Supplementum Supplementi Hellenistici (review)

When it was published in 1983, H. Lloyd-Jones and P. Parsons' magisterial Supplementum Hellenisticum (SH) brought together and made easily available for the first time a large number of texts that had never been collected in a single volume or that had been published separately in hard-to-access venues. The authors treated the work as a supplement to E. Powell's Collectanea Alexandrina (CA) and to the most important editions of the major Hellenistic poets, which they assumed readers would have on hand. The publication of that volume both reflected and facilitated a renaissance of interest in Hellenistic poetry in the second half of the last century, and especially in its last two decades.

The volume under review (SSH) announces itself as a supplement to the SH. It is so not primarily in that it makes accessible many new texts. There are in fact only a small handful of these—the adespota papyracea nova reperta consist of ten texts (including one wrongly classified; see below)—especially when one considers the wealth of new material included in SH. Indeed, the editor has elected not to include the poems on the new "Posidippus" papyrus, undoubtedly the most extensive and important addition to our corpus of Hellenistic poetry since 1983, presumably because those are now easily accessible in the editio minor of Austin and Bastianini. Other omissions include P.Lugd.Bat. 25.1, a text tentatively assigned by its first editors to Euphorion, and P.Oxy. 4711–14, published too late (2005) for inclusion in the volume.

Most of the new information contained in the volume involves select bibliography—on Callimachus' Iambi (before fr. 278), for example, the editor cites Kerkhecker's study of those poems but not that of Acosta-Hughes—and small corrections and additions to the apparatus of poets contained in SH and CA. Indeed, one merit of the volume is that it includes notes, however brief, on texts included in CA but not SH, like the fragments of Phanocles, Hermesianax of Colophon, and Parmeno of Byzantium. Considerable attention is devoted to providing cross-references to recent critical editions of individual poets, along with brief remarks on passages in which subsequent editors differed from SH. The result is that some pages mostly consist of white space with only limited new information. The lemmata on 82–83, for instance, contain only cross-references to the editions of Philitas by Sbardella and Spanoudakis (cf. the treatment of Archestratus, Matro, and Parthenius, among others).

The volume includes and expands on the corrigenda et addenda of the SH: corrections and additions consigned to brief mention in the back of the original volume now receive more complete treatment. This is convenient, even if there is room to wonder whether what has been gained always justifies the space that the press has devoted to it in laying out the text.

It is unfortunate, given the price of this volume and the extent to which it will be consulted by scholars, that the press has not done as good a job of production as one might wish. Greek punctuation and sigla have sometimes gone awry: half-stops are printed as English cola (e.g., fr. 783.3); obels as plus-signs (e.g., fr. 1887.21). Sublinear dots, used in papyrological texts to mark partially legible letters, have disappeared from a number of places in which they were printed in the editions on which SSH draws (e.g., fr. 1190.10, 15, 25). There are other slips of varying degrees of significance (e.g., p. 13, for the date of P. Brandt's Parodorum Epicorum Graecorum et Archestrati Reliquiae, read 1888; p. 63, on Hermippus, fr. 5 CA, read "Lightfoot"; fr. 975 should be cross-referenced FGE 1686–91 rather than 459–60). The final fragment included among adespota papyracea nova reperta (1195) in fact consists of a three-word snippet gleaned by Hollis not from a papyrus but from the text of Michael Choniates.

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