Under the evocative title Mythographica Graeca. Transmisión, textos y contextos, this volume brings together a collection of thirteen studies that perfectly illustrate the usual definition of mythography as a multifaceted genre encompassing prose compilations of mythical narratives and their variants, their material supports and discursive forms, as well as their functions and reception. The book clearly reflects the aims of the mythographical tradition from late antiquity: first, to transmit the ‘mythical histories’ rooted in archaic Greek sources; and second, to endow certain ‘poetic tales’, usually associated with Homer, with new meanings.
The unifying thread of the volume is mythography itself. However, the protean nature of the genre made it necessary to adopt an organising principle, and the editors opted for a chronological arrangement of the individual chapters based on the dating of the texts explored and of their transmitters and recipients. This simple yet dynamic criterion successfully structures the study of authors ranging from the logographers (sixth century bce) to Antoninus Liberalis (second–third centuries ce), while also encompassing the analysis of agents and media of transmission, from late antiquity to the online databases of our own century. The heterogeneity of the genre is further reflected in the multilingual nature of the volume (Spanish, English and French).
The volume opens with J. Pàmias’s perceptive study, ‘Una memoria excéntrica: contribución al estudio sobre los orígenes de la historia local en Grecia’, which focuses on a largely overlooked aspect of early Greek mythography: evidence pointing to authority derived from outside the political community. Authors such as Xenomedes of Ceos, Acusilaus of Argos, Hellanicus of Lesbos, Cadmus of Miletus, Xanthus of Lydia and Hecataeus of Miletus offer new insights into the origins of local history in Greece by providing a more marginal and decentralised perspective, far removed from the Panhellenic, homogeneous and stable image forged by epic poets.
J. Pagès and N. Villagra, in ‘La transmisión del Mythographus Homericus y su recepción del mito griego: el nóstos de Diomedes como estudio de caso’, analyse the tradition concerning the νόστος and exile of Diomedes as a paradigmatic example of the problems surrounding sources, transmission and reception. Their fine-grained analysis highlights the textual and interpretative difficulties posed by the three scholia preserved in three different redactions, which nevertheless probably derive from a common source: the Mythographus Homericus.
Two contributions are devoted to the Bibliotheca of Pseudo-Apollodorus. J. Michels, in ‘Towards a New Text History of the Bibliotheca of Pseudo-Apollodorus’, emphasises the need for an up-to-date critical edition of this mythographical handbook. By revisiting the textual history of the work, she convincingly demonstrates how the recent editions by M. Papathomopoulos and F.J. Cuartero i Iborra (2010–2012) suffer from the lack of an established stemma of all the codices and from erroneous assumptions regarding the Epitome Vaticana.
S. Acerbo, in ‘Changing Mythography: the Apollodorus’ Library and its so-called epitomes’, examines in-depth the texts of the Epitome Vaticana and the Fragmenta Sabbaitica of the Bibliotheca and urges caution against the widespread practice of using them to reconstruct lost parts of Apollodorus’ work and their mythological content, especially the Trojan saga. Rather, these two collections of excerpts should be regarded as authentic mythographical works, which dispense with the genealogical structure of Apollodorus’ original, probably as a deliberate attempt to simplify the complexity of the tradition.
C.A. Martins de Jesus, in ‘Tzetzes, Hesíodo y las Pléyades (Σ Op. 383–384 = 246.23–247.2 Gaisford): un caso especial de transmisión mitográfica’, focuses on Tzetzes’ extensive scholium on the Works and Days concerning the Pleiades and its textual transmission. With great philological precision he analyses Tzetzes’ technique and assesses the value of this text both as a source for the now-lost Astronomica of Hesiod and as a model of commentary widely used by students and philologists until at least the sixteenth century.
J.B. Juan-López, in ‘The Scholia to Hesiod of John Pediasimos, Protospatharius and Diaconos Galenos. Content, Authorship and Textual Transmission’, argues convincingly for the attribution to John Pediasimos of a set of scholia on Hesiod’s Shield, Works and Days and Theogony as well as paraphrases and epitomes of four minor treatises by Michael Psellos. The internal coherence of the texts, their transmission and the analysis of the titles in the Triclinius edition of Hesiod all support the case for single authorship. This rigorous study paves the way for future critical editions essential for understanding the reception of Hesiod and Psellos in the Palaiologan period.
