Bookrolls and Scribes in Oxyrhynchus

BOOKROLLS A N D SCRIBES IN OXYRHYNCH US William A. Johnson

U N I V E R S I T Y OF T O R O N T O PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

www.utppublishing.com © University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2004 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 0-8020-3734-8

! Printed on acid-free paper

National Library ot Canada

Cataloguing in Publication

Johnson,William A. (William Allen), 1956Bookrolls and scribes in Oxyrhynchus / William A Johnson. (Studies in book and print culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8020-3734-8 1. Oxyrhynchus papyri. I.Tide. II. Series.

2. Books and reading - Greece — History.

Z5.J63 2004

C2003-903965-X

091

Plates are reproduced by pernussion o f the University Library, C a m b r i d g e (plate 1); the Egypt E x p l o ration Society, L o n d o n (plates 2, 4 - 5 , 8 - 1 3 ) ; the B o d l e i a n Library, O x f o r d (plates 3 , 1 8 ) ; and the British Library, L o n d o n (plates 6 - 7 , 1 4 - 1 7 ) .

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

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Contents

Terminology, Conventions, and Sigla Acknowledgments xiii 1 Introduction

xi

3

1.0 Voluminology 3 1.1 Gathering the Evidence: The Necessity for Autopsy 1.2 Definition of the Project 9 1.3 Reconstruction of the Bookroll 10

5

2 Scribes in Oxyrhynchus: Scribal Habits, Paradosis, and the Uniformity of the Literary Roll 15 2.0 Prologue: The Importance of Case Studies

15

2.1 A Survey of Scribes w i t h Multiple Surviving Rolls

2.1.1 2.1.2 2.1.3 2.1.4 2.1.5 2.1.6

Scribe Scribe Scribe Scribe Scribe Scribe

#A1 #A2 #A3 #A5 #A6 #A7

17 17 18 20 21 21

2.1.7 Scribe #A17 22 2.1.8 Scribe #A19 23 2.1.9 Scribe #A20 24 2.1.10 Scribe #A24 24

16

"###

Contents

2.1.11 Scribc #A25 25 2.1.12 Scribe #A28 26 2.1.13 Scribe #A30 26 2.1.14 Scribe #A31 27 2.1.15 Scribe #A33 27 2.1.16 Scribe #B1 29 2.1.17 Scribe #B2 29 2.1.18 Scribe #B3 30 2.1.19 Scribe #B4 31 2.1.20 Scribe #B5 31 2.1.21 Scribe #B6 32 2.2 Scribes with Multiple Surviving Rolls: Summary and Evaluation 32 2.2.1 Excursus: Format changes in mid-roll 37 2.3 How Did the Scribe Copy the Text? Implicit examples for and against line-by-line copying 39 2.3.1 Copying the Text: Examples of scribal error that imply an exemplar of same or similar line length 41 2.3.2 Copying the Text: Examples of scribal error that imply an exemplar of different line length 43 2.3.3 Copying the Text: A remarkable example where different papyri of the same text coincide in line division 48 2.3.4 Copying the Text: Summary and conclusion 49 2.4 Uniformity and Variation in Bookrolls 49 2.4.1 Uniformity and Variation: Width of column, intercolumn, and width from column to column 50 2.4.2 Uniformity and Variation: Height of column, margins, and height of roll 54 2.5 Conclusions 57 Tables 60 3 Formal Characteristics of the Bookroll

85

3.0 Prologue: A Different Aesthetic 85 3.1 Construction of the Bookroll 86 3.1.1 Kollêsis and Kollêma: The constitution of the roll 88 3.1.2 Laying out the Columns: Maas's Law, ruling and alignment dots 91 3.1.3 Excursus: The laying out of columns in the Arden Hyperides papyrus (MP 1233) 99

Contents

3.2 Dimensions of the Column: Widths 100 3.2.1 Column Width in Prose Texts 101 3.2.2 Intercolumn and Column-to-column Width in Prose Texts 3.2.3 Letter Counts in Prose Texts 114 3.2.4 Column and Intercolumn Widths in Verse Texts 115 3.3 Dimensions of the Column: Height 119 3.4 Dimensions of the Column: Width X Height 125 3.4.1 Width X Height: Prose texts 125 3.4.2 Width X Height:Verse texts 129 3.5 Upper and Lower Margins 130 3.6 Roü Height 141 3.7 Roll Length 143 3.8 Roll Format and Literary Genre 152 3.9 Editions de luxe

155

3.10 Private versus Professional Book Production Tables 161

157

Appendix 1 Papyri Included in the Sample 231 Appendix 2 Addenda and Corrigenda to Editions in the Sample Sets Appendix 3 Resolution of Ambiguous Reconstructions 337 Glossary

341

Bibliography

345

Subject Index Index of Papyri

357 361

Illustrations are at the end of the book Figure 1 on !. "

109

251

ix

Figure 1

Anatomy of the bookroll

a. Parts of the Roll 1. Column width 2. Intercolumn 3. Column-to-column width 4. Column height 5. Upper margin 6. Lower margin 7. Roll height 8. Rolllength

h.Leading

Terminology; Conventions, and Sigla

In figure 1,1 have labelled the parts of a roll in order to make clear what I mean by 'column height' as opposed to 'roll height,' and so forth. By 'column' I always mean the written area of text. In general, the terminology for ancient bookroll and script is that common in the papyrological literature; for the benefit of non-specialists, I have added a short glossary of technical terms among the back-matter to the book. The term 'leading' may cause some mild confusion. As a typesetting term, the word traditionally denotes the blank space between lines of print. An alternative usage, however, has evolved wherein the word signifies the vertical distance from base line to base line. I use the word in the latter sense (see figure 1, b).1 Punctuation dots are distinguished as low, middle, or high. A high dot is a dot written at a level parallel to or above the top of the preceding letters; a low dot is a dot at the base line; a middle dot is one that seems intended to fall midway between the top and base lines. Papyrus numbers within the POxy series are indicated by bold face without further qualification, a convention familiar from the volumes themselves. One necessary innovation in the transcription of papyrus texts: I use an open box, to signal blank space of about one character width left deliberately (usually as punctuation) in the text. On the page following, I list the prefixes used to indicate to what degree a figure for width, height, etc. is approximated. If there is no prefix, the figure is measured.

1 During the period when physical type was used, the space between lines was set by small pieces of lead. The secondary use (i.e., from base line to base line) derivesfromterminology standard in computer software applications.

Terminology, Conventions, and Sigla

The figure is mostly measured, but has some element of approximation. This prefix is used, for instance, in the case of a badly distorted papyrus, or in the case of a column width if one or two letters are missing from the line. For widths and heights, this prefix indicates a margin of error of about ±1.5 mm. The figure is measured, but is an approximation of the average line length of a verse text. This prefix is used only for the column widths of verse texts, as a reminder of their very approximate nature. The figure is calculated. For widths, the margin of error is about ±2.5 mm (except for verse texts, on which see above). For heights, the error margin is perhaps ±10 mm. The figure is calculated, but on the basis of a small amount of evidence. This prefix is used before a width if, for instance, there are too few surviving letters to yield a reliable estimate of the character cell; before a height if there are too few lines (usually under 10) to derive reliable estimates of the leading. For widths, the margin of error is about ±5 mm. For heights, the margin is perhaps ±15 mm.

Acknowledgments

I am pleased to record my debt to a good many institutions and people. Indispensable to the project was funding for research and travel, early on, from Yale University and, later on, from the Semple Classics Fund at the University of Cincinnati. During my papyrological wanderings I had the good fortune to enjoy the resources of the following collections: The Bodleian Library, Oxford; The University Library, Cambridge; Department of Manuscripts, the British Library; Ägyptologishes Museum und Papyrussammlung, Berlin (where I single out Günther Poethke for his friendly assistance); Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna; Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich; The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University; Houghton Library, Harvard University; The University Museum, University of Pennsylvania (where Robert Kraft was most hospitable and helpful); The Oriental Institute, University of Chicago; Special Collections, Columbia University; The Milton S. Eisenhower Library, The Johns Hopkins University; Special Collections, Princeton University Library; Department of Egyptian Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Special Collections, Wellesley College Library; Special Collections, Muhlenberg College Library; Special Collections, Andover Newton Theological School; Freiberger Library, Case Western Reserve University; Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. I reserve for particular mention the Papyrology Rooms at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, where Revel Coles and John Rea were kind enough to entertain my frequent requests and interruptions over several weeks and trips. At an early stage of the project, magisterial encouragement and advice came from George Goold, Michael Ilaslam, and Peter Parsons; at a later stage, from Robert Babcock and Richard Janko. Finally, I wish to express my sorrow that William Willis did not see the work through to completion. With characteristic generosity, he volunteered to take me

xiv

Acknowledgments

through the basics of papyrology when I conceived of the work in 1989, and though lost to us in body he continues to inspire through his careful scholarship and passionate interest in the tattered remains of ancient writings recovered from the sands of Egypt.

BOOKROLLS AND SCRIBES IN OXYRHYNCHUS

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CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

1.0

Voluminology

Bookrolls, by which I mean papyrus rolls containing literary texts, survive in fragmentary form in many thousands of examples from antiquity.1 Yet the bookroll qua book, as an artefact that speaks in detail to the production and use of classical literature in its original context, has received surprisingly little attention. Even as codicology has become a mainstay of medieval studies, voluminology, so to speak, remains almost wholly neglected among classicists. For anyone with strong interests in ancient books, ancient readers, and ancient reading, a host of basic questions remain unanswered. A very few examples: What was the nature of the bookroll 'industry,' including the relation between scribe and book owner, scribe and readers, in the production and markup of the text? What were the changes in bookroll production over time and place, including both manufacture and elements of design? What was the relation, if any, between the format of the bookroll and its contents? In what ways was the design of the bookroll tied up with its use, and what were the circumstances ofthat use? Answers even to such basic questions as these are not yet possible, for the simple reason that much of the painstaking preliminary work - on scribes, on ancient readers, on the bookrolls themselves - has not been done.2 A detailed history of the bookroll is, then, an urgent desideratum. But the detailed

1 LDAB 1998 lists almost seven thousand bookrolls either published or referenced in the literature. Conversations with curators suggest that many thousands of (mosdy very small) fragments of bookrolls still await publication. 2 Kathleen McNamee's forthcoming work on marginalia in ancient bookrolls (McNamee forthcoming) promises to be an important contribution to our detailed knowledge of ancient scribes and readers. See also McNamee 1981a, Johnson forthcoming.

