Bibliography is a perilous trade. Let a man once follow a footnote, and he may find his hours and days consumed in searching for he knows not what – and wishes he did!
Today I made the acquaintance of a scholar who, as far as I can tell, is scarcely remembered. I first encountered him in a terse 19th century footnote.
The occasion was that I started to read about Byzantine Zoology – the study of animals in that period. The first author is a certain Timotheus of Gaza, who lived in the late 5th century, in the reign of the emperor Anastasius. The bibliographical source is Herbert Hunger’s Die hochsprachliche profane Literatur der Byzantiner, vol. 2, p.265. But I quickly discovered material online telling me that Timotheus was a pupil of the Egyptian philosopher, Horapollo. Unfortunately the ancient source was not specified.
However I was fortunate enough to come upon a preview of the Brill Companion to Ancient Greek Scholarship vol. 2, p.249, a volume hitherto unknown to me, giving a reference:
329. See Seitz [1892] 30 with n.3; cf. also Reitzenstein [1897] 312.
A bit of searching in the preview revealed that “Seitz” was Die Schule von Gaza, which was online here. This in turn had a nice note on p.30 which referred to Dr Egenolff, in gnomic terms:
The statement is plain enough; the claim is made in a manuscript, the “Codex Vallicellianus E 11”. Which is … what? Well, I thought that I would look up “Egenolff, Progr. Heidelberg, 1888.”
This apparently simple task has consumed much of the afternoon.
“Egenolff” is in fact Dr. Peter Egenolff, born in Limburg-Offheim in 1851, and who died young in Heidelberg in 1901. He seems to have spent his life in Heidelberg. There is an online entry for him at the German national library here, which points to a book entry, online in bitmap here, with a couple of pages on his life. Unfortunately the text was printed in Fraktur; and as neither German language nor Fraktur typeface is something I read with ease, the result is that I learned no more.
Somewhere there is Fraktur OCR, developed by Abbyy; but it was funded by public money in such a way that it was not made available to anyone. So … unless some German gentleman cares to transcribe it, the entry will remain unreadable.
Searching for Egenolff’s work produces a series of pamphlets online, all rather obscure. He seems to have specialised in philology, and in Greek grammatical and accentuation studies. For instance he published two volumes of Anonymi Grammaticae Epitoma, in different places: volume 1 appeared in 1878; volume 2 in 1889. These are extracts from manuscripts, with Latin preface and no translation. For a while I thought that our snippet must be in these; and I wished that I had more time to devote to reading them. He also published a Prolegomena in anonymi grammaticae epitomam; but this was in 1876 (online here).
Eventually I struck lucky: the volume is in fact Die Orthographischen Stücke der byzantinischen Litteratur / von P. Egenolff. … zu dem Programm des Gr. Gymnasiums Heidelberg für das Schuljahr 1887/88. (Online here). I think that Seitz could perhaps have picked a better abbreviation than “Progr.”. And on the last page of the booklet – all these items are less than 50 pages – we find the material that I was looking for. But that’s another story.
And I have still to look at “Reitzenstein”!