Papers related to papyrology at the upcoming Meeting of the Soc. for Classical Studies in New Orleans
Session #5
New Fragments of Sappho
Andre Lardinois, Radboud University Nijmegen, Organizer
Recently a new set of papyri with fragments of Sappho has been discovered. They preserve five stanzas of a completely new poem (Brothers poem), parts of three other new poems (Kypris poem, fr. 16a and the poem that preceded fr. 5), and add substantial new readings to fragments 5, 9, 16, 17 and 18. The purpose of this panel is to introduce this new material and to start the discussion of its significance both for our understanding of Sappho, her reception in Latin literature, and the presentation of her poetry to the larger public.
Andre Lardinois, Radboud University Nijmegen
Introduction (10 mins.)
1. Dirk Obbink, University of Oxford
Provenance, Authenticity, and Text of the New Sappho Papyri (25 mins.)
Paper 1: Provenance, authenticity, and text of the New Sappho Papyri
In this paper I wish to discuss the authenticity and dating of the new fragments on the basis of archaeological, linguistic, metrical, and textual evidence, and show how the detailed tracing of the provenance of one of the groups of new fragments was instrumental in leading to the discovery and identification of the other. Analysis of the preservation and conservation of the papyrus fragments yields further a strategy for reconstructing its fragmentary portions, including the new ‘Kypris Song’.
I will further discuss the literary and performative context in which these new fragments have to be situated. These new fragments of Sappho, published in Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 189 (2014) 1-50, show conclusively the alternation in Book One of poems about family and cult on the one hand, and personal concerns about love on the other. In particular, a cycle of poems concerning sea-faring is revealed, centering on the life of a mercantile family of wine-traders on 7th century Lesbos. The presence of Dionysus in the trinity of gods in the Pan-Lesbian sanctuary at Mesa on the island is explained, and the whole complex of love, sea-faring, wine, and trade falls neatly into the context of Herodotus’ story (2. 135) of how Sappho’s brother Charaxos spent ‘a great deal of money’ (χρημάτων μεγάλων) to free his lover the courtesan Rhodopis (aka Doricha), then a slave at Naucratis in Egypt—for which Herodotus claims a pedigree in a poem of Sappho’s. In Sappho fragments 5 and 17 and now the ‘Brothers Song’ we can see the existence of a particular song type: a prayer for the safe return of the merchant-gone-to-sea (or going). The prayer may rehearse an occasion leading to the performance of a song, or its actual performance in the past or present. The prayer for safe return, introduced as a matter of concern, then expands to envisage what such a return would mean for the family—wealth (images of which are ubiquitous in Sappho, as I will show), and an enhanced social position in the community. A further connection with the poems involving Aphrodite, who dominates book one but is virtually absent from poems in the other books, is suggested, since she is also typically invoked in seaside cults as a protectress of sailors. She connects the poems about love and about the sea in Book One of Sappho.
2. Joel Lidov, City University of New York
(S)he Do the Polis in Different Voices (25 mins.)
Paper 2: “(S)he do the polis in different voices”
Eliot’s quotation of Dickens draws attention to the familiar poetic paradox that the outstanding character of one single voice can be that it is the voice of many. The numerous additions to known poems in Sappho, Book One, published in ZPE 189 allow us to isolate this problem in the study of her work, for they make possible a fresh look at the unification of ritual repetition and personal experience in the Sapphic-stanza poems without appealing to theories that portray a uniform Sappho active in the whole corpus. Among these theories the last few decades have seen the gradual abandonment (led especially by Parker 1993) of a priori notions of the essential female poet. Most new attempts define Sappho by means of a cultural context: Williamson (1995) reintroduced the communal aspect; Aloni (1997) emphasized social “function”; Calame (1997, most recently 2012) applied a comparative anthropology; Stehle (1997) drew conclusions from reconstructions of performance situations in a “women’s circle”; Lardinois (in a series of articles 1994 through 2008) looked for a choral presence throughout the corpus; but Ferrari (2007/2010) returned to a strict biographical method that situated the personal in the political, and Schlesier (2014) has recently proposed a total revision of the biographical persona.
The new text of fr. 17 puts into relief the failed history of reconstructions (summarized in the most recent attempt, Lidov 2004) based on an expectation of what Sappho might do. But the importance of Hera in that poem can be now appreciated in a broader context. For example, the discovery that Kypris does not begin fr. 5 requires a new motivation for her presence in the last stanza and encourages comparison with her appearance in the last stanza of fr. 15, as well as with the implication of marriage at the end of the new Brothers poem. All of these poems apparently concern the safe return of a family member away at sea. The connection of this motif to formal and organized prayer to Hera in the Brothers poem draws fr. 17 into this perspective, and now enough of fr. 9 exists to suggest strongly the presence of thematic words from this group. On this basis it is possible to hypothesize a prayer structure that is formally different from the kletic and hymnic forms made familiar by Norden. Together with examples in Alcaeus of the importance of helper gods and of the role of the Mesa precinct in prayers for safe return, a picture of a ritual occasion emerges. On the one hand the role of Kypris in this group provides a link to the seemingly personal “erotic” poems; on the other, the multiple instances discourage emphasis on the experience of any individual. A more difficult example is posed by the new confirmation that there was almost certainly a complete poem after Sa. 16 and before Sa. 17. The editors place the start of it at Sa. 16.21; this yields a statement of individual experience in a ring composition; but the textual evidence also allows placing the start of “Sa. 16a” one stanza later, so that it would provide a generalizing comment on the previous experience suitable to a ritual context (the same dilemma is posed by Sa. 31).
Alongside these appearances of generic types we have to place distinctions in tone that mark the instances. The “erotic” poems display the power of Aphrodite but are otherwise dissimilar in substance, and they vary from the passion of Sa. 31 to the cool logic of Sa. 16. The dramatic introductory rhetorical question of the new Kypris poem has no parallel. The Brothers poem shows a syntactic complexity, uses of the subjunctives, and a repetitive 2+3 structure in the adonean not elsewhere typical of Sappho. Perhaps Sappho adapted performances of a single type to a variety of situations, each with its appropriate voice.
3. Eva Stehle, University of Maryland
Sappho and Her Brothers (25 mins.)
Paper 3: Sappho and Her Brothers
The newly-published poem by Sappho, which Dirk Obbink (2014) has dubbed the “Brothers Poem,” is rhetorically unlike any other extant (and readable) example of archaic or early-classical lyric. Lines 11-16, however, do have some affinities in language and theme with Pindar’s epinicians. The similarities suggest that the Brothers Poem could be an exemplar of the kind of poetry prominent families produced for themselves before Simonides and Pindar professionalized its production into different praise genres. And at first blush the Brothers Poem appears straightforward, as one might expect of a quotidian, occasional form: the speaker is arguing that the situation calls for her prayers, not irrational optimism.
Yet, while such in-house great-family poetry may well be the background for this poem, close attention to the rhetoric shows that Sappho has subtly and indirectly fashioned a more radical critique that shares some stylistic qualities with her love poetry. Like Pindar a century later, she adapts a tradition of poetic position-taking to express a deeper vision, in her case a woman’s lightly-veiled critique of her family’s political outlook.
To demonstrate, I begin with a comparison of Sappho’s lines 11-16 with Pindaric statements about the gods’ care in renewing the fortunes of a deserving house, using Isthm. 1.32-40 and Isthm. 4.14-23. I conclude that it was probably a common trope in great-family poetry, a counter to the pervasive Greek sense of cosmic flux. Sappho and Pindar share metaphorical use of eudia, good weather, to express the idea of revived fortunes.
I then show that Sappho uses this trope to characterize the conception that she is opposing. The first- and second-person forms in the first two stanzas reveal the relationship between speaker and addressee. I connect that relationship with the contrast in how each sees the solution to the current anxiety. The addressee asserts that Charaxos does/will come, with a “full ship”; the speaker proposes that she pray for him to come “captaining his safe ship.” That the difference between “full” and “safe” is significant is confirmed when she adds, beginning a new stanza, “and find us safe and sound” (9). She thus hints that she perceives a threat not just to Charaxos and his cargo but also to those at home. She next recommends simply entrusting “the rest” (i.e., the cargo) to the gods -- since, we must deduce, that for her the danger to the whole family’s safety appears as the greater problem. But instead of saying this in opposition to the addressee’s concern with cargo, she invokes the trope, the emotional basis of the addressee’s anxious conviction that it must come, in order to set his/her mind at rest about it.
Then in the last stanza Sappho undermines the idea that the cargo per se will bring well-being. Its first word, kammes (and we, 17), contrasts with kēnoi (those, 15) whom the gods make wealthy. We might be freed from grief if Larichos “lifts his head and finally becomes a man.” The domestic threat must be connected with Larichos’ behavior. Line 20 recalls 12, but its optative expresses the speaker’s doubt in contrast to the trope’s serene indicative.
Finally I will deal with the vexed problem who the addressee in the poem is. I suggest that the addressee is a male family member, which would explain speaker-addressee relations in the opening (cf. Hector telling Hecuba to pray in Iliad 6). Notionally, if not in performance, it could be Larichos himself. This poem is like Sappho 16 Voigt in its strong but inexplicit contrast of conventional male poetic perceptions with Sappho’s female perspective.
4. Llewelyn Morgan, University of Oxford
The Reception of the New Sappho in Latin Literature (25 mins.)
Paper 4: The Reception of the New Sappho in Latin Literature
No sooner had new fragments of Sappho come to light, than Latinists were trying to gauge their impact on Roman poetry. This paper will assess the relevance of this new material for our understanding of Latin literature, in the process arguing that an important connection exists between Sappho’s Brothers Poem and what is arguably Horace’s greatest lyric of all, Odes 3.29.
