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105-587: The main subtopics of the Homeric Question are: To these questions the possibilities of modern textual criticism and archaeological answers have added a few more: On the Greek side: On the Trojan side: The very forefathers of text criticism, including Isaac Casaubon (1559–1614), Richard Bentley (1662–1742) and Friedrich August Wolf (1759–1824) already emphasized the fluid-like, oral nature of

210-478: A Best-text edition essentially a documentary edition. For an example one may refer to Eugene Vinaver's edition of the Winchester Manuscript of Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur . When copy-text editing, the scholar fixes errors in a base text, often with the help of other witnesses. Often, the base text is selected from the oldest manuscript of the text, but in the early days of printing, the copy text

315-458: A book entitled The Songs of Homer , in which he questions Lord's extension of the oral-formulaic nature of Serbian epic poetry in Bosnia and Herzegovina (the area from which the theory was first developed) to Homeric epic. He holds that Homeric poems differ from those traditions in their "metrical strictness", "formular system[s]" and creativity . Kirk argued that Homeric poems were recited under

420-468: A branching family tree and uses that assumption to derive relationships between them. This makes it more like an automated approach to stemmatics. However, where there is a difference, the computer does not attempt to decide which reading is closer to the original text, and so does not indicate which branch of the tree is the "root"—which manuscript tradition is closest to the original. Other types of evidence must be used for that purpose. Phylogenetics faces

525-583: A canonical text of the Homeric poems did not exist until established by Alexandrian editors in the Hellenistic period (3rd to 1st century BC). The modern debate began with the Prolegomena of Friedrich August Wolf (1795). According to Wolf, the date of writing is among the first questions in the textual criticism of Homer. Having satisfied himself that writing was unknown to Homer, Wolf considers

630-418: A comprehensive exploration of relations among seven early witnesses to Dante's text. The stemmatic method assumes that each witness is derived from one, and only one, predecessor. If a scribe refers to more than one source when creating her or his copy, then the new copy will not clearly fall into a single branch of the family tree. In the stemmatic method, a manuscript that is derived from more than one source

735-420: A computer, which records all the differences between them, or derived from an existing apparatus. The manuscripts are then grouped according to their shared characteristics. The difference between phylogenetics and more traditional forms of statistical analysis is that, rather than simply arranging the manuscripts into rough groupings according to their overall similarity, phylogenetics assumes that they are part of

840-531: A designated text which they themselves had approved. In this way, the Homeridae became the authors of some of the first "authoritative" versions of Homeric poetry, and removed much of the improvisation which had hitherto characterized the art form. Incidentally, some people believed these attributions: Thucydides , though not easily fooled, quotes from a version of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo similar to

945-516: A few witnesses presumably as being favored by "objective" criteria. The citing of sources used, and alternate readings, and the use of original text and images helps readers and other critics determine to an extent the depth of research of the critic, and to independently verify their work. Stemmatics or stemmatology is a rigorous approach to textual criticism. Karl Lachmann (1793–1851) greatly contributed to making this method famous, even though he did not invent it. The method takes its name from

1050-463: A fixed written form is subject to debate. The traditional solution is the "transcription hypothesis", wherein a non-literate singer dictates the poem to a literate scribe in the 6th century BC or earlier. Sources from antiquity are unanimous in declaring that Peisistratus , the tyrant of Athens , first committed the poems of Homer to writing and placed them in the order in which we now read them. More radical Homerists, such as Gregory Nagy , contend that

1155-463: A later insertion by a different poet. Some ancient scholars believed Homer to have been an eyewitness to the Trojan War ; others thought he had lived up to 500 years afterwards. Contemporary scholars continue to debate the date of the poems. A long history of oral transmission lies behind the composition of the poems, complicating the search for a precise date. It is generally agreed, however, that

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1260-474: A number of errors in common, it may be presumed that they were derived from a common intermediate source, called a hyparchetype . Relations between the lost intermediates are determined by the same process, placing all extant manuscripts in a family tree or stemma codicum descended from a single archetype . The process of constructing the stemma is called recension , or the Latin recensio . Having completed

1365-489: A process of standardization and refinement out of older material, beginning in the 8th century BC. This process, often referred to as the "million little pieces" design, seems to acknowledge the spirit of oral tradition. As Albert Lord notes in his book The Singer of Tales , poets within an oral tradition, as was Homer, tend to create and modify their tales as they perform them. Although this suggests that Homer may simply have "borrowed" from other bards, he almost certainly made

1470-479: A record of rejected variants of the text (often in order of preference). Before inexpensive mechanical printing, literature was copied by hand, and many variations were introduced by copyists. The age of printing made the scribal profession effectively redundant. Printed editions, while less susceptible to the proliferation of variations likely to arise during manual transmission, are nonetheless not immune to introducing variations from an author's autograph. Instead of

