Over a period of more than five decades, until his passing after a long illness on the 1st of January 2007, Alexander Kleinlogel worked on the transmission of the Greek text of the historiographer Thucydides and on the scholia to the text in the Medieval manuscripts. His scholarly contributions have been published mainly in Germanophone journals.[1] He had planned the publication of the vestustiora and the recentiora together with the so-called Patmos-scholia, with an extensive introduction, in two volumes, when completion was halted by his passing. Klaus Alpers, himself an equally productive and well-known expert on ancient Greek Lexica and lexicographers, took on the task of collecting, finishing, and publishing Kleinlogel’s work on the Thucydides-scholia. He found the text and the tripartite apparatus on the vetustiora completed, but still had to piece together the introduction from separate and partly fragmentary chapters. The text of the Lexicon Patmense was also available, together with two indices. On the recentiora, however, much work still had to be done and the material available was not yet considered publishable. For that reason, Alpers defers the edition of the recentiora to a future publication. Nothing related to Kleinlogel’s mentioning of P.Oxy. 853 and Pap.Rainer 29247 could be retrieved from his legacy. The Scholia Graeca in Thucydidem currently under review is therefore a rationalised edition of Kleinlogel’s work, partly in progress, on the introduction to, and the text of, the vetustiora, and the Lexicon Patmense by Alpers, who strived to present the work by Kleinlogel unaltered[2] and benefitted from the help of Stefano Valente with the references and the corrections of the proofs.
Kleinlogel’s Scholia Graeca in Thucydidem aims to replace the edition by Hude,[3] by now almost a century old. It consists of an introduction (pp. 1-204), an inserted appendix comprising the text of the Lexicon Thucydideum Patmense with its own introduction and indices (pp. 205-254), the text of the scholia vetustiora with an apparatus lemmatum, testimonia, and an apparatus criticus (pp. 255-959) and two indices (glossarum, pp. 963-989; nominum, pp. 990-999) to the vetustiora.
The introduction as pieced together by Alpers consists of eleven chapters that only sparingly cross-reference, followed by the sigla codicum, and the stemma pertaining to the transmission of the scholia. Much of the introductory material has to do with the recentiora as well as with the vetustiora: the chapters on the manuscripts (pp. 3-36) and the transmission (pp. 37-40) obviously do not make any distinction between these two categories. Chapters 3 (on the history of the transmission of the scholia, pp. 41-54) and 11 (on the reception of the Thucydides-scholia from the presumed earliest reference to the Θ scholia in Sardonius to their interaction with the Etymologicum Magnum, pp. 177-202) read as individual essays. In general, the insertion of sections and larger notes into Kleinlogel’s intended introductory chapters was still a work-in-progress: the current chapter 5, a case study on Σ 2,4,3 enlarged with a comparison with the lexicographers (pp. 92-120),[4] finds a complement in chapter 10 on the interpolations from Hesychius (pp. 167-176). Chapter 9 on Θ’s relation to the exegesis of Homer (pp. 160-166) proceeds from the extensive comparison of the corpora Θ and Φ (pp. 55-91), especially from the observation that Φ only very rarely references Homer, whereas Θ regularly cites from the Iliad to account for both the usage of expressions as well as for the appropriateness of literary devices. The exact status of chapter 8, on the two extant epigrams on Thucydides, transmitted with the scholia (and ascribed to Christodorus of Coptos’ ekphrasis of the statues in the Zeuxippon in the second book of the Anthologia Palatina) in Kleinlogel’s introduction remains unclear. Chapter 7, on the other hand, on the assignment of lemmata (pp. 133-154) fits the introduction very well: it starts from the explicit aim that this new edition of the Thucydides scholia will offer both a (more) complete rendering of the extant material than Hude and a more accurate registering and assignment of the separate lemmata than any previous edition. Much of what is required to assess this claim is found in the various introductory essays, of which especially 1 and 4 are very rich in detail and discussion. For the interested reader they may serve as an extended commentary on the text. In other chapters, Kleinlogel at times starts out on interesting and possibly influent theses but unfortunately the chapter’s manuscript had not been finished, or it remains unclear which examples he planned to illustrate his statements with. A case in point is the notion, brought forward several times (and once linked to the observation that the first letter of Thucydides’ name suggests a partition into eight books for his work, much like Herodotus’ is suggestive of a division into nine, cf. Σ 4, 135, 2c, p. 754), that both Θ (going back to Aelius Dionysius) and Φ find their origin in the commentary on Thucydides by Antyllus (3rd century AD). Given the rarity of internal references, the fragmentary state of some of the sections, and the lack of organisational indications, Alpers is to be commended for the choice to present the chapters as semi-independent essays, while maintaining the many instances of overlap in argumentation and examples, and with the addition of only a minimum of necessary cross-references and indications of lacunae in Kleinlogel’s manuscript. I would have preferred, though, to find the sigla codicum and the stemma at the outset of the introduction, as particularly chapters 1 and 2 benefit from being read with both closer at hand.
