CAMWS 2008 Panel Proposal

Rediscovering Homer: Capturing the Venetus A Manuscript of the Iliad

Topic Code: GE

In May of 2007 an international team of Classicists, conservators, photographers, and imaging experts traveled to descended on [[makes me think of barbarian hordes—which the Marciana might have thought—how about “traveled to”?]] the Marciana library in Venice’s St. Mark’s square in order to bring to light a cultural treasure that had been hidden away for over 100 years. The Venetus A manuscript of the Iliad (Marcianuso Gr. Z. 454 [=822]), the tenth-century manuscript on which all modern editions are primarily based and whose margins are crammed full of scholia, had last been photographed in 1901. At that time Domenico Comparetti produced a beautiful, sepia-toned facsimile edition, but the camera available then was not able to focus evenly across the entire page of the oversized manuscript. And since few libraries acquired this deluxe, extremely large (and presumably very expensive) but ultimately flawed volume, the Venetus A was, until 2007, a very inaccessible document.

In 2000, a group of scholars conceived of a plan to change this state of affairswe began planning to change this state of affairs. Our goal was to capture extremely high resolution digital photos of the manuscript and publish them together with XML encoded transcriptions of the text and scholia. In the end, it took seven years to obtain permission from the Marciana, consult and assemble our team of experts, acquire the equipment needed (including a custom built manuscript cradle), and secure funding for the project. The imaging itself was accomplished in only a few weeks.

We would like to announce the results of our project at CAMWS, giving an overview of the significance of the manuscript and what it contains, an account of what was accomplished in Venice and some of the technological hurdles that were overcome, a demonstration of the images themselves and how to access them, and information about future applications and resources that are now or will soon become available. [[Maybe something about why this should be a panel: “A panel format will allow for this in-depth exploration of what the manuscript has to offer scholars and also provide an opportunity for questions, discussion, and suggestions from the audience.” or something better than that?]] In addition to these important tasks, the Individual papers will also address the significance of publishing Homeric texts in a digital environment and of illustrating the transmission of the Iliad in this new way.

The Venetus A is our oldest complete manuscript of the Iliad. It serves as a bridge between the ancient and medieval transmission, papyrus scrolls and parchment codices. The scholia in its margins are an historical record of many previous editions of the poems, as well as a treasure trove of ancient scholarly interpretation. A deluxe edition unparalled in beauty, design, cons[MKE1]tstruction, or execution by any other manuscript produced subsequently, the Venetus A is a cultural artifact worthy of study in its own right. The manuscript was a technological breakthroughon the cutting edge of book technology when it was created, and made the Homeric texts available to its audience in a way that was at that time sophisticated and novel. [[Not sure what you mean by these—I’m sure its my ignorance, but are you comparing it to papyrus scrolls or other codices?]] It allowed its readers to appreciate the poem together with a thousand years of interpretation, and it did so in a format that was far easier to use and more durable than earlier editions of the Iliad on papyrus. By publishing the Venetus A as collection of high resolution digital images, our project will be making a similar technological breakthrough in the presentation of the Iliad, and with it readers will receive a much clearer picture of where our Iliad comes from.

Note: This panel will consist of four twenty20-minute presentations (including audio-visualA/V demonstration) and a 15-minute response by a distinguished expert in digital Humanities initiatives.

Abstract: “Homer and History in the Venetus A”

Topic Code: GE

In this paper I will discuss the unique position of the tenth-century Venetus A manuscript of the Iliad (Marciano Gr. Z. 454 [=822]) in the transmission of Homeric poetry and the history of Homeric scholarship, using the high resolution images that were captured by our team in May 2007. The Venetus A contains the oldest complete text of the Iliad and it is the one on which all modern editions are primarily based, but it is invaluable to us for much more than its text of the Iliad. This manuscript contains not only the texts of the poem but also excerpts from the commentaries of the scholars associated with the library of Ptolemaic Alexandria, excerpts which are copied into its margins and between lines of the text. These writings, known as scholia, contain notes on the text that explain points of grammar, usage, the meaning of words, interpretation, and disputes about the authenticity of verses. The material contained in these marginal notes derive from scholarly works that predate the manuscript’s construction by a thousand years or more. And like the ancient papyri, which give us their surprising picture of the fluid state of the Homeric text in the antiquity, the scholia give us an historical window into the evolution of the Iliad and Odyssey.

After placing the creation of the Venetus A within its historical context, I will give a brief account of how it came to be in Venice. Next I will describe the construction of the manuscript and point out the components of a typical page. I will then give an overview of the different bodies of scholia contained in the document, their ultimate sources, and the kinds of commentary they contain. The reminder of my paper will consist of an introduction to the controversy that ensued when the Venetus A was rediscovered by Villoison in 1788 and an assessment of the manuscript’s unique importance for our understanding of the processes by which the Iliad crystallized into the form in which we now have it. This topic will then be taken up in greater detail by the next speaker.

Abstract: “The Venetus A and the joy of (re)discovery”

Topic Code: GE

When Villoison announced what he had seen in the Venetus A, it drew attention from a wide range of interested parties. One review expressed an interest in the manuscript’s “great quantity of various readings,” and noted that the scholia’s explanations of passages “throw new light on several parts of the Iliad.” The notice is a reminder not only of a time when the general public was engaged in the debates over the origins of the Homeric epics, but also of the pleasure that a fresh look at a familiar text can generate. In this paper I will describe what the Venetus A meant to Villoison and the debate over the Homeric question at the end of the 18^th century, and also what it could mean to us in the ongoing debate about the composition and transmission of the poem.

