The Venetus A and the joy of (re)discovery

Mary Ebbott (College of the Holy Cross)

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.