org/Edition/OrestesScholia_all.html, adding after .html (without a space) the anchor in the form #OrArg1, #OrArg2b. That is, append to OrArg the number of the item as displayed in this edition.
To create a hyperlink directly to an individual Triclinian treatise, use https://EuripidesScholia.org/Edition/OrestesScholia_treat.html, adding after .html (without a space) the anchor in the form #treat1, #treat2, or #treat3.
About the Author
Donald Mastronarde is Emeritus Distinguished Melpomene Professor of Classical Languages and Literature and Professor of the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley. His study of Euripidean manuscripts began over 40 years ago when he and Jan Maarten Bremer decided to collaborate in collating manuscripts of Euripides’ Phoenissae and investigating the textual tradition of the play. The general idea of editing the scholia originated then, but the present project was conceived in the mid 2000s and serious work began in 2009, with the sample ‘beta’ edition as proof-of-concept released in 2010. For more information see his departmental profile page or website or CV.
Revision History
For details see the listing on a separate page.
Acknowledgments
I am pleased to present here a slight expansion of the acknowledgments that appeared in Prelim. Stud. x–xi. Many individuals have assisted me with advice and materials, or by sending scans of bibliographic items inaccessible to me, or shooting digital photos of manuscript pages. For such help I owe sincere thanks to Robert Allison, Luigi Battezzato, Daniele Bianconi, Maria Broggiato, Maria Cannatà Fera, Guglielmo Cavallo, Jacopo Cavarzeran, Andrea Cuomo, the late Stephen Daitz, GiovanBattista D’Alessio, James Diggle, Giulia Dovico, Hans-Christian Günther, Timothy Janz, Teresa Martínez Manzano, the late Kjeld Mattheissen, Maria Mavroudi, Fausto Montana, Inmaculada Pérez Martín, Ilias Nesseris, Boris Nikolsky, Filippomaria Pontani, Lucia Prauscello, Mario Telò, Giuseppe Ucciardello, Andrey Vinogradov, Nigel Wilson, Georgios Xenis, and Michael Zellmann-Rohrer. Special thanks are due to Maria Pantelia and the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae for providing me with raw files of the scholia as published by Schwartz, and later adding Dindorf’s edition to the TLG and also providing me with raw files again. This saved me from inputting the relevant scholia myself.
Over the past 15 years number of Berkeley students have assisted me through the Undergraduate Research Apprentice Program, mainly by identifying lines on each digital image and renaming the image for easier consultation, but sometimes also by doing preliminary collations or typing up scholia not in Dindorf or Schwartz. I would like to thank them here: Mollie Appel-Turner, Alex Chow, J. B. Chun, Sara Hobe, Tovah Keynton, Charlie Kim-Worthington, YeChan Kwak, Jay Lamb, Brittany Lauber, Juhaie Hannah Lee (who also contributed high-level help after her graduation), Karen MacLaughlin, Henry Nicholson, Ryan Rasmussen, Alexander Reed, Jeremy Simmons, Josh Smith, and Nathaniel Solley.
Three Berkeley graduate students helped with proofreading: for Release 1 Nathan Herschel Levine spotted many typos in the English translations and offered suggestions to make them clearer and more consistent; Joshua Benjamins, asked to proofread the Comments as well as the translations, went far beyond the call of duty in spotting typos and copy editing issues in all parts of the edition. For Release 2 proofreading of English translations and comments was performed by Nathan Herschel Levine and Alex Kilman. Any remaining errors are of course my own fault.
The expenses of travel and of acquiring digital images (some of which are quite costly, although others have been free) would not easily have been met without the financial support I enjoyed from my Melpomene Chair fund, generously endowed by an anonymous donor and kindly awarded to me by my Department colleagues.
This project would not have been practical without modern digital imagery and without the welcome trend of making manuscript images available online. I am especially grateful to those collections that provide viewing of high-resolution color images, and even more so to those that allow free download of an image of sufficient resolution for magnification offline to read tiny script. (Downloads are important to efficient use of time because they allow very rapid rechecking of particular points, once the images are named with an indication of the lines contained, and because they eliminate the twitchy interfaces of some of the viewers and the flashing partial images that appear during loading on some sites.) Here I also want to acknowledge the hospitality of the libraries that I have visited so far for this project: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (Vatican City), Biblioteca Angelica (Rome), Biblioteca Ambrosiana (Milan), Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana (Venice), Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana (Florence), Bodleian Library (Oxford), Cambridge University Library, Biblioteca Nacional de España (Madrid), Biblioteca General Histórica (Universidad de Salamanca), Real Biblioteca del Monasterio de El Escorial, Bibliothèque Carnegie (Reims). For provision of images I am grateful to the same libraries, as well as to Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli, Biblioteca Nazionale Universitaria di Torino, Biblioteca Statale (Governativa) di Cremona, Biblioteca Estense Universitaria di Modena, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, British Library, Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (Munich), Oesterreichische Nationalbibliothek (Vienna), Det Kongelige Bibliotek København, National Bank Cultural Foundation: Center for History and Palaeography, Athens (and Monk Theologos of the Iviron Monastery).
It is also appropriate to credit two excellent software programs that have been essential to this project: BBEdit from Barebones Software and Oxygen XML Editor. The open-source home edition of the XSLT processor Saxon-HE has also been invaluable in allowing me to create efficiently multiple HTML files from one XML file. MS Word and MS Excel, despite their limitations and annoying features, have also been workhorses in various aspects of the project.
Privacy Policy
This site does not employ cookies. This site does not collect user data. This site does not require or allow user accounts and user login.
Digital Preservation
For the sake of digital preservation, the Library of the University of California, Berkeley, has provided the facilities of the site berkeley.pressbooks.pub, where the HTML files of most pages of this site and the HTML file of the full edition have been imported to form an eBook (based on Release 1.02) presented both in a web format and as a PDF, downloadable either from the same site or from the open-access repository escholarship.org. Similarly, as of February 2024, a preservation version of the material added in Release 2 (based on Release 2.1) is available both in a web format and as a PDF, downloadable either from the same site or from the open-access repository escholarship.org.
Creative Commons License
The pages of this site, EuripidesScholia.org, as well as the related source files, are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available. For inquiries, contact the author.
Contact
Feedback and corrigenda are welcome. Send email to djmastronarde@berkeley.edu.