The Codex Patm. S. Ioannis Evangelistae 263, a 10th-century document containing scholia to Demosthenes, Thucydides, and Aeschines, has been included as an appendix to the introduction though it should be included with the recentiora. The part on Thucydides consists of 125 entries with a predominantly lexical character, in a confusing order (the correct order is presented in an index to the appendix). In a separate Introduction, Kleinlogel follows Alpers in assigning its origin to the lexicon by Julianus.[5] Whereas Hude barely referred to the codex, Kleinlogel argues for incorporating it whole, and further distances himself from his forebearer by referring to it as a ‘Lexicon’, since he reserves the term scholia for elaboration on hypomnemata from antiquity. Alpers chose not to wait with the new edition of the Patmense until the completion of the text of the recentiora.
Kleinlogel’s text of the vetustiora was found completed – and what a resource it constitutes. With great care Kleinlogel identified, registered, lemmatized, referenced, assigned, and printed the scholia to Thucydides. The apparatus lemmatum shows to what extent lemmatization has been corrected in comparison to earlier editions. The section on testimonia quotes lavishly from the extant lexica. The apparatus criticus contains numerous editorial remarks and comments. Lexical entries alternate with longer, exegetical lemmata that are remarkedly often clustered at book-end (e.g. Σ 1, 143,1 a–b; 3, 111, 3a-113, 3 a; 5, 90 b-111, 1-5), and scholia figurata on numbers and emplacements (e.g. Σ 5, 68, 2 f-68, 3 b). True appreciation of this highly accessible, much more accurate, and very well-produced edition of the vetustiora will undoubtedly be the result of consulting this resource, by student and scholar alike.
Alpers has completed a wonderful and important task with the publication of the edition. The text and the apparatus stand out as an example of clarity, and the choices made in the reconstruction of an introduction are well defendable. Alpers has limited his corrections and suggestions to a minimum in the preface and the footnotes [in square brackets] to Kleinlogel’s text. Typos are very rare.[6] Together with Valente, who constituted a list of abbreviations from the diffusively referenced literature and editions, Alpers has brought the scholarly community a resource of great value, and his friend and colleague Kleinlogel a worthy tribute.
Notes
[1] Die jüngeren Handschriften des Thukydides, Heidelberg, 1953 (unpublished dissertation); Beobachtungen zu einigen “recentiores” des Thukydides, Heidelberg, 1957; Geschichte des Thukydidestextes im Mittelalter, Berlin, 1965; ‘Beobachtungen zu den Thukydidesscholien I’, Philologus 108 (1964), pp. 233-246; ‘Beobachtungen zu den Thukydidesscholien II’, Philologus 142 (1998), pp. 11-40); (posthumously) ‘Beobachtungen zu den Thukydidesscholien III’, Philologus 155 (2011), pp. 257-271.
[2] Any diverging views stemming from Alpers’ own work on Johannes Sardianos’ commentary on Aphthonios’ Progymnasmata(Untersuchungen zu Johannes Sardianos und seinem Kommentar zu den Progymnasmata des Aphthonios, Braunschweig, 2009) are merely referenced in footnotes.
[3] C. Hude (ed.), Scholia in Thucydidem ad optimos codices collata, Leipzig, 1927.
[4] With reference to I.C. Cunningham, Συναγωγὴ λέξεων χρησίμων, Texts of the Original Version and of Ms. B (Berlin-New York, 2003) for the Synagoge.
[5] K. Alpers, Das attizistische Lexicon des Oros, Untersuchungen und kritische Ausgabe der Fragmente (Berlin-New York, 1981), pp. 120-123; cf. S. Matthaios, ‘Greek Scholarship in the Imperial Era and Late Antiquity’, pp. 279-284 in F. Montanari, S. Matthaios & A. Rengakos (eds.), Brill’s Companion to Ancient Greek Scholarship (Leiden-Boston, 2015).
[6] I noted ‘vohanden’ (p. 40), ‘naheligend’ (p. 69), κα-τεῖχε (p. 80), van der Valk (p. 105), Hypom-nemas (p. 143).