{"id":50437,"date":"2024-05-17T14:14:40","date_gmt":"2024-05-17T13:14:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/?p=50437"},"modified":"2024-05-17T14:14:40","modified_gmt":"2024-05-17T13:14:40","slug":"from-my-diary-531","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/2024\/05\/17\/from-my-diary-531\/","title":{"rendered":"From my diary"},"content":{"rendered":"

In my last post I summarised as best I could the textual tradition of Plato, much of it from Pasquali’s Storia<\/em>, written in 1934 (!).\u00a0 After that, I returned to Pasquali, to see whether any other useful summaries of textual traditions lay hidden therein.\u00a0 Sadly “hidden” is the right word.\u00a0 The book is divided into sections, and the sections into chapters, and neither indicates the gold buried within.\u00a0 The material about Plato was in one of those chapters.<\/p>\n

The chapter itself was divided into 13 sub-sections, each headed only with a numeral.\u00a0 One of these gave the tradition of Plato, but if I had not known that it was there, I should not have known.\u00a0 Each sub-section was itself divided into sub-sub-sections, separated only by three asterisks.\u00a0 In fact the sub-sub-sections formed a pattern; stuff in the manuscripts, stuff in commentaries, etc.\u00a0 But no titles or marginalia indicated this.\u00a0 This is very hard on a non-Italian speaker.<\/p>\n

Worse yet, while each sub-section is indeed concerned with an author, such as Plato, or Homer, the reader must read almost a paragraph of piffle before any name is mentioned.\u00a0 Three of these mention some other<\/span> author first, just to confuse.<\/p>\n

It is really important, when writing something intended for more than one language group, to provide an apparatus of headings and numberings allowing the reader to find what he is looking for!<\/p>\n

Since then I have been reading into the textual transmission of Homer.\u00a0 The sheer quantity of talk is extraordinary, and most of it inward-looking.<\/p>\n

I was amused by some words of T. W. Allen, Homer: The Origins and the Transmission<\/em> (1924), online here<\/a>, whose edition of the text is still fundamental.\u00a0 Page 6:<\/p>\n

\n

The removal of \u2018literature\u2019 and the neglect of the principles of investigation imposed upon us these hundred years has led with me to remarkable results, namely the discredit of contemporary method and the rehabilitation of tradition. With whatever refraction and inaccuracy classical and mediaeval mentality present to us the ancient world, the image produced by modern philological method is more distorted, and is in fact in most cases completely false. The reasoning applied to ancient records in the last hundred years is not only baseless, but it has cumbered the old world with lumber which makes the study of it a difficult and certainly most tedious matter<\/em>. The repulsive jargon in which ancient history and literary criticism are conveyed, the narrow outlook, low vision and ignorance of human nature and the human mind\u2014its working and possibilities\u2014 have turned classical philology into ridicule.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

A century later, the same might be said again, I suspect.\u00a0\u00a0Indeed another scholar writing a couple of decades ago suggested that there is no such thing as “Homer”, only a mass of oral material more or less edited ad hoc by persons unknown in antiquity.\u00a0 From the lofty heights of his ivory tower, so far up in the clouds that the ground is no longer visible, he actually mocked a fellow scholar for expressing concern about whether we lose our Homer altogether in all this learned hairsplitting.\u00a0 It did not seem to occur to this gentleman, in his privileged little world, that somebody has to pay for his ivory tower, and that this someone might rather object to paying for the privileged to study something that doesn’t actually exist.\u00a0 The job of the text critic is to heal the text, not destroy it.<\/p>\n

There is a persistent lack of reference to the primary facts about the tradition in much of what I have read so far.\u00a0 This is not a good sign, in my experience.\u00a0 Whatever we say about antiquity must be grounded in that data.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In my last post I summarised as best I could the textual tradition of Plato, much of it from Pasquali’s Storia, written in 1934 (!).\u00a0 After that, I returned to Pasquali, to see whether any other useful summaries of textual traditions lay hidden therein.\u00a0 Sadly “hidden” is the right word.\u00a0 The book is divided into […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-50437","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-from-my-diary-announcements"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50437","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50437"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50437\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50437"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50437"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50437"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}