Non-Alexandrian erudition
and the papyri

Cassandra Borges (University of Michigan)

The study of para-literary and sub-literary papyri has, in recent years, dramatically increased what we know about the process of organizing, writing down, and disseminating literature in the Hellenistic world. Yet although our primary information comes almost exclusively from the chōra, the focus has too often been on what we can learn about Alexandrian scholarship from the papyrological record; the trickle-down effect is assumed to be in operation. There is nevertheless a great deal of material, even in the papyri with obvious scholarly antecedents, that is difficult to relate directly to the work of the Museum—material such as literary texts, catalogues, or hypotheses written in unpracticed and awkward hands, on inexpensive and sometimes even shoddy materials. A case in point is a new second-century BCE list of lyric and tragic incipits from the University of Michigan’s collections: its hand is irregular but confident, and it is written on a piece of cut-down palimpsest; it nevertheless features some highly sophisticated headings to separate entries by genre. Examination of this and similar texts—in their original context where possible—suggests that the practice of selecting and excerpting pieces of Greek literature is in itself an important component of a user’s claim to Greek identity. Adding headings, paragraphoi, and similar organizational features to an anthology is a way of asserting control over the works that it contains. The use of palimpsest and documentary-grade papyrus for sophisticated, carefully organized texts in relatively untrained hands—such as the Michigan incipits—suggests that even users who were unable to acquire high-quality papyrus, or hire trained scribes to copy their texts, wanted to participate in the selection and categorization of Greek literature for themselves. For the anthologizers of Ptolemaic Egypt, the process is almost as important as the result.