I will begin by sketching (rapidly) the remarkably pervasive influence exerted by Sappho on Roman literature, using specific examples to illustrate the depth and detail of the Roman engagement with this poet. For example, Sappho fragment 31 is famously imitated by Catullus, and alluded to by Horace, but is also a tangible presence in Plautus, Valerius Aedituus and Lucretius. Both Statius and Juvenal engage creatively with the Sapphic tradition as they find it, while Catullus 11 is a masterpiece of formal impropriety which exploits a Roman perception of Sappho (constituted both by her poetry and a tradition of commentary represented by figures such as Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Demetrius) to represent his lover and his love affair as a ghastly inversion of the Sapphic romantic ideal. I shall draw particular attention to the resurrection by Catullus and Horace of the sapphic stanza. But I also want to highlight the value of [Ovid] Heroides 15 as testimony for Sappho’s poetry and the Romans’ perception thereof: as I shall illustrate, the nature of Sappho’s relations with her addressees, the relevance of marriage as a context for her love poetry, and the status and circumstances of her brother Charaxos (who is of central importance in interpreting the new fragments), all find useful elucidation in the ps.-Ovidian poem.
Turning to the new fragments, after summarizing the observations of Phillips and Hutchinson on points of contact between the Brothers Poem and Horace’s Soracte Ode, 1.9, I will follow up on a suggestion of Morgan (2014) that an even stronger similarity can be identified between Sappho’s poem and the last stanzas of Horace’s valedictory ode to his first collection (understanding 3.30 as a freestanding sphragis), 3.29. Like 1.9, 3.29 displays verbal parallels to the Brothers Poem, and shares a fatalistic ethos (and the metaphor of stormy weather for the inherent unpredictability of human life), but what 3.29 has in common with Sappho (and 1.9 does not) is a more overtly economic characterisation of the fickleness of fortune, ultimately realised in a developed association of the vicissitudes of life with the uncertainties of Mediterranean sea trade. Sappho’s brother Charaxos was of course a trader, and the influence of Sappho’s poem about her brothers is most obvious in the awareness that the Brothers Poem and Odes 3.29 share of the perils of maritime commerce—how fine a line separates the arrival of a ship laden with goods, and a ship that has gifted those goods to the avaricious sea.
To find parallels between these new fragments and the Soracte Ode is exciting enough. But to identify their presence in a poem with the formal prominence of Odes 3.29 is, I shall suggest, even more striking evidence of the centrality of Sappho to Horace’s conception of lyric poetry. What would we find if we had all nine books of her poetry!
5. Diane Rayor, Grand Valley State University
Reimagining the Fragments of Sappho (25 mins.)
Recent Sappho discoveries allow us to reinterpret old fragments in light of the new additions to them. This paper focuses on the process of translating fragments, particularly the “New Kypris” poem, which is the more complete fr. 26 (Voigt), as well as (briefly) the re-translations of frs. 5, 9, and 17. While fr. 5 requires the additional pieces to fill in gaps and confirms a clear scenario, fr. 9 merely adds a few word images to the current list, and fr. 17 demonstrates how tenuous are our guesses in filling gaps. The new Kypris poem, however, radically changes the reading of the fragment 26 (Voigt) to which it adds. The initial six lines of the Kypris poem overlap with fr. 26 sufficiently to show that the previous suppositions were completely incorrect, and that the three stanzas address Aphrodite and most probably focus on the pain of erotic passion.
Translations of Sappho, particularly those for readers who cannot consult the Greek, optimally work on three levels: 1) The translation invokes the absent song. This involves working with sound, as well as paying attention to signs that could indicate performance possibilities (such as feminine plurals for choral song). 2) The translation reads as poetry. This involves compensating for missing words by helping the reader fill the gaps. 3) The translation evokes the physical fragment on worn or torn papyrus through various strategies.
Readers of Sappho come to the Greek text with their own expectations of what makes a Sappho poem. Because translators are readers first and then writers of text, translations provide a lens on the storytelling process. In translating fragments, the reader imagines a story, the song behind the scraps of words and phrases; the mind connects the dots to produce some kind of story. As Rayor notes, “The holes in the text are not left empty in the reading process. As we read, we fill in, ‘read between the lines.’” (15) This happens even with small scraps (cf. Anne Carson’s If Not, Winter in which “if” is not fully visible in the Greek fragment [22], yet the title of the book and the translation of the fragment build a story of Sappho’s poetry).
A single word can shape the tone of the fragment. An example is the word choice for the sole word visible in the P.Oxy. 1231 of fr. 26.5: ἀλεμάτ[ (idle, vain, crazy, day-dreaming). Each possibility calls up a different image of the speaker and referent. Yet in the context of the Kypris poem additions (P. Sapph. Obbink), it is most likely an adverb referring to the goddess
Intrageneric Dialogues in Hellenistic and Imperial Epic
James Clauss, University of Washington, Presider
1. Michael Haslam, University of California, Los Angeles
Argeia and Thersander in Antimachos’ Thebaid? (20 mins.)
In this paper I venture a proposal for Antimachos’ Thebaid. While it was his elegiac Lyde that stirred dissension among the Alexandrian poets, it was the Thebaid, his major work, that secured him a place in the canon of epici. Little is left of it. But there does exist a large fragment of a scholarly ancient commentary, published by Vogliano in 1935 (P.Mil.Vogl. I.17, 2nd cent. CE), just in time for inclusion as an appendix in Bernard Wyss’s still indispensable edition of Antimachos’ remains (Wyss 1936, 76-90). The commentary is unequivocally on Antimachean epic: one would expect it to be on the famed Thebaid. I believe that it is, and that it yields important information about the poem.
Reluctance to accept the Thebaid as the (exclusive) subject of the papyrus commentary has been based primarily on the fact that several of its lemmata appear to concern Artemis/Eileithuia rather than the saga of the Seven against Thebes. The first surviving lemma is a one-and-a-half line reference to her (fr. 174 Wyss [F99 Matthews]), and subsequent lemmata imply a birth and afterbirth cleansing (esp. frr. 178-179 W. [F103-104 M.]). In later lemmata, however, an Erinys appears (line 47 δὴ τότ’ Ἐρεινὺϲ ἦλθεν …, fr. 187 W. [F112 M.]), and this, as is widely recognized, would well suit the Thebaid, especially if the Erinys is Oedipus’, as Paul Maas (ap. ed. pr.) appealingly speculated.
Maas dealt with the problem of coherence by positing an unsignaled switch from the shadowy Artemis to the Thebaid in the course of the commentary fragment. The idea has been embraced by some scholars (Barber 1938, 1968 [“an erudite commentary on his Artemis (end) and Thebais (beginning)”], Trypanis 1981) but falls foul of invariable commentary practice. The commentary must surely be on a single work (cf. Lloyd-Jones and Parsons at SH 65: “eiusdem carminis esse credas”), no doubt on a single book. Victor Matthews, for his part, the most recent editor of Antimachos, is alone in assigning the entire commentary to the Artemis (Matthews 1996, pp. 44-45, 266-310), on the strength of the lemmata referring to the goddess; but these are wholly inadequate grounds for such an attribution, and most scholars reject the very existence of an Antimachean Artemis. Antimachos’ one and only epic, in fact, appears to have been the Thebaid. (The probability that the Deltoi was elegiac has been bolstered by a papyrus fragment published in 1994 [Brashear 1994].)
So it is reasonably safe to proceed on the assumption that the commentary is on one of the many books of the Thebaid. And it is not too hard to accommodate the problematic lemmata. The presence of Artemis/Eileithuia is accounted for by the childbirth, evidently the focus of this section of the poem, followed by the sudden appearance of the Erinys. Clearly, it is a significant birth. I propose that the mother is Argeia (Adrastus’ daughter, Polynices’ wife), and the newborn child Thersander (who was to rule Thebes after the expedition of the Epigoni). The proposal is a simple one, may even seem an obvious one, but seems not to have been made before. I find no competing identifications.
If this is right, it is of considerable interest that Antimachos involved Argeia and the infant Thersander in the story of the expedition against Thebes, and I end by briefly sketching something of the significance it may hold for the poem itself and for the poem’s relations with other treatments of the saga both earlier and later (Statius’ Thebaid among them), matters which invite fresh exploration beyond the scope of this paper.
Session #42
The Problematic Text: Classical Editing in the 21st Century
Tom Keeline, Western Washington University, and Justin Stover, University of Oxford, Organizers
Some 50 years ago E.R. Dodds remarked that our classical texts were good enough to live with; D.R. Shackleton Bailey replied, “That depends on your standard of living.” It’s now 2015: Do textual criticism and editing still have a place in classical scholarship? How does textual criticism overlap and interact with other established and emerging fields of classical studies, such as papyrology, reception studies, and digital humanities? What possibilities for editing classical texts are provided by new technologies like electronic text corpora, manuscript digitization, and digital editions? This panel showcases new work in textual scholarship that demonstrates the field’s ongoing importance to contemporary classical studies.
Justin Stover, University of Oxford
Introduction (5 mins.)
2. Sarah Hendriks, University of Oxford
Editing the Latin Papyri from Herculaneum: The Case of PHerc. 78 (20 mins.)
4. Francesca Schironi, University of Michigan
Philology and Textual Editing in the Classroom (and beyond) (20 mins.)
This is an aporetic paper, which is neither meant to provide answers nor even suggestions; rather, it raises questions. It will be divided in two parts: first a ‘pars construens’ and, then, a ‘pars destruens’. This anticlimactic order indeed reflects my own ‘aporia’ about the future of our discipline. I will tackle the problem from a didactic rather than scholarly perspective, and focus on which space, if any, philology and editing have or should have in the training of younger generations of classicists.
