Internet Stemmatics

In June 2005 the Times Literary Supplement carried an article by Martin West containing a much fuller version of Sappho 58 than we'd had before. The extra text had been found in mummy cartonnage at the University of Cologne. This was cause for great excitement, and it didn't take very long at all for a transcription to appear on the Classics-L mailing list.

Unfortunately, there was a small problem — there were two typos in the text, one a spacing issue, and one an interesting metagrammatism — *ἔμαπψε for ἔμαρψε — presumably caused by interference between English "P" and Greek "Ρ" (rho, an /r/ sound). Within hours of appearing on the mailing list, however, the poem — with errors — was all over the internet, on blogs and web pages. There are still some sites that have these errors.

I've recently started loading up Scholiastae.org with some of the major texts, to make it easy for people to drop scholia in without having to deal with some of the initial wikification of a large text (dividing into sections, line number marking, etc.). So I've been spending time looking over already-digitized texts of authors available on the web, which don't appear to be breaking copyright rules and which will be easily converted into wiki format.

When deciding on a text to use for Hesiod's Theogony, I realized that all but a tiny handful of versions of that on the web are from a single source, apparently based on Rzach's old Teubner edition. I know they're from the same source because they all contain the same error in line 268:

αἵ ῥ᾽ ἀνέμων πνοιῇσι καὶ οἰωνοῖς ἕμ᾽ ἕπονται

The underlined word is nonsense, a corruption of elided ἅμα which anticipates the start of the next word — a common enough scribal error. Last time I googled, only four hits show up on that line with the correct ἅμ’, though I've fixed copies I've found on open wikis, and I'll be sending out a few pieces of email. But I do wonder how long the error will persist.

RIP William Harris

I have learned through Nick, who learned from Harris' son, that Bill Harris died last Sunday, February 22nd.

I got to know Bill from his web site, Humanities and the Liberal Arts. I had just started to study Greek on my own again, and stumbled on his web page, probably looking for sites about Homer. I emailed him about a stray link in May 2000, and we corresponded ever since, sometimes very regularly, sometimes with quiet spots. It was a casual comment by him that led to the creation of Aoidoi.org — I still have the email, July 10, 2002. From that time on we communicated regularly about our own web sites, sharing new work for the other's comment. Without his enthusiasm about the project — there's a lot of email between us about it — Aoidoi.org might have faded away early.

I know that plenty of other people have been encouraged in their studies by him.

His death is a shock to me, the tears coming only today, because we had been mailing each other about some of his work only a few weeks ago. 83, about to start his second round of chemo, and he had been recording himself reciting verse — Ezra Pound, Dylan Thomas — and was intending to record some Sappho, in both English and Greek. He was always interested in getting verse off the page and into people's mouths, in whatever language. Last month was the first time I ever heard his voice.

I hadn't told him about the Scholiastae.org site yet, because I wanted to be able to show him a success, after a few more people got involved and posted things, taking control of their own education. That site, too, wouldn't exist but for him. I should have told him sooner.

New site: scholiastae.org

After years of waiting for web software to allow collaborative editing of documents like the ones I produce for Aoidoi.org, I finally gave up and wrote an extension to MediaWiki, the software that runs Wikipedia.

Testing of the extension is done, so now there's Scholiastae.org. You can see an example of the output — and the markup from the "view source" tab — for Catullus 48.

There aren't many texts there yet. I have a few works of Lucian I will be working up in the next few weeks, but of course I hope other people will be moved to create an account and add and comment upon works.

New Year's Gallimaufry

2008 was not a year of many blog posts. I thought I'd make a few random comments, before moving on to 2009.

I got my house re-sided at the end of the summer. Naturally, I take out a substantial debt to pay for this, just before the market exploded. My timing is, as always, impeccable.

The last few months of the year saw me start playing music again. In another month I hope to have my callouses back enough that I can slide notes on my mandolin without slicing open my fingers. I also went off the deep end, and got a 5-string banjo, on which I play old-time and celtic tunes — no bluegrass for me, thanks. In part, I blame Cathy Moore for playing all those funky, non-old-time tunes on the 5-string and making it work.

