Gynaikon Katalogos und Megalai Ehoiai : Ein Kommentar zu den Fragmenten zweier hesiodeischer Epen (review)

Our knowledge of the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women has been increased enormously by papyri, but—as happens all too often—what we now have merely makes our profound ignorance all the harder to bear. The text of Reinhold Merkelbach and Martin West, together with West's The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women (Oxford 1985), lie (rightly) at the basis of all recent discussion; enough dust has settled, however, to make a fresh look more than worthwhile, and there are indeed a number of signs of stirring in the forest. (I hope I may be permitted to cite R. Hunter (ed.), The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women: Constructions and Reconstructions [Cambridge 2005].) Martina Hirschberger's book, a revised version of her Düsseldorf thesis, is one of the most significant of these.

The heart of Hirschberger's project is the commentary; as a result of this, she prints only those fragments which display wholly or partially preserved verses, and this necessitates a new numbering of her fragments (though the M-W numeration is also cited). Hirschberger offers a "Lesetext" based on M-W and other published sources, rather than on firsthand study of the papyri, generous citation of quoting sources, an apparatus pared to the bare minimum, and a helpfully full bibliography to each fragment placed at the head of the commentary; modern reconstructions of partial verses are, for the most part, kept out of the text and reserved for the commentary, unless clear archaic parallels allow a high level of certainty. The introduction sketches with skill and clarity all the currently major questions of date, authorship, structure, relationship with Odyssey 11, and so forth; if what emerges tends to be a survey of the status quaestionis, this in no way diminishes the book's usefulness (far from it, in fact). Hirschberger exercises independent judgment both on structural questions and on the assignment of fragments, and it is good to be forced to think again about these matters; thus, for example, the well-known verses on Cheiron and the dogs of Aktaion (POxy 2509) are firmly accepted into the Catalogue (=fr. 103 Hirschberger), whereas one of the best known passages of the M-W Catalogue, Hippomenes' successful pursuit of Atalanta, is relegated to the category. The reasons for the latter decision are partly stylistic—the almost Ovidian (my phrase) description of the race seems to Hirschberger quite different from the "eher knappen, oft allusiven Erzählungen" of the Catalogue—but we may wonder just how uniform the full Catalogue actually was; the important new evidence published by Claudio Meliadò in ZPE 145 (2003) 1–5 will have appeared too late for Hirschberger. The strengths of the commentary lie in the linguistic parallels from archaic epic, the collection of material on mythic motifs, and the scholarly presentation of the evidence for the content of the poems; Hirschberger is also good on parallels from Near Eastern epic. All in all, Hirschberger has produced a very valuable resource for research on these fascinating poems and one to which scholars will often turn.

If I have a complaint which goes beyond the inevitable details of disagreement, it lies, perhaps surprisingly given the size of Hirschberger's task, in the scope of the work. Hirschberger nowhere discusses what she sees as the limits appropriate to her work, but there is in places a certain narrowness, particularly where issues of Nachleben are concerned, as though line-by-line commentary cannot accommodate wider questions—a commonly held, if of course utterly erroneous, view, and one which, for example, a very full note on ancient flood-myths (173–76) suggests that Hirschberger does not share. To take a few examples on some better-known passages: fr. 1 (=1 M-W): Catullus 64 is mentioned (cf. 71) and Filippomaria...