The Ionic Alphabet, Book Divisions, and Homer

Carolyn Higbie (University at Buffalo, SUNY)

The division of the Homeric epics into 24 books each has been attributed in recent scholarship to a poet or editor of the eighth century BC, but no later than the sixth. I would like to argue for the earlier belief that book division in Homer is the work of Alexandrian scholars. Authors of works either broad in scope or technical in subject may have used book divisions in the fourth century BC to structure their material, but later editors applied these divisions to already existing texts. The use of the Ionic alphabet as labels for these newly divided books of the Homeric epic may reflect Athenian traditions.

Evidence includes the way that authors from Herodotus to Aristotle cite Homeric lines: they refer to scenes and not to books. Apollodorus of Athens, a 2nd-century BC scholar, is the first surviving author to be credited with referring by book number to Homer, in his Commentary on Iliad 14. Similarly, papyrus texts of Homer show no book division until the first century BC. The author of the essay, On the Life and Poetry of Homer, attributes the Ionic letter-labels to the school of Aristarchus (54b, ch. 4), which corresponds with the range of dates from Aristarchus to these papyri.

The Homeric epics were not unique in their Ionic labels. Theophrastusí Laws seems to have been assigned Ionic letter-labels. The Ionic alphabet was also used to mark the number of lines in a text. Outside the library, Ionic letters designated anything which occurred in a series, including Athenian dikastai and building blocks of temples, altars, and monuments in Athens, Delphi, and elsewhere.

Some have seen symbolism in this division of the Homeric epics, offering the Christian imagery of alpha to omega as a parallel. The Christian symbolism appears, however, not to have been derived from the Greek world, but from the Hebraic. In the written form of the Hebrew word ìtruth,î used as a synonym for ìGod,î ìtruthî is spelled with the first, middle, and final letters of that alphabet.

The Homeric book division, I suggest, reflects the cultural world of the early third-century BC and later. When Demetrius of Phaleron was invited by the Ptolemies to establish the Library in Alexandria, perhaps he brought with him the ways of the Athenian book trade as well as scholars and texts. Demetrius had been, after all, part of Aristotleís circle, men dedicated to gathering and organizing knowledge.