In the pars construens I will list and briefly discuss some examples of what philologists can (still) do. Aside from editions of new texts, there is still plenty to do for scholars with what is already published. Papyri, fragments of minor authors, texts already published but nevertheless little known are waiting for more studies to gain appreciation in a wider audience. While most students gravitate toward the ‘usual’ authors (Homer, the tragedians, Virgil, just to name a few) there are many other authors, more or less technical or ‘famous’, that lay neglected and that could be excellent topics for dissertations or beyond, if only scholars were willing to present them in a more interesting way. Technical disciplines like medicine or mechanics, or minor authors of more important/literary genres are all fields that need work – and good editions. Papyri with fragments of unknown or very little known authors are also another field of research; moreover, papyri allow us studying also the ‘material’ aspect of our discipline, namely, book and book production – another neglected area of investigation. Yet, (and this is the pars destruens) there are problems. For all these very interesting studies one needs a rather technical background. It is not only a (fundamental!) question of an excellent knowledge of the ancient languages. To carry out philological and editorial work one often needs training in paleography and papyrology and sometimes a background in other, even more technical disciplines, such as medicine or mathematics for those who are interested in ancient sciences. Who is giving our students this training? I am not talking of whether or not there are instructors capable to teach these disciplines. I am much more concerned with the actual possibility to find the time and the ‘mental space’ to do it. In the institutions I have worked recently, faculty is more and more pressed to offer ‘broad’ courses to attract undergraduates. I teach a lot of reception and courses in translation. In fact, I genuinely enjoy them; yet, this is how most of my time is occupied. Another problem is that graduate students, who would be the target of philological training, often do not have a sufficient background for it. It is not their fault, as everyone knows. It is the system. Colleges do not train ‘philologists’ and I am afraid that graduate programs do not often have the time or the energy to bridge this gap. There are exceptions, of course, but they do not change the broad picture. In fact, these exceptions face another problem: finding a job. Who is going to hire someone with a dissertation on philological topics or, worse, consisting in an edition? American academia does not train or search for philologists, at least, not generally. I am not even certain that this is a bad thing – there are many other interesting areas to explore in classics. For all these reasons, many of us dissuade students from working on ‘editions’ or purely philological topics.
As is clear, I do not have an answer to what we should do or even if we should do anything at all to ‘resuscitate’ philology in our classrooms and beyond. Yet, at least, I am
glad that a panel has been organized to start facing these issues and discuss them.
Culture and Society in Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Egypt
Organized by the American Society of Papyrologists
Todd Hickey, University of California, Berkeley, Organizer
This year’s panel well illustrates the breadth of current papyrological research. It commences with a paper that challenges us, through a careful analysis of Egyptian funerary texts, to rethink our conceptions of translation. This is followed by a novel interpretation of a meletē on a Ptolemaic papyrus that yields an additional source for the suicide of Demosthenes. Socio-historical syntheses of assemblages of documentary texts from the Fayum depression are the object of the third and fourth contributions. The fifth paper moves into the “subliterary,” providing a close reading and contextualization of a Christian amulet. The panel closes with the presentation of a new document from a well-known late antique archive from Oxyrhynchus.
1. Emily Cole, University of California, Los Angeles
Translation as a Means of Textual Composition in the Bilingual Funerary Papyri Rhind I and II (25 mins.)
Under Ptolemaic and Roman rule, a number of innovations appear in Egyptian funerary practices. One of the most interesting is the appearance of many unique texts at this time. New compositions were creatively fashioned by borrowing themes and passages from earlier materials and religious rituals and combining them with original content in inventive ways. One particularly fascinating example is found in Papyri Rhind I and II, now housed at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh (Inv. A 1956.313-4). The papyri, which date to the 21st year of the reign of Augustus (9 BCE), were discovered in situ in the Theban necropolis by Sir Alexander Henry Rhind in 1857 (G. Möller, Die beiden Totenpapyrus Rhind des Museums zu Edinburg [Leipzig, 1913]). The texts had been placed within the sarcophagi of their owners, a husband and wife from Armant named Monthesuphis and Tanuat.
The Rhind Papyri are exceptional in that each bears two versions of the same text, first in Hieratic Middle Egyptian and beneath in Demotic. Comparison of the two language versions, however, does not readily indicate which one was the source text and which the target text of the translation. Instead, the two versions complement one another and should be read in unison in order to grasp a deeper understanding of the traditional religious principles at work. In this paper, I begin by outlining the ways in which the two versions of the texts diverge from one another; these include the addition or omission of words and phrases, the variation between names and epithets of deities, and the use of individualized references to the deceased. Then I examine the nature of the Middle Egyptian used in this text. I highlight instances where translation between the two versions was unnecessary because the same term existed in both phases of the language, but a variant was nevertheless chosen. This investigation will allow me to touch upon the nature of translation both in ancient Egypt and more generally. By fully documenting the translation practices in the Rhind papyri, I will attempt to demonstrate that the restricted understanding of translation as taking place when a source text is transformed into a target text is not sufficient in this instance (for more traditional views on translation, see S. Bassnett, Translation Studies [New York, 2002], and B. Hatim and J. Munday, Translation: An Advanced Resource Book [New York, 2004]). The Rhind papyri are rather examples of the manipulation of language; it was the scribe who had control over the creative process. The use of translation in these documents was, therefore, not simply as a tool for linguistic comprehension but a means of composition in its own right.
2. Davide Amendola, Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa
The Account of Demosthenes’ Death in P.Berol. inv. 13045 (25 mins.)
Under Ptolemaic and Roman rule, a number of innovations appear in Egyptian funerary practices. One of the most interesting is the appearance of many unique texts at this time. New compositions were creatively fashioned by borrowing themes and passages from earlier materials and religious rituals and combining them with original content in inventive ways. One particularly fascinating example is found in Papyri Rhind I and II, now housed at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh (Inv. A 1956.313-4). The papyri, which date to the 21st year of the reign of Augustus (9 BCE), were discovered in situ in the Theban necropolis by Sir Alexander Henry Rhind in 1857 (G. Möller, Die beiden Totenpapyrus Rhind des Museums zu Edinburg [Leipzig, 1913]). The texts had been placed within the sarcophagi of their owners, a husband and wife from Armant named Monthesuphis and Tanuat.
The Rhind Papyri are exceptional in that each bears two versions of the same text, first in Hieratic Middle Egyptian and beneath in Demotic. Comparison of the two language versions, however, does not readily indicate which one was the source text and which the target text of the translation. Instead, the two versions complement one another and should be read in unison in order to grasp a deeper understanding of the traditional religious principles at work. In this paper, I begin by outlining the ways in which the two versions of the texts diverge from one another; these include the addition or omission of words and phrases, the variation between names and epithets of deities, and the use of individualized references to the deceased. Then I examine the nature of the Middle Egyptian used in this text. I highlight instances where translation between the two versions was unnecessary because the same term existed in both phases of the language, but a variant was nevertheless chosen. This investigation will allow me to touch upon the nature of translation both in ancient Egypt and more generally. By fully documenting the translation practices in the Rhind papyri, I will attempt to demonstrate that the restricted understanding of translation as taking place when a source text is transformed into a target text is not sufficient in this instance (for more traditional views on translation, see S. Bassnett, Translation Studies [New York, 2002], and B. Hatim and J. Munday, Translation: An Advanced Resource Book [New York, 2004]). The Rhind papyri are rather examples of the manipulation of language; it was the scribe who had control over the creative process. The use of translation in these documents was, therefore, not simply as a tool for linguistic comprehension but a means of composition in its own right.
3. Micaela Langellotti, University of California, Berkeley
Village Elites in Roman Egypt: The Case of First-Century Tebtunis (25 mins.)
Despite the availability of rich documentation, and apart from a few scattered discussions, a comprehensive study of village elites in Roman Egypt is still lacking. In a paper entitled ‘Village and Urban Elites in Roman Tebtunis’ (Berkeley, 1999), Roger Bagnall indicated in the Tebtunis material, particularly family archives and dossiers, an excellent starting point for the investigation of village elites and of the socio-economic links between them. By reviewing some of the large Tebtunis archives, mostly dated to the second century AD, he proposed a social ‘framework’ which envisaged the presence of a considerable number of Greek landowners. A similar view had been proposed by Daniele Foraboschi (L’archivio di Kronion, 1971), who identified in the lessors and creditors of second-century Tebtunis a privileged group of Hellenised rich landowners, with Greek names, as opposed to the native small landowners, lessees and debtors, with Egyptian names. However, this model of society does not seem to be applicable to first-century Tebtunis. For this period we can draw on the evidence of the grapheion archive of Kronion, mostly made up of contracts and summary lists of contracts which were recorded at the local record-office (grapheion) by Kronion and his staff. The whole assemblage is unique in kind, and not only provides a clear sample of the economic activities contracted in the village at a specific time, but also allows us to reconstruct the socio-economic status of certain individuals and families. One example is the priestly family of Psuphis, son of Serapion, whose large property was made up of five substantial houses, land and slaves. A few of the Hellenic landowners and creditors can be identified as the ancestors of some wealthy families attested in second-century archives – e.g., the great-grandchildren of Herakleides the younger, son of Maron, a rich landowner in the 30’s and 40’s, appear as creditors in the archive of Kronion, son of Cheos, in the early second century.
In this paper I will use the grapheion archive and other contemporary documents to identify the most prominent individuals and families in first-century Tebtunis, examine their social condition and economic activities, and analyze the relationships between them. In particular, I will try to determine to what extent the priestly families, on the one hand, and the Hellenic families, on the other, were financially and socially influential.
To conclude I will show how a study of the role and nature of the elites in early Roman Tebtunis may contribute to advancing our knowledge of village economy and society in Roman Egypt.
4. W. Graham Claytor and Elizabeth Nabney, University of Michigan
Child Labor in Greco-Roman Egypt: New Texts from the Archive of Harthotes (25 mins.)
The archive of Harthotes, priest and public farmer of Theadelphia, is a rather enigmatic group of texts. Early interpretations focused on the family’s chronic debt as evidence of a threadbare existence (Casanova, 130), but more recent commentators have pointed out that the family was able to repay all of their loans, while leasing fairly substantial tracts of land and engaging in a variety of economic ventures (Rowlandson, 189). Perhaps because of these conflicting views, historians have not given the archive the attention that it deserves. The recent discovery of twelve more papyri belonging to the archive, including contracts, petitions, and another census declaration, therefore offers a welcome opportunity to reassess this important family archive from the early days of Roman rule.
