Enough and too much has been written about the Epic Cycle. Upon scanty quotations and a jejune epitome a tedious literature has been built. The older writers, such as Welcker, tried to ‘reconstruct’—as profitable and satisfying a task as inferring a burnt manor-house from its cellars; later scholars have gone out in tracing the tradition of the poems through the learned age of Greece—a scaffolding without ties, by which this or that conclusion is reached according to temperamental disposition to this (...) or that fallacy. I do not intend to enter more than is needful into a controversy where so far as I can see everyone has gone beyond the evidence. If I add to the bulk of the literature, it is in the hope of putting things in their proper places and of presenting the data as they appear to a future editor. (shrink)
As the apparent variant is in the text, Ludvvich alters the scholion into S0009838800018516_inline1, which has not been found in any MS. so far. The only noticeable point prima facie about S0009838800018516_inline2 is that it is an S0009838800018516_inline3 . Therefore I would read S0009838800018516_inline6. Ludwich's index to his A.H.T. gives cases of the omission of ov or OVK in the scholia. We need not restrict S0009838800018516_inline7 There is too much tendency to restrict usage in matters of language. At one time (...) it was believed that μxs22EFποτε was the property of Didymus! S0009838800018516_inline8 ‘passage’ does not occur in the scholia we possess, τόπος however does . Compare the note on H 96S0009838800018516_eqnU1xs22EFν xs1F04λλxs1FF3 xs1F51βριταxs22EF. We must supply in sense χωρxs22EFxs1FF3, for the reference is to Callim. Del. 69, where this is the meaning of xs22EFπειλητxs22EFρες. (shrink)
Mr. Agar has collected his adversaria on the Odyssey which have been enjoying cold storage these many years in the blue depths of the Journal of Philology, and increased them by about three-quarters. He has produced a very interesting and valuable book, the most important contribution to the linguistic history of the Homeric text that has been made for a long time. Mr. Agar holds that the language of Homer represents the original ‘Achaean’ speech, and that its abnormalities in vocabulary, (...) word-formation and metre are the result of natural unforced processes of transmission. This position, held by so well equipped and so trenchant an investigator as Mr. Agar, is reassuring. It does not involve any of the mythological factors of the Higher or the Lower Criticism still recommended among us by Mr. Leaf, Father Browne and Mr. Verrall–Pisistratus, Onomacritus, the Ionian conquest of Smyrna, the Thessalian Iliad, the original Achilleis,–and disagrees with Professor Murray's sinister diagnosis clear away the Attic surface and there rises beneath another surface with another set of corruptions, where Ionic rhapsodes have introduced just the same elements of confusion into an Aeolic or at least a pre-Ionic language. The confusion of tongues is deep down in the heart of the Homeric, dialect, and no surgery in the world can cut beneath it’. The last ten years’ work in Comparative Philology has made it clearer and clearer that the rule-of-thumb for distinguishing the historical non-Dorian dialects does not apply to the heroic and post-heroic age, and that the terms ‘Aeolic’ and ‘Ionic’ in their usual sense should disappear from the history of Homer. The Homeric tongue derives directly from the pre-colonial language of Greece wherein two elements are discernible, the original Ionian and the Achaean or North-Greek which overlaid it. (shrink)
A new edition of the Homeric Hymns is in preparation by Mr. W. R. Halliday, Principal of King's College, London, and myself. In the meantime there are some passages in the Hymn to Hermes which call for longer treatment than would be natural in an edition. Some of these notes are suggested by the substantial and valuable edition of Professor L. Radermacher.
Testimony, even in the well-worked parts of antiquity, continues to accrue, some from new papyri, some from texts long known but overlooked. In the result the critic is discomfited, honest men come by their own. οιόνδ' πέβη τόδε πργμα. This document, which consists of two lives of Homer and the Agon inserted between them, has long been derived from the Μουσεîον of Alcidamas. The conjecture was contested and the survival of Alcidamas denied. The publication of twenty-five lines from a papyrus (...) of s. II.–III. p. C. by Professor J. G. Winter, containing a Homeric biography signed αλκι] δαμαντος περι ομηρου put an end to the matter. See on the whole question Mr. Winter's remarks and a paper by Sig. Carlo Gallavotti of Bologna, Rivista di Filologia, 1929, 31. (shrink)
Testimony, even in the well-worked parts of antiquity, continues to accrue, some from new papyri, some from texts long known but overlooked. In the result the critic is discomfited, honest men come by their own. οιόνδ' πέβη τόδε πργμα. This document, which consists of two lives of Homer and the Agon inserted between them, has long been derived from the Μουσεîον of Alcidamas. The conjecture was contested and the survival of Alcidamas denied. The publication of twenty-five lines from a papyrus (...) of s. II.–III. p. C. by Professor J. G. Winter , containing a Homeric biography signed αλκι] δαμαντος περι ομηρου put an end to the matter. See on the whole question Mr. Winter's remarks and a paper by Sig. Carlo Gallavotti of Bologna, Rivista di Filologia, 1929, 31. (shrink)
A new edition of the Homeric Hymns is in preparation by Mr. W. R. Halliday, Principal of King's College, London, and myself. In the meantime there are some passages in the Hymn to Hermes which call for longer treatment than would be natural in an edition. Some of these notes are suggested by the substantial and valuable edition of Professor L. Radermacher.
As the apparent variant is in the text, Ludvvich alters the scholion into S0009838800018516_inline1, which has not been found in any MS. so far. The only noticeable point prima facie about S0009838800018516_inline2 is that it is an S0009838800018516_inline3. Therefore I would read S0009838800018516_inline6. Ludwich's index to his A.H.T. gives cases of the omission of ov or OVK in the scholia. We need not restrict S0009838800018516_inline7 There is too much tendency to restrict usage in matters of language. At one time it (...) was believed that μxs22EFποτε was the property of Didymus! S0009838800018516_inline8 ‘passage’ does not occur in the scholia we possess, τόπος however does. Compare the note on H 96S0009838800018516_eqnU1xs22EFν xs1F04λλxs1FF3 xs1F51βριταxs22EF. We must supply in sense χωρxs22EFxs1FF3, for the reference is to Callim. Del. 69, where this is the meaning of xs22EFπειλητxs22EFρες. (shrink)