Ibáñez Chacón, in ‘La Biblioteca de Focio en el ms. 1170 de la Biblioteca de Catalunya: la péntada mito-paradoxográfica’, studies a mythographical miscellany that includes extracts from the Bibliotheca of Patriarch Photius, for which a complete overview is provided. Juan Páez de Castro is identified as the author of the manuscript, who made use of codex Ψ.19.10 from the Biblioteca Real of El Escorial, copied for Diego Hurtado de Mendoza. The study highlights the interest of European humanists in completing their personal libraries and acquiring works full of curiosities, mythographical variants and erudite learnings that would otherwise have fallen into oblivion without Photius’ detailed summaries.
J.B. Torres Guerra, in ‘El uso pedagógico de Cornuto y otros mitógrafos: más allá de la Edad Media’, analyses the complete codicological evidence for Cornutus’ Survey of the Greek Theological Traditions in order to establish which other works were copied alongside this mythological compendium. Special attention is paid to manuscript Ιβήρων 1317, which reveals the pedagogical contexts in which Cornutus could be read from the Roman imperial period to the eighteenth century.
Three contributions focus on Palaephatus’ Περὶ ἀπίστων. E. Villa, in ‘A late-15th Century Latin Translation of Palaephatus between Padua, Rome, and Pesaro’, reconstructs the history of the earliest Latin translation of the work, concluding that its source was a manuscript used at the University of Padua in the last quarter of the fifteenth century and that the translation circulated primarily within the Roman Academy of Pomponio Leto. A. Zucker, in ‘Paléfato en el Violario de Constantino Paleocappa’, examines the treatment of Palaephatus’ On Unbelievable Tales in Paleocappa’s Violarium, showing how the compiler preserves Palaephatus’ rationalising reinterpretations of myth while abandoning his critical stance towards traditional narratives. His concluding reflections on the degradation of knowledge caused by Paleocappa’s encyclopaedism are particularly thought-provoking. Alganza Roldán, in ‘Copias de Paléfato en el siglo XVIII: el último capítulo de la transmisión manuscrita’, surveys the known eight codices of Palaephatus produced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and preserved in Greece and other centres of Hellenic culture under Ottoman rule. Despite their limited textual value, these manuscripts provide crucial evidence for completing the history of the transmission and reception of the Περὶ ἀπίστων from the Renaissance to the dawn of the contemporary era, and they testify to the later reception and pedagogical use of mythography in Greek schools during the late Turcocratic period.
F. Graziani, in ‘Fonction herméneutique de la tradition Mythographique: les Opuscula mythologica physica et ethica de Thomas Gale (1688)’, analyses Gale’s mythographical collections, emphasising the multiplicity of functions – aetiological, epistemological and political – that ancient readers attributed to the mythographical tradition. Never dogmatically fixed, this tradition accommodated a variety of allegorical interpretations that did not imply inconsistency, but rather allowed for the combination of new meanings.
Finally, C. Delattre, in ‘Manuscrits, imprimés, écran. Les Métamorphoses d’Antoninus Liberalis et leurs avatars’, examines Antoninus Liberalis’ Metamorphoses within the framework of the CaMP (Catalogical Mythography and Paradoxography) digital project at the University of Lille. He traces the way in which editorial formats, from manuscript to screen, shape possible modes of reading. The electronic project succeeds in integrating features of the manuscript tradition (Pal. gr. 398, ninth century) that are omitted in printed editions, and even in proposing new editorial formats.
The volume concludes with a series of detailed indexes – of mythological protagonists, authors and works, copyists, editors and translators, and manuscript evidence –, which significantly enhance its value as a research tool.
The great merit of the volume lies in its rigorous philological treatment of innovative or insufficiently explored aspects of the transmission of ancient Greek mythography, its agents, modes and media. All the chapters are meticulously documented and, despite the intrinsic difficulty of some of the subject matter, are written with notable fluency. The book convincingly conveys the idea that in the learned transmission of ancient Greek mythographers, hermeneutics are not confined to scholia and commentaries, but also shape the ways of updating this antiquarian legacy through new editions and translations.