In the first part of the paper, we draw on these unpublished texts to provide a fresh overview of the archive, including its acquisition history, types of documents, and earlier interpretations. We are inclined towards a relatively favorable view of the family’s economic position and point to a new work contract in which Harthotes appears as a foreman for 12 harvest workers (P.Mich. inv. 4436g+4344, 12/11 BCE). Then, we focus on a group of unpublished contracts that shed light on a previously unknown aspect of the family’s activities. They are paramone (service) contracts in which young members of the family are indentured in exchange for advance payments or interest-free loans. By locating these contracts within the archive and drawing on recent work on the family in Roman Egypt (Huebner, Pudsey), we argue that these are not acts of desperation, but rather part of a strategy for dealing with persistent cash flow problems. The family’s repeated recourse to mortgaging their children’s labor fits with their advance crop sales and loans in a web of financial obligations that implicated the whole family.
The longest and most complete example is P.Mich. inv. 931 + P.Col. inv. 7 (9 CE). In this contract, Harthotes arranges for his young daughter Taphaunes to work at an oil press on the estate of Livia and Germanicus for two and a half years, a renewal of a similar arrangement from two years earlier (P.Mich. inv. 4346+4446f, 7 CE). The return on his daughter’s labor is an advance payment of 80 drachmas, but since the employer was obliged to feed and clothe her, the family also benefitted from hidden savings on her maintenance, perhaps amounting to some 100 drachmas per year. Much earlier, Harthotes (acting with his mother Esersythis) had sent off his younger brother to work in another household in the village for four years (P.Mich. inv. 4299, 20/19 BCE), in this case for an interest-free loan, and a later contract suggests such practice continued in later generations (P.Mil. I2 7, 38 CE).
These contracts and the other unpublished documents promise to open up a new chapter in the study of the Harthotes archive and to provide valuable evidence for the financial and social strategies available to village families of Greco-Roman Egypt
5. Michael Zellmann-Rohrer, University of California, Berkeley
A Christian Amulet in Context: Report on a Re-edition and Study of P.Oxy. VIII 1151 (25 mins.)
The Christian amulet P.Oxy. VIII 1151 was first published over a century ago and has often been reprinted, but, beyond a single line (D. Hagedorn, ZPE 145 (2003), 226), never revised (bibliography in the TMMagic database organized by the Leuven Trismegistos project, http://www.trismegistos.org/magic/index.php, entry #61652). I provide a preliminary report on a new edition with expanded commentary. My discussion includes a detailed consideration of physical and orthographic features of the amulet based on autopsy, including the generally high quality of the writing and its affinities with scribal practice in literary book production; I attempt to set the dating of the piece, tentatively assigned by the editio princeps to the fifth century, on firmer ground. I also give the amulet further interpretative context, in two respects. First, with the vastly expanded corpus of amulets made available since the initial publication: correcting a misperception of the first editor that the piece is “purely Christian, with no admixture of heathen magic,” I examine formulaic elements of the text as evidence of continuity with pre-Christian amuletic practice, especially in its use of a particular apotropaic invocation addressed directly to the affliction troubling the bearer of the amulet, and the identification of the bearer with a metronym. Second, I set the amulet in the context of its production and use by a Christian woman in late ancient Oxyrhynchus, specifically as it invokes the protection of Christian saints with a cult presence in that city. I also analyze the composition of the text, whose formal architecture has never been studied in detail. I identify evidence of care in composition, to accompany the care in the act of writing manifested in the first part of my discussion, both of which contribute to the production of a high-quality artifact. Here I point especially to the artificial arrangement of words and clauses, particularly chiastic and tripartite structure, and the use of prose-rhythm based on word stress. Finally, I suggest an application of the amulet as a long-neglected testimonium at a crux in the textual history of the New Testament gospel of John. Namely, P.Oxy. VIII 1151 provides the only papyrus witness so far known for the placement of punctuation between clauses in John 1:3-4, χωρὶς αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο οὐδὲ ἕν. ὃ γέγονεν ... in the most recent edition of Nestle-Aland, with the variant χωρὶς αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο οὐδὲ ἓν ὃ γέγονεν.
6. C. Michael Sampson, University of Manitoba
A New Text from the Dossier of the Descendants of Flavius Eulogius (20 mins.)
The majority of the texts constituting the modest archive of Flavius Eulogius (PLRE 2.421 [10]) were excavated in Grenfell and Hunt’s first season at Bahnasa and published in P.Oxy. XVI. As additional texts were identified (in P.Oxy I, P.Iand. III, PSI V, and, most recently, P.Lond. V) and subsequently published (in P.Oxy. LXVIII and P.Mich. XV), the relationship of the texts and the nature of the archive became increasingly complex: not only did the documents span several generations—from Eulogius’ rise from Aurelius to Flavius as well as the careers of his sons Apphous and Martyrius, to those of the latter’s sons Serenus and Hatres—but the dispersal of the texts made it necessary to distinguish between the family archive proper and a dossier of related documents (Martin; Hickey and Keenan 1996-1997).
This paper has two goals. I begin by presenting an edition of P.Mich. inv. 476, in the course of which I will establish that it belongs to the dossier of texts related to the descendants of Flavius Eulogius. Its close affinities to P.Oxy. I 140 in palaeography, titulature and boilerplate in the document’s epistolary prescript all guarantee the connection, and its date—March 30, 557 CE—makes it the last known member of the dossier. The second goal of the presentation is the elucidation of the text’s contents. Unlike many other texts from the archive and dossier, it is no straightforward lease of property, and the process of understanding its contents and contextualizing the agreement requires that the various kinds of documents towards which it gestures be first distinguished and identified. I will argue that the document is unique, and that it combines the legalizing language of a loan (ὁμολοκοῦμεν [sic]... ἐσχηκέναι) with that of a contract for labor. For the terms of repayment (if there were any) are unclear, and the text otherwise appears to bind four individuals to Eulogius’ grandson Serenus, under mutual obligation (ἐξ ἀλληλεγγύης), regarding an irrigated plot (μηχανή) belonging to Serenus. The signatories acknowledge receipt of several solidi, but the text is obscure when it comes to the irrigated plot and the job to be conducted, and the papyrus breaks off before its full extent is clear. Nevertheless, the fact that the money appears to be their wages (τοῦ ἡμῶν μισθοῦ) positions the document less as a loan and more as a contract for labor, paid in advance.
Business meeting (35 mins.)
Ancient Books: Material and Discursive Interactions
William Johnson, Duke University, Presider
As in other humanistic disciplines, so in Classics the materiality of texts has been a major area of new research for some years now. These papers draw together some of the most important perspectives on textual materialism, including fundamental research and speculative hermeneutic approaches to primary sources, and considerations of both literal and symbolic texts in social and educational
contexts.
1. Richard Janko, University of Michigan
New Readings in the Derveni Papyrus (20 mins.)
The Derveni papyrus was found in 1962. Although it contains sensational new evidence for Hellenic religious and philosophical views in the late fifth century BCE, it was published, with the infrared photographs of Makis Skiadaressis, only in 2006 (Kouremenos, Parássoglou and Tsantsanoglou 2006, = KPT). Little progress has been made subsequently. Multispectral images were made (Alessio 2006), but these remain unavailable even to the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki where the papyrus is kept (D. Ignatiadou, pers. comm. 2014). The earliest set of infrared photographs by Spyros Tsavdaroglou is still unpublished. Even the reliability of KPT has been doubted, because there have been no independent reports by which to test it. The overall significance of the text continues to be disputed. It depends above all on the correct reconstruction and interpretation of the opening, which is controversial (Piano 2011), and of column 20. Hence the treatise has variously been ascribed to a presocratic freethinker (Janko 2008) or to a credulous mantis commenting on Persian religion (Ferrari 2011a, 2011b).
Study of the original papyrus, the infrared photographs and the conservation archive in Thessaloniki in April 2014, with the generous assistance of the Museum, reveals that KPT is generally reliable, although it omits one small piece (A10) and has misplaced others. The papyrus is in stable condition, except that the pieces in Frame 5 (E1–13) have suffered serious cracking since it was first photographed (and a number of the photographs are missing). Pace Tsantsanoglou (2013), there are no column-numbers in the upper margins; these are only cracks, fibres and shadows. Instead, there is a stichometric omicron in the left margin of column 6. A marginal chi and several corrections have also been missed. Hence the papyrus was a full-length book-roll written by a professional scribe.
Carbonized papyri are always the hardest to read, but advances in digital microscopy have permitted a better reading of faint or damaged letters throughout. The standard text is mostly confirmed, since it turns out that KPT often use dotted letters to indicate letters that are damaged but certain. However, autopsy confirms numerous proposals that KPT rejected, and at times offers totally unexpected readings. Tto the extent that time permits, a selection of them will be presented and documented with microphotographs. There is hope that, with a more precise reading of the unplaced fragments, more of them will be able to be restored to their correct places in the roll.
More of the fragment of Heraclitus (3+94DK) in column 4 can be read and reconstructed: “The sun, in accord with the nature of its course ([δρό]μου), is the breadth of a human foot, not waxing beyond its size; for if it exceeds its own breadth at all, the Erinyes, allies of justice, will discover it, [so that it may not] make [a course] that is excessive [in size].”
The controversial column 5 matches no previous reconstruction exactly: “For them we will enter the prophetic shrine to ask, with regard to what is prophesied, whether they are doing rightly. Why do they disbelieve that there are terrors in Hades? Since they do not understand dream-visions or all the other things, what sort of proofs would make them believe? When they are overcome by error and pleasure as well, they suddenly comprehend so that they believe.”
In column 6 not “prayers” (εὐ]χ̣α̣ί) but “barley-cakes” (μᾶ]ζα̣ι) placate the souls.
The second verse of the Orphic poem is partly legible in column 7: “Orpheus” announced his topic as the bold deeds of Zeus.
The controversy over τότε or τόδε in column 13 is decided in favor of τότε.
The ends of columns 18–20 are changed. That of 18 is extremely weird, that of 19 uses atomist terminology, while that of 20, where the author turns from insulting the initiates to the Orphic narrative of Zeus’ multiple rapes, can be read with greater confidence.
