The scholia vetera and a new electronic edition of the Venetus A

Neel Smith (College of the Holy Cross)

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.