1575-512: A restricted set of hypothetical hyparchetypes. The steps of examinatio and emendatio resemble copy-text editing. In fact, the other techniques can be seen as special cases of stemmatics in which a rigorous family history of the text cannot be determined but only approximated. If it seems that one manuscript is by far the best text, then copy text editing is appropriate, and if it seems that a group of manuscripts are good, then eclecticism on that group would be proper. The Hodges–Farstad edition of

1680-504: A scribe is unlikely on his own initiative to have departed from the usual practice. Internal evidence is evidence that comes from the text itself, independent of the physical characteristics of the document. Various considerations can be used to decide which reading is the most likely to be original. Sometimes these considerations can be in conflict. Two common considerations have the Latin names lectio brevior (shorter reading) and lectio difficilior (more difficult reading). The first

1785-435: A scribe miscopying his source, a compositor or a printing shop may read or typeset a work in a way that differs from the autograph. Since each scribe or printer commits different errors, reconstruction of the lost original is often aided by a selection of readings taken from many sources. An edited text that draws from multiple sources is said to be eclectic . In contrast to this approach, some textual critics prefer to identify

1890-412: A situation, a key objective becomes the identification of the first exemplar before any split in the tradition. That exemplar is known as the archetype . "If we succeed in establishing the text of [the archetype], the constitutio (reconstruction of the original) is considerably advanced." The textual critic's ultimate objective is the production of a "critical edition". This contains the text that

1995-610: A system that gave the reciter much more freedom to choose words and passages to achieve the same end than the Serbian poet, who was merely "reproductive". Shortly afterwards, Eric A. Havelock 's 1963 book Preface to Plato revolutionized how scholars looked at Homeric epic by arguing not only that it was the product of an oral tradition but that the oral-formulas contained therein served as a way for ancient Greeks to preserve cultural knowledge across many different generations. In his 1966 work Have we Homer's Iliad ? , Adam Parry theorized

2100-485: A text is referred to as a variorum , namely a work of textual criticism whereby all variations and emendations are set side by side so that a reader can track how textual decisions have been made in the preparation of a text for publication. The Bible and the works of William Shakespeare have often been the subjects of variorum editions, although the same techniques have been applied with less frequency to many other works, such as Walt Whitman 's Leaves of Grass , and

2205-526: A version of Bengel's rule, "The reading is less likely to be original that shows a disposition to smooth away difficulties." They also argued that "Readings are approved or rejected by reason of the quality, and not the number, of their supporting witnesses", and that "The reading is to be preferred that most fitly explains the existence of the others." Many of these rules, although originally developed for biblical textual criticism, have wide applicability to any text susceptible to errors of transmission. Since

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2310-428: Is a literal definition of a rhapsode . Later contemporary references come in fourth-century texts, in the works of Plato and Isocrates . In one of his essays, written around 350 BC, Isocrates says: Some of the Homeridae tell the story that Helen appeared to Homer in a dream and told him to make a poem about the Trojan expedition. At a slightly earlier date Plato makes a similar comment: I believe that some of

2415-577: Is extended by the complicating factor of the period of time now referred to as the " Greek Dark Ages ". This period, which ranged from approximately 1100 to 750 BC, followed the Bronze Age period of Mycenaean Greece during which Homer's Trojan War is set. The composition of the Iliad , on the other hand, is placed immediately following the Greek Dark Age period. Further controversy surrounds

2520-423: Is necessary when these basic criteria are in conflict. For instance, there will typically be fewer early copies, and a larger number of later copies. The textual critic will attempt to balance these criteria, to determine the original text. There are many other more sophisticated considerations. For example, readings that depart from the known practice of a scribe or a given period may be deemed more reliable, since

2625-416: Is not necessarily a single original text for every group of texts. For example, if a story was spread by oral tradition , and then later written down by different people in different locations, the versions can vary greatly. There are many approaches or methods to the practice of textual criticism, notably eclecticism , stemmatics , and copy-text editing . Quantitative techniques are also used to determine

2730-399: Is said to be contaminated . The method also assumes that scribes only make new errors—they do not attempt to correct the errors of their predecessors. When a text has been improved by the scribe, it is said to be sophisticated , but "sophistication" impairs the method by obscuring a document's relationship to other witnesses, and making it more difficult to place the manuscript correctly in

2835-405: Is the general observation that scribes tended to add words, for clarification or out of habit, more often than they removed them. The second, lectio difficilior potior (the harder reading is stronger), recognizes the tendency for harmonization—resolving apparent inconsistencies in the text. Applying this principle leads to taking the more difficult (unharmonized) reading as being more likely to be