New Fragments of Sappho
Andre Lardinois, Radboud University Nijmegen, Organizer
Recently a new set of papyri with fragments of Sappho has been discovered. They preserve five stanzas of a completely new poem (Brothers poem), parts of three other new poems (Kypris poem, fr. 16a and the poem that preceded fr. 5), and add substantial new readings to fragments 5, 9, 16, 17 and 18. The purpose of this panel is to introduce this new material and to start the discussion of its significance both for our understanding of Sappho, her reception in Latin literature, and the presentation of her poetry to the larger public.
Andre Lardinois, Radboud University Nijmegen
Introduction (10 mins.)
1. Dirk Obbink, University of Oxford
Provenance, Authenticity, and Text of the New Sappho Papyri (25 mins.)
Paper 1: Provenance, authenticity, and text of the New Sappho Papyri
In this paper I wish to discuss the authenticity and dating of the new fragments on the basis of archaeological, linguistic, metrical, and textual evidence, and show how the detailed tracing of the provenance of one of the groups of new fragments was instrumental in leading to the discovery and identification of the other. Analysis of the preservation and conservation of the papyrus fragments yields further a strategy for reconstructing its fragmentary portions, including the new ‘Kypris Song’.
I will further discuss the literary and performative context in which these new fragments have to be situated. These new fragments of Sappho, published in Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 189 (2014) 1-50, show conclusively the alternation in Book One of poems about family and cult on the one hand, and personal concerns about love on the other. In particular, a cycle of poems concerning sea-faring is revealed, centering on the life of a mercantile family of wine-traders on 7th century Lesbos. The presence of Dionysus in the trinity of gods in the Pan-Lesbian sanctuary at Mesa on the island is explained, and the whole complex of love, sea-faring, wine, and trade falls neatly into the context of Herodotus’ story (2. 135) of how Sappho’s brother Charaxos spent ‘a great deal of money’ (χρημάτων μεγάλων) to free his lover the courtesan Rhodopis (aka Doricha), then a slave at Naucratis in Egypt—for which Herodotus claims a pedigree in a poem of Sappho’s. In Sappho fragments 5 and 17 and now the ‘Brothers Song’ we can see the existence of a particular song type: a prayer for the safe return of the merchant-gone-to-sea (or going). The prayer may rehearse an occasion leading to the performance of a song, or its actual performance in the past or present. The prayer for safe return, introduced as a matter of concern, then expands to envisage what such a return would mean for the family—wealth (images of which are ubiquitous in Sappho, as I will show), and an enhanced social position in the community. A further connection with the poems involving Aphrodite, who dominates book one but is virtually absent from poems in the other books, is suggested, since she is also typically invoked in seaside cults as a protectress of sailors. She connects the poems about love and about the sea in Book One of Sappho.
2. Joel Lidov, City University of New York
(S)he Do the Polis in Different Voices (25 mins.)
Paper 2: “(S)he do the polis in different voices”
Eliot’s quotation of Dickens draws attention to the familiar poetic paradox that the outstanding character of one single voice can be that it is the voice of many. The numerous additions to known poems in Sappho, Book One, published in ZPE 189 allow us to isolate this problem in the study of her work, for they make possible a fresh look at the unification of ritual repetition and personal experience in the Sapphic-stanza poems without appealing to theories that portray a uniform Sappho active in the whole corpus. Among these theories the last few decades have seen the gradual abandonment (led especially by Parker 1993) of a priori notions of the essential female poet. Most new attempts define Sappho by means of a cultural context: Williamson (1995) reintroduced the communal aspect; Aloni (1997) emphasized social “function”; Calame (1997, most recently 2012) applied a comparative anthropology; Stehle (1997) drew conclusions from reconstructions of performance situations in a “women’s circle”; Lardinois (in a series of articles 1994 through 2008) looked for a choral presence throughout the corpus; but Ferrari (2007/2010) returned to a strict biographical method that situated the personal in the political, and Schlesier (2014) has recently proposed a total revision of the biographical persona.
The new text of fr. 17 puts into relief the failed history of reconstructions (summarized in the most recent attempt, Lidov 2004) based on an expectation of what Sappho might do. But the importance of Hera in that poem can be now appreciated in a broader context. For example, the discovery that Kypris does not begin fr. 5 requires a new motivation for her presence in the last stanza and encourages comparison with her appearance in the last stanza of fr. 15, as well as with the implication of marriage at the end of the new Brothers poem. All of these poems apparently concern the safe return of a family member away at sea. The connection of this motif to formal and organized prayer to Hera in the Brothers poem draws fr. 17 into this perspective, and now enough of fr. 9 exists to suggest strongly the presence of thematic words from this group. On this basis it is possible to hypothesize a prayer structure that is formally different from the kletic and hymnic forms made familiar by Norden. Together with examples in Alcaeus of the importance of helper gods and of the role of the Mesa precinct in prayers for safe return, a picture of a ritual occasion emerges. On the one hand the role of Kypris in this group provides a link to the seemingly personal “erotic” poems; on the other, the multiple instances discourage emphasis on the experience of any individual. A more difficult example is posed by the new confirmation that there was almost certainly a complete poem after Sa. 16 and before Sa. 17. The editors place the start of it at Sa. 16.21; this yields a statement of individual experience in a ring composition; but the textual evidence also allows placing the start of “Sa. 16a” one stanza later, so that it would provide a generalizing comment on the previous experience suitable to a ritual context (the same dilemma is posed by Sa. 31).
Alongside these appearances of generic types we have to place distinctions in tone that mark the instances. The “erotic” poems display the power of Aphrodite but are otherwise dissimilar in substance, and they vary from the passion of Sa. 31 to the cool logic of Sa. 16. The dramatic introductory rhetorical question of the new Kypris poem has no parallel. The Brothers poem shows a syntactic complexity, uses of the subjunctives, and a repetitive 2+3 structure in the adonean not elsewhere typical of Sappho. Perhaps Sappho adapted performances of a single type to a variety of situations, each with its appropriate voice.
3. Eva Stehle, University of Maryland
Sappho and Her Brothers (25 mins.)
Paper 3: Sappho and Her Brothers
The newly-published poem by Sappho, which Dirk Obbink (2014) has dubbed the “Brothers Poem,” is rhetorically unlike any other extant (and readable) example of archaic or early-classical lyric. Lines 11-16, however, do have some affinities in language and theme with Pindar’s epinicians. The similarities suggest that the Brothers Poem could be an exemplar of the kind of poetry prominent families produced for themselves before Simonides and Pindar professionalized its production into different praise genres. And at first blush the Brothers Poem appears straightforward, as one might expect of a quotidian, occasional form: the speaker is arguing that the situation calls for her prayers, not irrational optimism.
Yet, while such in-house great-family poetry may well be the background for this poem, close attention to the rhetoric shows that Sappho has subtly and indirectly fashioned a more radical critique that shares some stylistic qualities with her love poetry. Like Pindar a century later, she adapts a tradition of poetic position-taking to express a deeper vision, in her case a woman’s lightly-veiled critique of her family’s political outlook.
To demonstrate, I begin with a comparison of Sappho’s lines 11-16 with Pindaric statements about the gods’ care in renewing the fortunes of a deserving house, using Isthm. 1.32-40 and Isthm. 4.14-23. I conclude that it was probably a common trope in great-family poetry, a counter to the pervasive Greek sense of cosmic flux. Sappho and Pindar share metaphorical use of eudia, good weather, to express the idea of revived fortunes.
I then show that Sappho uses this trope to characterize the conception that she is opposing. The first- and second-person forms in the first two stanzas reveal the relationship between speaker and addressee. I connect that relationship with the contrast in how each sees the solution to the current anxiety. The addressee asserts that Charaxos does/will come, with a “full ship”; the speaker proposes that she pray for him to come “captaining his safe ship.” That the difference between “full” and “safe” is significant is confirmed when she adds, beginning a new stanza, “and find us safe and sound” (9). She thus hints that she perceives a threat not just to Charaxos and his cargo but also to those at home. She next recommends simply entrusting “the rest” (i.e., the cargo) to the gods -- since, we must deduce, that for her the danger to the whole family’s safety appears as the greater problem. But instead of saying this in opposition to the addressee’s concern with cargo, she invokes the trope, the emotional basis of the addressee’s anxious conviction that it must come, in order to set his/her mind at rest about it.
Then in the last stanza Sappho undermines the idea that the cargo per se will bring well-being. Its first word, kammes (and we, 17), contrasts with kēnoi (those, 15) whom the gods make wealthy. We might be freed from grief if Larichos “lifts his head and finally becomes a man.” The domestic threat must be connected with Larichos’ behavior. Line 20 recalls 12, but its optative expresses the speaker’s doubt in contrast to the trope’s serene indicative.
Finally I will deal with the vexed problem who the addressee in the poem is. I suggest that the addressee is a male family member, which would explain speaker-addressee relations in the opening (cf. Hector telling Hecuba to pray in Iliad 6). Notionally, if not in performance, it could be Larichos himself. This poem is like Sappho 16 Voigt in its strong but inexplicit contrast of conventional male poetic perceptions with Sappho’s female perspective.
4. Llewelyn Morgan, University of Oxford
The Reception of the New Sappho in Latin Literature (25 mins.)
Paper 4: The Reception of the New Sappho in Latin Literature
No sooner had new fragments of Sappho come to light, than Latinists were trying to gauge their impact on Roman poetry. This paper will assess the relevance of this new material for our understanding of Latin literature, in the process arguing that an important connection exists between Sappho’s Brothers Poem and what is arguably Horace’s greatest lyric of all, Odes 3.29.
