On the Copying of Things
It all began with, “ya wretch?”
In Iliad 17 Glaukos roasts Pretty- Boy Hector for slacking off in the battle for Patroklos’ corpse. He rhetorically asks him why he would fight to save Patroklos’ corpse when he didn’t even fight for Sarpedon’s. At the end of this accusation, he calls him a σχέτλι’, a “wretch” (Iliad 17.150). Our confusion and amusement at the term of abuse came from the Venetus B, where the scribe had made the punctuation following σχέτλι’ a question mark, unlike the Upsilon 1.1, which recorded a period. For a while we forgot to take into account the beginning of the sentence in the previous line, which starts with the interrogative πῶς “how”, and found it infinitely hilarious that Glaukos seemed to, in the middle of his reprimand, turn to Hector and say, “ya wretch?” (It also helped that while playing Cards Against Humanity with other participants of the Homer Multitext Summer Seminar the night before, the card “Bees?” had come up multiple times.)
This is how we started noticing all the little differences between the so-called “twin” manuscripts Upsilon 1.1 and Venetus B. They are called Twins because they are laid out so similarly that it seems they were copied from the same archetype. The differences we noted between these two manuscripts were not always the most interesting–most of them are the difference between a period and a comma–but added together they helped to form a picture of the two different scribes’ writing practices and personalities.
The most common type of divergence we noted between the two manuscripts was punctuation. Where Upsilon 1.1 had a period, Venetus B would have a comma. Where Upsilon 1.1 had a comma, Venetus B would have no punctuation. Our favorite instance of this type of difference is the above example of “ya wretch?”. Interestingly enough, the Venetus A records a comma, while the Towneley records a high stop. Therefore all possible types of punctuation are accounted for in this case, and all are perfectly possible and legitimate readings! The question Glaukos raises against Hector is more rhetorical and accusatory, so it does not necessarily demand a question mark. But what we believe the punctuation difference in the Twins shows is that the Venetus B scribe was slightly more reflective and attuned to the grammar of the passage than the Upsilon 1.1 scribe. Seeing that Glaukos’s statement was technically a question initiated by the interrogative πῶς–even if it is a question that isn’t meant to be answered–the Venetus B scribe seems to have decided it needed a question mark to fulfill that sense.
When we got down to translating the text, we came across another type of difference that we had flagged before but whose significance we hadn’t fully realized. For lines 144-145 of Iliad 17, in which Glaukos threatens to take the Lycians home if Hector doesn’t step up, Upsilon 1.1 records:
φράζεο νῦν ὄππως κε πόλιν καὶ ἄστυ σαώσηιςοἷος σὺν λαοῖσι, τοὶ ἰλίωι ἐγγεγάασιν
Consider now how you will save the city and town such as with people, who were born in Ilium.
Ok, kinda confusing, but ok. But then we came across a slightly different reading in Venetus B:
φράζεον νῦν ὄππως κε πόλιν καὶ ἄστυ σαώσηιςοἶος σὺν λαοῖσι τοὶ ἰλίωι ἐγγεγάασιν
Consider now how you will save the city and town alone with people who were born in Ilium.
Did you spot the difference? A single breathing mark (plus a comma) changes the meaning from “such as” (οἷος with rough breathing) to “alone” (οἶος with smooth breathing). Given that Glaukos has just threatened to abandon Troy and to withdraw his Lycian forces from the war effort, the reading in Venetus B makes more sense, and is again suggestive of the scribe’s stronger editorial impulse in comparison to the scribe of Upsilon 1.1. The Venetus B scribe seems to consistently make more spelling corrections to the archetype from which he and the Upsilon 1.1 scribe were copying, although we’ll never actually know for sure.
Speaking of spelling corrections, the scribe for Venetus B thinks iota-adscripts in the subjunctive are superfluous. That’s a bit of an exaggeration on our part. We can’t fully know why he does anything, but we do know that he consistently erases the iota-adscripts in subjunctive verbs. The scribe for Upsilon 1.1, on the other hand, leaves them in. We decided to look at a specific example of this kind of difference with the verb ἀναχωρήσηι “withdraw” (in the scholion to Iliad 17.110) across the Venetus A, Venetus B, Upsilon 1.1, and the Townley. In Upsilon 1.1, the verb is spelled with the iota-adscript. In Venetus B, the iota-adscript is deleted so that it reads ἀναχωρήση. Venetus A doesn’t even have this scholion. Finally, the Townley puts the verb in the optative ἀναχωροίη. Interestingly, the Venetus B scribe leaves the iota-adscripts in for datives, so he doesn’t just have something against iotas. It is possible that since the pronunciation of η, ει, and ηι were the same in the 11th century when he was copying, he thought it unnecessary to have the iotas. It is also possible that the deletion of the iota-adscripts in subjunctive verbs helped to distinguish the verb forms from datives with similar endings.
The final significant difference we found on the pages we were transcribing involved the different placements of scholia markers, which only happened twice. More folios must be transcribed in order to see if this is a common practice, but it certainly helped to paint a fuller picture of the scribe for Venetus B.