2940-407: Is typical of epic poetry in an exclusively oral culture . The crucial words here are "oral" and "traditional". Parry starts with the former: the repetitive chunks of language, he says, were inherited by the singer-poet from his predecessors, and were useful to him in composition. Parry calls these chunks of repetitive language "formulas". Many scholars agree that the Iliad and Odyssey underwent

3045-584: The Alexandrian text-type , are the most favored, and the critical text has an Alexandrian disposition. External evidence is evidence of each physical witness, its date, source, and relationship to other known witnesses. Critics will often prefer the readings supported by the oldest witnesses. Since errors tend to accumulate, older manuscripts should have fewer errors. Readings supported by a majority of witnesses are also usually preferred, since these are less likely to reflect accidents or individual biases. For

3150-466: The Comma was known for Tertullian . The stemmatic method's final step is emendatio , also sometimes referred to as "conjectural emendation". But, in fact, the critic employs conjecture at every step of the process. Some of the method's rules that are designed to reduce the exercise of editorial judgment do not necessarily produce the correct result. For example, where there are more than two witnesses at

3255-545: The Greek New Testament . In his commentary, he established the rule Proclivi scriptioni praestat ardua , ("the harder reading is to be preferred"). Johann Jakob Griesbach (1745–1812) published several editions of the New Testament. In his 1796 edition, he established fifteen critical rules. Among them was a variant of Bengel's rule, Lectio difficilior potior , "the harder reading is better." Another

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3360-406: The Iliad and Odyssey . They also developed stories about how the poems had originated, such as Homer's dream of Helen. Like other rhapsodes, they travelled widely, but they were perhaps based on Chios. Certain Homeridae were active in adding new poems to the tradition. Due to Pisistratus (tyrant of Athens) that Homeric reformation became compulsory. The Homeridae, like other rhapsodes, switched to

3465-576: The Iliad and the Odyssey are unified poems, in that each poem shows a clear overall design, and that they are not merely strung together from unrelated songs. It is also generally agreed that each poem was composed mostly by a single author, who probably relied heavily on older oral traditions. Nearly all scholars agree that the Doloneia in Book X of the Iliad is not part of the original poem, but rather

3570-466: The Iliad exhibits minutely detailed metalwork that characterized Phoenician crafts, they are characterized in the Odyssey as "manifold scurvy tricksters" ( polypaipaloi , parodying the Greek polydaidaloi , "many-skilled"). Wolf's speculations were in harmony with the ideas and sentiment of the time, and his historical arguments, especially his long array of testimonies to the work of Peisistratus, were hardly challenged. The effect of Wolf's Prolegomena

3675-432: The beginnings of two lines are similar. The critic may also examine the other writings of the author to decide what words and grammatical constructions match his style. The evaluation of internal evidence also provides the critic with information that helps him evaluate the reliability of individual manuscripts. Thus, the consideration of internal and external evidence is related. After considering all relevant factors,

3780-544: The stylometry allows to scan various linguistic units: words, parts of speech, and sounds. Based on the frequencies of Greek letters, a first study of Dietmar Najock particularly shows the internal cohesion of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Taking into account the repetition of the letters, a recent study of Stephan Vonfelt highlights the unity of the works of Homer compared to Hesiod . The thesis of modern analysts being questioned,

3885-484: The "date" of "Homer" should refer to the moment in history when the oral tradition became a written text. At one extreme, Richard Janko has proposed a date for both poems to the eighth century BC based on linguistic analysis and statistics. At the other extreme, scholars such as Gregory Nagy see "Homer" as a continually evolving tradition, which grew much more stable as the tradition progressed, but which did not fully cease to continue changing and evolving until as late as

3990-490: The Greek New Testament attempts to use stemmatics for some portions. Phylogenetics is a technique borrowed from biology , where it was originally named phylogenetic systematics by Willi Hennig . In biology, the technique is used to determine the evolutionary relationships between different species . In its application in textual criticism, the text of a number of different witnesses may be entered into

4095-453: The Homeric canon. This perspective, however, did not receive mainstream recognition until after the seminal work of Milman Parry in the early 20th century. Now most classicists agree that, whether or not there was ever such a composer as Homer, the poems attributed to him are to some degree dependent on oral tradition, a generations-old technique that was the collective inheritance of many singer-poets (or ἀοιδοί , aoidoi ). An analysis of

4200-537: The Homeridae recite two hymns to Eros from among the esoteric poems. One of them is quite disrespectful to the god, and, what's more, the metre is incorrect! This is what they sing: Now this winged god is called by mortals Eros, But immortals say "Pteros" because love must grow wings. There are two further mentions, in Plato's Republic and in the Ion . In the latter the rhapsode Ion claims that he should be "crowned by

