Editorial politics in the Medieval Greek War of Troy

Editorial politics in the Medieval Greek War of Troy At a date in the fourteenth century, somewhere in the Greek-speaking Eastern Mediterranean, a massive translation was completed. The source text was the 30,316 eight-syllable lines of Benoit de Sainte-Maure's Roman de Troie, written two centuries before as part of a movement to secularise the history of Western Europe andtogive its rulers a Virgilian aristocratic genealogy going back to Troy.1 The fourteendi-century translation was made into the mixed learned and popular Greek which was the lowest register then in use in writing.2 In the terms of Western Europe, this was a translation into the vernacular rather than into the equivalent of Latin—we may call it an early text of M o d e m Greek. The translation runs to 14,400 fifteen-syllable lines, making it the longest work in that genre of Greek literature. It is usually called the ri6Xep.og trie, Tpco&Scu;, the War ofTroy.3 The War of Troy was probably commissioned by a western ruler of Greek-speaking subjects, for there are persuasive hints that one of its purposes was to establish western connections to the Trojans, w h o were, marginally at least, older than the Greeks. This would ensure that Greek claims for special cultural and historical antiquity via Homer would not go uncontested. The Frankish principality of the Morea, set up by the Fourth Crusade, is a likely place for such a project.4 The poem also has interesting implications for medieval Greek society: though Homer was a major setbook of Byzantine education, his authority was insufficient, at least in a Greek outpost under western colonial rule,tokeep outtiiisrival and very 1 Published by L. Constans (ed.), Le Roman de Troie, 6 vols, Paris, 1904-12. For ideological implications see F. Ingledew, 'The Book of Troy and the Genealogical Construction of History: The Case of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britanniae', in Speculum 69 (1994), 665-704. 2 R. Browning, Medieval and Modem Greek, 2nd edn, Cambridge, 1983, pp. 69-87. 3 An edition of the text by E. M . Jeffreys and M . Papathomopoulos has long been near completion. The writer of this article has been close to the process of edition, but this does not imply support from either of the editors for the arguments or conclusions expressed here. 4 E. M . Jeffreys, 'Place of Composition as a factor in the edition of early demotic texts', in N. Panayotakis (ed.), Origini della Letteratura Neogreca I, Venice, 1993, pp. 310-24. P A R E R G O N ns 13.2, January 1996—Text, Scribe, Artefact 38 M. J. Jeffreys different account. The War of Troy even mangles the names of Homeric heroes in returning them to Greek from a French source, itself derived via Latin from original Greek works of Dares and Diktys.5 Only the best-known heroes are recognised and restored to their authentic Greek forms. In this paper I will use the War of Troy to analyse the interface of a past manuscript world with modern scholarship and its print and electronic cultures. I shall concentrate on the impasse faced by those w h o wish to make the products of that past world available for m o d e m readers. There are extantfivemajor manuscripts and two substantial fragments of the War of Troy, all probably written somefiftyto one hundred and fifty years after the estimated date of its composition.6 It m a y be proved conclusively, by referencetomissing passages, that no manuscript is a direct or indirect copy of another. All the manuscripts tend to vary more from one to another than w e can accept with comfort under the rubric 'copy'. This substantial variation in copying results in part from the fact that the poem had been translated into the vernacular. It seems clear that in many cultures manuscripts using something like the regular spoken language of their scribes were less often copied with word-for-word accuracy than those adopting more learned linguistic levels. This has been shown, for example, by analysis of the flexibility of Anglo-Saxon and the comparative stability of Latin...