In Upsilon 1.1, the scholia markers for ια and ιβ are placed on line 17.133 over ὥσ τίς and τέκεσσιν respectively. In Venetus B, the ια marker is placed on line 133 over λεών, while ιβ is placed on line 134 over ἄγοντι. The lines which the scholia comment on describe Ajax standing over Patroklos with his shield like a lion over its kids. Scholion ια discusses the gender of the word used for lion. It claims that Homer did not use the word for lioness because he did not know it, while also noting that male lions obviously do not look after the cubs (this not true, by the way, because male lions do look after the cubs when the females are out hunting). Anyways, Upsilon 1.1 places the scholia marker at the beginning of the line over ὥσ τίς, probably because that’s where the archetype has it, and probably because that’s the beginning of the simile. The Venetus B scribe, however, places the marker more precisely over the word lion, possibly because the scholion is specifically about this word.
The ιβ scholion, which actually demonstrates examples of almost all the major differences we found, quotes multiple instances in the Iliad and the Odyssey where mothers protect their young. The placement of ιβ in Upsilon 1.1 makes sense because the passage focuses on children. The placement in Venetus B also makes sense in its own way, because it suggests more about the type of love between an animal mother and its young in the way it leads them. The movement of the scholia markers from where they probably were in the archetype suggests that the Venetus B scribe read the scholia, at least before writing the scholia markers if not the scholia themselves, and made a more deliberate choice about where to place them, focusing the markers on what he believes the scholia are specifically about.
These little differences–an erasure here, a correction there–add up to form a larger glimpse into how the two scribes of the Twins approached their work. It seems that the scribe for Upsilon 1.1, who showed little to no inclination for correction or deletion in the folios we transcribed, copied what he saw as it was in the archetype. Maybe he didn’t know enough to realize there were mistakes. Maybe he didn’t care. Or maybe by Book 17 of the Iliad he was tired and less attentive to the smaller details of the text. The scribe for Venetus B, on the other hand, seems to have been more critically reflective of the text he was copying. Maybe he had more zeal for his work and knew more about ancient Greek, or maybe he was just a stickler for grammar. Either way, both scribes managed to miss a typo in scholion ιβ, where they misquote the Odyssey and write λεών instead of κυνῶν. This just goes to show how both scribes were equally susceptible to little mistakes. It’s the little things that let their humanity shine across one-thousand years, even as they copy word-for-word an archetype whose roots go back thousands.
On the Copying of Things It all began with, “ya wretch?” In Iliad 17 Glaukos roasts Pretty- Boy Hector for slacking off in the battle for Patroklos’ corpse. He rhetorically asks him why he would fight to save Patroklos’ corpse when he didn’t even fight for Sarpedon’s. At the end of this accusation, he calls him a σχέτλι’, a “wretch” (Iliad 17.150). Our confusion and amusement at the term of abuse came from the Venetus B, where the scribe had made the punctuation following σχέτλι’ a question mark, unlike the Upsilon 1.1, which recorded a period. For a while we forgot to take into account the beginning of the sentence in the previous line, which starts with the interrogative πῶς “how”, and found it infinitely hilarious that Glaukos seemed to, in the middle of his reprimand, turn to Hector and say, “ya wretch?” (It also helped that while playing Cards Against Humanity with other participants of the Homer Multitext Summer Seminar the night before, the card “Bees?” had come up multiple times.) This is how we started noticing all the little differences between the so-called “twin” manuscripts Upsilon 1.1 and Venetus B. They are called Twins because they are laid out so similarly that it seems they were copied from the same archetype. The differences we noted between these two manuscripts were not always the most interesting–most of them are the difference between a period and a comma–but added together they helped to form a picture of the two different scribes’ writing practices and personalities. The most common type of divergence we noted between the two manuscripts was punctuation. Where Upsilon 1.1 had a period, Venetus B would have a comma. Where Upsilon 1.1 had a comma, Venetus B would have no punctuation. Our favorite instance of this type of difference is the above example of “ya wretch?”. Interestingly enough, the Venetus A records a comma, while the Towneley records a high stop. Therefore all possible types of punctuation are accounted for in this case, and all are perfectly possible and legitimate readings! The question Glaukos raises against Hector is more rhetorical and accusatory, so it does not necessarily demand a question mark. But what we believe the punctuation difference in the Twins shows is that the Venetus B scribe was slightly more reflective and attuned to the grammar of the passage than the Upsilon 1.1 scribe. Seeing that Glaukos’s statement was technically a question initiated by the interrogative πῶς–even if it is a question that isn’t meant to be answered–the Venetus B scribe seems to have decided it needed a question mark to fulfill that sense. When we got down to translating the text, we came across another type of difference that we had flagged before but whose significance we hadn’t