To make time for the music, my desultory attempts to get Latin back into my brain have been shut down.

I've mostly been reading Greek prose the last few months, but I have several things in the pipeline for Aoidoi. These will not see fruition for a month or so. A piece of web software I would love for Aoidoi does not yet exist, but I am afraid to write it.

Given the lovely state of the economy, paying to take classes in Greek seems like an extravagance right now. I'll probably not be doing that in the next year. Another sign of the economy and the strange state of contemporary American politics — for the first time in her 80 years, my grandmother voted Democratic last November.

I never had warts as a child, but I enter 2009 with a giant one on my face — very attractive. Good thing I don't believe in omens.

In Praise of Little Ideas

While it is true that there are plenty of science fiction authors who are writerly, whose language shows signs of care beyond the bare need to tell the story, it is nonetheless the case that most of such literature is read for the ideas. A good number of these ideas are conventional, a well-worn path the experienced reader of science fiction uses to get up to speed on whatever it is the author is about to do that's new.

Though I might appreciate The Big Idea in many of these books as a way to generate a story or to work out the idea, an awful lot of the time I don't consider The Big Idea terribly plausible. From time to time, however, I do run across a Little Idea — a one-off or a minor point — that strikes me as either absolutely true or a Really Good Idea.

For example, in one book, the title of which I cannot even remember, is a scene in a giant space ship several kilometers in length. Charlie Stross has convinced me that travel between solar systems is monumentally impractical, as much magic as dragons and rings of power. In any case, in this book the computing subsystems all over the ship were a pain in the ass to deal with because they were all kept on isolated networks. It turns out most of the ship's computers were riddled with viruses and couldn't be connected safely. This, sadly, strikes me as all too likely, should it ever happen that we have a legitimate reason to build such ships.

In Vernor Vinge's most recent book, Rainbows End, he makes occasional mention of the "Friends of Privacy," an organization that produces lots of false information about people all over the internet, with the goal of concealing people who want a little privacy in a world of ubiquitous online presence and data recording. This seems to me at least a possible development, and, frankly, given the growth of the participatory panopticon, a desirable one.

I have recently been reading Neal Stephenson's latest tome, Anathem. Because it's Neal Stephenson book it has quite a few Big Ideas. You can read the overview at the link, but the main point I'm interested in here is the world of this book, scholars are sequestered away in things quite like convents — here called "concents" — while the outside world goes on without them. Once a year doors are opened which allow those inside and those outside to mingle for about a week. Within the concents populations are sequestered from each other, too, so that the "centenarians," for example, only encounter the outside world once every hundred years. Within the concents people select different specialties — physics, philosophy, math, etc. One brilliant Little Idea mentioned a few times in passing and with a minor role late in the book is the order known as the Lorites,

Lorite: A member of an Order founded by Saunt [< Savant — Wm] Lora, who believed that all of the ideas that the human mind was capable of coming up with had already been come up with. Lorites are, therefore, historians of thought who assist other avout in their work my making them aware of others who have thought similar things in the past, and thereby preventing them from re-inventing the wheel.

People who've spent a lot of time with me have heard me complain that the field of computer science seems so consistently and utterly ignorant of its own intellectual past. This is a field that desperately needs Lorites. Granted, about half of the time our CS Lorites would be saying one of three things — (1) Lisp did this in 1960-mumble; (2) Alan Kay's group did this in 1970-mumble; or (3) MULTICS — but there'd still be plenty of work for them. Lots of fields of study could probably use a Lorite or two in the department. It would certainly save wasted paper on pointless dissertations and books.

