Hornblower, 'Interpolation in Thucydides', Bryn Mawr Classical Review 9512
URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/bmcr/bmcr-9512-hornblower-interpolation
@@@@95.12.11, Maurer, Interpolation in Thucydides
Karl Maurer, Interpolation in Thucydides. Mnemosyne
Supplement 150. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995. Pp. xxiv + 242.
$84.00. ISBN 90-04-10300-7.
Reviewed by Simon Hornblower -- University of Oxford
Karl Maurer of the University of Pennsylvania has written a
scrupulous, distinguished and important book. If Thucydides is
reading it somewhere, he is surely muttering "At last!" The
combination of akribeia with occasional wrath, and a witty
if sometimes acid style, all remind one of The Master himself.
Maurer proves hearteningly that work of the very highest value
can still be and is being done on the most difficult and the most
rewarding of Greek prose authors.
The preface announces with disarming, and as it turns out
misleading, mildness, that the author (henceforth "M") found
himself feeling that "present-day conservatism is a trifle
insensitive". But on p. xiii of the Introduction the mask has
begun to slip because we read that "my own position will be
somewhat relentlessly conservative"; the beguiling words "trifle"
and "somewhat" are characteristic. Again: ch. 1 begins by
declining to use or to offer a "typology" of interpolation: "the
attempt to organise the entire work by types would be
self-defeating". But again things turn out otherwise ("somewhat
otherwise"?) than we should expect from this programmatic
utterance, because the organisation of the book is indeed and
fortunately determined by, though admittedly it does not exactly
follow, the different types of interpolation (unconscious,
conscious and so forth). Ch. 2 is on interpolation in some
capital mss. exposed by others; the epigraphic ch. 3 treats IG
i383 and its relation to Thucydides (henceforth "Th.") v.47; the
inscription, M. concludes, does not encourage excisions. Ch. 4
covers 'linguistic' evidence (arguments from supposedly
impossible Greek. M. rightly calls this "the weakest of all
grounds of excision"). The magnificent and in every way central
ch. 5 is about the scholia and other sorts of indirect evidence.
Here M. makes some acute and elegant distinctions, designed to
subvert some traditional arguments of the slovenly "scholiastes
non legit" variety. Thus he notes that some "scholia" were not
originally written as such but were drawn from (for instance)
reference works whose authors extracted information from Th. This
disposes, or may on occasion dispose, of the standard editorial
argument that verbatim repetition by a scholiast of something in
a text is a reason for excision of the relevant bit of that text.
Ch. 6 discusses the evidence of L. Valla and its misuse by
modern critics, ch. 7 is on the papyri (conclusion similar to
that of ch. 3), ch. 8 is about internal evidence (allegedly
implausible or otiose supplements and so forth), ch. 9 discusses
miscellaneous passages in book viii. The remaining chapters are
10, "Unconscious interpolation", the short ch. 11 is "On the
possible extent and causes of very early corruption", and 12 is a
global Summary. There are appendixes on: Longer omissions in the
MSS; Conflated scholia; Dionysius' text of Th.; Valla's mistakes;
Remarks on editors and the stemma. Naturally with a book of this
degree of technicality, the indexes will be much used and include
above all a full index locorum but also a helpful index of
passages adduced for comparison.
M. asserts early on that "The MS tradition is sometimes, for
whole passages, at base astonishingly sound; and it is so even
where modern scholars find it impossible". This general statement
(which much of the book is devoted to demonstrating) is however
preceded by another to the effect that "one gets a strong
impression that much of the worst corruption is very old". By
this time one has begun to grasp what M.'s conservatism amounts
to. He does not at all deny corruption, or interpolation; but he
thinks the amount of "crude interpolation in Th. has been
exaggerated" (187) and (1) that when a passage is plainly
corrupt one should not immediately posit interpolation, "but bear
in mind the more constant presence of other kinds of corruption"
(M.'s emphasis). At several points in the book, M. has hard and
no doubt justified things to say about what he startlingly calls
"paranoia" - that is, the behaviour exhibited by those readers of
Th. who (like the present reviewer, who is singled out) "suffer a
sudden sort of paranoia, in which any kind of queerness or
roughness puts him [or her, one hopes] in mind of interpolation".
