G.P. Goold, 'Homer and the Alphabet'.
Apr. 4th, 2005 11:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bouteillebleuI've just finished an essay on the transmission of the Iliad and the Odyssey during antiquity, and G. P. Goold's article on Homer and the development of the Greek alphabet has wonderful footnotes. I quote parts of a few of them below. (Hopefully the best parts.)
2. A murderous attack on the theory forms a particularly enjoyable chapter of Wilamowitz's Homerische Untersuchungen...
10. Meillet... even wonders whether σπηεσσι (e.g. Odyssey 9.400) is a mistransliteration of ΣΠΕΣΙ, the correct form being σπεεεσσι !
13. "Intolerable," says Palmer intolerantly, apud M. Platnauer, Fifty Years of Classical Scholarship...
22. Touching the so-called Pisistratean recension (as opposed to a copy of Homer which may have been made for Pisistratus) I accept Davison's contention... that the story is a fiction of the Pergamenes designed to discredit Aristarchus, and is based on nothing more than implausible slanders of Megarian irredentists.
And the last line (minus the quotation), describing Homer as compared to his predecessors whose poetry was not recorded in writing:
2. A murderous attack on the theory forms a particularly enjoyable chapter of Wilamowitz's Homerische Untersuchungen...
10. Meillet... even wonders whether σπηεσσι (e.g. Odyssey 9.400) is a mistransliteration of ΣΠΕΣΙ, the correct form being σπεεεσσι !
13. "Intolerable," says Palmer intolerantly, apud M. Platnauer, Fifty Years of Classical Scholarship...
22. Touching the so-called Pisistratean recension (as opposed to a copy of Homer which may have been made for Pisistratus) I accept Davison's contention... that the story is a fiction of the Pergamenes designed to discredit Aristarchus, and is based on nothing more than implausible slanders of Megarian irredentists.
And the last line (minus the quotation), describing Homer as compared to his predecessors whose poetry was not recorded in writing:
He is Tiresias, and even in the land of the hereafter can speak to the generations of eternity; they are the merest shadows, without name as without voice.