4

Introduction

investigation of the various raw data must come first, and that is what I take up in this book: the collection and close analysis of formal and conventional features for a sample of over four hundred bookrolls. The work is unusual among papyrological studies in that it focuses not on fragments of previously lost literature (fascinating though those are), but on the papyri of known literary texts, that is, texts that also survive in full form in medieval manuscripts. The contributions that such material can make to our understanding of the production, use, and aesthetics of the ancient book are impressive. Since the papyrus fragments derive from known texts, it is often possible to reconstruct a great many details of the format of the ancient book: the column width and height, the height of the roll, even sometimes the length and contents of the roll. Recovery of an extensive body of these data leads to unexpected discoveries. Systematic analysis of hundreds of bookrolls shows, for example, that the rakish lean often seen in the columns of an ancient bookroll is a deliberate design feature; this is proved not only by remarkable consistency of format, but by the discovery of scribal dots that marked the pattern before the column was written out. Analysis of finely written rolls overturns the prejudicial assumption (taken from codex culture, but firmly implanted in the papyrological literature) that a tall roll or column was considered more elegant than a short roll or column. Analysis of the conjunction of format and content yields a great deal of suggestive detail about the relationship between book and genre.These and many other discoveries, small in themselves, reveal that the ancient bookroll was designed according to principles surprisingly different from those of the codex. That difference suggests, in turn, intriguing questions - and some provisional answers about the ways in which the use and function of the bookroll among ancient readers may differ from modern or medieval practice. The book you hold in your hands is a work of fundamental scholarship both in the sense that the work has not been done before, and in the sense that the results are not so much an edifice as a foundation. The strength of the work lies in the comprehensiveness, depth, and thoroughness of the collection and analysis of the data. Those who want detailed facts about the design, construction, and use of ancient bookrolls, so far as they are recoverable, will want to read this book. Now it must be admitted that delving into the many details of drainage, plumbing, electricity, gas, venting, and so forth that form the guts of a modern basement is not to everyone's taste; nor will be the level of detail summoned here. Still, to change the metaphor for a moment, the level of detail is necessary so as to construct a meticulous mosaic, a portrait that takes form with light and shadow and colour. The result is, I think, a reasonably secure evidentiary basis from which to build. I have already begun elsewhere to sketch out some ways in which these data can be creatively deployed in a variety of broad historical inquiries (see esp. Johnson 2000, 2003). My hope is that others will join the enterprise, still very much at its beginnings. My original impetus, now a decade away, had little to do with the task of working through the physical details of several hundred literary papyri. Like many researchers, I was

Gathering the Evidence: The Necessity for Autopsy

5

fascinated by various problems of orality and literacy in early Greece, and my initial investigation was driven by questions I had about the interrelation among form, function, and content in Greek literary texts.The first issue, or so it seemed to me, was to gain a firm and detailed impression of what the Greeks meant by a 'book* and to understand how these books were produced and used. I quickly stumbled upon the embarrassment that the standard work on the ancient book remains Theodor Birts monumental 1882 study, Das antike Buchwesen in seinem Verhältniss zur Littérature I call this an 'embarrassment' not because this is a bad book — quite the opposite is the case — nor simply because it is old, but because Birt in 1882 had very limited access to the artefactual evidence. True, a succession of subsequent works summarize the evidence of the literary papyri, but these are uniformly cursory in their treatment, at times almost anecdotal. I think in particular of the two standard handbooks, both by famous papyrologists, Wilhelm Schubart's Das Buch bei den Griechen und Römern (second edition, 1921) and Frederic Kenyon's Books and Readers in Ancient Greece and Rome (second edition, 1951), both of which tend to generalize on the basis of a very few examples from the papyri in their respective collections (the Berlin and British Museums). More recent decades have seen good but limited progress. The Herculaneum papyri have received fairly detailed treatment in Guglielmo Cavallo's Libri} scribi, scritture a Ercolano (1983); in a succession of more recent books and articles by Mario Capasso; and now in Jankos detailed study of Philodemus s On Poems (2000).4The Herculaneum papyri are, however, in several respects a special case, and the physical details of these bookrolls may or may not reflect the evidence of other Greek literary papyri. Eric Turner s writings are sprinkled with valuable, detailed observations on ancient bookrolls (see esp. The Terms Recto and Verso: The Anatomy of the Papyrus Roll, 1978 and Greek Manuscripts of the Ancient

World, revised by Peter Parsons in 1987).Turners name will therefore recur over and over in the discussion here, even though Turner reserved detailed treatment for papyrus codices (The Typology of the Early Codex, 1977). But the lone systematic study of the mise en page of

the bookroll outside of Herculaneum is a recent chapter by Alain Blanchard on a group of early Ptolemaic papyri extracted from cartonnage (Blanchard 1993), a study of only twenty-four papyri. 1.1 Gathering the Evidence: The Necessity for Autopsy The main focus of this book is a detailed investigation of a large number of papyri, all literary, all of extant works, and all published in the volumes of The Oxyrhynchus Papyri, The 3 birt incorporated later thoughts and revisions on his life s work into Birt 1913, but he did not attempt a detailed treatment of the papyri. 4 Capasso 1991 and 1995; cf. also Capasso's edited volumes in the series Papyrologica Lupiensia, esp. Capasso 1994. For Philodemus, see Janko 2 0 0 0 , 7 0 - 1 1 9 , but also the introductions to Obbink 1996 and Delattre's forthcoming edition of Philodemus's de Musica.

6

Introduction

fundamental aim is to learn what we can about the bookroll. Of each fragment we should like to know what it can tell us about the literary roll from which it came: how the roll was fashioned, what it looked like, what dimensions or extent it had. Of the fragments severally, we will want to know what they can tell us about literary rolls as a class: what defines the look and feel of a bookroll, how precise are the characteristics, how are these characteristics influenced (or are they influenced at all) by genre, script, the fashions of the time? To that end, I have first assembled from the published editions as detailed a preliminary reconstruction of each roll as possible. But my second step has been in each case a personal inspection of the papyrus itself Consider first what sort of information must be collected for a proper investigation of even the most obvious physical details of the bookroll. At a minimum, one needs measurements for upper and lower margins, the written column, and the space between columns (the intercolumn). The older Oxyrhynchus volumes almost never provide these data. This fact alone necessitates measuring, preferably by direct inspection, a large number of the fragments. Recent volumes are more detailed in this regard, but even here descriptions are often insufficient. Take as a common example the upper and lower margins. The maximum extent is now given as a matter of course, but not the details that provide a basis for judging whether the margin may be complete (on which see further at §3.5). How can we speak intelligently of roll heights without knowing whether the margins are partial or whole? Even in those cases where the relevant information is given, problems arise.What does one mean, for instance, by 'width of column'? A prose column will be written with a more or less regular right margin, but it will not be so regular as on a printed page. Does one mean then the minimum measurement for the lines of writing, the maximum, the average, or what appears as the notional border the scribe is aiming at? I have always measured the last of these, but comparison of my measurements with those printed in the POxy introductions shows that different editors use different systems. What one means by the column width of a verse text will be more difficult yet.Terminology is also a problem.Take but one example: the 'column height' should be clear enough, since 'column' signifies the written block of text. Yet editors sometimes will use 'column' where 'roll' or 'sheet' is intended, and will speak of the overall height of the roll as the 'column height' (thus, e.g., in the introductions to 3550 [Theocritus] and, apparently, 3325 [Moschus]). And none of this even begins to attack the significant problems of reconstruction and calculation that attach to obtaining figures for a partially preserved column. We see then that even in the case of physical dimensions, if we are to avoid comparing apples and oranges, there is a strong case to be made for a single researcher taking the measurements. Still, there are a number of other essential physical details that are irregularly reported. We certainly want to know whether the column has a slant to it ('Maas's Law': see §3.1.2), and, if so, how much of a slant; we want to know, so far as one can

Gathering the Evidence: The Necessity for Autopsy

7

tell, what is the quality of the papyrus; we want to be able to divide the scripts into meaningful categories (such as whether the script bespeaks a deluxe, everyday, or substandard copy). All of these are reported, but none regularly and consistently. There are also the dimensions of script and spacing that are necessary to calculate the width and height for partially preserved columns. These include the height of the letters, the average horizontal spacing, the leading between lines. Such details - critical to the enterprise - are almost never given. A different sort of difficulty arises in connection with, for instance, 26 (Demosthenes, Exordia plate 6). Study of that text will show the scribes apparent inconsistency in his treatment of jota-adscript. Final iota is added to the masculine dative singular in three cases, but in two cases it is not. More striking yet arc, at iii 11, two subjunctive forms in succession that seem to disagree on the use of adscript: the scribe appears to write, $%$&'(" )(* #$ '+,-& ,(& .-/&01-. The manuscript is otherwise carefully copied and well written. The circumstances seem, then, an indictment against the insouciance of scribes in such matters. Yet personal inspection tells quite a different tale. In fact, iota-adscript can be clearly seen in all five cases of the masculine dative. As for the pair of subjunctives, one supposedly with iotaadscript, the other without, autopsy reveals a misreading of the strokes. Following So,- the papyrus has pulled slightly apart; the supposed & is no more than the hasta of the following ,, which because of the vertical tear is somewhat detached from the rest of the letter. In fact, the scribe writes the adscript for neither of the two subjunctives. A parallel example in the case of punctuation will be found for 2181 (Plato, Phaedo, plate 13).The editor, in his introduction, dismisses the punctuation as 'erratic.' Paragraphus, for instance, seems to be used in conjunction with dicolon where there is a change of speaker, and thus it is found eight times; but in six instances, the paragraphus is omitted.Yet autopsy reveals that the paragraphus exists, in fact, in every one of these six cases. In one instance where the paragraphus is transcribed, the editor notes a middle dot used in lieu of the dicolon. But here too the transcription, not the scribe, errs: a dicolon is plain to see. And so on, as the entry in Appendix 2 clearly shows. The editing of papyri, even those of known works, is fraught with difficulties, some beyond what may immediately come to mind. Let us reconsider the two examples just given: 26 was one of an impressively substantial volume produced by Grenfell and Hunt in the eleven-month interim between excavation seasons in 1897-8; 2181 was somehow gotten out during one of the more ferocious periods of the Second World War. In such circumstances, one can see that the Logia Jesou would attract more of the editors' attention than a fragment from a known work of Demosthenes or Plato. Study of Appendix 2 will show how relatively few of the corrigenda belong to more recent and settled times. In Appendix 2 I propose probable or definite corrections for many dozens of punctuation dots, paragraphia iota-adscripts, and diacritics. Now many of these corrections are piddling enough, to be sure. Yet if we are to come to a proper understanding of

8

Introduction

the ancient book, we must first assemble the details, and (so far as is humanly possible) get them right.5 The detailed consideration of writing conventions such as punctuation and iotaadscript, while certainly part of the eventual aim of producing a detailed history of the bookroll, is beyond the scope of the project set here.There are logistical constraints, since a full treatment would swell this work far beyond the limits appointed.Yet more importantly - and here I anticipate somewhat - substantial portions of details like adscript and punctuation seem to be part of what is traditionally copied, part of the paradosis. Where that is the case, we begin to study something quite different in kind, for the investigation veers toward study of the history of the text and away from the study of scribal habits and book production. Still, one aspect of the use of writing conventions, be it use of adscript, punctuation, or division between lines, deserves immediate attention. My general observation, after a great deal of detailed study, is that these features are considerably more consistent than is commonly recognized. This does not apply to all texts, nor to all features (accentuation being the outstanding exception). But for every papyrus in the samples here collected, I have noted what one would expect if the scribe had been consistent, and have examined those locations on the papyrus; in myriad cases the missing dot or adscript or what-haveyou is either in lacuna or transcribed in error.This procedure will be seen as the genesis of Appendix 2, where a great many of the entries provide evidence of scribal consistency unrecognized by the editor. Let us not think that an ancient literary book, because it was hand-made, was a haphazard affair without any very specific notion of how it should look or how it should be written. All the evidence suggests otherwise. Obviously deliberate are the limited number of script types, and the consistent look and feel, such as the wide margins or (for prose) the narrow columns and very narrow intercolumns. Less obvious, but perhaps more telling, are subtle features such as the frequent slant to the columns and the tight spacing between lines. It is often remarked that bookhands are frequently found in documents as well as in literary rolls.6 Yet what is not so often remarked is that, in general, the overall look of a document and that of a literary roll could not be more different. When we ask ourselves what should prepare us to find any order in the sort of data here collected, the reply must be this defmiteness and constancy of form. The tradition of book production is fundamentally

5 Even so, these corrections do not always give the complete information required. Study of punctuation, for example, will necessitate knowledge of what punctuation does not exist on the papyrus. Where the punctuation is expected but not transcribed, it is unclear whether the surface of the papyrus is blank, rubbed, or missing altogether. I have compiled notes on many such details, but full presentation and analysis will have to await future work. O n e may hope that future editors will follow the lead of M.W. Haslam, w h o now consistently includes expected punctuation, with brackets where it is missing, for the known literary texts (though, unfortunately, his present system makes the presence or absence of a paragraphus sometimes ambiguous). 6 See, e.g., Roberts 1955, xi-xii.

