Lamberton, 'Plutarchus, Demosthenes et Cicero, Kartonierte Studienausgabe aus Plutarchi Vitae Parallelae', Bryn Mawr Classical Review 9512
URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/bmcr/bmcr-9512-lamberton-plutarchus
@@@@95.12.5, Ziegler, ed., Plut. Vit. sel. (Studienausgabe
Ziegler, Konrat (ed.), Plutarchus, Demosthenes et Cicero,
Kartonierte Studienausgabe aus Plutarchi Vitae Parallelae
Vol. 1, Fasc. 2, Ed. corr. ['643]. Leipzig: Teubner,
1994. Pp. iv + 95. DM 26. ISBN 3-8154-1691-4 (pb).
Ziegler, Konrat (ed.)., Plutarchus, Alexander et Caesar,
Kartonierte Studienausgabe aus Plutarchi Vitae Parallelae
Vol. 2, Fasc. 2, Ed. corr. ['682], Leipzig: Teubner,
1994. Pp.iv, 187. DM 34. ISBN 3-8154-1692-2 (pb).
Reviewed by Robert Lamberton, Classics -- Washington
University
rdlamber@artsci.wustl.edu
Konrat Ziegler devoted much of his long life to the editing
and reediting of Plutarch's Lives, along with the equally
thankless and unglamorous work of editing the
Pauly-Wissowa, where his own articles number in the
hundreds, as well as the Kleine Pauly. When he died early
in 1974, a few days before what would have been his 90th birthday
and less than a year after the appearance of his revision of the
final volume of the Lives (Vitae Parallelae
3.22, 1973), he had edited and published the entire
voluminous corpus twice. The first edition (1914-39), begun with
Cl. Lindskog, spanned the period between the two world wars, in
the first of which Ziegler was a combattant. As the
Nazizeit dawned, he was Rector of the University of
Greifswald, but was expelled from his position there after 1933
on the grounds of "untrustworthiness" (wegen nationale
Unzuverlaessigkeit) stemming from his opposition to
militarism and to anti-semitism (see his obituary by Lothar
Wickert, Gnomon 46 [1974], 636-40). It was many years
before he held another academic post, this time at Goettingen,
where he served as Honorarprofessor from 1950 until his
retirement in 1965. The final volume of the first edition of the
text of the Lives appeared in 1935 and his extensive and
invaluable indices to the entire corpus, in 1939. These volumes
quickly became unavailable for the obvious reasons.
There is little doubt that Ziegler's edition of the
Lives is, in the form in which he left it, "by far the
most convenient and distinguished available" (Christopher Pelling
in JHS 115 [1975], 217). The only competition has been
Robert Flaceliere's Bude (15 vols, 1957-79, with an Index des
noms propres by Edouard Simon as vol. 16, 1983). Flaceliere
was not generous in his reviews of his rival's revised edition as
it appeared (Revue de Philologie et d'Histoire 40 (1966),
332-33; Antiquite Classique 44 (1975), 256-57). He began
by deploring the division of volumes into numbered fascicles
(1.2, 3.1, etc.) which in his opinion "complique inutilement les
references et ne se justifie en aucune facon," and whose source
he found in "ce meme gout des vaines complications" that
cluttered Ziegler's margins with line numbers on the one side and
a sometimes bewildering annotation of the pagination of various
previous editions on the other, along with succinct indications
of the historical date of some of the events described in the
text (RPh 40 [1966], 332). Beyond Ziegler's admittedly
fussy format, Flaceliere was similarly grudging in his assessment
of the improvements Ziegler, now in his eighties, was making in
the work he had done thirty years earlier. Flaceliere criticized
his continuing zeal in changing word order in order to "eliminer
a toute force les hiatus," and characterized the bulk of
Ziegler's new readings as elevations to the text of emendations
previously aired in the apparatus of the first edition
(RPh 40 [1966], 333). Some of these criticisms are not
without foundation, and it is good to bear them in mind when
using Ziegler's text of the Lives, but his superior
apparatus and the sheer depth of scholarship that went into this
lifetime effort make it unlikely that any other editor will soon
supplant Ziegler's work.
