The Infamous Eagle

Toward the end of Prometheus Bound Hermes describes the further punishment that P. will suffer. First, he tells us, Zeus will shatter the cliff with lightning, and entomb his body (reminiscent of Typhos) while he remains chained. It is only then that we finally hear about the infamous eagle which will repeatedly devour P.'s liver (1020-1025):

μακρὸν δὲ μῆκος ἐκτελευτήσας χρόνου
ἄψορρον ἥξεις εἰς φάος: Διὸς δέ τοι
πτηνὸς κύων, δαφοινὸς αἰετός, λάβρως
διαρταμήσει σώματος μέγα ῥάκος,
ἄκλητος ἕρπων δαιταλεὺς πανήμερος,
κελαινόβρωτον δ᾽ ἧπαρ ἐκθοινήσεται.

[And after a long period of time you will come back into the light, and then the winged dog of Zeus, the bloodthristy eagle, will violently shred great chunks of your body, an unwelcome feaster creeping all day long, and will eat at your chewed-black liver.]

The word δαφοινός, according to Griffith, can be taken in three ways. It could mean blood-red or tawny as at Euripides Alcestis 581, where it is used of lions, or at Iliad 2.308: δράκων ἐπὶ νῶτα δαφοινός, a blood-red serpent on the back. This might simply refer to a golden eagle. It could also imply blood-spattered, something like Iliad 16.159: παρήιον αἵματι φοινόν, jaw red with blood. It might also imply blood-thirsty or murderous (see LSJ under φοίνιος II). For this Griffith cites the Hesiodic Shield of Heracles at line 250, where the Κῆρες δαφοιναί are given the description: πᾶσαι δ᾽ ἄρ᾽ ἵεντο αἵμα μέλαν πιέειν, they were all eager to drink dark blood. There is probably no need to try to pick one of these over the others: all of them contribute nicely to the image here.

West on Textual Discrepancy

In his book on editorial technique West has a very readable introduction to the various causes of textual discrepancies. What follows is a summary of a brief introduction.

Miscopying is far from being the only cause of textual variation, and misreading is far from being the only cause of miscopying. This is how West opens the section, and he proceeds with the very first way in which a text may change: the author himself may make changes after a work has already begun to circulate. Aristophanes revised Clouds after the first production in 424/3, and both versions were around in Hellenistic times, and we have inherited the revision, according to West. The scholia to the Argonautica quote from an earlier edition (προέκδοσις). And Ovid tells us himself that the Metamorphoses was being circulated before he made his final revisions (Tristia 1.7.13). Besides the author, others may make conscious "improvements" to the text. This is most evident in the Greek tragedies, where the actors made changes to their copies. West says that this probably also happened to the plays of Plautus, but likely on a smaller scale, and the evidence is less clear. Slightly different is the way in which the rhapsodes handled the Homeric poems. And certain types of writing were considered open for alteration: commentaries, lexica, and grammatical works were treated differently from literary works. Also things of a technical nature, like the Hippocratic corpus, were revised or rearranged.

Changes could occur when a passage was quoted. Most of this was a result of inaccurate recollection, since ancient writers in general would quote from memory rather than unrolling a scroll and searching for a passage without the help of chapter divisions or the like. (This is not usually true of grammarians, however, who went through the trouble to look things up as a rule.) In addition, a writer might be quoting from another author or anthology, and so even when they copied directly, the passage may already have been tweaked. Quotations tend to become less accurate toward the end. And they may be deliberately altered to suit the context, such as changing γάρ to τοι at the beginning of excerpts, which happened often in anthologies, or simply filling out a line to neaten a verse.

Christian zeal could affect a text. For instance, in the Vienna ms. of Ps.-Hippocrates περὶ διαίτης, the names of Greek gods were removed, and θεοί was changed to θεός. The suppression of obscenity, however, was rarer than we might suppose according to West. In one group of mss. of Herodotus, the chapter on sacred prostitution (1.199) was omitted altogether. In one copy of Martial the copyist made changes such as adulter for fututor, and turpes for cunnos. One critic went so far as to change τῇ πιθόμην καὶ ἔρεξα in Iliad 9.453 to τῇ οὐ πιθόμην οὐδ᾽ ἔρξα, apparently unhappy with the confession of Pheonix that he seduced his father's lover at the request of his mother.

Natural changes in orthography are an issue in the transmission of texts. The Ionian contraction of ε and ο to εο often appears as ευ in our texts. And quoi and quom appear often as cui and cum. But in Hellenistic times, there was a counter movement which tried consciously to preserve or restore original dialect forms, and this resulted in many pseudo-Ionic being placed into texts of Herodotus and Hippocrates, and pseudo-Doric forms in the bucolic poets. Planudes and his disciples regularly wrote γίγνομαι and γιγνώσκω for γίνομαι and γινώσκω. And some consistent changes are made for no apparent reason, such as in a late copy of Apollonius Rhodius, where νύμφη is used in place of κούρη.