Definition of the Project

9

conservative in almost all times and places, and it is reasonable to suspect from the outset that even subtle changes to the look of the bookroll may be the result of definable shifts in time or circumstance. 1.2 Definition of the Project The focus of this project, as mentioned, are papyri of known works published in volumes 1 to 61 of %$& Oxyrhynchus Papyri? A complete list of the papyri in this primary group, which I will refer to as 'the Oxyrhynchus sample,' can be found in Appendix 1 A. The Oxyrhynchus sample comprises 317 papyri. For purposes of comparison, I have also collected data on 96 papyri of (probably) non-Oxyrhynchite provenance. I will refer to this secondary group as 'the comparison sample'; see Appendix IB for a full listing. The comparison sample itself falls into two subgroups: (1) papyri of the Roman era, where a provenance other than Oxyrhynchus can be established; and (2) papyri that are preRoman era. (Since the Oxyrhynchus papyri are very predominantly Roman era, and the literary texts almost exclusively so, the second subgroup is likely to be also predominantly non-Oxyrhynchite.) The comparison sample will be used primarily in two ways: (1) in statistical contexts, as a check to see whether the Oxyrhynchus evidence does or does not seem to conform to what is observed in non-Oxyrhynchite Roman-era papyri; (2) as a way, using papyri from the Ptolemaic era, to get some idea of whether the Oxyrhynchus evidence does or does not seem to accord with earlier bookroll traditions. I have, over the course of the last ten years, personally examined all these papyri. I am fully aware that the controls are not what one would like. There is, for example, no way of knowing how many of the papyri excavated at Oxyrhynchus were local products, and how many were imported from elsewhere;8 the assignment of provenance for non-Oxyrhynchite examples is sometimes tenuous;9 and the number of examples in the comparison set is not as large as would be ideal. Still, the numbers are not small, and in statistical analysis the inclusion of a few false representatives will not affect the general tendencies. Also, there are interesting indications that, for the Oxyrhynchus data at least, the

7 The sample is not, however, complete for these volumes. More than a few papyri, mostly in Australia, Europe, or Cairo, could not be included because of their location. Papyri published by description in the early Oxyrhynchus volumes have generally been set aside, except that several larger Homeric fragments have been included to make the sample more representative. Finally, a small number of papyri had to be omitted because they are missing from their collections. 8 Turner and Parsons 1987, 17-18. 9 Excepting pieces from excavation, the certainty of the designation of provenance is often doubtful. An idea of the problems besetting assignment of provenance can be gained from the detective work in Harraurer andWorp 1993 (which attempts to isolate the pieces from Soknopaiou Nesos in the Vienna collection); similarly, Sijpesteijn and Worp 1993, and van Minnen 1998.

10

Introduction

sample has reached the point of statistical viability.10 With only a very few exceptions (all noted in the text), the broader sampling of data verifies the preliminary analysis of a smaller (but not insubstantial) group of papyri that saw light of day as my Yale dissertation (Johnson 1992a). The fact that a large expansion of the data in almost every case simply confirms the tendencies noticed in that pilot project makes coincidence, or tendentious misreading, far less likely. Those familiar with the dissertation will note here, in consequence, a more confident tone to conclusions in the cases where that seems warranted. A moment's reflection will show the obvious merits of the restriction to known literary works. Since the text is usually predictable within narrow limits, even very partial remains will allow substantial reconstruction of the roll. Important to that end is the simple point that the works are almost all available in the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae data bank (see further under §1.3).The restriction to known works has, however, its disadvantages as well. We will see, for instance, very little of Greek lyric, though it is well represented among the Oxyrhynchus papyri. Perhaps more important for the history of the bookroll, we will see nothing of the works of later historians, commentators, and the like, which might lend important insights into differential treatment (if there was such) accorded authors belonging to the classical canon. Similarly, the exclusion of all documents will rob us of detailed evidence by which to judge how different were the rolls of these classical works from other book or book-like productions. The definition of the project is, then, restricted and, in certain ways, quite limited in scope. On the other hand, anyone who has worked through the details of large numbers of papyri will have some inkling of what an enormous and difficult undertaking even so limited a project has been. I know of no other attempt to draw together so many literary examples for analysis. Conclusions regarding the details of the bookroll are usually based on disconcertingly few examples, or, better, on the general impressions of a seasoned scholar. Kenyon, for instance, sets the 'extreme limit' of roll length at slightly over 10 metres, a rule 'well established on a wide basis of proof.' His 'wide basis of proof,' however, is 14 examples.11 Nitpicking, one might well think, except that in the event it seems that Kenyon is wrong (see §3.7). 1,3 Reconstruction of the Bookroll Some of the fragments will allow the column width or height to be measured outright. Yet even so simple a procedure may not be completely straightforward, since the papyrus can be separated or distorted in confusing ways; but such problems will be familiar to anyone 10 I will not, however, offer statistical checks on the sample (e.g., the 'chi-squared' test of goodness of fit), since the correct use of such tests in humanistic inquiry is far more difficult than is generally recognized. Cf. Greenberg 1991, 319;Wallace-Hadrill 1994,67. 11 Kenyon 1951,54-5 , who seems to be following Schubart 1921, 52-3, 177n. Schubart offers a total of five examples.

Reconstruction of the Bookroll

11

who has worked with papyri. Most of the sample is, however, too fragmentary for simple measurement, and it will be necessary to reconstruct the contents of the columns before going further. This too will be familiar to the papyrologist, who has performed such operations for many years by hand and more recently with the help of computers. What will be new about the project here is its systematic nature and, quite simply, its scale. Facility with machine-assisted techniques has allowed the reconstruction in great detail of a large number of rolls in a reasonably short time. By 'reconstruction' I do not intend anything unduly sophisticated. It is possible, of course, to program a computer to reconstruct a column in accordance with the particularities of a given hand. One would need to record the characteristics of each letter in the script, particularly the typical size and horizontal spacing, and to simulate the accumulation of letters in each line of text. A demonstration of such a technique, based on digitization of the letters by optical scanning, was offered by Robert Kraft at the 1989 meeting of the American Philological Association.12 Yet for large-scale accumulations of data such techniques have serious drawbacks. Relying as they do on the digitization of a script sample, there is both the necessity for a plate or photograph of each papyrus and a great deal of time involved in the scanning itself. Nor is it clear that such techniques will be as precise as they seem for broad statistical comparisons.The variations from letter to letter, line to Une, and column to column will, over a larger scale, belie the sort of accuracy that such techniques seem to promise (see further at §2.4). In the interests of efficiency, I have therefore adopted the following techniques. All of these have been tested over a broad array of examples to ensure tolerable accuracy. Column width. Where the full width of column cannot be measured directly, a set of measurements is taken to estimate the average character cell. For each partially extant line, I measure the width in millimetres from the start of the first extant letter to the start of the last extant letter in the line. Every line is measured for small fragments; for larger fragments a sample of 10 to 20 lines (depending on how much of the line survives) is taken. The total of these measurements is divided by the total number of characters to give the average character cell. This technique has the great merit that it works with surprising accuracy regardless of the script, since it delivers an average that is already weighted, to large extent, in accordance with the actual frequency of letters. Small samples of this sort, it is true, may sometimes exhibit letter frequencies that do not well match those of the text as a whole. But in general the match is good to excellent. Tests have shown that this simple and fast technique lends itself to much better than expected precision.

12 The software was developed in collaboration with Jay Treat for the CATS S project at the University of Pennsylvania. Kraft and Treat's program resulted in hard copy of the simulated column, which of course could be useful for certain purposes. But in order to accumulate data on column dimensions and the like, it is not in fact necessary for the computer to know anything of the actual shapes of letters, but merely how many of them in a given sequence will fit into a line.

12

Introduction

For partially preserved prose texts, I multiply the average character cell by the average line length for the column. Before that can be calculated, it is necessary first to lay out the fragment with the missing parts of the text disposed in a way that is consistent with the physical remains of the papyrus and the scribes habits in matters such as division between lines, scriptio plena, use of iota-adscript, and the like. I accomplish this by reformatting the text from the Tlxesaurus Linguae Graecae data bank. A software program I have developed removes accents, punctuation, and other aspects of the modern edition, adds (or not) iotaadscript and the like in accordance with the particular text, and realigns the text to the narrower columns of the papyrus; other software facilitates a number of tasks related to editing and checking the text. What results is a machine-readable text much as it is printed in the Oxyrhynchus volumes. Working from this text, a program then delivers the average letters per line for each column. For partially preserved verse texts, the column width is calculated by a rough average of the letters per line in a given author. (Homer and Hesiod are calculated at 36 letters per line where adscript is written, 35.5 where it is not; Apollonius is calculated at 35.5 with adscript, 35 without; drama is calculated on the basis of the average trimeter line, thus 30 letters with adscript, 29.5 without.) Column height. Where the full height of the column does not survive (the usual case), the column height must be calculated wherever possible. In order to calculate the height, the following information is required: lines in the column, average vertical space from line to line (leading), letter height.The calculation is made according to the formula: Column height = ([lines per column - &] 2 leading) + letter height The average leading is determined by taking the maximum number of continuously surviving lines within a given column and measuring from the base of the top line to the base of the bottom. This figure is then divided by the number of lines. I measure the letter height by using a metric-scale attachment (increment = 0.1 mm) on a Bausch and Lomb Lenscope magnifier. The measurement is made from top of letters such as " % to the base line (the two lines ofTurner s 'bilinear' scripts), estimated to the nearest quarter millimetre. The number of lines in a partial column can only be calculated where one of the following conditions exists. (1) More than one column exist in succession, either with a physical join between the fragments or with extant margins. (2) A margin occurs close enough to the start of the work to set the column length. (3) So many small fragments exist that the column divisions can be defined by the elimination of possible alternatives. All of these conditions exist in the sample, but the last two are uncommon. Where, for instance, the tops of two columns survive in succession, one needs to figure out how many lines are missing from the bottom of the first column. This is done by computing the number of letters missing (taking into account &ota-adscript and the like) and dividing these by the average number of letters per line in the extant part of that column.