I will begin by sketching (rapidly) the remarkably pervasive influence exerted by Sappho on Roman literature, using specific examples to illustrate the depth and detail of the Roman engagement with this poet. For example, Sappho fragment 31 is famously imitated by Catullus, and alluded to by Horace, but is also a tangible presence in Plautus, Valerius Aedituus and Lucretius. Both Statius and Juvenal engage creatively with the Sapphic tradition as they find it, while Catullus 11 is a masterpiece of formal impropriety which exploits a Roman perception of Sappho (constituted both by her poetry and a tradition of commentary represented by figures such as Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Demetrius) to represent his lover and his love affair as a ghastly inversion of the Sapphic romantic ideal. I shall draw particular attention to the resurrection by Catullus and Horace of the sapphic stanza. But I also want to highlight the value of [Ovid] Heroides 15 as testimony for Sappho’s poetry and the Romans’ perception thereof: as I shall illustrate, the nature of Sappho’s relations with her addressees, the relevance of marriage as a context for her love poetry, and the status and circumstances of her brother Charaxos (who is of central importance in interpreting the new fragments), all find useful elucidation in the ps.-Ovidian poem.
Turning to the new fragments, after summarizing the observations of Phillips and Hutchinson on points of contact between the Brothers Poem and Horace’s Soracte Ode, 1.9, I will follow up on a suggestion of Morgan (2014) that an even stronger similarity can be identified between Sappho’s poem and the last stanzas of Horace’s valedictory ode to his first collection (understanding 3.30 as a freestanding sphragis), 3.29. Like 1.9, 3.29 displays verbal parallels to the Brothers Poem, and shares a fatalistic ethos (and the metaphor of stormy weather for the inherent unpredictability of human life), but what 3.29 has in common with Sappho (and 1.9 does not) is a more overtly economic characterisation of the fickleness of fortune, ultimately realised in a developed association of the vicissitudes of life with the uncertainties of Mediterranean sea trade. Sappho’s brother Charaxos was of course a trader, and the influence of Sappho’s poem about her brothers is most obvious in the awareness that the Brothers Poem and Odes 3.29 share of the perils of maritime commerce—how fine a line separates the arrival of a ship laden with goods, and a ship that has gifted those goods to the avaricious sea.
To find parallels between these new fragments and the Soracte Ode is exciting enough. But to identify their presence in a poem with the formal prominence of Odes 3.29 is, I shall suggest, even more striking evidence of the centrality of Sappho to Horace’s conception of lyric poetry. What would we find if we had all nine books of her poetry!
5. Diane Rayor, Grand Valley State University
Reimagining the Fragments of Sappho (25 mins.)
Recent Sappho discoveries allow us to reinterpret old fragments in light of the new additions to them. This paper focuses on the process of translating fragments, particularly the “New Kypris” poem, which is the more complete fr. 26 (Voigt), as well as (briefly) the re-translations of frs. 5, 9, and 17. While fr. 5 requires the additional pieces to fill in gaps and confirms a clear scenario, fr. 9 merely adds a few word images to the current list, and fr. 17 demonstrates how tenuous are our guesses in filling gaps. The new Kypris poem, however, radically changes the reading of the fragment 26 (Voigt) to which it adds. The initial six lines of the Kypris poem overlap with fr. 26 sufficiently to show that the previous suppositions were completely incorrect, and that the three stanzas address Aphrodite and most probably focus on the pain of erotic passion.
Translations of Sappho, particularly those for readers who cannot consult the Greek, optimally work on three levels: 1) The translation invokes the absent song. This involves working with sound, as well as paying attention to signs that could indicate performance possibilities (such as feminine plurals for choral song). 2) The translation reads as poetry. This involves compensating for missing words by helping the reader fill the gaps. 3) The translation evokes the physical fragment on worn or torn papyrus through various strategies.
Readers of Sappho come to the Greek text with their own expectations of what makes a Sappho poem. Because translators are readers first and then writers of text, translations provide a lens on the storytelling process. In translating fragments, the reader imagines a story, the song behind the scraps of words and phrases; the mind connects the dots to produce some kind of story. As Rayor notes, “The holes in the text are not left empty in the reading process. As we read, we fill in, ‘read between the lines.’” (15) This happens even with small scraps (cf. Anne Carson’s If Not, Winter in which “if” is not fully visible in the Greek fragment [22], yet the title of the book and the translation of the fragment build a story of Sappho’s poetry).
A single word can shape the tone of the fragment. An example is the word choice for the sole word visible in the P.Oxy. 1231 of fr. 26.5: ἀλεμάτ[ (idle, vain, crazy, day-dreaming). Each possibility calls up a different image of the speaker and referent. Yet in the context of the Kypris poem additions (P. Sapph. Obbink), it is most likely an adverb referring to the goddess
Intrageneric Dialogues in Hellenistic and Imperial Epic
James Clauss, University of Washington, Presider
1. Michael Haslam, University of California, Los Angeles
Argeia and Thersander in Antimachos’ Thebaid? (20 mins.)
In this paper I venture a proposal for Antimachos’ Thebaid. While it was his elegiac Lyde that stirred dissension among the Alexandrian poets, it was the Thebaid, his major work, that secured him a place in the canon of epici. Little is left of it. But there does exist a large fragment of a scholarly ancient commentary, published by Vogliano in 1935 (P.Mil.Vogl. I.17, 2nd cent. CE), just in time for inclusion as an appendix in Bernard Wyss’s still indispensable edition of Antimachos’ remains (Wyss 1936, 76-90). The commentary is unequivocally on Antimachean epic: one would expect it to be on the famed Thebaid. I believe that it is, and that it yields important information about the poem.
Reluctance to accept the Thebaid as the (exclusive) subject of the papyrus commentary has been based primarily on the fact that several of its lemmata appear to concern Artemis/Eileithuia rather than the saga of the Seven against Thebes. The first surviving lemma is a one-and-a-half line reference to her (fr. 174 Wyss [F99 Matthews]), and subsequent lemmata imply a birth and afterbirth cleansing (esp. frr. 178-179 W. [F103-104 M.]). In later lemmata, however, an Erinys appears (line 47 δὴ τότ’ Ἐρεινὺϲ ἦλθεν …, fr. 187 W. [F112 M.]), and this, as is widely recognized, would well suit the Thebaid, especially if the Erinys is Oedipus’, as Paul Maas (ap. ed. pr.) appealingly speculated.
Maas dealt with the problem of coherence by positing an unsignaled switch from the shadowy Artemis to the Thebaid in the course of the commentary fragment. The idea has been embraced by some scholars (Barber 1938, 1968 [“an erudite commentary on his Artemis (end) and Thebais (beginning)”], Trypanis 1981) but falls foul of invariable commentary practice. The commentary must surely be on a single work (cf. Lloyd-Jones and Parsons at SH 65: “eiusdem carminis esse credas”), no doubt on a single book. Victor Matthews, for his part, the most recent editor of Antimachos, is alone in assigning the entire commentary to the Artemis (Matthews 1996, pp. 44-45, 266-310), on the strength of the lemmata referring to the goddess; but these are wholly inadequate grounds for such an attribution, and most scholars reject the very existence of an Antimachean Artemis. Antimachos’ one and only epic, in fact, appears to have been the Thebaid. (The probability that the Deltoi was elegiac has been bolstered by a papyrus fragment published in 1994 [Brashear 1994].)
So it is reasonably safe to proceed on the assumption that the commentary is on one of the many books of the Thebaid. And it is not too hard to accommodate the problematic lemmata. The presence of Artemis/Eileithuia is accounted for by the childbirth, evidently the focus of this section of the poem, followed by the sudden appearance of the Erinys. Clearly, it is a significant birth. I propose that the mother is Argeia (Adrastus’ daughter, Polynices’ wife), and the newborn child Thersander (who was to rule Thebes after the expedition of the Epigoni). The proposal is a simple one, may even seem an obvious one, but seems not to have been made before. I find no competing identifications.
If this is right, it is of considerable interest that Antimachos involved Argeia and the infant Thersander in the story of the expedition against Thebes, and I end by briefly sketching something of the significance it may hold for the poem itself and for the poem’s relations with other treatments of the saga both earlier and later (Statius’ Thebaid among them), matters which invite fresh exploration beyond the scope of this paper.
Session #42
The Problematic Text: Classical Editing in the 21st Century
Tom Keeline, Western Washington University, and Justin Stover, University of Oxford, Organizers
Some 50 years ago E.R. Dodds remarked that our classical texts were good enough to live with; D.R. Shackleton Bailey replied, “That depends on your standard of living.” It’s now 2015: Do textual criticism and editing still have a place in classical scholarship? How does textual criticism overlap and interact with other established and emerging fields of classical studies, such as papyrology, reception studies, and digital humanities? What possibilities for editing classical texts are provided by new technologies like electronic text corpora, manuscript digitization, and digital editions? This panel showcases new work in textual scholarship that demonstrates the field’s ongoing importance to contemporary classical studies.
Justin Stover, University of Oxford
Introduction (5 mins.)
2. Sarah Hendriks, University of Oxford
Editing the Latin Papyri from Herculaneum: The Case of PHerc. 78 (20 mins.)
4. Francesca Schironi, University of Michigan
Philology and Textual Editing in the Classroom (and beyond) (20 mins.)
This is an aporetic paper, which is neither meant to provide answers nor even suggestions; rather, it raises questions. It will be divided in two parts: first a ‘pars construens’ and, then, a ‘pars destruens’. This anticlimactic order indeed reflects my own ‘aporia’ about the future of our discipline. I will tackle the problem from a didactic rather than scholarly perspective, and focus on which space, if any, philology and editing have or should have in the training of younger generations of classicists.