Emendation by scholars and scribes is more evident in the Middle Ages and Renaissance than in antiquity, and is a bigger problem, according to West. Ancient conjectures are usually recorded in scholia and other commentaries, but seldom appear to have entered the textual tradition. In West's words: the contribution of any individual must usually have been as evanescent as a pee into the river. In the Middle Ages there were fewer copies, and the scribes often had inferior knowledge of the language, so they would frequently change what they couldn't understand, and this could affect the "whole stream" or a branch of it anyway. In the copy of Lucretius from which all of our copies come, at 3.1, E tenebris tantis tam clarum extollere lumen, the intial E was left off on purpose, and a space provided for it where the scribe intended to return and write it ornamentally in red ink, but never got around to it.

And then there are semi-conscious or unconscious errors made in copying. Sometimes similar sounding words were mistaken, perhaps because the copyist repeated the words aloud to himself, and so words that were pronounced identically in later times could be confused, such as ἐπεὶ for αἰπὺ in Mimnermus 9.1, or εὖρον for Ἕβρον in Theocritus 7.112. The writing of e for ae, or v for b (less often the opposite), are considered cases of modernized spelling, according to West, but have the similar implications for the editor. Spoonerisms are common, for example, βαλών and λαβών, or suscipit and suspicit. Also, consonant clusters tend to be simplified, like ἔκλαξεν for ἔκλαγξεν, or astersi for abstersti.

Non-phonetic mental associations can cause unintentional changes, such as πύλαι and θύραι, which are widely found as variants. A monk might mistake a word for another that is more applicable to his life, for example, καθολκήν for καθολικήν. The copyist may unwittingly write a word or phrase that he has recently copied in place of what the text before him reads. In one copy of Hesiod Theogony 454 the scribe has written χρυσοστέφανον for χρυσοπέδιλον, with lines 17 and 136 apparently affecting his train of thought. And in Ovid Metamorphoses 12.103, inritamina cornu is written as inritamenta malorum, probably with 1.140 in mind.

Word order may be altered for various reasons, especially when the copyist has a phrase or whole line in his head while writing. One particular type of transposition is called the vitium Byzantinum, which occurs in texts of Greek tragedy, where a paroxytone is moved to the end of the iambic trimeter, making it sound more like a Byzantine dodecasyllable. In one family of Plutarch mss. the rhythm at the end of a sentence conforms to the habits of Byzantine language. Sometimes copyists try to avoid hiatus in prose by changing the word order. A more common operation is the simplification of word order: for instance, Bacchylides 15.47, Μοῦσα, τίς πρῶτος λόγων ἆρχεν δικαίων, is changed at the end to ἆρχεν λόγων δικαίων. And at Ovid Am. 1.14.1, dicebam "medicare tuos desiste capillos" becomes dicebam "desiste tuos medicare capillos" in some manuscripts.

The change to more straightforward word order is one example of a wider tendency for simplification: unusual forms are replaced by more common ones; asyndeton is removed by the addition of a conjunction; things left implicit are made explicit. The copyist may be trying to fix what he thinks is a mistake, or perhaps just making the text more readable, or maybe he is simply writing what his mind expects to see there. He may mistake a note in the margin for part of the actual text. This often happens with glosses of rare words. In Hipponax fr. 72.7, ἀπηναρίσθη Ῥῆσος Αἰνειῶν πάλμυς, the rare word πάλμυς appears in only one ms. (as παλαμάς), and the others read βασιλεύς in its place.

There are mistakes of the visual type, such as haplography and dittography. Haplography is writing once what should be written twice, such as defendum rather than defendendum, and dittography is the opposite. Also there is the saut du même au même, which happens when the same phrase occurs more than once on the page, and the scribe, after writing the first, brings his eye back to the page at the second instance, and fails to copy what is in between.

Certain letters were confused in manuscripts, some of which I can't explain here because of the inadequacy of fonts. A few of the Greek ones are as follows, although the similarities can't be appreciated fully in computer fonts:

Α = Δ = Λ
Γ = Τ
Θ = Ο = ϲ
Η = ΕΙ
Η = Ν = Κ = Ιϲ
ΛΛ = Μ
ΑΙ = Ν
Τ = Υ

Some of the miniscules are:

α = αυ
α = ει
α = ευ
β = κ = μ
ε = ευ
η = κ
μ = ν
ν = ρ
π = σσ

The use of abbreviations caused confusion as well, and this became more common in miniscule scripts, when their use became much more common. And the lack of word division in early manuscripts was often a source of confusion, for example, Pindar Ol. 10.55, τὸ δὲ σαφανὲς, where the rare word σαφανὲς was not easily recognized, and so this sometimes appears as τὸ δ᾽ ἐς ἀφανὲς. And a mistake like this can lead to further mistakes, such as Aristophanes Ach. 832, where ἀλλ᾽ ἁμὶν was wrongly understood as ἀλλὰ μὶν, and then subsequently μὶν became μὴν in other manuscripts.

