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Retrospective
In the beta release of 2010 there is a page entitled Project Description that described the project goals under two headings, traditional and digital. For some reason, this was not carried over into the information pages accompanying release 1 and 2. The following expands on part of a keynote presentation entitled ‘An Online Edition of Euripides Scholia: Lessons Learned’ I gave virtually for the hybrid conference ‘Ancient Greek Theatre in the Digital Age, 2nd Edition’ hosted in Bari in October 2024. Below I quote the language of the 2010 document and add a comment in a blockquote.
The Traditional Side
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. Specifically:
1. 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).
This edition is accomplishing this goal by the use of modern images capable of great magnification and by the process of checking new collations against the apparatus criticus in the previous editions. Further improvement will be possible when the multispectral images of H are available to all. Likewise, my reports of scholia present in Dindorf but not in Schwartz are also more precise and accurate and provide more context for understanding the sources of such notes. Of course, no large edition is ever free of faults in its reporting of manuscript readings, and greater accuracy can be attained in the future.
2. Clarify the extent, nature, and possible stemmatic relationships of the scholia in some of the so-called recentiores.
As one might have expected, the tradition of the scholia in these witnesses is very messy. As is the case with their relationships in the text of Euripides, for the scholia one can detect signs of familial groupings, but any connections are far from consistent, since any member of a family can be affected by contamination from another family or by omissions and additions, as well as by the variations that arise in any subliterary form of text.
3. Provide a reliable and complete edition of the scholia attributable to Manuel Moschopulus and Thomas Magister.
Such an edition is certainly in progress. Alexander Turyn speculated that Thomas was aware of Moschopulus’ scholia and argued against Moschopulus’ view in some cases. What I have found is that in the majority of places where Thomas criticizes a previous interpretation, the objectionable view is not in Moschopulus, but in the scholia vetera or in the scholia of the recentiores, or else in no extant witness, possibly because the view was known to Thomas from hearing reports of, or himself attending, the oral explications offered in other learned circles. Both Moschopulus and Thomas felt free to adopt glosses that already existed in older manuscripts, and most of the coinciding glosses of Moschopulus and Thomas can be explained as independently derived from earlier sources. I have found no ironclad proof that Thomas Magister himself ever saw Moschopulus’s commentary, although other copyists in the Thomano-Triclinian circle came to recognize the utility of adding Moschopulean glosses (no one more comprehensively than Triclinius himself).
4. Provide full reporting of Triclinius’ work on the triad in T together with information about his much sparser metrical annotation in L.
For Triclinius on the triad, this edition offers a more complete view than in the edition of the metrical scholia of Lorena de Faveri. The reference to L in this item concerns the metrical labels in the alphabetic plays. Working on that lies far in the future and will probably be the task of some successor.
5. Incorporate into the corpus the few traces of marginal annotation that have been found in papyri of the plays and the few remains of commentaries, such as P. Würzb. 1.
Two small marginalia in papyri are included in the scholia on Orestes. With two co-authors I have restudied and republished P. Würzb. 1 (Essler et al. 2013), and those scholia will be included in the scholia on Phoenissae in the next stage.
6. Clarify the nature and extent of scholia labeled as being by Maximus Planudes or conjectured by some scholars to reflect his work.
I have discussed this problem in Prelim. Stud., supporting a very cautious approach to ascribing to Planudes any annotations other than those specifically labeled as his (mainly in the Naples manuscript II.F.9, Y).
7. Include, eventually, non-Triclinian metrical scholia.
So far, the edition does not include the metrical scholia from Fp, the Parma manuscript used in Smith 1977.
The Digital Side
1. A digital format is variable.
EuripidesScholia.org does have a variable display. This is produced by a shell script that automates creation of 10 different versions as html files by processing the one large xml file. Further variations are produced by employing different stylesheets according to a simple choice menu using javascript.
2. A digital format is updatable.
The edition has been updated several times to correct errors, to add scholia not previously collated, and to expand the edition with annotations on further ranges of the text. And it will be easy to update, for instance, when multispectral images of H are made public
3. A digital format allows for sharing of interim stages of the work.
The choice of creating a digital edition was motivated in part by the belief that such an edition could proceed in chunks and that additions and corrections could be added easily. Here the actual experience has been mixed. First, in moving from the beta sample to release 1, I discovered that it was considerably more clumsy to add information from additional collations to the XML file than to the MS Word collation files that precede the XML version. Moreover, to make the most of my trips to Europe to do autopsy checking, it seemed prudent to collate more than just the chunk of Orestes I was working on. In preparation for a planned visit to a particular library, I would therefore collate all the plays in a manuscript so that I would have a fairly complete list of passages that deserved inspection in the original. In view of these realities, I decided that I should aim to collate all the witnesses I intended to use before creating an XML version of any chunk. This decision led to a long gap in time between the beta sample (2010) and release 1 (2020). The isolation of the COVID period was beneficial in that it allowed the completion of so much collation for the entire triad. The collation MS Word files are now complete enough to permit regular progress in new releases as the focus turns to Phoenissae.
4. A digital format is expandable.
Should anyone continue the project in the future, the XML structure will readily allow the addition of scholia on non-triad plays, the addition of glosses in Latin or medieval Italian present in some of the manuscripts used in the project, and the addition of more annotations from witnesses later than 1350.
5. A digital format is searchable.
The search utilities of browsers have changed over the years, but at present Firefox and Safari can once again do exact searching with diacritics, while Chrome offers only a search that ignores diacritics and potentially finds far too many matches. A different solution will have to be sought when the scholia on more than one play are present on the site.
6. A digital format is likely to be able to be transformed into updated formats as technology changes in the future.
This has held true so far and seem likely to hold true for the foreseeable future.
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