In the pars construens I will list and briefly discuss some examples of what philologists can (still) do. Aside from editions of new texts, there is still plenty to do for scholars with what is already published. Papyri, fragments of minor authors, texts already published but nevertheless little known are waiting for more studies to gain appreciation in a wider audience. While most students gravitate toward the ‘usual’ authors (Homer, the tragedians, Virgil, just to name a few) there are many other authors, more or less technical or ‘famous’, that lay neglected and that could be excellent topics for dissertations or beyond, if only scholars were willing to present them in a more interesting way. Technical disciplines like medicine or mechanics, or minor authors of more important/literary genres are all fields that need work – and good editions. Papyri with fragments of unknown or very little known authors are also another field of research; moreover, papyri allow us studying also the ‘material’ aspect of our discipline, namely, book and book production – another neglected area of investigation. Yet, (and this is the pars destruens) there are problems. For all these very interesting studies one needs a rather technical background. It is not only a (fundamental!) question of an excellent knowledge of the ancient languages. To carry out philological and editorial work one often needs training in paleography and papyrology and sometimes a background in other, even more technical disciplines, such as medicine or mathematics for those who are interested in ancient sciences. Who is giving our students this training? I am not talking of whether or not there are instructors capable to teach these disciplines. I am much more concerned with the actual possibility to find the time and the ‘mental space’ to do it. In the institutions I have worked recently, faculty is more and more pressed to offer ‘broad’ courses to attract undergraduates. I teach a lot of reception and courses in translation. In fact, I genuinely enjoy them; yet, this is how most of my time is occupied. Another problem is that graduate students, who would be the target of philological training, often do not have a sufficient background for it. It is not their fault, as everyone knows. It is the system. Colleges do not train ‘philologists’ and I am afraid that graduate programs do not often have the time or the energy to bridge this gap. There are exceptions, of course, but they do not change the broad picture. In fact, these exceptions face another problem: finding a job. Who is going to hire someone with a dissertation on philological topics or, worse, consisting in an edition? American academia does not train or search for philologists, at least, not generally. I am not even certain that this is a bad thing – there are many other interesting areas to explore in classics. For all these reasons, many of us dissuade students from working on ‘editions’ or purely philological topics.
As is clear, I do not have an answer to what we should do or even if we should do anything at all to ‘resuscitate’ philology in our classrooms and beyond. Yet, at least, I am
glad that a panel has been organized to start facing these issues and discuss them.
Culture and Society in Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Egypt
Organized by the American Society of Papyrologists
Todd Hickey, University of California, Berkeley, Organizer
This year’s panel well illustrates the breadth of current papyrological research. It commences with a paper that challenges us, through a careful analysis of Egyptian funerary texts, to rethink our conceptions of translation. This is followed by a novel interpretation of a meletē on a Ptolemaic papyrus that yields an additional source for the suicide of Demosthenes. Socio-historical syntheses of assemblages of documentary texts from the Fayum depression are the object of the third and fourth contributions. The fifth paper moves into the “subliterary,” providing a close reading and contextualization of a Christian amulet. The panel closes with the presentation of a new document from a well-known late antique archive from Oxyrhynchus.
1. Emily Cole, University of California, Los Angeles
Translation as a Means of Textual Composition in the Bilingual Funerary Papyri Rhind I and II (25 mins.)
Under Ptolemaic and Roman rule, a number of innovations appear in Egyptian funerary practices. One of the most interesting is the appearance of many unique texts at this time. New compositions were creatively fashioned by borrowing themes and passages from earlier materials and religious rituals and combining them with original content in inventive ways. One particularly fascinating example is found in Papyri Rhind I and II, now housed at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh (Inv. A 1956.313-4). The papyri, which date to the 21st year of the reign of Augustus (9 BCE), were discovered in situ in the Theban necropolis by Sir Alexander Henry Rhind in 1857 (G. Möller, Die beiden Totenpapyrus Rhind des Museums zu Edinburg [Leipzig, 1913]). The texts had been placed within the sarcophagi of their owners, a husband and wife from Armant named Monthesuphis and Tanuat.
The Rhind Papyri are exceptional in that each bears two versions of the same text, first in Hieratic Middle Egyptian and beneath in Demotic. Comparison of the two language versions, however, does not readily indicate which one was the source text and which the target text of the translation. Instead, the two versions complement one another and should be read in unison in order to grasp a deeper understanding of the traditional religious principles at work. In this paper, I begin by outlining the ways in which the two versions of the texts diverge from one another; these include the addition or omission of words and phrases, the variation between names and epithets of deities, and the use of individualized references to the deceased. Then I examine the nature of the Middle Egyptian used in this text. I highlight instances where translation between the two versions was unnecessary because the same term existed in both phases of the language, but a variant was nevertheless chosen. This investigation will allow me to touch upon the nature of translation both in ancient Egypt and more generally. By fully documenting the translation practices in the Rhind papyri, I will attempt to demonstrate that the restricted understanding of translation as taking place when a source text is transformed into a target text is not sufficient in this instance (for more traditional views on translation, see S. Bassnett, Translation Studies [New York, 2002], and B. Hatim and J. Munday, Translation: An Advanced Resource Book [New York, 2004]). The Rhind papyri are rather examples of the manipulation of language; it was the scribe who had control over the creative process. The use of translation in these documents was, therefore, not simply as a tool for linguistic comprehension but a means of composition in its own right.
2. Davide Amendola, Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa
The Account of Demosthenes’ Death in P.Berol. inv. 13045 (25 mins.)
Under Ptolemaic and Roman rule, a number of innovations appear in Egyptian funerary practices. One of the most interesting is the appearance of many unique texts at this time. New compositions were creatively fashioned by borrowing themes and passages from earlier materials and religious rituals and combining them with original content in inventive ways. One particularly fascinating example is found in Papyri Rhind I and II, now housed at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh (Inv. A 1956.313-4). The papyri, which date to the 21st year of the reign of Augustus (9 BCE), were discovered in situ in the Theban necropolis by Sir Alexander Henry Rhind in 1857 (G. Möller, Die beiden Totenpapyrus Rhind des Museums zu Edinburg [Leipzig, 1913]). The texts had been placed within the sarcophagi of their owners, a husband and wife from Armant named Monthesuphis and Tanuat.
The Rhind Papyri are exceptional in that each bears two versions of the same text, first in Hieratic Middle Egyptian and beneath in Demotic. Comparison of the two language versions, however, does not readily indicate which one was the source text and which the target text of the translation. Instead, the two versions complement one another and should be read in unison in order to grasp a deeper understanding of the traditional religious principles at work. In this paper, I begin by outlining the ways in which the two versions of the texts diverge from one another; these include the addition or omission of words and phrases, the variation between names and epithets of deities, and the use of individualized references to the deceased. Then I examine the nature of the Middle Egyptian used in this text. I highlight instances where translation between the two versions was unnecessary because the same term existed in both phases of the language, but a variant was nevertheless chosen. This investigation will allow me to touch upon the nature of translation both in ancient Egypt and more generally. By fully documenting the translation practices in the Rhind papyri, I will attempt to demonstrate that the restricted understanding of translation as taking place when a source text is transformed into a target text is not sufficient in this instance (for more traditional views on translation, see S. Bassnett, Translation Studies [New York, 2002], and B. Hatim and J. Munday, Translation: An Advanced Resource Book [New York, 2004]). The Rhind papyri are rather examples of the manipulation of language; it was the scribe who had control over the creative process. The use of translation in these documents was, therefore, not simply as a tool for linguistic comprehension but a means of composition in its own right.
3. Micaela Langellotti, University of California, Berkeley
Village Elites in Roman Egypt: The Case of First-Century Tebtunis (25 mins.)
Despite the availability of rich documentation, and apart from a few scattered discussions, a comprehensive study of village elites in Roman Egypt is still lacking. In a paper entitled ‘Village and Urban Elites in Roman Tebtunis’ (Berkeley, 1999), Roger Bagnall indicated in the Tebtunis material, particularly family archives and dossiers, an excellent starting point for the investigation of village elites and of the socio-economic links between them. By reviewing some of the large Tebtunis archives, mostly dated to the second century AD, he proposed a social ‘framework’ which envisaged the presence of a considerable number of Greek landowners. A similar view had been proposed by Daniele Foraboschi (L’archivio di Kronion, 1971), who identified in the lessors and creditors of second-century Tebtunis a privileged group of Hellenised rich landowners, with Greek names, as opposed to the native small landowners, lessees and debtors, with Egyptian names. However, this model of society does not seem to be applicable to first-century Tebtunis. For this period we can draw on the evidence of the grapheion archive of Kronion, mostly made up of contracts and summary lists of contracts which were recorded at the local record-office (grapheion) by Kronion and his staff. The whole assemblage is unique in kind, and not only provides a clear sample of the economic activities contracted in the village at a specific time, but also allows us to reconstruct the socio-economic status of certain individuals and families. One example is the priestly family of Psuphis, son of Serapion, whose large property was made up of five substantial houses, land and slaves. A few of the Hellenic landowners and creditors can be identified as the ancestors of some wealthy families attested in second-century archives – e.g., the great-grandchildren of Herakleides the younger, son of Maron, a rich landowner in the 30’s and 40’s, appear as creditors in the archive of Kronion, son of Cheos, in the early second century.
In this paper I will use the grapheion archive and other contemporary documents to identify the most prominent individuals and families in first-century Tebtunis, examine their social condition and economic activities, and analyze the relationships between them. In particular, I will try to determine to what extent the priestly families, on the one hand, and the Hellenic families, on the other, were financially and socially influential.
To conclude I will show how a study of the role and nature of the elites in early Roman Tebtunis may contribute to advancing our knowledge of village economy and society in Roman Egypt.
4. W. Graham Claytor and Elizabeth Nabney, University of Michigan
Child Labor in Greco-Roman Egypt: New Texts from the Archive of Harthotes (25 mins.)
The archive of Harthotes, priest and public farmer of Theadelphia, is a rather enigmatic group of texts. Early interpretations focused on the family’s chronic debt as evidence of a threadbare existence (Casanova, 130), but more recent commentators have pointed out that the family was able to repay all of their loans, while leasing fairly substantial tracts of land and engaging in a variety of economic ventures (Rowlandson, 189). Perhaps because of these conflicting views, historians have not given the archive the attention that it deserves. The recent discovery of twelve more papyri belonging to the archive, including contracts, petitions, and another census declaration, therefore offers a welcome opportunity to reassess this important family archive from the early days of Roman rule.
