Work in progress: Greek paleography at Iowa

D.F. Jackson: Work in Progress - Palaeography 129 Work in progress: Greek paleography at Iowa D.F. Jackson The Greek paleography seminar offered every three years to graduate students at the University of Iowa covers all aspects of the transmission of classical texts to modem times. It includes an assignment to each student of a microfilm of a manuscript witness for collation and interrelation with other known witnesses of the work under consideration. It is therefore necessary to choose works of a length suitable to the short time allowed for collation and works whose manuscripts are well enough known to allow placement of newly read witnesses within an established stemma. The most recent object of our study has been Xenophon's Hiero. Some students who began with Hiero have gone on to write dissertations on other opúsculo. In 1975 Rosemary Wieczorek did a collation, stemma and critical text of Agesilaus and in 1982 Edward Schmoll did the same for Cynegeticus.1 Our in and out of class investigations have produced some very important information about the transmission of Xenophon's opúsculo as individul works and as a corpus. The picture is not yet altogether clear, but each week brings new information to light. That the opúsculo fall into two distinct families has long been maintained, but which witnesses belong to which side ofthe tradition has met with no agreement, and whether various opúsculo contained in a single witness cross familial lines has hardly been addressed.2 First steps toward remedying these problems were taken by Dennis 1 These dissertations are available through University Microfilms, Ann Arbor, MI. Sometimes a semester of Xenophon is enough. Such was the case with Diana Robin who in 1979 wrote a dissertation. The manuscript tradition ofOppian's Haliéutica, which was published by the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Bollettino dei Classici, serie terza, fase. ? (1981) 28-94. Lynn Leverenz is presently engaged in writing a dissertation on the scholia found in the Z-group of Haliéutica manuscripts. For a good summary of the familial question see G. Serra, "La tradizione manoscritta della Costituzione degli Atenesi dello Pseudo-Senofonte, " Alii e Memorie dell' Accademia Patavina 91 (1978-79) 77-78 and 83-103. We want to offer sincere thanks to Prof. Mark Sosower of North Carolina State University for supplying us with this article and for his continuing interest in our work. 130Syllecta Classica 1 (1989) Haltinner and Edward Schmoll through the publication of findings they made in the seminar.3 They showed that, although the oldest extant witness of the opúsculo, Vaticanus gr. 1335 (A), contains Hiero, there are at least three later witnesses4 which do not derive from A. These Hiero manuscripts belong to a second family and can be used as a firm basis for the reconstruction of that group as a whole. The A family is itself a complicated tangle.5 Wieczorek saw in Agesilaus a straight line derivation from A through Vaticanus gr. 1950 (B) to Ambrosianus Ell inf. (S). She saw Vat. Urbinas gr. 1 17 (V) and Brit. Mus. Harleianus 5724 (D) as gemelli deriving from A, apart from BS, through a lost exemplar. At the end of the line of Agesilaus witnesses she placed Marcianus gr. 511 (M), a derivative of S through a series of lost intermediaries.6 My own work with Hiero indicates that BS are gemelli deriving from a lost copy of A. Whereas the association of A and B seems to have been broken early, S continued to be geographically close to A (and, by implication, the source of BS as well). Codices A and S each profited greatly from corrections made in the other manuscript.7 The Harley codex (E in Hiero) contains even more A corrections than S and is an A derivative which postdates B and S. The corrections in S can be divided into two stages and its numerous offspring can be divided into two groups differentiated by a text which follows S in its first or second corrected state. Both of these groups were investigated in some detail by Judy K. Deuling and John Cirignano during the last seminar. Their findings will soon...