Euripides Scholia by Donald J. Mastronarde

The goals of this project are quite traditional in a philological sense, but also experimental and forward-looking in terms of format.

On the traditional side, the goal is to gain a better understanding of the scholia surviving in medieval manuscripts of Euripides and make the information widely available to scholars and students. Some of the specific issues or goals are the following:

• Improve the accuracy and completeness of the information about the most important manuscripts used in the standard edition of the old scholia by Eduard Schwartz (1887-1891). From my sample to date covering Orestes 1-500, it is evident that Schwartz’s collations of M, B, and V were quite accurate, but there are some corrections to be made; his collation of C was less accurate and less complete. He also provided insufficient information about the lemmata and he omitted some glosses (written by the same hands as the scholia blocks). The scholia in H (the Jerusalem palimpsest) were not known to him (the existence of H had been reported, but because of the nature and condition of the manuscript nothing was known of the scholia readings), and he did not report those in O, which he wrongly considered to be of the 15th century, whereas currently scholars date this manuscript to ca. 1175.
• Clarify the extent, nature, and possible stemmatic relationships of the scholia in some of the so-called recentiores (manuscripts generally dating from the very late 13th century and the 14th century and usually confined to the plays of the Euripidean triad: Hecuba, Orestes, Phoenissae). The editions of Matthiae and Dindorf reported some of these, while Schwartz limits himself to rare reports, citing only readings that he adopts from one of the recentiores when the older manuscripts he cites all present a corruption or omit the relevant word(s). The relationship of the scholia in these manuscripts to the those in the older manuscripts needs to be fully explored. Many recentiores also carry frequent glosses, and these cannot be accurately judged unless the glosses in the older manuscripts are also collected completely. The glosses in various recentiores also need to be known to provide context for judging the younger scholia (scholia recentiora) by named scholars, a very high proportion of which are glosses.
• Provide a reliable and complete edition of the scholia attributable to Manuel Moschopulus and Thomas Magister (both of whom were probably commenting on the triad plays of Euripides roughly during the period 1290-1305). Moschopulean scholia are in general known from reports of Gr in Dindorf’s edition, but Dindorf’s reporting of Gr is not complete and Gr is in any case not the most reliable witness of this set of scholia. Thoman scholia are partially known from reports of Gu in Dindorf’s edition, but Dindorf’s reporting is even less complete for this set, and Gu’s versions offer more variations and expansions than other witnesses of the Thoman set.
• Provide full reporting of Triclinius’ work on the triad in T together with information about his much sparser metrical annotation in L. Triclinius worked on this manuscript over a number of years in roughly the period 1300-1325. The Triclinian scholia on the triad have been published from T by De Faveri, but a few corrections can be provided and a few omissions repaired (her edition is also hard to obtain). For instance, only by comparison with an accurate collection of Moschopulean and Thoman scholia can one recognize a few glosses and notes that are unique to T (or to T and one or two other intriguing witnesses). In addition, information about the colon-layout that Triclinius’ metrical scholia describe can be provided to the user in a more convenient fashion. The Triclinian notations in L on other plays were partially reported in Matthiae’s edition, and are also treated by Zuntz.
• Incorporate into the corpus the few traces of marginal annotation that have been found in papyri and the scholia of P. Würzb. 1.
• Clarify the nature and extent of scholia labeled as being by Maximus Planudes or conjectured by some scholars to reflect his work.
• Include, eventually, non-Triclinian metrical scholia.

Work is under way to bring a very full set of scholia on Orestes 1-500 online in 2018. In the meantime:

• The open-access book Preliminary Studies on the Scholia to Euripides in now available. For information and links for page-view reading or for ordering print-on-demand copies, see the Catalogue page of California Classical Studies.
• In order to keep track of the sigla used for Euripidean manuscripts, maintaining as many as possible of those used from Turyn 1957 to the present, a spreadsheet has been compiled containing 136 sigla. On this site you can now see a table displayed or download the Excel file itself: EurSiglaTable.html.
• An updated Manuscripts page is present now and being actively revised with more complete information, with additional fields added, such as the diktyon number used in the database at Pinakes.

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