The Critical Apparatus

I did not always appreciate that mass of variants and Latin and curious symbols at the foot of the page in my Greek books. In fact, as so often happens with ignorance, I actively disliked it. But as I've learned more about the Greek language, and the precious course of transmission by which I have access to an ancient literature, and spent some time myself trying to puzzle out a particular piece of text, I've come to see what wealth lies compacted into those little word-hoards. In his book on textual criticism and editorial technique (1973) M.L. West points out that even seemingly trivial debates over variants such as δέ and τε, which might not change in the slightest the meaning of a particular passage, can be valuable in the long run for our knowledge of particles, for instance, or meter, or stylistics. And these things, in turn, may shed light on a passage where the reading of δέ or τε does indeed put the meaning at stake.

He aims his book not only at editors, but at readers like myself, who, even with some appreciation for the value of textual criticism, have been content to leave such work to the men and women we trust to have superior knowledge. In his words: "Unfortunately editors are not always people who can be trusted, and critical apparatuses are provided so that readers are not dependent upon them. Though the reader lacks the editor's long acquaintance with the text and its problems, he may nevertheless surpass him in his feeling for the language or in ordinary common sense, and he should be prepared to consider the facts presented in the apparatus and exercise his own judgment on them. He must do so in places where the text is important to him for some further purpose."

West relates Eduard Fraenkel's epiphany about the value of the critical apparatus, which was originally told in Fraenkel's introduction to Leo's Ausgewählte kleine Schriften: "I had by then read the greater part of Aristophanes, and I began to rave about it to Leo, and to wax eloquent on the magic of this poetry, the beauty of the choral odes, and so on and so forth. Leo let me have my say, perhaps ten minutes in all, without showing any sign of disapproval or impatience. When I was finished, he asked: In which edition do you read Aristophanes? I thought: has he not been listening? What has his question got to do with what I have been telling him? After a moment's ruffled hesitation I answered: The Teubner. Leo: Oh, you read Aristophanes without a critical apparatus. He said it quite calmly, without any sharpness, without a whiff of sarcasm, just sincerely taken aback that it was possible for a tolerably intelligent young man to do such a thing. I looked at the lawn nearby and had a single, overwhelming sensation: νῦν μοι χάνοι εὐρεῖα χθών. Later it seemed to me that in that moment I had understood the meaning of real scholarship."

On the Acquisition of Mosquensis

The codex Mosquensis is a famous book that was found in 1777 by Christian Friedrich Matthaei in the library of the Synod in Moscow, and which includes part of Homer, and also the Homeric Hymns. It's famous because it contains our only copies of the hymns to Dionysus and Demeter, while all other manuscripts of the hymns open with the one to Apollo. In his edition of the Hymn to Demeter Richardson states simply that Matthaei "discovered" it, while Allen, in his edition to the hymns, says that he "acquired" it. But recently I read the History of Classical Scholarship by Wilamowitz, where he writes quite bluntly that the manuscript was "stolen" (gestohlen) without going into more detail. I'm curious about what actually happened. We know that he sold it to Ruhnken, the hymn's first editor. But I appreciate such details, and since I've mentioned this discovery before, I thought I would pass it on.

Prodelision

It was only recently, while reading Prometheus Bound, that I encountered prodelision (or aphaeresis) for the first time. As you might guess from the name, it is like elision, but happens at the beginning of a word, when an inital short vowel is lost, following a long vowel or diphthong at the end of the previous word. I was surprised that I hadn't come across this before now, but today I discovered why, from reading Maurice Platnauer's article, Prodelision in Greek Drama, in Classical Quarterly (1960): PB is my first attempt at either tragedy or comedy, and it seems that this phenomenon, with few exceptions, is confined to drama. Here are a few interesting notes from the article.

It can be found very rarely in inscriptions or manuscripts of prose authors, such as Plato, but then almost always with ᾽κεῖνος and its cases. It happens not at all in Homer and Hesiod (and so presumably nowhere else in epic verse), and only rarely in lyric, and seems to show up first in fifth century tragedy. The frequency for the major dramatists is as follows: in Aeschylus about 1 in 250 lines, in Sophocles about 1 in 77 lines, in Euripides 1 in 154 lines, and in Aristophanes 1 in 43 lines. Although unusual, it can happen after a comma or colon; and it has been printed in some editions at the beginning of a line, but, according to Platnauer, this almost always turns out to be an impossible reading, or a case of false line division.

Prodelision is caused by the following vowels and diphthongs: ᾱ, ᾳ, η, ῃ, ω, and ῳ. Of these, η and ῃ are by far the most common. The only vowels suffering prodelision are α and ε, but α is much more common. Alpha privative is generally not prodelided, and most cases of prodelided alpha are with ἀπό and ἀνά and their compounds. The rare prodelision of epsilon will usually be found with the prepositions ἐπί, ἐκ, ἐς, ἐν, and their compounds, but sometimes with the syllabic augment.

It occurs in PB at lines 80, 440, 651, 741, and 773, or 5 times in 1093 lines, which is about 1 in 219 lines. Of the dramatists discussed above, this is closest to the frequency of Aeschylus.