4305-545: The Homeridae were named after Homer, while Seleucus said that they were not. Finally, the geographer Strabo says that the people of Chios adduced the Homeridae as evidence that Homer came from Chios; which implies, though Strabo does not say it, that the Homeridae, too, came from Chios. It seems from this evidence that the Homeridae were a guild of oral performers (rhapsodes, as implied by Pindar's phrase "singers of stitched words") who claimed to inherit Homer's tradition and performed poems ascribed to Homer, no doubt including

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4410-466: The Homeridae" for his work in promoting the poems of Homer. Supplementary information, of uncertain validity, is found in later Greek antiquarian writings. A scholarly commentary on Pindar's poem gives the following details: The name Homeridae originally meant descendants of Homer, who maintained the tradition of singing his poems, but afterwards was applied to rhapsodes who did not claim literal descent from him. One famous member, Cynaethus of Chios ,

4515-490: The Trojan story into the background and were then enlarged by successive generations of rhapsodists. Some parts of the Iliad , moreover, seemed to him to be older than the poem on the wrath of Achilles; and thus, in addition to the Homeric and post-Homeric matter, he distinguished a pre-Homeric element. The conjectures of Hermann, in which the Wolfian theory found a modified and tentative application, were presently thrown into

4620-473: The absorption of preexisting lays in the formation of the Iliad and Odyssey , and also the existence of considerable interpolations, but assigned the main work of formation to prehistoric times and the genius of a great poet. Whether the two epics were by the same author remained an open question; the tendency of this group of scholars was towards separation. Regarding the use of writing, too, they were not unanimous. Karl Otfried Müller , for instance, maintained

4725-620: The applicability of the different methods for coping with these problems across both living organisms and textual traditions is a promising area of study. Software developed for use in biology has been applied successfully to textual criticism; for example, it is being used by the Canterbury Tales Project to determine the relationship between the 84 surviving manuscripts and four early printed editions of The Canterbury Tales . Shaw's edition of Dante's Commedia uses phylogenetic and traditional methods alongside each other in

4830-601: The area. In a similar vein, the word "Homer" may simply be a carryover from the Mediterranean seafarers' vocabulary adoption of the Semitic word base ’MR, which means "say" or "tell". "Homer" may simply be the Mediterranean version of "saga". Pseudo-Plutarch suggests that the name comes from a word meaning "to follow" and another meaning "blind". Other sources connect Homer's name with Smyrna for several etymological reasons. Exactly when these poems would have taken on

4935-425: The author has determined most closely approximates the original, and is accompanied by an apparatus criticus or critical apparatus . The critical apparatus presents the author's work in three parts: first, a list or description of the evidence that the editor used (names of manuscripts, or abbreviations called sigla ); second, the editor's analysis of that evidence (sometimes a simple likelihood rating), ; and third,

5040-501: The canons of criticism are highly susceptible to interpretation, and at times even contradict each other, they may be employed to justify a result that fits the textual critic's aesthetic or theological agenda. Starting in the 19th century, scholars sought more rigorous methods to guide editorial judgment. Stemmatics and copy-text editing – while both eclectic, in that they permit the editor to select readings from multiple sources – sought to reduce subjectivity by establishing one or

5145-492: The censoring of printed work for political, religious or cultural reasons. The objective of the textual critic's work is to provide a better understanding of the creation and historical transmission of the text and its variants. This understanding may lead to the production of a critical edition containing a scholarly curated text. If a scholar has several versions of a manuscript but no known original, then established methods of textual criticism can be used to seek to reconstruct

5250-435: The copy-text. Homeridae The Homeridae ( Ancient Greek : Ὁμηρίδαι ) were a family, clan or professional lineage on the island of Chios claiming descent from the Greek epic poet Homer . The origin of the name seems obvious: in classical Greek the word should mean "children of Homer". An analogous name, Asclepiadae, identified a clan or guild of medical practitioners as "children of Asclepius ". However, since

5355-559: The correct reading. After selectio , the text may still contain errors, since there may be passages where no source preserves the correct reading. The step of examination , or examinatio is applied to find corruptions. Where the editor concludes that the text is corrupt, it is corrected by a process called "emendation", or emendatio (also sometimes called divinatio ). Emendations not supported by any known source are sometimes called conjectural emendations . The process of selectio resembles eclectic textual criticism, but applied to

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5460-471: The critic forms opinions about individual witnesses, relying on both external and internal evidence. Since the mid-19th century, eclecticism, in which there is no a priori bias to a single manuscript, has been the dominant method of editing the Greek text of the New Testament (currently, the United Bible Society, 5th ed. and Nestle-Åland, 28th ed.). Even so, the oldest manuscripts, being of