Reconstruction of the Bookroll

13

(I in fact create a line-by-line transcription of the missing area, since this both helps the visualization of the column, which cuts down on errors, and facilitates subsequent computations, placement of fragments, and so forth.) It cannot be stressed too much that the missing text must be reconstructed column by column, and not on the basis of gross averages. Consider but two examples among a great many. In 2096 col, " (Herodotus 1), the editor notes three lines lost following line 19.The missing text totals 59 letters, thus an average of 19.7 letters per line if three lines, 14.75 if four lines. Now in general 17 letters per line is typical for this rolL But this column, as it happens, averages 14.9 letters per line; thus four lines is far more probable. Similarly, in 3675 (Plato, Leg,), the editors calculation of 34 to 35 lines per column is based on an average of the letters per line for the two columns. The editor rightly states that the overall average is just over 17' letters per line, but the column to be reconstructed shows just under 18. Thus, 33 to 34 lines is the better assumption. A detailed account of the basis for reconstructing each column would be impractical, but some of the more complex examples are discussed in Appendix 2. An impression of the techniques and difficulties involved can be gained through a study of the examples discussed in Appendix 3. Roll length. Where a full column can be reconstructed, an estimate for the length of the roll can be got from dividing the total letters for the work (or book, if a multi-volume work) by the average number of letters in a column. The letter count is derived from the TLG text with adjustments for addition or not of iota-adscript, again making use of specialized software. These techniques, as I have said, are designed to deliver tolerably accurate estimations with enough efficiency to create a statistically viable sample within a reasonable time. The methods, though streamlined, are not, I think, crude. Some confirmation of the procedure may be found in the case of 2181 (Plato, Phaedo). The reconstruction of the many columns in that extensive papyrus preceded work on the unplaced fragments. Later a goodly number of the unplaced fragments were located using searching software. Twice during that process a reconstructed column division was found to match exactly an extant margin on a previously unlocated fragment (frr. 55, 60).

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C H A P T E R TWO

Scribes in Oxyrhynchus: Scribal Habits, Paradosis, and the Uniformity of the Literary Roll

2.0 Prologue: The Importance of Case Studies Before any sort of statistical analysis can be attempted, prior questions at once confront us. To what extent are the particular features of a bookroll the result of scribal habit and the conventions of the time, and to what extent are these features governed by the exemplar from which the copy is made? When a scribe copies from his exemplar, what exactly does he copy? Is it the letters only, or does he copy also the punctuation? Do orthographic features like iota-adscript derive solely from the model, or does the scribe regularize the usage as he goes? As for the format, does the scribe copy line by line from the exemplar? If so, does he also then copy column by column? Such questions are basic to any analysis. For example, if we believe that copies are made line by line from the antigraph, then it will be appropriate, in the statistical analysis, to look at letters per line rather than the physical widths of columns, for the physical width would be no more or less than a function of the letter count. That is, the letter count would be passed on in the copy, and we would be analysing neither the habits of particular scribes nor the formal fashions of the age, but the widths, by letter count, which became dominant or popular in the various textual traditions. We must in short be as clear as possible what we are studying. Is a particular feature likely to be an inheritance, and thus general to one tradition of a given work, at least over a certain period? Or is the feature a convention to which the scribe freely adapts the material he is copying? Both matters will be of interest, but we must be clear which is which. A second set of questions is likewise fundamental. Given the fact that the literary roll is a handwritten document, what sort of variation might we expect to find? Regarding features such as punctuation and writing of adscript, is there enough consistency of usage to speak intelligently of systems and conventions? Or is the addition of such lectional aids

16

Scribes in Oxyrhynchus: Scribal Habits, Paradosis, and the Uniformity of the Literary Roll

whimsical and idiosyncratic? In this one case, I will simply assert that lectional signs are typically used in a more or less systematic fashion, and defer specific demonstration to future work. But in the case of formal features, a detailed answer is necessarily prior. What degree of variation should we expect? Will the width of columns in a roll vary by 5%, 10%, or 50%? This must be answered, however roughly, before attempting an analysis. For the grouping into types will only be valid if the types are separated by more than the variation we expect within a roll. That is, if one thinks to see a width 'type' centring around a column width of 5.0 cm, and a new 'type' centring around 5.5 cm, the delineation will hardly make sense if, say, a 15% variation within a roll is normal. One might fairly object that the questions are too baldly put. It is unlikely, for instance, that a given feature is always an inheritance and never the result of scribal interference; even within a given manuscript, the same features can sometimes be copied and sometimes added at the scribes own instigation.Yet one can nonetheless make a start, focusing upon what, if any, is the usual case. To attempt some sort of answer, I propose to work through a series of case studies. As is natural in the study of particular examples, we will find that the results are more suggestive than conclusive. Sometimes we will follow where the evidence leads only to find an impasse. Still, the examples are both numerous and multifarious enough to present, I think, a sound set of suggestions for further analysis. Four areas of investigation are promising and will be the subject here. (§2.1, 2.2) A comparison of techniques and habits in cases where more

than one roll is written by the same scribe. Does a given scribe write to one format or many, does he use one system of punctuation for all works, or vary work by work? That is, does he show the sort of uniformity from roll to roll we expect if the formats and conventions were Iiis own, or does he show the sort of variation we expect if the formats and conventions are copied from a variety of models? (§2.2.1) Investigation of changes of format within a roll. If a scribe writes to a conventional standard of format, or, for that matter, if he copies the format of his exemplar, how does one explain violent shifts of format in mid-roll? (§2.3) Inferences from scribal error. What can be inferred about the format of the exemplar from mechanical errors in the copying? In this section we will also look at papyri that contain the exact same text to see if there is any evidence for close relatives among the manuscripts within a given tradition. (§2.4) Analysis of the degree of uniformity and variation within a bookroll Considering only the best-preserved manuscripts, what sort of variation shows up in column width and height, intercolumn, and so forth? What does the variation or its lack tell us in turn about scribal practice? 2 A A Survey of Scribes with Multiple Surviving Rolls In almost fifty cases, multiple rolls have been identified as the product of a given scribe. These are collected in table 2.1 at the end of this chapter. Some of the identifications are

A Survey of Scribes with Multiple Surviving Rolls

17

doubtful, and others comprise scraps of small extent or uncertain content. I have therefore selected twenty-one scribes whose fragments are extensive enough to yield some evidence, and whose location has allowed a detailed examination.1 In the survey that follows I will attend in particular to the scribe's tendencies to uniformity or variation from roll to roll. Where a practice is uniform between different works, the presumption will be that the scribe follows his own standard; where varying, that the scribe takes over the features of his several models. Note that these are not the only possible interpretations of the evidence; the particular needs of a customer might, for instance, govern the format and the presence or absence of lectional signs. 2.1.1 Scribe #A1 (844 Isocrates, Panegyricus; 1246 Thucydides, 7; ?767 Homer, Iliad 11) late 2nd cent. AD. The

attribution of 767 to this scribe, though possible, is doubtful. Too little remains to be certain, but several small variations in letter forms (as the top of 8, the right arm of 3, the top of $, and the central vertical of 4) argue against it. On the other hand, style and use of serifs is very similar. All three papyri, moreover, exhibit closely similar leading and letter height, and all are written on papyrus of like quality: a fairly good front surface, with a back surface that is much inferior. But the identification of 767 remains dubious, and that papyrus will be considered no further. The column width of 844 and 1246 is remarkably similar: ranging from 5.75 to 6.05 cm for 844, compared with about 5.7 cm for 1246; the column-to-column width, about 8.1 cm for 844, is unknown for 1246. Though, as commonly, it is difficult to say with certainty what of the punctuation is original, the method of punctuation is clearly different. In 844, the paragraphus is used in conjunction with a slight accompanying space to mark a full stop. In all but one instance (line 378) that space contains a dot written high in the line, which appears to be written by the text hand; a second pen has also added a number of low, middle, and high dots at lesser pauses in the text. In 1246, the paragraphus is also used to mark a full stop, but there is no space at that point in the text: the dots, which may well be by the original pen, are written above the letters. The signs of later addition and correction abundant in 844 are not found in 1246. 2.1.2 Scribe #A2 (2373 Boeotian lyric verse; 2404+PLaur inv. III/278 Aeschines, in Ctesiphontemj 2nd cent. AD.

Many points of comparison are inoperative due to the exiguous remains of 2373. (I have not been able to examine PSI IX 1090 or PLaur inv. III/278.) Of correspondences: both 1 Fragments associated with a given scribe that I have not been able to examine are for the most part omitted from the survey; consult table 2.1 for the complete listing of the papyri assigned to each scribe.

18

Scribes in Oxyrhynchus: Scribal Habits, Paradosis, and the Uniformity of the Literary Roll

2373 and 2404 are written on papyrus of very good quality; both slope leftward at the left margin, observing Maass Law (though 2373 slopes, it appears, rather more strongly); both are punctuated by high dots apparently written by the original scribe (the single low dot in 2404 is added by a different pen). The most noticeable difference is the size of the script: 2373 is considerably larger, with the average character measuring in millimeters about 4.6 2 3.1 (w 2 h) on 6.3 leading as against 2404, whose average character occupies 3.5 2 2.6 mm on 5.0 leading. The larger script will have its consequences for letter and line counts in the column, but, since a full column cannot be reconstructed for 2373, no more can be said. The many accents and breathings added by the original hand of 2373 are unexampled in 2404, whose lone accent is added apparently by a second hand; this comes however as no great surprise, for 2373 contains Boeotian verse, while 2404 is the prose of Aeschines. Judging from the style of correction and the script, the busy corrector of 2404 is probably not the same corrector as that of 2373. Yet both correctors go beyond simple collation against the antigraph. The corrector of 2404 adds six variant readings in two columns; the sole adjustment in 2373 (fr. 3) is a correction to proper Boeotian orthography (- (5+0 changed to - (#6+^). The unusual number of variant readings in 2404 and the eclectic nature of the Boeotian verse in 2373 and PSI IX 1090 (Erinna) all suggest intellectually refined readers. The two different correctors argue against facile assignment of these texts to a single scholarly owner; one wonders, but cannot prove, whether the papyri were commissioned for use in some sort of readers' group. 2-· 3 Scribe #A3 (1249 Babrius; of the Aeschylean papyri, 2178 Agamemnon, 2179 Septem contra Thebas, 2161 Diktyulkoi, 2162 Theoroi or Isthmiastai, 2245 Prometheus?j 2nd or early 3rd cont. AD.2 Lobel credits this copyist with a large number of fragments from various plays ofAeschylus, as well as a small piece from the fables of Babrius. The often scrappy remains cast doubt on how many plays are represented, but Lobel identifies eight at least tentatively, and subsequent scholars have suggested several additional identifications. Only large fragments or those of extant works are considered here, as listed above; for a complete list see table 2.1.3 The size and layout of line and column for the Aeschylean fragments is so remarkably similar that the conclusion of a set of matching rolls seems inescapable. All the fragments use very good, and strikingly similar, papyrus; the size of script and leading shows only

2 O f the Babrius fragment Hunt wrote that it 'can hardly be put later than the end of the second century, and may easily be appreciably earlier.' Luzzatto and La Penna demur, dating the Babrius fragment to the early third century: see Luzzatto and La Penna 1986, xxix. Lobel ascribes the Aeschylean fragments to the second century without comment. 3 Krügers assignment (Krüger 1990,193) of 3677 to this copyist results from his misinterpretation, I think, of a confusing introductory statement by the POxy editor.The hand is not in any case the same.

