This excellent volume, which originated in a conference honouring Peter Parsons on his seventieth birthday, assembles sixteen papers presented by students and colleagues of a scholar internationally regarded as one of the pre-eminent figures in literary papyrology. This tribute showcases the variety of approaches essential to reconstructing historical and cultural contexts from fragmentary textual evidence.
O.'s essay stands as a searching prolegomenon to the (still unwritten) guide to the editing of fragmentary literary texts as it vividly illustrates aspects of the process of literary detection by which ‘fragments become texts in their own right’. His masterly reconsideration of Sappho fr. 1 well repays reading his arduous methodology section. Following up on E.G. Turner's conclusion that another poem of Sappho must have preceded fr. 1 in the papyrus roll, O. entertains the possibility that the text on the underlying layer is that of the hymn that Aphrodite partly quotes in the penultimate strophe in fr. 1 and reconstructs what a fragment of the hymn preceding Sappho 1 may have looked like.
S. West discusses the papyri of Herodotus, which comprise 47 entries in the database of Greek and Latin literary papyri Mertens-Pack3 (inexplicably referred to as Pack, Pack2 or Mertens-Pack throughout the essay). Nearly half the papyri contain passages from Book 1, West's primary focus. Most contain only a few chapters and only in one case do fragments belong to a roll originally containing the entire book, thus suggesting that some of the shorter fragments could be extracts. This leads West to suggest that the papyri could point to a readership wont to enjoy Herodotus in an ‘unhistorical’ way.
M. West surveys Pindar's complete poems and significant fragments with a view to portraying the poet as a man of letters who consciously and critically reflects on his predecessors, articulates a theory of lyric genres and possesses a sense of the evolutionary nature of literary history. He holds that Pindar must have kept copies of all his works, and that the substantial extant corpus of his compositions must go back to his own autograph private collection.
R. considers the methodological steps involved in detecting and reading irony, a quality whose detection can be shaped by one's idea of the character of the author and one's knowledge of other works by the author, as in Catullus 49. Most examples, however, are not so clear-cut. Taking Euripidean plays involving self-sacrifice or quasi-voluntary sacrifice as a test case, R. observes that whereas the text and the characterisation of the play itself make an ironic reading of IA plausible, the papyrus fragments of Erechtheus suggest that an ironic reading of that tragedy is misguided.
A. Hollis surveys traces of Greek literary culture in Hellenistic central Asia. They include remnants of tragic trimetres from Aï Khanum in Afghanistan, possibly debating Dionysus' claim to divinity as son of Zeus, and the autobiography of the Indian Sophytos in the form of an inscribed elegy from Kandahar (Alexandria Arachosia) that reveals not only strong influence from Homer but also familiarity with diction from the Callimachean Hecale.
Three essays are devoted to Menander. In the first, H.-G. Nesselrath observes that Menander is much more likely to be detected among the authorless papyrus fragments of comic plays than his contemporaries. Surveying the papyrus adespota accepted or rejected as Menandrean, Nesselrath highlights the danger of using purely stylistic criteria to determine authorship and suggests that the age of the papyrus could be used as a guideline instead. E. Handley† surveys the ‘rediscovery of Menander’ ushered in by the recovery of various collections of his plays in papyrus books and considers the important role which the visual representations of comedy perform both in the study of plays and fragments and in their reception. Next, C. Austin† applies his matchless intelligence and wit to reconstructing in critical detail the end of Act 1 and the beginning of Act 2 of Epitrepontes from the scraps supplied by P. Oxy. 68.4021 and 4641.
Five chapters explore Hellenistic poetry. In the first, A. Harder acknowledges the immense impact Supplementum Hellenisticum has had on scholarship on Hellenistic poetry, while noting that the bulk of the collection remains largely untapped. Making didactic poetry the object of her inquiry, she unveils what the fragments assembled in SH add to our understanding of the literary genre. In the second, S. Stephens argues that the myth of the Argonauts, with its links to Libya (and hence to Egypt), allowed Callimachus and Apollonius ‘to craft a legitimating myth for Greek occupation of an older culture’. She reads Pindar's 4 Pyth., in which the Argo breaks her voyage home by stopping on Thera, the site of a prophecy that a clod of Libyan soil will someday confer a Greek claim on Cyrene, as a key intertext for both poets.
Next, G. Massimilla offers a new text and interpretation of Call. fr. 93 Pf. The fragment concerns the sacrifice of Theudotus of Lipara to Apollo by the Tyrrhenians, a tale Callimachus told in Book 4 of Aetia. Massimilla surveys the various interpretations given of lines 1–6 and retrieves from the damaged lines 7–18 a narrative that harmonises both with the preserved text and the story as quoted in the scholia of the Ibis. In the fourth essay, R. Hunter discusses three related moments in the reception of Callimachus, pointing out the different ways in which his literary significance was articulated. Hunter begins with Severianus, whose open dislike of Callimachus he views as grounded in the polemical Neoplatonist distinction between inspired poets (Homer) and poets as mere master craftsmen (Callimachus). The second moment transpires in the obscure distich against Callimachus (Anth. Pal. 11.275), for which Hunter conjures a literary context and attempts a translation, and the third is On the Sublime 33–6 from which Callimachus' noticeable absence is explained as an implicit tribute to the poet's supreme reputation. In the last article on Alexandrian poetics, G. Hutchinson considers Ovid's use of secondary narrators and the poet's informed reworking of sources for the Greek myths which he introduces into Latin hexametric poetry. Ovid's epic is envisioned as constructing two ‘worlds’ – the ‘story world’ of the mythological events and the ‘writing world’ in which the poet/narrator designs the multi-level narrative and makes learned use of his sources and the reader ‘constructs’ his own image of the poet.
The last essays concern subjects chronologically rooted in the Roman period, whose elucidation is informed by their Greek background or foundations. M. Winterbottom ponders some of the ‘mysterious’ transitions that punctuate the story of ancient prose rhythm, such as the Hellenistic system (with its predilection for a cretic base), which the Romans adopted and modified, or the move from quantitative to accentual clausulae in Latin. Examination of rhythmical endings in 100 strong pauses in Pro Sulla 69–90 leads him to suggest that Cicero was not taught to speak rhythmically but that he ‘felt’ and developed various preferences from listening to orators in Rome and to Greek rhetors in Asia.
C. Riedweg's article showcases the linguistic and textual complexity of editing a multilayered source tradition. Of Alexander of Aphrodisias' De providentia we have two Arabic translations (one of which is based on a Syriac version) and seven fragments of the Greek text quoted exclusively by Cyril of Alexandria. The examination of both sources enables Riedweg to produce a new critical edition of the Greek fragments restored to their original sequence.
In his rich essay A. Henrichs first surveys the long scholarly debate over the ‘proper’ definition of what constitutes a Greek novel and next considers the chronology and transmission of the extant novels in light of the papyri. Lastly, he revisits Lollianus' Phoinikika, discusses a new lost ass romance and ponders the lessons to be learned from the thematic connections between Apuleius' Metamorphoses and the two new novels on papyrus.
The volume closes with a bibliography of Peter Parsons' publications, up to the summer of 2010, and two selective indexes. There is no comprehensive bibliography, as individual bibliographies are appended to each essay, and of the very few typos encountered in this meticulously produced book, only the omission of footnote 6 on p. 175 is serious.
The variety of the essays and the vast learning and ingenious wit of their authors contribute to making this volume an eminently worthy tribute to Peter Parsons, an exemplary and inspiring ‘artificer of facts’.