M. insists (26) on the austere principle that "words should
not be expelled from the text unless someone can explain how they
probably got there". I expect this is right, though I fear that
historians will nevertheless occasionally want to invert this and
ask timidly for an explanation of why Th. should have supplied
every scrap of the information he does ostensibly supply; I think
of some of the ritual material in i. 126 (Cylon); or Dorieus'
athletic victory at iii. 8, which looks to me terribly like some
of the items regularly deleted from the early sections of the
Hellenica of Xenophon, debatable though some of this stuff
is too. M. more than once associates "paranoia" of this sort with
the whiskered desperadoes of the nineteenth century, plus a few
revenants like myself. But one name oddly absent from M.'s
bibliography and I think from his book is that of F. Jacoby: see
FGrHist 323a F 24, commentary n. 18 and relevant text:
""this text [that of Th.], like any other, was not exempt from
small interpolations of matter"; in the footnote Jac. observed
that a systematic investigation of the texts of Herodotus, Th.,
and even Xenophon's Hellenica with a view to glosses of
this kind [he was thinking of i.50] would prove "most fertile".
But, he added darkly, "it must not be conducted along the lines
of Jachmann (recently Klio 35, 1942, p. 60ff.)". At this
point, however, I can sense Th. himself, as well as M. ,
beginning to frown, so I move hastily on.
On the "indirect tradition" it is a pleasure to see so many
favourable allusions to the late D. M. Lewis' work on the text,
in particular to his Princeton dissertation Towards a
Historian's Text of Thucydides (written in less than five
months in January-May 1952!) M. draws both on this and on Lewis'
phenomenally shrewd and assured reviews in JHS 1957
(Hemmerdinger), Gnomon 1966 (Kleinlogel), and CR
1980 (Ferlauto). Lewis' main thesis in the dissertation,
sometimes reiterated in the reviews, was that hellenistic
scholars either "improved" Th.'s text so as to bring it into line
with what they "knew" from (usually) Ephorus, or interfered with
the text in ways which betray their obsessive familiarity with
Homer. M. uses words like "astute" of Lewis' contributions to
Th.'s text, even though (75 n.30) in the end he recoils from full
acceptance of the 1952 Lewis thesis: "we should be wary of
attributing any kind of systematic interference in the MSS to
hellenistic "editors"..." M. frequently applauds the "attentive"
Andrewes (usually for HCT vol. 5, 1981). This is no more
than just, but in justice to Lewis it may be be observed that
Andrewes was able to benefit from his very full comments on and
correspondence about drafts of that final volume of the
commentary.
M. 's work is full of incidental surprises which are often a
sheer joy. Note the brilliant observation (74 n.28) that Th.
tends to enumerate places counter-clockwise, and he instances
vii. 57 (Syracuse allies). As it happens I can corroborate this
from iv. 109, where Th. enumerates the places on Akte in a
counter-clockwise direction, exactly reversing (with one
exception) Herodotus' clockwise order (Hdt. vii. 22)!
Sometimes M. does not cite (it would be rash of a reviewer to
say M. has missed) an obvious modern discussion. Mention was made
above of Andrewes, particularly for book viii to which (as we
have seen) M. allots a whole chapter. But H. Erbse's book
Thukydides-interpretationen (1989) was largely a critique
of Andrewes' handling of book viii and could have been cited by
M. with advantage, notably for viii. 71 (M. 156-9; contra,
Erbse 17-18). Again, M. (52-4) correctly urges the retention of
dia to periechein auten in iv. 102.4 (102.4 in some
texts). But W. K. Pritchett, Studies in Ancient Greek
Topography 3 (1980) 308-9 had already made this point quite
certain.
M. usually writes very well (but shame on him for the verb "to
diagram" at 121 n.32). I specially liked the drily sarcastic
concession that a "strategically placed" scribe can affect a
whole tradition, and the picture at 93 of scholars "sifting the
gravel [of Valla's Latin text] for the gold of old readings". M.
is harsh but fair in his judgments of other scholars, thus (114
n.18) a note of Arnold is "confused but interesting". More than
once he is moved to comment on the beauty of some examples of
Th.'s prose (26 n.31; 54 n.11; 121 n.32) but he does not tell us
why or how they are beautiful.
In a book of this nature and quality one does not expect to be
distracted by misprints in the Greek, but there are too many. 26
n. 31 sumphora; 31, quote from iii. 87 Athenaious
wrongly spelt twice and from ii. 50 autous and
nosesai wrongly accented; 39 line 3 up meta has
gone wrong; 40 foot Hude's punctuation with Jones' accentuation;
64f. Meritt misspelt in the usual way (but once spelt
correctly!); 111.2 up Endios; 174.6 intrusive breathing in
penultimate word.