A CJ-Online Exclusive.
*See the foot of the review below for notes on reading the transliterated Greek. A PDF
version with embedded Greek has been attached.
Supplementum Supplementi Hellenistici. By HUGH LLOYD-JONES, ed. Texte und
Kommentare 26. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2005. Pp. xiv + 159. Cloth, $89.60.
ISBN 978–3–11–08537–7.
Order this text for $89.60 from Amazon.com using this link and benefit CAMWS and the
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When Hugh Lloyd-Jones and Peter Parsons published their massive Supplementum
Hellenisticum in 1983, the fragments of Hellenistic poetry suddenly became more
accessible to modern scholars than they had ever been before. The shattered bits and
pieces of a few “major” poets were already available in separate editions (notably
Pfeiffer’s magisterial Callimachus), and the epigrams had been organized and briefly
commented on by Gow–Page. But the standard text of most other “lost” Hellenistic poets
was still Powell’s 1925 Collectanea Alexandrina, which was incomplete from the first and
rapidly became more so, as additional papyri and inscriptions were read and published,
and the ancient literary sources scrutinized more closely.
As the title of their book made clear, Lloyd-Jones and Parsons aimed to supplement
the existing editions rather than replace them. But the sheer volume of new material
abruptly made available in an up-to-date and reliable form in the Supplementum was
nonetheless astounding: 862 fragments, some over 100 lines long, attributable to
individual poets in Section A; 98 papyrus adespota (most admittedly very badly damaged)
in Section B; and 186 previously overlooked bits and pieces (only three of them longer
than two verses or partial verses, and many consisting of only a few words) of
unidentified poets, drawn from scholiasts, lexicographers and the like in Section C. In
addition, the Greek text in the Supplementum was accompanied by a solid critical
apparatus, substantial if concise notes, and a series of massive indices, including an
index verborum that also took account of the material collected in Powell. The most
obvious weaknesses of the volume were the fact that the apparatus for the book
fragments was generally drawn from the standard edition of the source author, rather
than from inspection of the manuscripts themselves, and its price. But the book was
beautifully produced, and whatever it cost, there was little doubt that it was worth it.
In part due to the existence of the Supplementum itself, an increasing amount of work
has been done on Hellenistic poetry in the last few decades, and new papyri continue to
be published. The Supplementum Supplementi Hellenistici (produced by Lloyd-Jones
alone, Parsons being committed to other projects) is an attempt to respond to the
dilemma posed by this wealth of new texts, conjectures and commentaries, by offering a
“supplement to the Supplement.” The most substantial contribution of the volume for the
non-specialist will be the adespota papyrus fragments, all previously published
elsewhere, but now made available to a broader audience. Particularly intriguing are SSH
970 (a marvelous 24-line elegiac threat by the goddess Dikê against a shameless wrong-
doer, considerably expanded from the version of the text printed in SH via the discovery
of a new scrap of the papyrus); 985 (a substantially improved text of a terribly damaged,
but still intriguing set of epigrams on early Athenian dramatic poets); and 1190 (a
Michigan papyrus containing about 40 lines of a mock-Homeric War of Mice and Weasels,
originally published by Schibli in ZPE 53 (1983) 1–25). Also worth noting are a few new
bits and pieces of Callimachus (notably SSH 257–8; 276A; 279A–B) and other poets
(notably Euph. SSH 454C). Beyond that, the average reader will find little of interest.
Instead, the bulk of the volume consists of brief textual notes and notices of new
bibliography or editions, with the material often presented less succinctly than it might
have been; indeed, many pages contain little more than very generously spaced lists of
equivalent numbers. One might nonetheless argue that the volume is worth owning, if
only for the papyri; and de Gruyter is to be commended for offering a combination of the
reprinted SH (seemingly on different paper, and thus much thinner than in its previous
incarnation) and SSH at a relatively affordable price.
The bad news is that SSH has been so poorly produced and proofread that there is
little point in purchasing it until a systematically corrected second edition appears. The
most obvious, if least significant problem involves matters of editorial consistency.
Should inclusive page-number references be written out in full (e.g. “223–229” at SSH
76), or in a modestly more succinct if still pleonastic form (e.g. “286–88” at SSH 79A), or
in the most economical fashion possible (e.g. “132–4” at SSH 81)? Ought there to be a
period at the end of citations of equivalent numbers (e.g. “= Page, FGE 439–444.” at SSH
226) or not (e.g. “= Page, FGE 444–9” at SSH 225)? Should a notice of an equivalent
number be followed by a return (as in SSH 121), or should the line continue (as in SSH
122)? And is “Herodotus” to be abbreviated “Herod.” (as in SSH 145) or “Hdt.” (as in SSH
135)? Much more important, something has gone systematically wrong with the Greek,
transforming numerous half-stops into what appear to be English cola (e.g. SSH 289A.5;
738.3; 975.1; 976.6, 10, 12, 20), and obels into something resembling crude plus-signs
(e.g. p. 54, Euph. fr. 84 CA; SSH 1187.21). Likewise enough primary and secondary
references are obviously incorrect to suggest that no one has checked them
systematically (e.g. at fr. 140 CA read “= Gow–Page, HE 1801–4” [not 1001–4]; at SSH
758 read “Sophron, PSI XI” [not X!]; at SSH 975 read “= Page, FGE 1686–91” [not 459–
60]; and in the apparatus on p. 116 read “?<superscriptVEBarb**Th**> Ar. Ra. 473” [for
the multiply garbled “c Ar. VEBarb**uTh** ad Ran. 473”]).
