Donald Mastronarde's work on the Euripidean scholia offers a stellar example of the thorough, nuanced work that is now possible. Part broad analysis, part focused study of individual manuscripts, Mastronarde offers important guidance on how we can approach these dramatic commentaries, the scholars (when identifiable) who penned them, and appreciate each of them on their own terms.
The term “Preliminary” in the title is vital to his project; given the paucity of available sources back in the pre-internet age, and the errors made by past editors, Mastronarde advises us to regard his work here as early days; but he offers a glimpse of what is possible for a new generation of scholars. The state of technology also enables Mastronarde to invite the reader/student to go online and read manuscripts side-by-side with him, as he describes what he has found.
Among the important contributions here is Mastronarde's treatment of the old Classicist fetish for ‘original’ commentaries, the mythical scholia vetera. Attribution of scholarship, like that of authorship, is always a dodgy proposition, and Mastronarde points out that in numerous cases where a Hellenistic scholar is named, the citations are not consistent among each other. Rather, they show signs of emendation and/or paraphrase, thus rendering them episodes in the history of the reception of Hellenistic scholarship, not truly ‘ancient’ scholia. He qualifies our attempts at pinning down the precise nature of the scholia vetera by noting “We have no idea … how many stages of anonymous adaptation, filtering, and compilation our corpus went through between the 2nd century CE and what we find in the minuscule manuscripts over 800 years later.” (26) In other words, the much-maligned recentiora may ultimately have a far longer lineage than first suspected.
An illustration of his reception-historical approach comes in the appendix to Chapter 1 (44-59), in which he states his case for the work of Arsenius (the first to publish a modern edition of the scholia) being based, to a significant part, on a specific Venetian manuscript, Marc. gr. 469. The evidence he cites – through parallel quotations – centres on the periphrastic commentary. We are still trying to reconstruct the process by which we have reached our current understanding of the scholia—warts and all – and Mastronarde offers one way to understand this history.
Chapter 2 includes a helpful typology of dramatic scholia, but also addresses some of the Middle-and-Late Byzantine commentators. No account of Euripidean scholia would be complete without a word or two about Ioannes Tzetzes, whose access to previous scholarship was vast. Tzetzes never hesitated to second-guess everyone as to the quality of Euripides’ work, in colourfully blunt language, and Mastronarde summarizes Tzetzes’ work concisely (77-89), while putting in a good word for a more discreet analysis by later scholars like Maximos Planudes (89-106).
Chapter 3 focuses on several manuscripts, beginning with Salamanca Bibl. Univ. 31 and Vatic. gr. 1345 (S and Sa, respectively) and culminates in the first publication of a miscellany found in Laur. plut. 31.03. Dating from the late 13th century, notes like these are easily overlooked because the manuscripts containing them don't include any dramatic text. Mastronarde publishes these notes here, comparing them with later texts, to further support his argument that Late Byzantine sources should be taken more seriously as evidence of scholastic practice in the Middle Byzantine period - and well before that. He also points out that as more manuscripts become available, and are studied in greater detail, more gems like this will likely be discovered.
As a rule, Mastronarde argues for earlier dates of production for manuscripts traditionally dismissed as too late to be of much relevance to classical scholarship. He does this to reinforce the value of Euripidean scholia from Middle and Late Byzantine MSS, and to argue that their commentaries almost certainly predate those times. Chapters 4 and 5 focus on specific, contrasting manuscripts: one of the earliest editions of Euripides extant, the 11th century Venetus Marcianus Graecus 471 (M); and the early 13th century Vatic. gr.909 (V), produced early in the reign of the Palaeologi. As I write this it is now possible to access facsimiles of both of these manuscripts online; you can complement Mastronarde's work (or even double-check it, if you wish) through direct analysis of the texts themselves.
One aspect of the scholia which—to my mind, at least—merits far more attention is that they were originally intended as a reconstruction of the original performance. As Mastronarde notes: “Dramatic texts that are being read will always require some recuperation of the speech situation by the reader or teacher.” (33). In an age when papyrus or vellum were the only recording devices available, a heavily-annotated manuscript page was the closest one could get to a ‘high fidelity recording’ of Euripides’ work. The verbal scholia would have complemented Aristophanes of Byzantium's diacritical marks, and offer nuances to delivery that would be instantly recognizable, say, to modern-day actors in rehearsal. The variety of strategies employed by the scholiasts, although regarded today as devoted to “readerly reception,” may also have been in service of an aural experience of the drama.
What is truly exciting about this volume is that it accompanies the first serious attempt to collate and publish poetic scholia online—Mastronarde is focused on the first 600 lines of Orestes, and as the numbers of available manuscripts proliferate the Euripidesscholia.org site should offer mind-blowing opportunities for future research. With the veritable tsunami of high-definition facsimiles of Byzantine manuscripts now available online, we are entering a new golden age of Byzantine philology.
Parallel to Mastronarde's project with the Euripidean scholia we also have Gregory Nagy's Homer Multitext Project, which offers a similar approach to Homeric scholarship, with facsimiles and transcriptions side-by-side. Both Mastronarde and Nagy wish to highlight the multivocal quality of the classical tradition, and aid us in appreciating in a far deeper way the long, complex path of Byzantine poetic criticism.