A Survey of Scribes with Multiple Surviving Rolls

19

slight variation between fragments; the text at all measurable left margins slopes leftward about 3-4 degrees. Three columns are preserved from top to bottom, and all contain 34 lines; 2161 col. i measures 14.9 cm, 2161 col. ii 15.0 cm, 2162 fr 1(a) col. i 14.9 cm. From this last column one can also take a horizontal measurement, 14.2 cm from column to column, which compares with the estimate of *14.0 cm calculated for 2161. The happy concurrence is somewhat upset by the column-to-column width of 2245 fr. 1 col. ii, which measures 12.5 cm, but this width depends upon an intercolumnar join made solely by matching the fibre patterns, a dangerous basis for any conclusion about column construction.4 Upper and lower margins are fully preserved or nearly so in several instances: the upper margins vary from 4.8 to 5.4 cm, the lower from 6.5 to 6.8.The total height of the papyrus, measured at 27.1 cm for 2161 and 26.6 for 2162, appears therefore more or less constant. The general concinnity in the layout of the text is quite deliberate: two of the three largest fragments, and probably also the third, contain dots apparently intended to mark the top left of each column (see further at §§3.1.2, 3.1.3). As for textual matters, one again finds much harmony: in the use of adscript, the indentation of lyric verses, the occasional intrusion of an itacism. But not so in the employment of lectional signs — despite the apparent fact of a set of matching rolls of Aeschylus. The substantial remains in 2161 and 2162 contain no use of punctuation dots and no (2161) or rare (2162) use of diacritics; on the other hand, high dots and diacritics are added liberally in 2245. The remaining fragments, including those excluded from the survey, seem to show a like dichotomy (though the slim remains often make a definite conclusion impossible). Papyrus 2164, for example, contains much in the way of accent and punctuation, as do 2246,2253,2254; but 2179, from an extant work, does not have punctuation in the expected locations. The natural assumption will be that the punctuation dots and diacritics were a later addition, and in places (2164 is a good example) this appears the case. Yet the situation, as often, is not clear. A few of the punctuation dots appear original, given the spacing around them: thus at 2160 fr. 3 line 5, for example. Many of the diacritics appear, so far as one can tell, by the same pen and hand as the text, as in 2245 and 2253. Still, in general, the text has the look of one where a few accents and dots are original, with additional lectional marks freely added, in some plays or sections of plays, by a reader or readers. The Babrius fragment, 1249, conforms, as far as it goes, to what is found in the Aeschylean fragments. Size of script and leading is very similar; the text at the left slopes leftward 4-5°; no punctuation or accents appear; the use of paragraphus and ekthesis to mark a new fable is akin to the treatment of lyric (in eisthesis from the trimeter) and of strophe/ antistrophe (marked by paragraphus) in the Aeschylean fragments. The papyrus itself, however, is of considerably lower quality; the front is only somewhat inferior, but the back 4 Cf. Johnson 1992b.

20

Scribes in Oxyrhynchus: Scribal Habits, Paradosis, and the Uniformity of the Literary Roll

(which in the Aeschylean fragments almost matches the quality of the front) is quite coarse. Unfortunately, too little remains to deduce column or roll size. 2.1.4 Scribe #A5 (1092 Herodotus, 2 [plate 3]; 2297 Alcaeus; 3213 Dork lyric verses; 3676 Plato, Phd. [plate 4]; 3710 Commentary on Odyssey 20 [plate 5]) late 2nd or early 3rd cent. AD.5 T h e fortunate

survival of three substantial prose pieces allows definite comparisons of column height and width, the results of which are of first importance. The column widths for the extant pieces, 1092 (Herodotus) and 3676 (Plato), are almost exactly the same, measuring 4.4-4.6 cm. But the script in 3676 is substantially larger than that in 1092 (1.9 2 2.0 mm [w 2 h] for 1092,2.25 2 2.5 mm for 3676), and the scribe must write several fewer characters per line to manage the same width (20 letters per line for 3676 compared with nearly 24 for 1092). The intercolumn likewise measures quite exactly 2.0 cm for both papyri. The coincidence in widths is all the more striking in light of the third surviving prose text by this scribe. Papyrus 3710, a commentary on the Odyssey, has the same 2.0-cm intercolumn found in 1092 and 3676, but the column width is considerably wider, 5.6-5.8 cm.There is no evidence for ruling or alignment dots in any of the examples, but the natural conclusion is surely that the columns for the rolls containing Herodotus and Plato (1092 and 3676) were measured to a fixed size, while the commentary (3710) was either measured to a different size or written without measuring.The motivation for the difference in treatment lies, I suspect, in the less formal nature of a commentary,6 and I should think it most likely that the scribe simply left off the laborious blocking of columns to speed up the copying. Analysis of the height of column and roll tells, however, a different story. Despite similar leading between lines, the overall height and number of lines per column exhibit no similarity: POxy

Lines/column

C o l u m n height (cm)

Leading ( m m )

1092 (Hdt.)

39-41

163

40

3676 (Pl.)

about 48

about *19

4.1

3710 (Od. comm.)

at least 55

at least 22.9

4.2

The difference in column height very likely reflects variation in the height of the roll.The margins appear complete for 1092 (3.0 cm above, 3.3-3.4 below), thus the full height seems to have been about 23.0 cm. Papyrus 3710 cannot conform to this height, and 3676 would have had unusually narrow margins to do so. Punctuation exhibits a good deal of variety, though there is no reason to suspect a hand other than the original (only in 3676 is there any real doubt). In 1092 (Herodotus) the 5 Funghi and Savorelli 1992a, 76 date to the first half of the third century. 6 See Turner 1980, chapter 7.

A Survey of Scribes with Multiple Surviving Rolls

21

high dot is used, both alone and with the paragraphus, and a similar system underlies the poetic fragments (2297,3213) though medial and low dot are also occasionally employed. But in 3676 (Plato) the scribe uses a three-level system (dicolon, high dot, low dot), while in the Homeric commentary (3710) he uses blank spaces, with and without the paragraphus, to articulate the text. For this scribe, at least, the punctuation seems mostly or totally inherited from the exemplar. The usual correspondences obtain: all of the papyri are of similar quality papyrus, in this case very good quality; adscript is written; Maas's law is observed, though the degree of leftward drift varies quite a bit. Accents are rare on the prose texts, frequent in the poetic texts; diaeresis is usually written on initial iota, usually not on initial upsilon. In 2297, the scribe leaves an uncommonly wide intercolumn (of about 5 cm) to accommodate the scholia he has added. The Homeric commentary and the Doric verses also suggest that the scribe is copying at least some of these rolls for one or more scholarly readers. 2.1.5 Scribe #A6 (1809 Plato, Phd.; 2076, 2288 Sappho) late 1st or early 2nd cent, AD7 The fragments of

Sappho are too scanty to derive much profit from the comparison. Of physical features: all three pieces are on remarkably similar and very good papyrus; one of the Sappho pieces (2288) is written in a considerably smaller script on smaller leading while 1809 and 2076 are roughly comparable. Among other features, the punctuation is worth attention. In the Plato fragment (1809) the points appear original and part of the paradosis: a three-point system (dicolon, high dot, middle dot) is employed with noticeable spacing about the dots. The treatment is quite different in the Sappho fragments, where the points (all middle dots) seem a later addition since they lack accompanying space and are sometimes awkwardly positioned (twice interfering with the previous letter in 2076 line 8).The marginal scholia in 1809 and in 2076 are by the same hand, and possibly, as Hunt thought, the text scribe in a more cursive aspect (though I find the attribution doubtful). The heavy use of scholia and the interest in Sappho seem to imply a scholarly reader. 2.1.6 Scribe #A7 (231 Demosthenes, de Corona [plate 1]; 1619 Herodotus, 3 [plate 2]; 2313 Archilochus) late 2nd

cent. AD. A comparison of the two prose fragments offers another striking coincidence in column width, for both measure 7.1—7.2 cm. The agreement holds despite a slight difference between the two in script size and hence in the letters per line (25.5 for 231, 24 for 1619). As for column height, the considerable variation in leading among and even within the three rolls need not suggest a variation in physical measure; we simply do 7 O n the date see Turner-Parsons 1987,48.

22

Scribes in Oxyrhynchus: Scribal Habits, Paradosis, and the Uniformity of the Literary Roll

not know. All three are written on good or very good papyrus; and the papyrus used in 1619 and 2313 is remarkably similar. In all three rolls iota-adscript is written by the usual rules. Equally striking are differences in the use of lectional signs. In 1619 punctuation is effected by blank space and the paragraphus (disregarding a very few scattered dots added by a reader); in 231 the scribe employs a three-level system of dots (high, middle, low) along with the paragraphus; in 2313, the situation is less clear, but a dicolon occurs, along with high and middle dots.The dots all appear original (with the exception noted), though one cannot rule out the possibility that original blanks were later filled in by dots in a similar ink. If original, as I think, one naturally infers that the scribe copied the punctuation from his exemplar. He may well have copied accents and elision marks, too, for a similar contrast is found there. In 231 the original scribe adds several accents in a few lines, yet initial 3 goes unmarked seven times; in the extensive remains of 1619, by contrast, there are only two rough breathings, but diaeresis is twice added to initial 3 (and goes unmarked only where initial 3 is also line initial). A similar contrast is discernible in the scribes use of elision marks, though here the number of examples is too few to be conclusive: elision is never marked over the extent of 231 and 1619, while the fragments of 2313 contain several elision signs. That the scribe copies movable nu from his exemplar appears very likely, as we should expect: for in 231 and 2313 he writes it, more or less, by the customary rules, but in 1619raw-movableis consistently omitted in the way we learn to expect in papyri of Herodotus. Yet even here one cannot be certain. The omission of raw-movable in Herodotus is, after all, a special case. The scribe was in any event not above systematic adjustment of the text in conflict with the exemplar, for he twice corrects %*-) ( to the (otherwise unattested) Ionic form %*-2 (.7^ the many fragments of 1619 contain no further evidence for collation against another copy, I infer that the scribe came upon this form (perhaps later in the same book) and went back through the text to make the spelling consistent. In both 1619 and 2313, scholiastic marginalia of some sort survive, added, apparently, by different hands. 2-.7 Scribe #A17 (2321 Anacreon; 2693 Apollonius Rhodius, 3) early 2nd cent. AD.Whzt

remains is too scrappy

to allow for much inference in matters of format. Correspondences of note include the quality of papyrus, which is very similar between the two, and the consistent addition of /ota-adscript. Both manuscripts are annotated with scholia, in each case probably by at least two hands distinct from the text hand; though little is preserved, nothing seems to indicate a coincidence of scholiasts between the two texts. That the text scribe wrote almost all punctuation dots is strongly suggested by ink and point, placement of the dots (in a middle-high to high position in the line), and the slight

A Survey of Scribes with Multiple Surviving Rolls

23

spacing around mid-line punctuation. At line end the dots are separated by a full character space in 2321, and, though not so exaggerated, a similar tendency is evident in 2693. Most if not all of the many accents in 2321 have been added by a later hand in a brownish ink. In neither text was diaeresis added to initial $ or 3, but the opportunities are few. The method of punctuation is remarkably consistent, and certainly the spacing of dots at line end may be attributed to the scribes individual style; but nothing precludes the possibility that the punctuation is copied from the exemplar. The presence of annotations in several hands may, here as elsewhere, imply a scholastic context, though it is also possible that the roll was owned by a succession of scholarly readers. 2.1.8 Scribe #A19 (2430 Choral lyric in the Doric dialect [Simonides?]; 2327 Early elegiacs; 2318 Iambic trimetersf?] in the Ionic dialect; 2389 Commentary on Alcman; 2397 Commentary on Iliad 17) 2nd cent, AD.

