CUP (2016) p/b 192pp £18.99 (ISBN 9780521158992)
This useful and well-organised little book—a sort of would-be editor’s ‘vade-mecum’—might have been subtitled The Application of Thought to Textual Criticism if that title had not already been taken, and it covers a lot of ground, some of it familiar, some less so. After a substantial Introduction, which introduces and illustrates the concept of the transmission of texts, or Ueberlifererungsgeschicht— ‘a longer and nobler name than fudge’—as Housman famously said in a rather different context , Chapter 1 (‘Textual criticism in a post-heroic age’) argues correctly that ‘textual criticism is becoming increasingly arcane to most professional classicists’; the ‘heroic’ editors of the past (Scaliger, Bentley, Heinsius, Lachmann, Housman) , are no more, and among the (many) results is a reduction in the attention paid to new editions in the form of critical reviews (T. documents this tellingly from Classical Review).
There are many reasons for this, not all of them flattering, and one may be the remark attributed to E. R. Dodds: ‘Our editions of Greek and Latin authors are good enough to live with’; thus, even so fine an edition and commentary as that by E. Gowers on Horace, Satires I (2012) contains no apparatus criticus, and deals with the subject of ‘Text and Transmission’ with great brevity. Her text is based on Klingner’s Teubner edition of 1959, with a list of 38 places where she disagrees, most of them trivial (e.g. Forum for forum), and only three or four of real significance. Do we see here the ‘law of diminishing returns’? Creating a new text is an arduous business, as is the collation of manuscripts, and the editors of the early OUP ‘Reds’ of Euripides notoriously had to use Murray’s OCT as the basis for their commentaries.
T. goes on in Chapter 2 to discuss ‘the rhetoric of criticism and textual criticism as rhetoric’. Unsurprisingly (but enjoyably) Housman plays a large part here, but T. also singles out the ‘savaging’ of Budé editions by British scholars, in part because of their ‘hollow assurances of quality’; Budé is not alone here in being on the receiving end, and the reviewer adds that the denunciations are normally documented with almost frightening precision and detail. But, as T. reminds us more than once, it is ‘unrealistic to hope that … we can ever fully recover the original or first form of any classical text’: textual criticism cannot aspire to certainty. T. goes on to compare—and contrast—the critical styles of Heinsius and Bentley, and to conclude that in today’s world the more appropriate ‘rhetoric’ is that of Heinsius.
Chapters 3 and 4 are devoted to (a) recension, and (b) conjecture. In the first of these, T. demonstrates various stemmata of differing degrees of complexity, and, as he says, ‘the application of stemmatic reasoning is an exercise in judgment, not a set of mechanically determined steps’. One sympathises with J. B. Hall who, after collating 132 out of 134 MSS of Claudian’s de raptu Proserpinae, concluded that the tradition was completely contaminated: and, as Paul Maas famously observed, ‘Against contamination there is no specific’ (surprisingly, T. does not quote this): here, too, we are reminded of the validity of the saying recentiores non deteriores (a concept taken further by Malcolm Reeve).
In the next chapter we are treated to a wealth of conjectures, many of them ‘successful’: but of Shackleton Bailey’s 2000 plus conjectures, T. suggests that only 200 or more will find a place in future texts—thus only one in 10, but still an ‘extraordinary accomplishment’ (apocryphally, S.B. had replied to Dodds, quoted above, ‘It all depends on one’s standard of living’). Yet far from all editors have his eustokhia and agkhinoia (Jebb is a notable example of reluctance to conjecture), and of 20,000 conjectures on Aeschylus made between 1890 and 1960, how many have been accepted? Roger Dawe suggested that 20 ‘might be the estimate of a man who allowed cheerfulness to enliven a normally austere judgment’. Still, as T. says, the effort must be made (where it is not made, the results can be lamentable).
The subject is developed further in Chapter 6, which considers interpolation, collaboration, and intertextuality. Are Heroides xvi–xxi by Ovid? Are there interpolations in the Odes of Horace? Is even mens sana in corpore sano by Juvenal? T. makes the sensible point that interpolations which demonstrate command of a difficult metrical form are more likely to be ancient than mediaeval, but perhaps more is needed when considering possible additions to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where T. offers several plausible examples; and in the case of the disputed Heroides, stylometric analysis—not discussed here—may have a part to play.
We move to yet a further stage in Chapter 6, which is wholly devoted to Propertius, a notably thorny case, with ‘an idiosyncratic author preserved by a highly fallible MS tradition’. ‘Be slow to emend the text, and slow to defend it’, said Housman about the Culex; and even he was defeated by Propertius. Whether Heyworth, in his fundamentally new recension presented in his OCT of 2007, Goold (Loeb, 1990), Shackleton Bailey (Propertiana, 1956), or Giardina (2005 and 2010) comes closest to what the poet wrote, adhuc sub iudice lis est. (T. notes that Giardina prints nearly a thousand of his own suggestions in the text!)
In Chapter 7, T. considers the merits or demerits of the large-scale apparatus criticus (e.g. F. W. Lenz in his 1956 Nux, demonstrated here to frankly horrifying effect) or the leaner, even minimalist approach; here T. compares Kenney’s selective apparatus in Ovid’s Amores (1994) with the flatulent offering of Ramirez de Verger (1958). Of course, much will depend upon the intended readership—and even more upon the degree of careful thought that is devoted (but thought, we know, is irksome!) to the text in question, even though that reasoning can only rarely be presented in conjunction with the editor’s choice. T. usefully shows ways of alleviating that separation (he cites Housman’s editions of Juvenal, Manilius, and Lucan as precursors of recent Teubner editions).
In his final Chapter, T. considers the question of the extent to which traditional editing procedures will be affected by new and emerging technology. The potential of the internet is clearly gigantic, but will editors be swamped by ‘too much information’? And technical questions flood into one’s mind (T. lists some of them); but finally, says T., ‘at the heart of the process will always be the scholar applying his/her judgment to the improvement of a text that can never be completely recovered’. Perhaps it is not to be wondered that the scholars most frequently cited in the Index are Housman, Shackleton Bailey, Kenney, and Heinsius.
There is much of genuine interest packed into this quite short book, and the reviewer enjoyed it from start to finish. But how much is new? What can our putative editor gain from it that he cannot find in the works (including reviews) of Housman, Maas, Timpanaro, Kenney, M.L. West or Malcolm Reeve (or Pasquali, for those fluent in Italian)? Is it, in fact, a sort of ‘Companion’ volume to those scholars? The publishers, with traditional optimism, say that it will be ‘useful both to classicists who are not textual critics and to non-classicists interested in issues of editing’. One hopes so, and at least it should help to clear up the all too frequent confusion that is found between textual and literary criticism.
Colin Leach