5565-443: The debate remains open. Most scholars, although disagreeing on other questions about the genesis of the poems, agree that the Iliad and the Odyssey were not produced by the same author, based on "the many differences of narrative manner, theology, ethics, vocabulary, and geographical perspective, and by the apparently imitative character of certain passages of the Odyssey in relation to the Iliad ." Nearly all scholars agree that

5670-460: The destruction of Babylon by Sennacherib in 689 BC and the Sack of Thebes by Ashurbanipal in 663/4 BC. Textual criticism Textual criticism is a branch of textual scholarship , philology , and literary criticism that is concerned with the identification of textual variants, or different versions, of either manuscripts (mss) or of printed books. Such texts may range in dates from

5775-468: The difference in composition dates between the Iliad and Odyssey . It seems that the latter was composed at a later date than the former because the works' differing characterizations of the Phoenicians align with differing Greek popular opinion of the Phoenicians between the 8th and 7th centuries BC, when their skills began to hurt Greek commerce. Whereas Homer's description of Achilles 's shield in

5880-451: The earliest known written documents. Ranging from ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt to the twentieth century, textual criticism covers a period of about five millennia. The basic problem, as described by Paul Maas , is as follows: We have no autograph [handwritten by the original author] manuscripts of the Greek and Roman classical writers and no copies which have been collated with

5985-481: The earliest writing in cuneiform, impressed on clay, for example, to multiple unpublished versions of a 21st-century author's work. Historically, scribes who were paid to copy documents may have been literate, but many were simply copyists, mimicking the shapes of letters without necessarily understanding what they meant. This means that unintentional alterations were common when copying manuscripts by hand. Intentional alterations may have been made as well, for example,

6090-399: The evidence of contrasts between witnesses. Eclectic readings also normally give an impression of the number of witnesses to each available reading. Although a reading supported by the majority of witnesses is frequently preferred, this does not follow automatically. For example, a second edition of a Shakespeare play may include an addition alluding to an event known to have happened between

6195-401: The existence of the Homeridae is authenticated while that of Homer is not, and since Greek homeros is a common noun meaning "hostage", it was suggested even in ancient times that the Homeridae were in reality "children (or descendants) of hostages". The natural further step is to argue that Homer, the supposed founder, is a mythical figure, a mere back-formation , deriving his name from that of

6300-503: The existence of the most fully developed oral poet up to his time, a person who could (at his discretion) creatively and intellectually form nuanced characters in the context of the accepted, traditional story; in fact, Parry altogether discounted the Serbian tradition to an "unfortunate" extent, choosing to elevate the Greek model of oral-tradition above all others. Lord reacted to Kirk and Parry's respective contentions with Homer as Oral Poet , published in 1968, which reaffirmed his belief in

6405-463: The form of an epic poem until about 500 years after their original composition. This conclusion Wolf supports by the character attributed to the Cyclic poems (whose want of unity showed that the structure of the Iliad and Odyssey must be the work of a later time), by one or two indications of imperfect connection, and by the doubts of ancient critics as to the authenticity of certain parts. This view

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6510-514: The later guild. Their influence on the dark early history of transmission of the Homeric texts, though incalculable, is sure to have been conservative. Evidence on the Homeridae relates to the late sixth, fifth and fourth centuries BC, after which nothing more is heard of them. The first contemporary mention of this group is in a poem of about 485 BC by Pindar : In the same way as the Homeridae, Singers of stitched words, usually Begin with an address to Zeus ... A "singer of stitched words"

6615-469: The meantime been made the subject of a work which, for exhaustive learning and delicacy of artistic perception, has few rivals in the history of philology : the Epic cycle of Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker . The confusion which previous scholars had made between the ancient post-Homeric poets (such as Arctinus of Miletus and Lesches ) and the learned mythological writers (like the scriptor cyclicus of Horace )

6720-461: The method was not as rigorous or as scientific as its proponents had claimed. Bédier's doubts about the stemmatic method led him to consider whether it could be dropped altogether. As an alternative to stemmatics, Bédier proposed a Best-text editing method, in which a single textual witness, judged to be of a 'good' textual state by the editor, is emended as lightly as possible for manifest transmission mistakes, but left otherwise unchanged. This makes

6825-480: The middle of the second century BC. Martin Litchfield West has argued that the Iliad echoes the poetry of Hesiod , and that it must have been composed around 660-650 BC at the earliest, with the Odyssey up to a generation later. He also interprets passages in the Iliad as showing knowledge of historical events that occurred in the ancient Near East during the middle of the seventh century BC, including