These scrappy if numerous remains of three unknown poetic works and two commentaries are clearly in the same hand. Whether the same scribe wrote 2694 (Apollonius Rhodius) is, however, disputed (see table 2.1); since that papyrus is currently missing from the Ashmolean collection, no more can be said. The group shares several features.The papyrus surface itself, in all cases of (apparently) good to very good quality, is often noticeably similar from text to text. (In all cases, the back of the papyrus is not accessible.) The poetic texts are laid out with unusually large intercolumns (c. 3-4 cm for 2430; c. 4 cm for 2327), apparently to accommodate the marginal annotations. The intercolumns for the (subliterary) commentaries are narrow, as is usual for a prose text, but unusually variable from column to column (ranging from 1.1 to 1.6 for 2389, and 1,2 to 2.0 for 2397). Annotations for the three poetic texts are all at least plausibly by the same hand (and a hand different from that of the scribe); the annotations in the Alcman commentary are too exiguous for fair judgment, but perhaps are also by that same hand. In two of the poetic texts (2430,2318) a few accents have been added in a different ink, perhaps a second pen or (given affinities in the stroke) by the scribe in a second pass. All (except the Iliadic commentary, too fragmentary to measure) show a slight tilt right (1—2°) to the column, in accordance with Maas's Law. The punctuation employed in these fragments shows interesting points of agreement and disagreement. The poetic texts are all punctuated by slight spaces of half to two-thirds of a character in width; similarly, the prose commentaries, though there the spaces are sometimes as wide as a full character space (and once fully 2-3 spaces: 2389, line 35). (The punctuation spaces are only sporadically noted by the editors.) Dots accompanying the spaces are, however, various: none in the two commentaries; in 2327 added by a second hand only at line end, and (oddly) at some remove; also added only at line end in 2318, but tight against the text; in 2430 added both mid-line and at line end, usually in a position above the letters and sometimes added also where no punctuating space was left by the

24

Scribes in Oxyrhynchus: Scribal Habits, Paradosis, and the Uniformity of the Literary Roll

scribe. In the last two cases, it is impossible to say whether the scribe or a second pen is at work, but the situation certainly has the overall appearance of a scribe routinely using space to punctuate the text, and later readers adding dots to clarify. Unfortunately, the fragments are too small to allow measurement of formal features like column width and height. 2.1.9 Scribe #A20 (1604 Pindar, Dithyrambs; 2445 Pindar?, Dithyrambs? [same roll as 1604?]; 1788 Alcaeus?; 2446 Pindar, Hyporchemata; ?2443 Alcman) late 2nd or early 3rd cent. AD. Funghi and

Savorelli 1992b claim 2443 (Alcman) for this scribe, but the common 'severe' style and scanty fragments make the identification difficult at best; not much grist for the mill here in any case. The other fragments here listed, though securely identified as by the same hand, are also too scrappy to yield much. About all that can be said of formal features is that the columns are written with a decided tilt forwards (of about 4°); but 2446 and 2443 are too fragmentary to allow even that conclusion. None are extensive enough to allow comparison of features like column width and height. Characteristic of all these papyri is that they have been heavily worked over by multiple hands. Papyri 1604,1788, and 2445 all have frequent annotations; and all show signs of the addition of various lectional marks. In two of the papyri (1604 and 2445), a slight space is sometimes left by the scribe for punctuation, and in these cases the accompanying dot appears the work of the copyist. But in all the manuscripts punctuation is also added above the line in the manner of a later addition, and in 1604,2445, and 2446, some punctuation dots have a difference in ink suggestive of a different hand. Similarly, the trema on initial 3, $ looks to be by the original scribe in almost all cases, while the frequent accents and breathings have every appearance of a later addition; where one can tell (especially 1604), the ink does not appear to match that of the annotator. The annotator for 1604 and 1788 is certainly the same; a similar hand is responsible for the annotations in 2445, which are however too scanty to allow a clear judgment. Lobel mooted the possibility that 1604 and 2445,both apparently Pindaric, are one and the same roll; no evidence points to a lyric collection able to comprise the likes of 1788, but such cannot be entirely ruled out. The surface of these papyri is not noticeably similar, though all appear to be of good quality On the identification of this scribe with Scribe #A30, see below at §2.1.13. 2.1.10 Scribe #A24 (1364 Antiphon Sophistes, 8$*# 6-9 :;-1$#(9; 2077 Sophocles, Nauplius?; 2452 Sophocles [or Euripides?], Theseus; 2889 Aeschines Socraticus, Miltiades; 3215 Tragedy; ?3683 Leon?,

Halcyonj late 2nd or early 3rd cent.AD.The abundance of material here is illusory, since the

A Survey of Scribes with Multiple Surviving Rolls

25

lack of extant works and the mostly slim remains offer little to compare. I have been able to examine the extensive fragments of 1364 only by photograph. As regards physical measurements: 2889 and 3683 contain about 12 letters per line, but as 3683 is slightly more compressed laterally, physical measurements do not concur; the association of 3683 with this scribe is in any case doubtful. The calculated width for 2889 (Aeschines Socr.) at *4.9 agrees, however, with the ~4.7 measured for 1364 (Antiphon).The column height of 3215 can be measured at 12.3 cm (20 lines per column), which matches neither that of 2077, whose 25 extant lines calculate to a minimum of 15 cm, nor the 17—17.5 cm and 33 lines measured for 1364. The script size is more or less constant, excepting the dubious 3683. Leading, however, is variable, at 6 mm or more for 2077 and 3215 (and 3683), but closer to 5 mm for 2452 and 2889. Of interest will be the use of adscript, which appears to be written in the usual fashion in 2077, 2889, 3215, and 1364), but in 2452 is usually omitted and added by, apparently, the second hand. (Adscript is also once added by the second hand in 3215.) Punctuation dots are mostly added above the line, but by what hand is difficult to say. The slight space allowed for dots in 2889 argues for the first hand there, and the dots in 2452 also appear original; the others are more questionable, including 1364, where roughly half the dots fall at a slight space in the text and half not. In 2077 and 1364 low and middle dots seem to be distinguished. All are written on rather coarse papyrus; 3683 (which, again, may not belong) is written on the coarse back of an agricultural account. The extensive and learned annotations in 2077, 2452, and 3215, as well as the rather eclectic nature of all these texts, suggest readers of some sophistication. Note that the scholia, for 2452 and 3215 at least, are by different hands. 2.1.11 Scribe #A25 (2495 Hesiod, Catalogus mulierum, 5 ? 2 are all quite different. Given the variation within 2495 of . (two forms), the differences between odd letters may not be decisive, but 3 is quite different and consistently so. In general 2495 presents a more 'loopy' aspect. Even so, the scripts are superficially very like and one cannot, I suppose, rule out the possibility that these are the product of one scribe writing the rolls under different conditions, such as at different times of life. Given the uncertainties, a detailed comparison is inappropriate. There are no coincidences or differences in format or features that argue very strongly either for or against the identification.

26

Scribes in Oxyrhynchus: Scribal Habits, Paradosis, and the Uniformity of the Literary R o l l

2.1.12 Scribe #A28 (Î806 Theocritus; 3325 Moschus) late 1st cent. AD. Despite the negative opinion of M.E.

Weinstein in the introduction to 3325, the differences between the two scripts are superficial, and I regard the identification as certain. The characters in 1806 are somewhat smaller and on slightly longer leading, and are written with a sharper pen; but the details of the script match exactly (cf., e.g., the treatment of , and the top oft). I agree, however, with the editor's opinion that 3325 is not likely from the same roll as 1806: the different leading (6.05 mm for 3325 versus 6.55 for 1806) as well as the different number of lines per column (25 versus 30-1) results in a wide difference in height of column (*14.9 cm8 versus *19.4). Punctuation systems differ: in 3325 middle dots are written at line end wherever we expect them; 1806, despite one middle dot, is generally unpunctuated. Moveable nu is written at line end in both papyri, even where the following line begins in a consonant. The papyrus itself is very similar for both fragments, with a good quality front and a much coarser back. 2.1-3 Scribe #A30 (1787 Sappho, Book 4; 2442 Pindar, Hymns, Paians, etc.,) late 2nd or early 3rd cent. AD.

Following Hunt (ad 1788) and Lobel (by implication ad 2442 and 2445), and contra Funghi and Savorelli 1992b, I do not believe that this scribe is the same as #A20. Aside from the general question of the look and feel' of the script, which is close but not exact in what is after all a common style, the ductus differs for several letter forms, especially 5 (and less seriously " 3). Moreover, the form of the coronis in 1787 and 2442 does not match that appearing in 1788 and (in partial form) in 1604. One could argue that the coronis shape is copied from the antigraph, but in that case the identity of coronis in only those papyri whose hands are most obviously the same would be an extraordinary coincidence. The two rolls (if they are such, and not fragments of a single poetic collection) seem to be written to similar widths, or at least one can say that the column-to-column width of 2442, measured at ~15.7 cm, matches that roughly estimated for 1787, at about 14.5-16 cm (based on a column width of ~~12-13 cm and intercolumn of ~~2.5-3 cm, which however appear separately). The column tilt forwards matches, at about 2°. Other formal features are indeterminable. Both are punctuated by the original scribe (high dots internal to the line are accompanied by a slight space and appear to be in the same ink as the text), but both also show signs

8 The editor ot 3325 wrongly estimates 22 cm for the column height, by which he apparently intends the roll height. M y calculation is based on a column of 25 lines at 6.05 mm leading with a letter height of 4 m m (.4 + [24 . .605] = 14.9 cm).

A Survey of Scribes with Multiple Surviving Rolls

41

of later additions to the punctuation (dots appearing above the line without accompanying space have ink of different appearance in 1787, and possibly also in 2442). Accents and breathings are liberally applied, and while most are written by the copyist, some are clearly the work of a different pen (in the case of 2442, perhaps by two different pens). 2442 is heavily annotated by at least two, and possibly three, hands (I do not share Lobel's confidence that one of these matches the copyist), a characteristic not shared by 1787. 2.1.14 Scribe #A31 (3839 Aristophanes, Thesmophoriazusae; PMich inv. 6035 Aristophanes, Equitesj late 2nd or

early 3rd cent. AD. I have examined the Michigan piece only by photograph. From the photograph, Turner's identification of the hands (reported by Cockle ad 3839) seems convincing. Formal scripts (here'biblical majuscule') demand caution, since they are more regular from hand to hand, but the exact correspondence of particulars, including not only letter shapes (such as the slightly idiosyncratic mu) but size, spacing, and the like, is to my eye persuasive.The fact that both pieces derive from excavation, 3839 from Oxyrhynchus and PMich inv. 60359 from Karanis, makes the identification unusually interesting and important. I see, however, no good reason to assume, as does the POxy editor (W. Cockle), that the scribe worked somewhere other than Oxyrhynchus or Karanis. Unfortunately, the papyri are too fragmentary to yield much by way of comparison. Of physical features aside from the script, one can compare only the lower margin — in both cases 6.0 cm, but since neither is indubitably complete, that may be coincidental. As for matters of scribal convention: in both, change of speaker is marked (as is usual) with a paragraphus, and in both the original scribe does not appear to have added dots or spaces to punctuate the text (the several dots in 3839 are squeezed above or in between letters, and look to be later additions). The accents, breathings, and corrections in the PMich piece, which are not characteristic of 3839, may also be additions; but from a photograph sure judgment is impossible, nor does the published edition (Hendricks 1969) offer an opinion. 2.1.15 Scribe #A33 (3882+PSI XI 1195 Thucydides, 1; 2466 (+3319?) Sesonchosis Romance; PSI XVII Congr. 12 Demosthenes, Philippica iv; ?3894 Thucydides, 3; ?2630 Choral lyric) early 3rd cent. AD. The

first three of these papyri are clearly by the same hand, and survive in sufficient extent to allow detailed comparison. In most respects, these papyri demonstrate a variety of striking agreements, despite the fact that the bookrolls comprised three different prose genres (history, romance, oratory). Agreement in format: 3882+PSI XI 1195 (Thucydides) and 2466 (Sesonchosis 9 Published in Hendricks 1969.