fully realized. For lines 144-145 of Iliad 17, in which Glaukos threatens to take the Lycians home if Hector doesn’t step up, Upsilon 1.1 records: φράζεο νῦν ὄππως κε πόλιν καὶ ἄστυ σαώσηις οἷος σὺν λαοῖσι, τοὶ ἰλίωι ἐγγεγάασιν Consider now how you will save the city and town such as with people, who were born in Ilium. Ok, kinda confusing, but ok. But then we came across a slightly different reading in Venetus B: φράζεον νῦν ὄππως κε πόλιν καὶ ἄστυ σαώσηις οἶος σὺν λαοῖσι τοὶ ἰλίωι ἐγγεγάασιν Consider now how you will save the city and town alone with people who were born in Ilium. Did you spot the difference? A single breathing mark (plus a comma) changes the meaning from “such as” (οἷος with rough breathing) to “alone” (οἶος with smooth breathing). Given that Glaukos has just threatened to abandon Troy and to withdraw his Lycian forces from the war effort, the reading in Venetus B makes more sense, and is again suggestive of the scribe’s stronger editorial impulse in comparison to the scribe of Upsilon 1.1. The Venetus B scribe seems to consistently make more spelling corrections to the archetype from which he and the Upsilon 1.1 scribe were copying, although we’ll never actually know for sure. Speaking of spelling corrections, the scribe for Venetus B thinks iota-adscripts in the subjunctive are superfluous. That’s a bit of an exaggeration on our part. We can’t fully know why he does anything, but we do know that he consistently erases the iota-adscripts in subjunctive verbs. The scribe for Upsilon 1.1, on the other hand, leaves them in. We decided to look at a specific example of this kind of difference with the verb ἀναχωρήσηι “withdraw” (in the scholion to Iliad 17.110) across the Venetus A, Venetus B, Upsilon 1.1, and the Townley. In Upsilon 1.1, the verb is spelled with the iota-adscript. In Venetus B, the iota-adscript is deleted so that it reads ἀναχωρήση. Venetus A doesn’t even have this scholion. Finally, the Townley puts the verb in the optative ἀναχωροίη. Interestingly, the Venetus B scribe leaves the iota-adscripts in for datives, so he doesn’t just have something against iotas. It is possible that since the pronunciation of η, ει, and ηι were the same in the 11th century when he was copying, he thought it unnecessary to have the iotas. It is also possible that the deletion of the iota-adscripts in subjunctive verbs helped to distinguish the verb forms from datives with similar endings. The final significant difference we found on the pages we were transcribing involved the different placements of scholia markers, which only happened twice. More folios must be transcribed in order to see if this is a common practice, but it certainly helped to paint a fuller picture of the scribe for Venetus B. In Upsilon 1.1, the scholia markers for ια and ιβ are placed on line 17.133 over ὥσ τίς and τέκεσσιν respectively. In Venetus B, the ια marker is placed on line 133 over λεών, while ιβ is placed on line 134 over ἄγοντι. The lines which the scholia comment on describe Ajax standing over Patroklos with his shield like a lion over its kids. Scholion ια discusses the gender of the word used for lion. It claims that Homer did not use the word for lioness because he did not know it, while also noting that male lions obviously do not look after the cubs (this not true, by the way, because male lions do look after the cubs when the females are out hunting). Anyways, Upsilon 1.1 places the scholia marker at the beginning of the line over ὥσ τίς, probably because that’s where the archetype has it, and probably because that’s the beginning of the simile. The Venetus B scribe, however, places the marker more precisely over the word lion, possibly because the scholion is specifically about this word. The ιβ scholion, which actually demonstrates examples of almost all the major differences we found, quotes multiple instances in the Iliad and the Odyssey where mothers protect their young. The placement of ιβ in Upsilon 1.1 makes sense because the passage focuses on children. The placement in Venetus B also makes sense in its own way, because it suggests more about the type of love between an animal mother and its young in the way it leads them. The movement of the scholia markers from where they probably were in the archetype suggests that the Venetus B scribe read the scholia, at least before writing the scholia markers if not the scholia themselves, and made a more deliberate choice about where to place them, focusing the markers on what he believes the scholia are specifically about. These little differences–an erasure here, a correction there–add up to form a larger glimpse into how the two scribes of the Twins approached their work. It seems that the scribe for Upsilon 1.1, who showed little to no inclination for correction or deletion in the folios we transcribed, copied what he saw as it was in the archetype. Maybe he didn’t know enough to realize there were mistakes. Maybe he didn’t care. Or maybe by Book 17 of the Iliad he was tired and less attentive to the smaller details of the text. The scribe for Venetus B, on the other hand, seems to have been more critically reflective of the text he was copying. Maybe he had more zeal for his work and knew more about ancient Greek, or maybe he was just a stickler for grammar. Either way, both scribes managed to miss a typo in scholion ιβ, where they misquote the Odyssey and write λεών instead of κυνῶν. This just goes to show how both scribes were equally susceptible to little mistakes. It’s the little things that let their humanity shine across one-thousand years, even as they copy word-for-word an archetype whose roots go back thousands.