The Kallierges Pindar: A Study in Renaissance Greek Scholarship and Printing by Staffan Fogelmark (review)

Staffan Fogelmark’s monumental work on Zacharias Kallierges’ 1515 edition of Pindar is undoubtedly going to stand as the most thorough study of this edition, and, to an extent, on the Roman period of Kallierges’ activity. Fogelmark’s research offers valuable new material based on primary evidence, as well as an interesting insight into a number of questions that, so far, scholars, and philologists in particular, have failed to address convincingly.

Two years after Aldus Manutius’ Venetian editio princeps of Pindar in 1513, issued as part of his elegant octavo series of Greek and Latin classics, Kallierges published, in Rome, a new edition in quarto, with the major addition of the scholia to the Pindaric text. This version, commonly referred to as the editio romana, soon became the standard scholarly reference edition for centuries to come. Crucially, a particular section of the text in this edition, the Pythian odes, contains a number of unique readings that survive only in this edition, and not in any of the manuscripts extant today. This fact alone is of paramount importance; but of possibly even greater interest, in 1974 Fogelmark made the fascinating discovery that the four quires of the Pythian odes (A–∆) had been re-composed, resulting in a large majority of surviving copies containing a combination of sheets from the two different settings. This led, until very recently, to a number of reciprocal accusations of scholarly incompetence by academics who were, in effect, reading different texts. In this context it is worthy of note that Fogelmark does some justice to Bowra’s edition of Pindar, praising his philological analysis not only of the manuscripts, but of the printed editions too.

Fogelmark therefore undertook a methodical analysis of the quires of the Pythian Odes in all the known surviving copies of the editio romana (227 according to his census) in order to assess the state of the edition, and the reasons that led to such bibliographical complexity. His approach to these questions has many merits, but it will be as well first of all to draw attention to a few flaws in his study.

The first and most important of these is that the book lacks a clear structure; a guide is needed to navigate its almost eight hundred pages. This becomes clear even in the Preface: ‘some chapters are basically philological (III–V, except for the first part of Ch. III), others are basically bibliographical (II, VII–IX) and others again are mixed (I, VI)’ (p. xiv). The book’s unnecessarily complicated structure leads in turn to the second flaw: its swelling, in size, far beyond need. Fogelmark’s claim in the Preface that he wanted to keep his manual ‘as short as possible’ (p. xiii) is almost risible, in light of its huge size, and one can only fear what might have happened had he not endeavoured to limit himself. The author then informs us that, in order to serve both classical scholars and bibliographers, ‘the attentive reader will find that some important facts are repeated, sometimes even more than once, in other parts of the book’ (p. xiv). This might be understandable if it were limited to the essential facts, but unfortunately it hardly requires an attentive reader to notice a large number of passages which would not have been necessary had the structure been organized more efficiently. Moreover, the balance of information is uneven: classicists will learn more about early book production than book historians will find about classical scholarship.

The thoroughness demonstrated by the author occasionally borders into pedantry, insisting on publishing even the minutest piece of evidence, even when, on occasion, this evidence is not directly used to prove any specific point: this is found throughout the two volumes, but it holds particularly true for Appendices II (pp. 533–58) and III (pp. 559–89...