Hans Goertner began his work on Ziegler's edition of the
Lives by producing a long-awaited and extremely valuable
new and corrected edition of the 1939 Index volume (1980).
His work on the current re-edition has been modest and ancillary.
There is, in fact, little reason to go to the expense of
replacing Ziegler's postwar edition (where substantial
improvements over the earlier edition in the apparatus and text
are widespread) with the corrected reprint.
Along with the new corrected edition, Teubner has taken the
interesting and welcome step of offering the separate, paperback
editions, under review here, of two of the most popular sets of
lives, Demosthenes and Cicero from 1.2 and Alexander
and Caesar from 2.2. These are certainly of pedagogical
value, and should and will be used in courses for students
advanced enough to read Plutarch "raw". They will have to be
supplemented, of course--e.g. by J. R. Hamilton, Plutarch:
Alexander, A Commentary (Oxford: OUP, 1969). That valuable
commentary in fact helps to bring into focus the greatest
shortcoming of this minimally modified re-edition of a text now,
by the most conservative of estimates, a generation old. Ziegler
helped Hamilton by giving him advance access to the then still
unpublished text of his last edition of the Alexander--and
Hamilton's commentary is closely matched to that text,
essentially unchanged in this new, corrected edition. But
Hamilton very occasionally ventured to differ with Ziegler's
reading and was sometimes clearly right (e.g. ch. 7, on the
question whether it was the Metaphysics [with the mss.] or
the Physics [Xylander's emendation followed by Ziegler] of
Aristotle that Plutarch identified as useless for learning the
field in question and of value only as a "memorandum"
[U(PO/DEIGMA] for those who had been taught it already).
Unfortunately, this "corrected" edition of Ziegler 25 years later
is not of a sort that would allow acknowledgement of such
contributions.
Nevertheless, these little paperback "study editions" mark a
great step forward in making this important text available in a
form financially accessible to students. But there is something
lost from Ziegler's second edition all the same. The quality of
the offset is mediocre and the improvements I have been able to
find are minimal. Where a correction requires a change in
spacing (e.g. Deomosthenes et Cicero, p. 23 = Vol. 1,
fasc. 2, p. 301, where the mistaken attribution of H)UTU/XHSE in
line 13 to Photius is now deleted) a blank is left, preserving
the lineation of the edition but at the cost of esthetic effect.
And even corrections of this sort are very few and far between.
More important, it is too bad that a little more thought was not
given to the problem of how to paginate these separate editions.
The pages are simply excerpted from the larger volumes and
repaginated, starting from page one. What was not taken into
consideration is the fact that Ziegler was given to referring in
his apparatus to page and line of his own edition when a nearby
passage might throw light on one of his editorial decisions. The
text of the apparatus is unchanged in the "study editions" but
the changed pagination renders these not infrequent references
unintelligible, so for instance, the reader who consults the
apparatus at p. 50, line 20 of the Alexander is told, "cl.
p. 201, 16," a reference that is accurate in the hardbound
edition and in its predecessors. But the reader of the paperback
who is not armed with the formula "N minus 150" (or "N minus 278"
in Demosthenes et Cicero) will have a hard time finding
the relevant passage--in this instance, line 16, p. 51 of the
book in hand. This sort of thing does not render the "study
editions" useless by any means, but this is sloppy and
regrettable book-production (as distinct from editing--I don't
mean to put this problem at Goertner's door and he may in fact
not be the responsible party at all). Flaceliere's rather testy
comment addressed to Ziegler's complex marginal notation is even
more relevant to this misleading apparatus: "on se demande
comment un lecteur un peu novice peut se reconnaitre dans le
fouillis de ces annotations" (RPh 40 [1966], 332).