6930-484: The original text . Textual criticism has been practiced for over two thousand years, as one of the philological arts. Early textual critics, especially the librarians of Hellenistic Alexandria in the last two centuries BC, were concerned with preserving the works of antiquity , and this continued through the Middle Ages into the early modern period and the invention of the printing press . Textual criticism

7035-415: The original text as closely as possible. The same methods can be used to reconstruct intermediate versions, or recensions , of a document's transcription history, depending on the number and quality of the text available. On the other hand, the one original text that a scholar theorizes to exist is referred to as the urtext (in the context of Biblical studies ), archetype or autograph ; however, there

7140-422: The original. Such cases also include scribes simplifying and smoothing texts they did not fully understand. Another scribal tendency is called homoioteleuton , meaning "similar endings". Homoioteleuton occurs when two words/phrases/lines end with the similar sequence of letters. The scribe, having finished copying the first, skips to the second, omitting all intervening words. Homoioarche refers to eye-skip when

7245-506: The originals; the manuscripts we possess derive from the originals through an unknown number of intermediate copies, and are consequently of questionable trustworthiness. The business of textual criticism is to produce a text as close as possible to the original ( constitutio textus ). Maas comments further that "A dictation revised by the author must be regarded as equivalent to an autograph manuscript". The lack of autograph manuscripts applies to many cultures other than Greek and Roman. In such

7350-402: The piece his own when he performed it. The 1960 publication of Lord's book, which focused on the problems and questions that arise in conjunction with applying oral-formulaic theory to problematic texts such as the Iliad , the Odyssey and even Beowulf influenced nearly all subsequent work on Homer and oral-formulaic composition. In response to his landmark effort, Geoffrey Kirk published

7455-520: The possibility that the original author may have revised her or his work, and that the text could have existed at different times in more than one authoritative version. The critic Joseph Bédier (1864–1938), who had worked with stemmatics, launched an attack on that method in 1928. He surveyed editions of medieval French texts that were produced with the stemmatic method, and found that textual critics tended overwhelmingly to produce bifid trees, divided into just two branches. He concluded that this outcome

7560-406: The practice of consulting a wide diversity of witnesses to a particular original. The practice is based on the principle that the more independent transmission histories there are, the less likely they will be to reproduce the same errors. What one omits, the others may retain; what one adds, the others are unlikely to add. Eclecticism allows inferences to be drawn regarding the original text, based on

7665-558: The prose writings of Edward Fitzgerald . In practice, citation of manuscript evidence implies any of several methodologies. The ideal, but most costly, method is physical inspection of the manuscript itself; alternatively, published photographs or facsimile editions may be inspected. This method involves paleographical analysis—interpretation of handwriting, incomplete letters and even reconstruction of lacunae . More typically, editions of manuscripts are consulted, which have done this paleographical work already. Eclecticism refers to

7770-476: The purported Donation of Constantine . Many ancient works, such as the Bible and the Greek tragedies , survive in hundreds of copies, and the relationship of each copy to the original may be unclear. Textual scholars have debated for centuries which sources are most closely derived from the original, hence which readings in those sources are correct. Although texts such as Greek plays presumably had one original,

7875-652: The question of whether some biblical books, like the Gospels , ever had just one original has been discussed. Interest in applying textual criticism to the Quran has also developed after the discovery of the Sana'a manuscripts in 1972, which possibly date back to the seventh to eighth centuries. In the English language, the works of William Shakespeare have been a particularly fertile ground for textual criticism—both because

7980-411: The question of written or unwritten literature, on which Wolf's entire argument turned, and showed that the art of writing must be anterior to Peisistratus. In the later part of the same series of discussions (1837), and in his chief work ( Die Sagenpoesie der Griechen , 1852), he investigated the structure of the Homeric poems, and their relation to the other epics of the Trojan cycle. These epics had in

8085-460: The real mode of transmission, which he purports to find in the Rhapsodists , of whom the Homeridae were an hereditary school. Wolf reached the conclusion that the Iliad and Odyssey could not have been composed in the form in which we know them without the aid of writing. They must therefore have been, as Bentley has said, a sequel of songs and rhapsodies, loose songs not collected together in

8190-410: The relationships between witnesses to a text, called textual witnesses , with methods from evolutionary biology ( phylogenetics ) appearing to be effective on a range of traditions. In some domains, such as religious and classical text editing, the phrase "lower criticism" refers to textual criticism and " higher criticism " to the endeavor to establish the authorship, date, and place of composition of

8295-494: The relevance of Serbian epic poetry and its similarities to Homer, and downplayed the intellectual and literary role of the reciters of Homeric epic. In further support of the theory that Homer is really the name of a series of oral-formulas, or equivalent to "the Bard" as applied to Shakespeare, the Greek name Homēros is etymologically noteworthy. It is identical to the Greek word for "hostage". It has been hypothesized that his name