Greek prose has meter, too: Clausulae

Since I may be auditing a Greek class next semester on Plutarch, I decided to do a little background digging early. My primary reading in Greek is still usually verse, though I have slowly been working my way out into prose authors. When searching on Plutarch's prose style I ran across a few references to clausulae, a habit of prose rhythm — meter, really — at the end of sentences or major clauses. I already knew some Latin authors did this. Cicero, for example, was evidently fond of a double cretic, -u--u- (I'll always notate the final common syllable as long). It would not naturally have occurred to me that Greek prose authors before the Hellenistic period used clausulae, but it turns out it was fairly common after Thrasymachus, whom Greek tradition says invented these metrical touches in prose.

The first systematic study of these I can find reference to is by A.W. de Groot, who has an entire book of tables, Handbook of Greek Prose Rhythm (our library has a German edition, but I will have to delve into the oft-pillaged Cutter stacks to find it). By comparing frequencies of metrical patterns within a sentence to their frequency at the end you can see which patterns were preferred for the end of a line. It also turns out certain patterns were scrupulously avoided. For example, a hemiepies (-uu-uu-, a fundamental unit of Epic meter) occurs naturally in Plutarch's Lives 2.5% of the time, but only 0.8% finally. Other obviously Epic metrical patterns are avoided some authors, though Plutarch makes no special efforts to control the oft-avoided adonic end, -uu--.

Certain clausulae are common, regardless of author or genre: -u-- is very popular, and in the Moralia Plutarch uses it a whopping 29.1% of the time:

ὥστε καθίσας περὶ τὸν νεὼν τὰ μὲν αὐτὸς ἠρξάμην ζητεῖν, τὰ δ’ ἐκείνους ἐρωτᾶν [-u--], ὑπὸ τοῦ τόπου καὶ τῶν λόγων αὐτῶν ἀνεμνήσθην ἃ πάλαι ποτὲ καθ’ ὃν καιρὸν ἐπεδήμει Νέρων ἠκούσαμεν Ἀμμωνίου καί τινων ἄλλων διεξιόντων [-u--], ἐνταῦθα τῆς αὐτῆς ἀπορίας ὁμοίως ἐμπεσούσης [-u--].

The E at Delphi, 385B

-u-- is also used by Xenophon, Lysias, Isocrates, Demosthenes (this is the only clausula he obviously favors), Plato, Aristotle and sometimes Lucian (sometimes he avoids it).

Other common clausulae:

• -u--- : Isocrates, Isaeus, Plato (in some works; avoided in the Laws), Plutarch


• -u--u- : (Cicero's double cretic again) Aeschines, Aristotle, Lysias, Lucian; avoided by Isocrates


• ----u- : Lysias, Isaeus, Aeschines, Plato, Aristotle, Lucian; avoided by Plutarch


• -uu-u- : Lysias, Isocrates, Xenophon, Aeschines, Plato, Lucian

Thucydides is fairly restrained, obviously preferring only -uu--- and avoiding -u-u- (a shape favored, on the other hand, by Xenophon).

Here's a selection of Xenophon's Cyropaedia (1.2.1 - 1.2.2) with some clausula noted:

Πατρὸς μὲν δὴ ὁ Κῦρος λέγεται γενέσθαι Καμβύσου Περσῶν βασιλέως [uuu-]· ὁ δὲ Καμβύσης οὗτος τοῦ Περσειδῶν γένους ἦν [-u--]· οἱ δὲ Περσεῖδαι ἀπὸ Περσέως κλήιζονται· μητρὸς δὲ ὁμολογεῖται Μανδάνης γενέσθαι [-u--]· ἡ δὲ Μανδάνη αὕτη Ἀστυάγους ἦν θυγάτηρ τοῦ Μήδων γενομένου βασιλέως [uuu-]. φῦναι δὲ ὁ Κῦρος λέγεται καὶ ἄιδεται ἔτι καὶ νῦν ὑπὸ τῶν βαρβάρων εἶδος μὲν κάλλιστος, ψυχὴν δὲ φιλανθρωπότατος καὶ φιλομαθέστατος καὶ φιλοτιμότατος, ὥστε πάντα μὲν πόνον ἀνατλῆναι, πάντα δὲ κίνδυνον ὑπομεῖναι τοῦ ἐπαινεῖσθαι ἕνεκα. φύσιν μὲν δὴ τῆς μορφῆς καὶ τῆς ψυχῆς τοιαύτην ἔχων διαμνημονεύεται [-u-u-]· ἐπαιδεύθη γε μὴν ἐν Περσῶν νόμοις· οὗτοι δὲ δοκοῦσιν οἱ νόμοι ἄρχεσθαι τοῦ κοινοῦ ἀγαθοῦ ἐπιμελούμενοι οὐκ ἔνθενπερ ἐν ταῖς πλείσταις πόλεσιν ἄρχονται. αἱ μὲν γὰρ πλεῖσται πόλεις ἀφεῖσαι παιδεύειν ὅπως τις ἐθέλει τοὺς ἑαυτοῦ παῖδας, καὶ αὐτοὺς τοὺς πρεσβυτέρους ὅπως ἐθέλουσι διάγειν, ἔπειτα προστάττουσιν αὐτοῖς μὴ κλέπτειν μηδὲ ἁρπάζειν, μὴ βίαι εἰς οἰκίαν παριέναι [uuu-], μὴ παίειν ὃν μὴ δίκαιον [-u--], μὴ μοιχεύειν, μὴ ἀπειθεῖν ἄρχοντι, καὶ τἆλλα τὰ τοιαῦτα ὡσαύτως· ἢν δέ τις τούτων τι παραβαίνηι, ζημίαν αὐτοῖς ἐπέθεσαν [uuu-].

Until now I've been telling people on Textkit asking about Greek pronunciation that vowel quantities probably didn't matter to appreciate prose. I guess I'll have to stop saying that.

_____
I've grabbed the data for this post from W.H. Shewring's Prose-rhythm and the Comparative Method, CQ v.25 no.1 pp. 12-22. He has a lot more on the Greek authors, as well as all the Latin authors I've skipped here. And F.H. Sandbach's Rhythm and Authenticity in Plutarch's Moralia, CQ v.33 no.3/4 pp.194-203. I still have to track down de Groot.

Patsy Cline Greeked

About a month ago my iPod handed me a classic Patsy Cline tune, Leaving on your Mind. For some reason I decided the song needed to be translated into ancient Greek. I decided on quatrains of glyconics (xx-uu-u-) with the occasional anaclastic glyconic, a.k.a. the choriambic dimeter, xx-x-uu-. Here's the original:

If you've got leavin' on your mind
Tell me now, get it over
Hurt me now, get it over
If you've got leavin' on your mind

If there's a new love in your heart
Well, tell me now, get it over
Hurt me now, get it over
If there's a new love in your heart

Don't leave me here
In a world filled with dreams that might have been
Hurt me now, get it over
I may learn to love again

If there's a new love in your heart
Well, tell me now, get it over
Hurt me now, get it over
If there's a new love in your heart

Hurt me now, get it over
If there's a new love in your heart

I removed some of the repeats. I indulged in an outrageous aeolic future infinitive — ἀπολειψέμεν — using a verb Lucian disapproved of for men to describe "leaving." However, I don't think ἐκπέμπω quite captures the right feel for "leaving" in this song.

εἰ μέλλεις ἀπολειψέμεν,
ἐμοὶ μὲν λέγε νῦν τελῶν,
πήμηνον δέ με νῦν τελῶν
εἰ μέλλεις ἀπολειψέμεν.

εἰ δ’ ἐν θυμῷ καινὸς ἔρως,
ἐμοὶ μὲν λέγε νῦν τελῶν,
πήμηνον δέ με νῦν τελῶν
εἰ δ’ ἐν θυμῷ καινὸς ἔρως.

στᾶσαν ἐνθάδε μὴ λίπῃς
παθοῦσάν τέ με καὶ μάτην.
πήμηνον δέ με νῦν τελῶν,
ἀλλ’ αὖθίς πού μοι φιλία.

In my first pass I bungled the meter of the third line from the end. I'm still not certain about my repairs there.