editionHistoryOfIliad

How did the Iliad (and the Odyssey, and other Greek texts) get to us at UVM in 2018?

Developed out of Near Eastern/Greek epic mythology oral traditions over hundreds of years.

We can peek into those years here and there and know things were happening.
We've tried to do a bit of that in this class already.

So what about the Iliad as we know it? a basically complete and polished valuable literary work whose text we are pretty confident about.
Presumably first written on papyrus, which is like paper, but perhaps it was first written down on animal skins. No certainty possible.
Even after it was written, oral performance continued for a very long time, and the oral performance was the real event: we know that, for example, there was a full performance at the great Panathenaic festival in Athens. The written version(s) were not the real thing any more than a play script is. Hence the variety in the text persisted: different bards told it differently on different occasions. Plato's Ion is a somewhat amusing talk between Socrates and a bard of Plato's time (the bard is not particularly bright).
It was a massive undertaking to write down, or compose, these poems: perhaps there was also a rich patron who wanted it done.
Most people think that the moment of writing down may have been a moment of added creativity (writer/bard/composer wanted to make the best possible version is the thought), and added length (that's what happens in some cases of transcribing living oral poets in our times).
It is also not at all clear at what date the first writing down occurred, or whether after the first, it was changed/improved subsequently by additional writing down/verifying or comparison between bards (council of bards?). Maybe it was just an audience member who knew how to write and went back repeatedly or traveled with a bard?
Speculation can run rampant.

Somehow it became a written text and was close to the text that we now have.

But there was a lot more variety than is usual today.
Whole lines, whole episodes, seem to have been slightly different or even wholly absent here or there or added at some time in the process.
Remember, every copy of it was a copy, not like modern books, which are copies in a different, more identical way. That is a good source for errors, additions, improvements, etc.

For centuries, copies were made, always by hand: there was no printing press.

We do have scraps of papyrus with texts from the Iliad and Odyssey on them.

The earliest are from the 3rd c. BCE, centuries after we think the first written versions occurred.

We think the first ones predate the 3rd c. BCE because of the language: it matches the language of earlier poets and seems earlier than all of them.

Papyri of the Homeric epics vastly outnumber all other literary papyri.
And there are twice as many from Iliad as from Odyssey.
Here's a great website that can provide more information on Iliad papyri.
Here's a how to make a scroll site.

When we say that "Homer" dates to the 8th century, we mean that the language and latest cultural elements in the poems that we can date even vaguely date to that time. It is a date "after which."
In Athens, under the ruler Pisistratus, the epics were performed at the Panathenaic festival, and that is why many speak of a "Pisistratean Recension," dated to around 566. The thought is that before that, perhaps the epics were sung piecemeal, irregularly, and Pisistratus was the first to make them be sung through in some fashion (reports indicate, however, that it was really only a bit later, under Hipparchus, that they were sung in their entirety at the Panathenaic festival), which would have required deciding what belonged in the performance and what did not (for example, many think that the Doloneia was inserted at the time of the Pisistratean recension: a scholia says it was originally not part of the Iliad, and it has some problems fitting into the rest of the poem: one wonders about Thersites too: Catalog of Ships?).

From before the 3rd c. BCE, we have many quotations of Homer in various authors (Plato, etc.), and those that quote the same passage show some variety. Different authors have different versions of the same passage.

Think of it like a giant telegraph game: each copy introduces a few errors (the scribe's eyes play tricks, the scribe doesn't understand the passage and so puts down what he thinks it should be, the scribe likes to invent a line or two, 'improve' a scene or two, leave out some things he doesn't like, etc.), and because people have attended many Homeric singing occasions, they remember it a bit differently too.
In the 2nd and 3rd c. BC, however, a full 400 years after the hypothetical Pisistratean Recension, a change occurs in the scraps of the epics that survive: the text becomes much more uniform, particularly after Aristarchus (see next bullet point).
The first time when we have clear evidence that someone produced an edition of Homer is in the Hellenistic era, when Aristarchus, director of the Library of Alexandria in the middle of the 2nd c. BC, is reported to have produced an authoritative edition of the texts of Iliad and Odyssey. Of course, there must have been earlier editions, but we have no real evidence about any specific ones.

We have none of Aristarchus' own text.
It was not a scholarly edition in the modern sense: it was a record of what he thought the "received text" was, and he explained how he thought it should be changed in notes.
Aristarchus is the culmination, the final product, of a long line of scholars in Alexandria in Hellenistic times, who worked on Homer's epics.
SKIP THIS PART IN CLASS: PLEASE READ THIS ON YOUR OWN IF YOU ARE CURIOUS:

We have only reports, piecemeal, in the scholia, about Aristarchus' text: the 'scholia' is a collection of notes on the text

These scholia are short entries on specific words, phrases, or passages. They come originally from extensive works, individual works by many individuals, including Aristarchus, dating back to Hellenistic times.
Later ages cut those individual works up and took excerpts from them and condensed them into shorter versions, and so the original longer works were lost.

What is left and is called the "scholia" is a mish-mash from many authors from many ages with many different ideas and approaches.