8400-483: The same difficulty as textual criticism: the appearance of characteristics in descendants of an ancestor other than by direct copying (or miscopying) of the ancestor, for example where a scribe combines readings from two or more different manuscripts ("contamination"). The same phenomenon is widely present among living organisms, as instances of horizontal gene transfer (or lateral gene transfer) and genetic recombination , particularly among bacteria. Further exploration of

8505-417: The same level of the tree, normally the critic will select the dominant reading. However, it may be no more than fortuitous that more witnesses have survived that present a particular reading. A plausible reading that occurs less often may, nevertheless, be the correct one. Lastly, the stemmatic method assumes that every extant witness is derived, however remotely, from a single source. It does not account for

8610-413: The same reasons, the most geographically diverse witnesses are preferred. Some manuscripts show evidence that particular care was taken in their composition, for example, by including alternative readings in their margins, demonstrating that more than one prior copy (exemplar) was consulted in producing the current one. Other factors being equal, these are the best witnesses. The role of the textual critic

8715-482: The same time, the critical text should document variant readings, so the relation of extant witnesses to the reconstructed original is apparent to a reader of the critical edition. In establishing the critical text, the textual critic considers both "external" evidence (the age, provenance, and affiliation of each witness) and "internal" or "physical" considerations (what the author and scribes, or printers, were likely to have done). The collation of all known variants of

8820-473: The scenes in Olympus (348–429, 493–611). The second book forms a second lay, but several passages, among them the speech of Odysseus (278–332), are interpolated. In the third book, the scenes in which Helen and Priam take part (including the making of the truce) are pronounced to be interpolations; and so on. New methods try also to elucidate the question. Combining information technologies and statistics,

8925-495: The shade by the more trenchant method of Karl Lachmann , who (in two papers read to the Berlin Academy in 1837 and 1841) sought to show that the Iliad was made up of sixteen independent lays, with various enlargements and interpolations, all finally reduced to order by Peisistratus. The first book, for instance, consists of a lay on the anger of Achilles (1–347), and two continuations, the return of Chryseis (430–492) and

9030-427: The single best surviving text, and not to combine readings from multiple sources. When comparing different documents, or "witnesses", of a single, original text, the observed differences are called variant readings , or simply variants or readings . It is not always apparent which single variant represents the author's original work. The process of textual criticism seeks to explain how each variant may have entered

9135-431: The stemma, the critic proceeds to the next step, called selection or selectio , where the text of the archetype is determined by examining variants from the closest hyparchetypes to the archetype and selecting the best ones. If one reading occurs more often than another at the same level of the tree, then the dominant reading is selected. If two competing readings occur equally often, then the editor uses judgment to select

9240-424: The stemma. The stemmatic method requires the textual critic to group manuscripts by commonality of error. It is required, therefore, that the critic can distinguish erroneous readings from correct ones. This assumption has often come under attack. W. W. Greg noted: "That if a scribe makes a mistake he will inevitably produce nonsense is the tacit and wholly unwarranted assumption." Franz Anton Knittel defended

9345-493: The structure and vocabulary of the Iliad and Odyssey shows that the poems contain many regular and repeated phrases; indeed, even entire verses are repeated. Thus according to the theory, the Iliad and Odyssey may have been products of oral-formulaic composition , composed on the spot by the poet using a collection of memorized traditional verses and phrases. Milman Parry and Albert Lord have pointed out that such elaborate oral tradition, foreign to today's literate cultures,

9450-413: The text, either by accident (duplication or omission) or intention (harmonization or censorship), as scribes or supervisors transmitted the original author's text by copying it. The textual critic's task, therefore, is to sort through the variants, eliminating those most likely to be un -original, hence establishing a critical text , or critical edition, that is intended to best approximate the original. At

9555-489: The texts, as transmitted, contain a considerable amount of variation, and because the effort and expense of producing superior editions of his works have always been widely viewed as worthwhile. The principles of textual criticism, although originally developed and refined for works of antiquity and the Bible, and, for Anglo-American Copy-Text editing, Shakespeare, have been applied to many works, from (near-)contemporary texts to

9660-430: The textual critic seeks the reading that best explains how the other readings would arise. That reading is then the most likely candidate to have been original. Various scholars have developed guidelines, or canons of textual criticism, to guide the exercise of the critic's judgment in determining the best readings of a text. One of the earliest was Johann Albrecht Bengel (1687–1752), who in 1734 produced an edition of