28

Scribes in Oxyrhynchus: Scribal Habits, Paradosis, and the Uniformity of the Literary Roll

romance) both measure a column width of 8.2 cm, an intercolumn of 1.8 cm, and a column-to-column width of 10.0 cm. PSI XVII Congr. 12 (Demosthenes), which I have examined only by photograph, measures (according to the editor, and confirmed by the photograph) c. 8 cm for the column width, c. 2 cm for the intercolumn, and c. 10 cm for the column-to-column width. But while widths match exactly, column heights clearly differ: - 1 8 . 5 cm for 3882+PS7XI 1195, but c. 16 cm for PSI XVII Congr.. 12 (and @>16 cm

for the partial column in 2466). As so often, the margins for these papyri are too incomplete to allow comparison, or to allow comment on the roll height. Agreement in scribal convention: The scribe has several consistent habits that are immaterial, such as the use of a wedge (>) to fill out the line, or the occasional use of an overbar to signal nu at line end. Of more interest for the purposes here is the punctuation system. In both 3882+PS/XI 1195 (Thucydides) and PSI XVII Congr. 12 (Demosthenes), the scribe uses a dot in the middle position (accompanied by space and evidently part of the original copying) to mark full stops as well as a few lighter pauses. The medial dot (as opposed to a dot in the high position) is itself unusual, but very striking is the fact that the paragraphus is not added to mark periods, as is the norm, but is reserved only for points of major division in the text (akin to our idea of a 'paragraph'): thus the use of paragraphus at 3882 ii.2, and (not noticed by the editor, but apparent in the plate) PSIXVII Congr. 12 ii.6. (2466 lacks punctuation, since by happenstance there is little or no occasion for it.) Here at least it is unlikely that the scribe is taking over the punctuation from his antigraph. Other points of scribal convention are less clear. While the trema is generally added by the scribe, the apparent inconsistency in 2466 relies on only three opportunities. Similarly, iotaadscript appears consistently added in 3882+PS/XI 1195,but there are only three examples; the adding or not of adscript is decidedly inconsistent elsewhere. The other papyri identified for this scribe have been questioned. Papyrus 2630 is probably in the same hand, but is too exiguous (a mere scrap) to add useful information one way or the other. I feel more certain that 3894 is in the same hand (the editor, M.W. Haslam, is not quite committed), but if so the only yield is an estimated column width that, at *7.85, roughly approximates that observed for the other witnesses to this hand (and, as we will see, a column width this great is fairly rare). After long consideration, I join with Funghi and Savorelli 1992a, 86-8 in judging that 3319 is probably not in the same hand as 2466, and almost certainly not from the same bookroll. The height of column measures 15.1 cm (col. i) and 14.9 cm (col. ii) for 3319, but the column in 2466, which is incomplete, measures at least 16.0 cm; we will see in §2.4 that, pace S. West ad 3319, so great a variation is unusual. Given that 3319, in addition to a slight but noticeable difference in the script (on which see Funghi and Savorelli 1992a), shows differences in convention (no use of overbar for final nu, a different punctuation system) and in column width (6.7 cm; column-to-column width of 8.2 cm), and given the uniformities noted above for this scribe, I think it best to assume a different hand. The fact of so similar a hand and so rare a text (the

A Survey of Scribes with Multiple Surviving Rolls

29

Sesonchosis romance) may, however, suggest rolls that are in some sense related, as for example rolls written by two scribes working in the same 'shop.' 2.1.16 Scribe #B1 (1174 Sophocles, Ichneutai; 1175 Sophocles, Eurypylus) late 2nd cent. AD. In their introduction to 1174 Grenfell and Hunt point out that while the greater part of 1174 and 1775 were discovered in different excavation seasons, minor fragments of 1174 were found close by 1175. I follow Grenfell and Hunt in assuming that the two plays are from sister rolls rather than from a single roll, but, given the physical exigencies, that assumption is by no means assured (see further at §3.7). That the two plays are written to match in format is in any case certain. Both are written on very good papyrus, similar in appearance, with the sheets of the manufactured roll all roughly the same size at 23—6 cm (and thus of the same (grade': see §3.1.1). For both plays the scribe adds only diaeresis, paragraphus, and forked paragraphus; the last is, however, different in form between the two plays, which implies that the exact shape of this less frequent siglum is copied from the antigraph. In both plays, the same annotator later added scholiastic comments and corrections, and apparently is also responsible for punctuation (including high, middle, and low dots), accents, breathings, apostrophe, diastole, coronis, and occasional notae personarum.

The column layout for the two plays is also identical. For both, the column height is 11.5 cm or just under (1174—11.0 [v],~11.3 [vi], 11.5 [vii],-11.3 [ix], 11.3 [xiv]; 1175: —11.5 [fr. 5]); and the margins seem to be of a piece (in 1175, fr. 8.ii, the lower margin is intact and measures 3.5 cm; in 1174, the lower margin is probably intact in columns vi and ix, measuring 3.4 and 3.5 cm). Both plays use two levels, as it were, of indentation (not rigorously deployed, however, and not necessarily meaningful): 1174 uses eisthesis of 1.2-1.3 cm at cols, iv and vii, but 1.8-2.0 at cols, iii, v, viii, x, xiii; 1175 uses eisthesis of both 1.1 and 1.7 cm in fr. 5.ii. The differing levels of indentation cause some confusion for the scribe in measuring the column-to-column width, but that 13.6 cm is the rule he intends can scarcely be doubted: the lone column-to-column width in 1175 measures 13.6; in 1174, columns iv, v, vi, ix, 2 measure within a couple of millimetres of 13.6, while columns ii and vii measure 13.6 to the point of eisthesis; only column xii (measuring 15.5 from the eisthesis and 17.1 cm overall) deviates in a basic way from the pattern.The fact that the scribe occasionally gets confused about what he should be measuring from or to (that is, from the left of the trimeter or from the left of the indented choral lines) is itself a precious detail, since it strongly implies that the scribe measures one column at a time as he goes along. 2.1.17 Scribe #B2 (26 Demosthenes, Exordia [plate 6]; 2549 Demosthenes, Epistula i; ?2548 Demosthenes, in

30

Scribes in Oxyrhynchus: Scribal Habits, Paradosis, and the Uniformity of the Literary Roll

Timocratem) 2nd cent. AD, Despite the editor's confidence, the identification of 2548 with the writer of 26 and 2549 is not certain. The two scripts, for all their likeness, vary considerably in details and idea (the writer of 26 and 2549, for instance, uses a double base line, one for ", the other for ( , $ c ', but in 2548 all these characters have the same notional base). As for 26 and 2549, the identification of the script is secure enough, but it is possible that the fragments all derive from a single roll. (In medieval codices, the Exordia is usually followed directly by the Epistulae.) The fragments of 2548 and 2549 are insufficient to allow firm conclusions, but the following is worth remark. All three pieces are written in a similarly sized script with 17-18 characters per line, resulting in a roughly equivalent width of column. Papyrus 2548 is, however, slightly more cramped horizontally, and thus has a somewhat narrower column, perhaps *4.7 cm as opposed to 5.2-5.6 cm for 26 and *5.1 for 2549. 2548 shares with 26 several characteristics: a strong slope leftward of the text at the left margin (4—5°), use of expungement dots above letters to delete characters, use of dots above the line, and no spacing to signal punctuation. (The latter two features may in both cases be later additions. The remains of 2549 are too exiguous to reveal how such details were handled.) Overall, I would say that such details, though hardly conclusive, support the case for identification of 2548 with the other two pieces. But 2548 was in any case not, probably, part of the same roll, for the leading (5.0 mm) is markedly distinct from the others. On the other hand, the similar leading of 26 (6.1-6.3 mm) and 2549 (6.45) lends some support to the hypothesis that these two may be pieces from a single roll. All three fragments are written on good to very good quality papyrus with a somewhat to noticeably coarser back; but the papyrus lacks any striking correspondence. 2.1.18 Scribe #B3 (2485 Hesiod, Catalogus mulierum; 2639+PSI XI Î191 Hesiod, Theogonyj 3rd cent. AD. That these fragments derive from two separate rolls is suggested, but not proved, by the full colophon preserved for the Theogony, and by the different size and spacing of the writing. The script of 2639 is significantly smaller, more laterally compressed, and on tighter leading than 2485. The column of text was therefore noticeably narrower, but as the intercolumn is not preserved for 2639, the column-to-column widths cannot be compared. The height of 2485 at least approached the *21.1 cm estimated for 2639, but nothing definite can be said. Mid-line punctuation is indicated by a short blank space in 2485,10 by space with accompanying dot in 2639; but as the dot is possibly by a different pen, this may reflect the same original system. Diacritics are extensively added to both texts, but by different hands;

10 The space used as internal punctuation in 2485 is neglected by the editor in fr. 2, lines 19,22,24. Only the first of these is at all doubtful.

A Survey of Scribes with Multiple Surviving Rolls

31

those in 2639 may be by the text hand, but, as usual, certainty is not possible. Both texts often write the adscript, but with erratic omissions (rather more in the remains of 2485). 2.1.19 Scribe #B4 (3436 Dinarchus, in Demosthenem; 3437 Dinarchus, in Philoclem) late 2nd or early 3rd cent.