The digital images of the manuscript afford another opportunity for a rediscovery of its contents. A demonstration of the images and the applications for viewing them will show how the photography actually aids in reading the smallest or most obscure writing on the page. Indeed, the 1781 notice on Villoison’s announcement described the scholia as “written on the margins in small characters, with such fine strokes of the pen, as to render them but barely legible.” Another 225 years has only made that situation worse, but the techniques of digital photography, including ultraviolet photography, will, as I will show, give us better access to these scholia than even reading the fragile manuscript itself can.

Finally I will give a few examples of what this unprecedented access to the manuscript can offer readers of Homer in their understanding and interpretation of the poems. One brief example is the scholion on Iliad 3.100. It gives a variation in Menelaos’ speech in which he says that he should fight Alexander alone because the original dispute was between them. The main text of the Venetus A (and most modern editions) reads: εἵνεκ᾽ ἐμῆς ἔριδος καὶ Ἀλεξάνδρου ἕνεκ᾽ ἀρχῆς· but the scholion preserves Zenodotus’s reading of ἄτης for ἀρχῆς. The phrase Ἀλεξάνδρου ἕνεκ᾽ ἄτης in fact appears in the text at Iliad 6.356 and 24.28, where ἀρχῆς is the variation reading. Although the change of meaning may seem slight, the alternation of the two words tells us a great deal about the oral formulaic system that underlies the composition of the poetry and can lead to new avenues for considering the long vexed question of the Iliad’s use of the Judgment of Paris and the cause of the war. The questions we are trying to answer may be framed somewhat differently from those in Villoison’s era, but the insights to be gained from careful study of the Venetus A can still parallel the excitement and joy felt then.

Quotations taken from M. de Francheville, review of Nouveaux Memoirs de l’Academie Royale des Sciences et Belle Lettres de Berlin, 1779, in R. Griffiths, ed. The Monthly Review, or Literary Journal (London, 1781) 508–510.

Abstract: “A Terabyte of Homer: Managing the Data for the CHS/Marciana Project”

Topic Code: GE

The team that went to Venice in May of 2007 photographed three manuscripts of the Iliad, generating 2211 raw digital images. In this talk, I will discuss the management of these images from the moment of their capture through their initial publication on the CHS’s website. Topics will include: the file-naming conventions for the raw images; the process of sharing, storage, and backup in the field; the process of generating useful derivative images from the raw files, and the scholarly decisions behind that process; issues of copyright and licensing; the technology of MD5 checksums that ensure perfect fidelity among duplicate sets of data; and some lessons we learned from our mistakes along the way.

Of particular interest to a general audience may be the challenge of making such a vast amount of digital data available online in a practical and useful way. The second half of this talk will consist of a demonstration of the interfaces to the published images, which combines technology from the Google Maps Application Programming Interface, a Canonical Text Services engine allowing access to images based on citations to the Iliad, and the system of electronic indexing that allows users to move among different views of the same folio, and to page between folios.

The talk will conclude with an invitation for interested parties to contribute to the ongoing project of providing access, through an open-ended set of applications, to this important, freely available data.

Abstract: “The scholia vetera and a new electronic edition of the Venetus A”

Topic Code: GE

This paper discusses the design of an interconnected digital publication of the text of the Iliad and the unique set of scholarly comments in the Venetus A. We possess none of the great works of Hellenistic scholarship on the Iliad today. While we read in later sources about the editions of Zenodotus and Aristophanes, and the commentary (ὑπομνήματα) that Aristarchus composed (with discussions keyed to his independent text by a series of critical signs), none is preserved in the manuscript tradition. Perhaps stimulated in part by the shift from volumen to codex, later readers and editors incorporated material from earlier commentaries into the marginal spaces of manuscripts. The resulting collections of scholia are quite varied, and in some cases have been intensely studied for their potential evidence about the earlier sources they draw on.

The scholia of the Venetus A are of special importance for our understanding of ancient scholarship on the Iliad. As the new high-resolution photographs of the MS make clear, the 10th-century copyist followed a carefully planned system relating different categories of scholarly information to the text. The text of the Iliad occupies the center of each page. Ample margins above, below and to the outside of the text have blocks ruled out for the principal commentary, repeatedly identified as (drawn from) the work of Aristonicus, Didymus, Herodian and Nicanor. In between the major commentary and the body of the text, a narrower column has occasional glosses and other comments, in a much smaller script, although apparently the same hand. As La Roche and Dindorf recognized in the nineteenth century, these intermarginal scholia are probably drawn from a separate source. Finally, and unique to the Venetus A, a small column to the left of the text block contains editorial symbols probably deriving directly from Hellenistic editorial practice. More than 2800 lines of the text — between 15-20% of the lines of the Iliad! — include one of these symbols.

Editors of print editions ever since Villoison have opted for a different organization, clearly separating text and scholia. More recent printed material disposes altogether with a readable version of either text or scholia: “variants” from a standard text of the Iliad are buried in a critical apparatus, while scholia are organized alongside scholia from other manuscripts according to the text they comment on, and the source a modern editor attributes them to. Because it is impossible to treat scholia from one MS as a single unit, it is impossible to compare scholia from one MS systematically with the scholia from another MS.

A thoughtfully structured electronic edition allows us to view scholia and text in multiple ways. I will illustrate how we can juxtapose the text of Venetus A with the associated scholia, or read text and scholia independently; read transcribed text and/or scholia together with images of the folio; and, where we have transcribed texts or scholia of other MSS, perform simple searches characterizing differences among the scholia of different MSS. The result is a sounder basis for discussing the history of scholarship on the Iliad, and a model for organizing electronic editions of manuscripts that we hope will be of use to others publishing texts with commentaries.

*NOTE: In addition to these four paperse, there will be a 15 minute response.*

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