9765-498: The traditional point of view in theology and was against the modern textual criticism. He defended an authenticity of the Pericopa Adulterae (John 7:53–8:11), Comma Johanneum (1 John 5:7), and Testimonium Flavianum . According to him, Erasmus in his Novum Instrumentum omne did not incorporate the Comma from Codex Montfortianus , because of grammar differences, but used Complutensian Polyglotta . According to him,

9870-429: The two editions. Although nearly all subsequent manuscripts may have included the addition, textual critics may reconstruct the original without the addition. The result of the process is a text with readings drawn from many witnesses. It is not a copy of any particular manuscript, and may deviate from the majority of existing manuscripts. In a purely eclectic approach, no single witness is theoretically favored. Instead,

9975-519: The view of Wolf on this point, while strenuously combating the inference which Wolf drew from it. The Prolegomena bore on the title-page the words "Volumen I", but no second volume ever appeared; nor was any attempt made by Wolf himself to compose it or carry his theory further. The first important steps in that direction were taken by Johann Gottfried Jakob Hermann , chiefly in two dissertations, De interpolationibus Homeri ( Leipzig , 1832), and De iteratis apud Homerum (Leipzig, 1840), called forth by

10080-483: The word stemma . The Ancient Greek word στέμματα and its loanword in classical Latin stemmata may refer to " family trees ". This specific meaning shows the relationships of the surviving witnesses (the first known example of such a stemma, albeit without the name, dates from 1827). The family tree is also referred to as a cladogram . The method works from the principle that "community of error implies community of origin". That is, if two witnesses have

10185-455: The writings of Nitzsch. As the word "interpolation" implies, Hermann did not maintain the hypothesis of a conflation of independent lays. Feeling the difficulty of supposing that all ancient minstrels sang of the wrath of Achilles or the return of Odysseus (leaving out even the capture of Troy itself), he was led to assume that two poems of no great compass, dealing with these two themes, became so famous at an early period as to throw other parts of

10290-461: Was Lectio brevior praeferenda , "the shorter reading is better", based on the idea that scribes were more likely to add than to delete. This rule cannot be applied uncritically, as scribes may omit material inadvertently. Brooke Foss Westcott (1825–1901) and Fenton Hort (1828–1892) published an edition of the New Testament in Greek in 1881 . They proposed nine critical rules, including

10395-563: Was an important aspect of the work of many Renaissance humanists , such as Desiderius Erasmus , who edited the Greek New Testament , creating what developed as the Textus Receptus . In Italy, scholars such as Petrarch and Poggio Bracciolini collected and edited many Latin manuscripts, while a new spirit of critical enquiry was boosted by the attention to textual states, for example in the work of Lorenzo Valla on

10500-478: Was at the centre of a group who were specially active in composing new poems and attaching them to Homer's works. Cynaethus himself was the author of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo and was the first to perform Homeric poems at Syracuse . A second source is Harpocration , who names three early writers of Greek local history whose works are now lost: Acusilaus and Hellanicus of Lesbos apparently stated that

10605-480: Was back-extracted from the name of a society of poets called the Homeridae , which literally means "sons of hostages", i.e., descendants of prisoners of war . As these men were not sent to war because their loyalty on the battlefield was suspect, they would not be killed in conflicts, so they were entrusted with remembering the area's stock of epic poetry, to remember past events, from the time before literacy came to

10710-406: Was first cleared up by Welcker. Wolf had argued that, had the cyclic writers known the Iliad and Odyssey which we possess, they would have imitated the unity of structure which distinguishes these two poems. The aim of Welcker's work was to show that the Homeric poems had influenced both the form and the substance of epic poetry. Thus arose a conservative school which admitted more or less freely

10815-409: Was often a manuscript that was at hand. Using the copy-text method, the critic examines the base text and makes corrections (called emendations) in places where the base text appears wrong to the critic. This can be done by looking for places in the base text that do not make sense or by looking at the text of other witnesses for a superior reading. Close-call decisions are usually resolved in favor of

10920-432: Was so overwhelming, and its determination so decisive, that, although a few protests were made at the time, the true Homeric controversy did not begin until after his death in 1824. The first considerable antagonist of the Wolfian school was Gregor Wilhelm Nitzsch , whose writings cover the years between 1828 and 1862 and deal with every side of the controversy. In the earlier part of his Metetemata (1830), Nitzsch took up

11025-488: Was unlikely to have occurred by chance, and that therefore, the method was tending to produce bipartite stemmas regardless of the actual history of the witnesses. He suspected that editors tended to favor trees with two branches, as this would maximize the opportunities for editorial judgment (as there would be no third branch to "break the tie" whenever the witnesses disagreed). He also noted that, for many works, more than one reasonable stemma could be postulated, suggesting that

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