The index verborum is similarly chaotic. In the corresponding index in SH, words are
given in the case and number in which they appear in the poetic text or testimonium in
question, and this form serves as the lemma unless it would disturb the alphabetical
order: thus the accusatives **A)/gchiton** and **a)gô~na** appear as lemmata in place
of the alphabetically equivalent nominatives **A)/gchitos** and **a)gô/n**, but **a)/
gagon** is indexed under **a)/gô**. In SSH, this system is sometimes respected, but
sometimes not: although genitive **Ai)aki/dao** in Euph. fr. 40.2 CA, for example, is
indexed in that form between **a)~thlon** and **Ai)/geiran**, **A)game/mnona** in
SSH 276A.13 is unnecessarily indexed under the nominative **A)game/mnôn** (between
**a)ga/llô** and **a)/ggelos**), while **A)thê/nês** in SSH 276A.9 is unnecessarily
indexed under the nominative **A)thê/nê** (between **A)thê/na** and **a)~thlon**)—
in neither case with any indication that the word appears in an oblique case in the text.
**e)/pea**, meanwhile, is indexed between **e)pau/lion** and **e)pi**, where no one
will ever find it, rather than under **e)/pos**. In addition, numerous words or fragments
of words are missing from the index (e.g. **Sôsipha/nous**, **aeido-** and **kerto-**
in SSH 985, 16, 24); others are included that should not be (e.g. **A)si/ês** in SSH
319.2, which is a comparandum rather than a conjecture); indications of dubious or
conjectural readings (marked with one or two asterisks, respectively) are frequently
omitted or garbled (e.g. **a)kou/sas** in SSH 1190.59 and **bi/ên** in SSH 1187.18 are
actually conjectural rather than dubious readings); and other, seemingly random errors
abound (e.g. s.v. **a)tha/natos** read “79 A 2” [not 97 A 2]; remove the parentheses
around **a)/rthrôn**).
The most unfortunate aspect of SSH, however, is the way the papyri have been
handled. In some cases, the text has merely been badly set up: SSH 1187, for example,
represents the right-hand side of one column of elegiac couplets and the left-hand side of
the next, but the text has been so clumsily laid out on the page as to render it
unrecognizable as such. Many problems are more serious than this. Thus SSH 985 (the
epigrams on Athenian playwrights) draws on the work of F. Maltomini, who in a
marvelous bit of scholarly detective work rediscovered the papyrus (long thought lost) in
the Bodleian Library and published a radically improved version in ZPE 134 (2001) 55–66.
Comparison with Maltomini’s article, however, shows that what appears in SSH is a
strikingly inferior text. 25 **e)pi\ t .[**, for example, although set all the way to the left
in SSH, is a title introducing the epigram partially preserved in 26–9, and should be set in
about three letters—as on the papyrus and in Maltomini pp. 56–7—to match the titles in
30, 35 and 40; and 35 is patently to be restored **e)p[i\**, while **epit** in 40 must
represent **e)pi\ t[ **. So too what SSH prints as **outeskêno .[ ** in 37 is undoubtedly
**ou)/te skêno-** (thus Maltomini—and the SSH index verborum s.v. **ou)/te**!), just
as **krênaspar .[ ** in 29 must be **krê/nas par-**, and **diskaitôn** in 39 is surely
**di\s kai\ tô~n** (both Maltomini; cf. the SSH index verborum s.v. **di/s**; while the
mysterious **dallaton** in 38 ought to be articulated **a)lla\ to\n** (Maltomini), the
initial **d** (absent from SH) being an intrusion into SSH rather than into the papyrus.
Some of the most basic conventions for the presentation of fragmentary papyrus texts,
meanwhile, have been ignored throughout the volume. Thus sublinear dots (which
indicate badly damaged letters that require a bit of guesswork to be read) are routinely
omitted, while the precise relative position of letters, lines and gaps in the papyrus—upon
which proper restoration and often sense depend—is misrepresented again and again. In
the case of badly damaged and obscure texts in particular, where interpretation often
turns on tiny points, these are not trivial errors; and the ubiquity of such problems in the
most interesting sections of this volume defeats what would seem to be its primary
purpose, of making difficult but important material more widely available in a reliable
form.
Exactly what went wrong with SSH is unclear. But the press (which has a
distinguished history of publishing top-quality work in the classics) would be well-advised
to cease printing and distribution of the volume until it can be re-issued in a more
carefully produced form.
S. DOUGLAS OLSON
University of Minnesota
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* The limitations imposed by the list-serve require Greek to be transliterated as follows:
-Greek has been set off within double asterisks
-Aspiration and accent (in that order) follow their letter:
smooth breathing = )
rough breathing = (
acute accent = /
grave accent = \
circumflex accent = ~
The following characters are used:
a = alpha n = nu
b = beta x = xi
g = gamma o = omicron
d = delta p = pi
e = epsilon r = rho
z = zeta s = sigma
ê = eta t = tao
th = theta u = upsilon
i = iota ph = phi
k = kappa ch = chi
l = lambda ps = psi
m = mu ô = omega
e.g. **a)/ndra moi e)/nnepe, Mou~sa, polu/tropon**
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