In the first part of the paper, we draw on these unpublished texts to provide a fresh overview of the archive, including its acquisition history, types of documents, and earlier interpretations. We are inclined towards a relatively favorable view of the family’s economic position and point to a new work contract in which Harthotes appears as a foreman for 12 harvest workers (P.Mich. inv. 4436g+4344, 12/11 BCE). Then, we focus on a group of unpublished contracts that shed light on a previously unknown aspect of the family’s activities. They are paramone (service) contracts in which young members of the family are indentured in exchange for advance payments or interest-free loans. By locating these contracts within the archive and drawing on recent work on the family in Roman Egypt (Huebner, Pudsey), we argue that these are not acts of desperation, but rather part of a strategy for dealing with persistent cash flow problems. The family’s repeated recourse to mortgaging their children’s labor fits with their advance crop sales and loans in a web of financial obligations that implicated the whole family.
The longest and most complete example is P.Mich. inv. 931 + P.Col. inv. 7 (9 CE). In this contract, Harthotes arranges for his young daughter Taphaunes to work at an oil press on the estate of Livia and Germanicus for two and a half years, a renewal of a similar arrangement from two years earlier (P.Mich. inv. 4346+4446f, 7 CE). The return on his daughter’s labor is an advance payment of 80 drachmas, but since the employer was obliged to feed and clothe her, the family also benefitted from hidden savings on her maintenance, perhaps amounting to some 100 drachmas per year. Much earlier, Harthotes (acting with his mother Esersythis) had sent off his younger brother to work in another household in the village for four years (P.Mich. inv. 4299, 20/19 BCE), in this case for an interest-free loan, and a later contract suggests such practice continued in later generations (P.Mil. I2 7, 38 CE).
These contracts and the other unpublished documents promise to open up a new chapter in the study of the Harthotes archive and to provide valuable evidence for the financial and social strategies available to village families of Greco-Roman Egypt
5. Michael Zellmann-Rohrer, University of California, Berkeley
A Christian Amulet in Context: Report on a Re-edition and Study of P.Oxy. VIII 1151 (25 mins.)
The Christian amulet P.Oxy. VIII 1151 was first published over a century ago and has often been reprinted, but, beyond a single line (D. Hagedorn, ZPE 145 (2003), 226), never revised (bibliography in the TMMagic database organized by the Leuven Trismegistos project, http://www.trismegistos.org/magic/index.php, entry #61652). I provide a preliminary report on a new edition with expanded commentary. My discussion includes a detailed consideration of physical and orthographic features of the amulet based on autopsy, including the generally high quality of the writing and its affinities with scribal practice in literary book production; I attempt to set the dating of the piece, tentatively assigned by the editio princeps to the fifth century, on firmer ground. I also give the amulet further interpretative context, in two respects. First, with the vastly expanded corpus of amulets made available since the initial publication: correcting a misperception of the first editor that the piece is “purely Christian, with no admixture of heathen magic,” I examine formulaic elements of the text as evidence of continuity with pre-Christian amuletic practice, especially in its use of a particular apotropaic invocation addressed directly to the affliction troubling the bearer of the amulet, and the identification of the bearer with a metronym. Second, I set the amulet in the context of its production and use by a Christian woman in late ancient Oxyrhynchus, specifically as it invokes the protection of Christian saints with a cult presence in that city. I also analyze the composition of the text, whose formal architecture has never been studied in detail. I identify evidence of care in composition, to accompany the care in the act of writing manifested in the first part of my discussion, both of which contribute to the production of a high-quality artifact. Here I point especially to the artificial arrangement of words and clauses, particularly chiastic and tripartite structure, and the use of prose-rhythm based on word stress. Finally, I suggest an application of the amulet as a long-neglected testimonium at a crux in the textual history of the New Testament gospel of John. Namely, P.Oxy. VIII 1151 provides the only papyrus witness so far known for the placement of punctuation between clauses in John 1:3-4, χωρὶς αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο οὐδὲ ἕν. ὃ γέγονεν ... in the most recent edition of Nestle-Aland, with the variant χωρὶς αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο οὐδὲ ἓν ὃ γέγονεν.
6. C. Michael Sampson, University of Manitoba
A New Text from the Dossier of the Descendants of Flavius Eulogius (20 mins.)
The majority of the texts constituting the modest archive of Flavius Eulogius (PLRE 2.421 [10]) were excavated in Grenfell and Hunt’s first season at Bahnasa and published in P.Oxy. XVI. As additional texts were identified (in P.Oxy I, P.Iand. III, PSI V, and, most recently, P.Lond. V) and subsequently published (in P.Oxy. LXVIII and P.Mich. XV), the relationship of the texts and the nature of the archive became increasingly complex: not only did the documents span several generations—from Eulogius’ rise from Aurelius to Flavius as well as the careers of his sons Apphous and Martyrius, to those of the latter’s sons Serenus and Hatres—but the dispersal of the texts made it necessary to distinguish between the family archive proper and a dossier of related documents (Martin; Hickey and Keenan 1996-1997).
This paper has two goals. I begin by presenting an edition of P.Mich. inv. 476, in the course of which I will establish that it belongs to the dossier of texts related to the descendants of Flavius Eulogius. Its close affinities to P.Oxy. I 140 in palaeography, titulature and boilerplate in the document’s epistolary prescript all guarantee the connection, and its date—March 30, 557 CE—makes it the last known member of the dossier. The second goal of the presentation is the elucidation of the text’s contents. Unlike many other texts from the archive and dossier, it is no straightforward lease of property, and the process of understanding its contents and contextualizing the agreement requires that the various kinds of documents towards which it gestures be first distinguished and identified. I will argue that the document is unique, and that it combines the legalizing language of a loan (ὁμολοκοῦμεν [sic]... ἐσχηκέναι) with that of a contract for labor. For the terms of repayment (if there were any) are unclear, and the text otherwise appears to bind four individuals to Eulogius’ grandson Serenus, under mutual obligation (ἐξ ἀλληλεγγύης), regarding an irrigated plot (μηχανή) belonging to Serenus. The signatories acknowledge receipt of several solidi, but the text is obscure when it comes to the irrigated plot and the job to be conducted, and the papyrus breaks off before its full extent is clear. Nevertheless, the fact that the money appears to be their wages (τοῦ ἡμῶν μισθοῦ) positions the document less as a loan and more as a contract for labor, paid in advance.
Business meeting (35 mins.)
Ancient Books: Material and Discursive Interactions
William Johnson, Duke University, Presider
As in other humanistic disciplines, so in Classics the materiality of texts has been a major area of new research for some years now. These papers draw together some of the most important perspectives on textual materialism, including fundamental research and speculative hermeneutic approaches to primary sources, and considerations of both literal and symbolic texts in social and educational
contexts.
1. Richard Janko, University of Michigan
New Readings in the Derveni Papyrus (20 mins.)
The Derveni papyrus was found in 1962. Although it contains sensational new evidence for Hellenic religious and philosophical views in the late fifth century BCE, it was published, with the infrared photographs of Makis Skiadaressis, only in 2006 (Kouremenos, Parássoglou and Tsantsanoglou 2006, = KPT). Little progress has been made subsequently. Multispectral images were made (Alessio 2006), but these remain unavailable even to the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki where the papyrus is kept (D. Ignatiadou, pers. comm. 2014). The earliest set of infrared photographs by Spyros Tsavdaroglou is still unpublished. Even the reliability of KPT has been doubted, because there have been no independent reports by which to test it. The overall significance of the text continues to be disputed. It depends above all on the correct reconstruction and interpretation of the opening, which is controversial (Piano 2011), and of column 20. Hence the treatise has variously been ascribed to a presocratic freethinker (Janko 2008) or to a credulous mantis commenting on Persian religion (Ferrari 2011a, 2011b).
Study of the original papyrus, the infrared photographs and the conservation archive in Thessaloniki in April 2014, with the generous assistance of the Museum, reveals that KPT is generally reliable, although it omits one small piece (A10) and has misplaced others. The papyrus is in stable condition, except that the pieces in Frame 5 (E1–13) have suffered serious cracking since it was first photographed (and a number of the photographs are missing). Pace Tsantsanoglou (2013), there are no column-numbers in the upper margins; these are only cracks, fibres and shadows. Instead, there is a stichometric omicron in the left margin of column 6. A marginal chi and several corrections have also been missed. Hence the papyrus was a full-length book-roll written by a professional scribe.
Carbonized papyri are always the hardest to read, but advances in digital microscopy have permitted a better reading of faint or damaged letters throughout. The standard text is mostly confirmed, since it turns out that KPT often use dotted letters to indicate letters that are damaged but certain. However, autopsy confirms numerous proposals that KPT rejected, and at times offers totally unexpected readings. Tto the extent that time permits, a selection of them will be presented and documented with microphotographs. There is hope that, with a more precise reading of the unplaced fragments, more of them will be able to be restored to their correct places in the roll.
More of the fragment of Heraclitus (3+94DK) in column 4 can be read and reconstructed: “The sun, in accord with the nature of its course ([δρό]μου), is the breadth of a human foot, not waxing beyond its size; for if it exceeds its own breadth at all, the Erinyes, allies of justice, will discover it, [so that it may not] make [a course] that is excessive [in size].”
The controversial column 5 matches no previous reconstruction exactly: “For them we will enter the prophetic shrine to ask, with regard to what is prophesied, whether they are doing rightly. Why do they disbelieve that there are terrors in Hades? Since they do not understand dream-visions or all the other things, what sort of proofs would make them believe? When they are overcome by error and pleasure as well, they suddenly comprehend so that they believe.”
In column 6 not “prayers” (εὐ]χ̣α̣ί) but “barley-cakes” (μᾶ]ζα̣ι) placate the souls.
The second verse of the Orphic poem is partly legible in column 7: “Orpheus” announced his topic as the bold deeds of Zeus.
The controversy over τότε or τόδε in column 13 is decided in favor of τότε.
The ends of columns 18–20 are changed. That of 18 is extremely weird, that of 19 uses atomist terminology, while that of 20, where the author turns from insulting the initiates to the Orphic narrative of Zeus’ multiple rapes, can be read with greater confidence.
posted by G.W. Schwendner | 10:15 PM
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