Didymus and Aristonicus are among the most important names in the creation and transmission of ancient scholia, because they give us the best evidence about Aristarchus, and they are pretty close to him in time.
The scholia that we have divide into two groups:

"Scholia vetera," which refers to ancient scholia before Byzantine times, and
"Scholia recentiora," which refers to scholia written by Byzantine scholars (i.e. during the Byzantine Empire).
Often, the distinction between the two is not clear.
In any case, we have about 4,000 pages of scholia, mostly not translated! And spanning many centuries!
I have read very very little of these.
They offer many many many ideas about variations in individual words and phrases as well as whether whole lines and whole passages are or are not authentic to Homer. They also offer comments about all manner of other things in the epics.

BUT, at this point, that is in the middle of the 2nd c. BCE, the number of verses in each book becomes pretty much fixed. The question is, which verses to include, and which variants of phrasing to include.

END OF SECTION SKIPPED IN CLASS
By the time of Aristarchus, and as far as we can trace it before him, "Homer" was thought of as a single author.

Thus, given the variety of variants that were known by many people, the question arose at the time, "What did Homer write?" because what Homer wrote was the real Iliad, and this author "Homer" could only have written one version, right?

The idea was that there was at some time, "The actual words of Homer" and that they were unique: Homer wrote the poems as an individual, finished them, and then that edition was the real Homeric epics.
We now know, from oral poetry in many places in the world, that it doesn't work that way really.
We know that that the idea that there is only one fixed, permanent, unvarying authoritative version is an idea only a literate culture would have.

Milman Parry and the idea of orality and the naturalness of variations had not yet come along.

As the centuries rolled by, handwriting changed, punctuation of various sorts was invented, more (and less) sophisticated approaches were tried, etc. The text had to be copied out again and again, by hand. So the copies were copies of copies of copies of copies...

Papyrus was originally in rolls, but it changed to being on codices (singular codex: here is an image from the most famous Iliad codex), which were like books of our day. That transition required recopying, and all the old scrolls were old fashioned and perhaps replaced.
In the 8th/9th century CE, letters changed from majuscule (capitals) to minuscule (small letters), and gradually, all books had to be copied into minuscule. That was a time when many ancient texts were lost, because they either weren't copied into minuscule or not enough copies were made to survive.
In case you are curious, here's a site that tries to teach you how to read a minuscule text

Eventually, in Byzantium (later Constantinople, now Istanbul), in the 10th century CE, a scribe copied out a manuscript which we know as Venetus A. The scribe copied not just the text of the Iliad, but also the scholia, the scholarly notes about the text.

Venetus A is our oldest surviving manuscript of the entire text of Iliad.
There are a lot of other later manuscripts. Some omit large bits, such as the catalog of ships, etc.
Other bits of manuscripts prior to Venetus A are not complete.

An aside about Greek in Western Europe: Venetus A is a Byzantine manuscript, from the eastern side of the mediterranean. Over in the western side, in the old Roman Empire of Rome, eventually the knowledge of reading Greek was lost, but then, after the European "dark ages," around the 4th crusade (early 13th century of the Common Era), a fair bit of Greek re-entered western Europe, but when the Byzantine empire fell (1453 CE), Greek came back to western Europe like wildfire in the universities: the Greek scholars were running out of the Byzantine Empire from the Ottoman Turk with manuscripts under their arms. There had been some Greek in western Europe before then, but it really came back then. That fueled the fire of the Renaissance in Italy and in the north too, and Homer has been read in western Europe ever since. That is the line of tradition that brought Homer to UVM.
Further importance of Venetus A

In 1788, a French man, named Villoison, published Venetus A with the scholia and claimed that the scholia were of supreme importance for not only information about customs, mythology, rites, and geography, but for the very text of the Iliad.

Why were the notes important for the text?
Because the scholiasts discussed variants (should the text read "a boar" or "a lion," for instance), which meant that variants of the text could and should be studied.
Also, Villloison thought that Venetus A was an authoritative witness to the ancient Aristarchus' edition of the Iliad.

In 1795, Wolf published his Prolegomena which questioned the authority of Venetus A and whether Aristarchus' edition should be considered authoritative.
To this day, scholars debate the same issues as Villoison and Wolf disagreed about.
That, and its status as the earliest complete manuscript, make Venetus A an important focus of contention in Homeric studies.
For the most part, this discussion's evidence is a matter for scholars and those who know ancient Greek. If you get really interested, you've got to learn Greek. And it's quite a worthwhile language.

The first printing press edition of the epics in Greek was in Florence in 1488/89. Those early printed books are called incunabula.

Most modern scholars think that recovering the actual words of the earliest writing down of the epics is impossible. We can try, and we have lots of ways of arguing for this or that word or for this or that entire line, but we cannot attain certainty. It's fascinating and involves a lot of admirable learning. Aristarchus' methods and text are central to it all.
You should be interested to learn that the best modern scholars probably have a better chance of recovering "Homer" and "Homeric language" than many of their ancient predecessors: they have comparative linguistics, good editions, knowledge of many Greek dialects, etc.

For example, Bentley discovered the digamma, a letter that was lost, but still influenced the text of the epics, because it affected meter: for example, Ilion was pronounced wilion (and there is in Hittite reference to wilusa!!!). The very word epos, from which English "epic" derives, was originally pronounced wepos.

You can see a diagamma in the word "work," which is cognate with erg (a unit of work) or ergonomics: work and erg are linguistic cousins. Greek lost the digamma, while Germanic retained it as a w in work.