AD. So like is the physical format - a written column of 5.0 2 19.5 cm with 35-6 lines per column and a 2.0 intercolumn - that one might naturally assign these two short speeches to one roll. In light of the Aeschylean rolls written by scribe #A3, however, the possibility of rolls in twin format remains. The papyrus itself gives perhaps slight support to the latter hypothesis, for the surface of 3437 is noticeably coarser. The identical format makes the difference in punctuation systems all the more striking. In 3436, full stops are marked by paragraphus and middle dot, all apparently by the original hand; in 3437 there is no punctuation at all. I infer then that the punctuation in 3436 is taken over from the exemplar. Of possible significance for what else was or was not part of the paradosis: diaeresis is consistently written in both texts; adscripts in both texts are sometimes written, sometimes not, even for simple datives; 3436 contains three itacistic spellings, whereas 3437, despite at least one example where it might be expected, contains none. 2.1.20 Scribe #B5 (2100+389Î+4Î09

Thucydides, 4-5, 8) middle 2nd cent. AD. Fragments from books 4 and 5

agree noticeably in number of lines per column (32—3) and leading (5.6—6.3 mm) when compared to the line count (37-9) and leading (4.75-5.1 mm) of fragments from book 8. Yet none of this translates into a markedly different physical format. All measurable columns, of which there is one in book 5 and three in book 8, are within a couple of millimetres of 5.5 cm in width. The height of column for the book 8 fragments (18.3518.65 cm) is somewhat less than those from books 4-5 (—19.7 cm), but, given compensating variation in margin size, one need not presume much difference in overall height for the rolls.The intercolumn is consistent at 1.5 cm for all books. The strong similarities noticed above in books 4 and 5 tempt one to suggest a roll division different from the books we are familiar with. Alternative divisions were certainly known in antiquity.11 Still, the uniformity may, of course, be the result merely of copying the books in close succession; the much-remarked agreement between the medieval codices and papyri of the Roman era will predispose us to assume the usual divisions in a papyrus of this date unless there is strong evidence to the contrary. iviarceumus, uje oj nucymaes dö: o o m e divide nis work into 13 books, and others make other divisions,' though, he goes on to say, the division by Asklepiades into 8 books has prevailed. Diodorus Siculus 12.37, c £ 13.42: 'Thucydides wrote in 8 books, or as some divide it, in 9.'Alternate points o f b o o k divisions are also re-marked in theThucydidean scholia (ad 4 . 1 3 5 . 2 , 2 . 7 8 . 4 , 3 . 1 1 6 . 3 , 4 . 7 8 . 1 , 4 . 1 3 5 . 2 ) : details in Hemmerdinger 1948.

32

Scribes in Oxyrhynchus: Scribal Habits, Paradosis, and the Uniformity of the Literary Roll

Lectional signs are used or not in uniform fashion among the fragments, with no discernible difference by roll. The papyrus itself is very similar among all the fragments. 2,1.21 Scribe #B6 (3376 Herodotus, 1, 2) 2nd cent. AD. The small scrap of book 1 contains somewhat more widely spaced letters and a markedly different leading between lines: in book 1, the leading measures about 7.0 mm, whereas the fragments from book 2 vary from 5.0 to 5.4 mm.The strong difference suggests that the fragments derive from two rolls. Column width, from what one can tell, was more or less constant between the two books. Little more can be added, except that the fragment of book 1 uses a high dot for punctuation in a manner consistent with the fragments from book 2. The assignment of the fragment from book 1 to the same hand as the others, though very probable in my view, is not quite certain due to the common style of script and different location of the find.12 2.2 Scribes with Multiple Surviving Rolls: Summary and Evaluation Let me first emphasize that such a small amount of evidence inevitably leads to some distortion and, moreover, that the method of selection skews the results in a specific way. A scribe tends to be recognizable precisely because his script is idiosyncratic.Thus, this group of scribes contains many somewhat unusual scripts, and is underrepresented, for example, in the so-called Severe Style common in the second and third centuries. The preponderance of less usual scripts is perhaps related to another striking feature of this group of papyri, namely, the presence of'scholarly' annotations in the text. The fragments of over half of the group (scribes #A3, #A5, #A6, #A7, #A17, #A19, #A20, #A24, #A28, #A30, #B1) contain either sigla or scholiastic comments in the margins; several of the remainder contain variant readings. On the other hand, common school works are rare: the group contains only one Homeric papyrus, for example. The sample appears to be heavy in texts custom-made for serious readers.13 Though often assumed, however, it does not follow that 'scholarly' texts of this sort were privately produced (on which question, see further at §3.9). In none of the texts is it clear that the annotator has the same hand as the

12 Brunner 1987 advances the hypothesis that the fragments from book 2 derive from two identical rolls written by the same scribe. His view is untenable, however, since it is based on an erroneous join in one of the fragments: see Johnson 1992b. 13 Turner 1956,144 asserted that instances 'where more than one work has been transcribed by a single scribe in a workaday hand' can be assumed as scholars' texts.Yet it is hard to see what exacdy he intends by 'workaday/ since his examples are for the most part unusually neat, often decorated, and sometimes (as with scribes # A 1 , #A2) rather formal scripts. Turner backs away from this point somewhat in Turner 1980,92-3, but he maintains the position that multiple copies by a single scribe imply a scholar's text. The logic of his assertion escapes me. For detailed studies of 'scholars texts' see McNamee 1981a, forthcoming, and Johnson forthcoming.

Scribes w i t h Multiple Surviving; Rolls: S u m m a r y a n d Evaluation

33

copyist of the text (though that may be true of #A6); in three cases the annotator is the same for more than one roll (#A19, #A20, #B1); but the texts of scribes #A7 and #A17 (and cf. #A30) have different, in one case multiple, annotators. Since the 'scholarly' user or users are generally different from the copyist, one might venture the suggestion that the 'scholar,' presumably the owner, in some cases repeatedly used the same copyist; and that in some cases different 'scholars' are involved, though whether because of a shared library or because there were different owners is not clear. There is nothing, however, to infer about the copyist himself. All of these texts in any case appear to be the products of competent and experienced copyists. With regard to formats, it is important to note that the identity of a scribe is sometimes confirmed or rejected on the basis of the layout.Thus, 1806 Theocritus and 3325 Moschus (scribe #A28) were thought different scribes by the editor, wrongly in my view, partly on the basis of a difference in column height (see §2.1.12). Many of the formats are nonetheless strikingly homogeneous. Wherever it is possible to compare the column width of different prose texts, the width agrees either exactly (scribes #A5, #A7, #A33) or very nearly (scribes #A1, #A24).The same is true of the lone verse text where the column-to-column measurement can be compared (scribe #A30). In one remarkable example (scribe #A33), it is possible to compare column, intercolumn, and column-to-column widths across three prose texts written in three different genres, all of which have identical measurements. Under scribe #A5 there is also a case of disagreement, but it is the exception that proves the rule: for there the two classical texts agree exactly in column width, while the commentary (a 'subliterary' text) is written to a somewhat wider format. A given scribe's copies of different works of the same author similarly agree in column width (scribes #A3, #B2, #B4, #B5; #B1 for a verse example), and such rolls usually agree in height of column as well (scribes #A3, #B1, #B4; and #B5 approximately). But rolls from different authors, in all cases where one can take a measure, show marked disagreement in column height (scribes #A5, #A24, #A28, #A33); in all these cases, the discrepancy is wide enough to preclude (scribe #A5) or argue against (scribes #A24, #A28, #A33) an equivalent roll height with variously sized margins.14 From the agreement in column widths I draw the following inference: in a well-executed literary roll, column widths seem to be measured before the writing of a column. (Moreover, the scribe seems to have measured the columns one by one as he went along: see §2.1.16 and 3.1.3.) The combination of two facts suggests that measurement is at work here and not estimation by eye: (1) the size and spacing of the writing can vary considerably from roll to roll even while the column width remains constant; (2) the agreement in width is in most cases exceedingly exact. Nothing too sophisticated is required by way of a

14 1093 and 1182 (scribe #137, both works ot Demosthenes) offer, according to the editor of 1182, another example of rolls written to the same width but of different column and roll height.

34

Scribes in Oxyrhynchus: Scribal Habits, Paradosis, and the Uniformity of the Literary Roll

tool. Before writing the next column, the scribe could, for instance, use a notched stick to position the top left of the new column at a fixed distance from the top left of the last column, and a second notch could fix the column's right edge; there would of course need to be a separate set of notches to fix the column-to-column width of verse texts. Ruling marks on the papyrus itself seem at any rate uncommonly employed; the evidence for ruling dots exists but is slim (details at §3.1.2), and only one example appears among the fragments surveyed in the scribal study. The reader will note that this result is not what we expect. Though never, to my knowledge, supported in any detail, a common rule of thumb among papyrologists holds that especially narrow columns are characteristic of oratory, wide columns of commentaries, with history and philosophy occupying the middle ground.15 Commentaries, as indicated above, can be reasonably viewed as a different level of formality in book production, and may well be written to different standards and by different methods; scribe #A5 offers an instance of this .Yet the evidence presented here clashes directly with the notion that the column width of classical texts varies by genre. Scribe #A1 writes Isocrates and Thucydides to the same width; scribe #A7 Demosthenes and Herodotus; scribe #A33 Thucydides, romance, and Demosthenes. A scribe could, in theory, use one measure for oratory and another for philosophy and history even as he uses one measure to fix column widths for prose, and another to fix the width of a verse text. But nothing in the evidence here suggests it. I will return to the relationship between format and genre again in the next chapter (§3.8). Before leaving the subject of column width, let us look briefly at an example outside of the survey, the extraordinary case of 881. On the front (along the fibres) is written Plato's Entitydemus in a tiny, neat, semi-formal script; on the back, in a small, clumsy, informal script, Plato's Lysis. The editor assumes that the script on the back is about a half-century later than that on the front, but the scripts of themselves do not compel this opinion. Both sides are written the same way up in the manner of an opistograph; that is, the Lysis begins at the edge that contains the end of the Euthydemus (thus one can speak confidently of front and back).16 What is extraordinary is that the column width for the front, at 5.0—5.2 cm, measures to exactly the same size as the column width of the back. (The intercolumn is known for only one of the sides.) Coincidence is of course possible. Still, as the columns do not align between front and back, a tool of measurement seems once again the natural inference. That the measurement agrees may suggest a standard tool, or one standard to a particular group (such as a master scribe and his apprentices); but the most economical explanation will be that the scribe of the Lysis shared or inherited the tools (as well as the papyrus) from the scribe of the Euthydemus.

15 Turner and Parsons 1987,7, with characteristic caution, state the common opinion. 16 See 881 in Appendix 2A.

Scribes with Multiple Surviving; Rolls: Summary and Evaluation

35

As regards column height, there is little evidence for any practice that would result in a general uniformity among rolls written by a given scribe. As mentioned, there is an apparent effort to write works of a given author on papyrus of similar height (or to cut it to size) so as to create a matched set; the height of written columns at any rate concurs in such texts, and in one case (#A3) the measured roll height is very close. Yet roll and column height otherwise vary considerably, and it seems a fair inference that heights correspond to the papyrus stock available. In this context, one may recall the general agreement noticed in the quality of papyrus used by a given scribe. Front and back usually conform to the same standard, and the papyrus is sometimes strikingly similar in appearance (scribes #A3, #A6, #A7, #A17, #A19, #B1). In only two cases (scribe #A3, but only for the Babrius fragment, and #B4) was there a noticeable difference in the quality of the papyrus used. The natural supposition is that, for a given clientele, a scribe tended to buy papyrus of a given grade; but the corollary must then be that the standards governing the surface quality did not apply to roll height. This conclusion accords with the fact (and it is a fact that has disturbed commentators) that the Elder Pliny, in his detailed discussion of papyrus grades, says nothing of roll height even while enumerating measurements for sheet widths in the various types (Nat. Hist. 13.78). I will return to this point in the next chapter when we turn to consider the anatomy of the manufactured roll in more detail (§3.1.1). Punctuation in the papyri is complicated by the problem that it is so often impossible to know what hand is responsible, but there is nonetheless considerable evidence that a given scribe used different punctuation systems for different texts. Particularly striking is scribe #B4, who wrote two speeches of Dinarchus in the same column format, possibly even in the same roll, but with different systems ofpunctuation. A lone example arguing in the opposite direction is scribe #A33, where the scribe seems to substitute his own, somewhat idiosyncratic, system for whatever he found in his respective models; but even here the specific placements for the punctuation may well be inherited. I infer that punctuation, in some sense, was usually copied along with the text. Given the dates in the sample, all of which fall in the second or early third century, the data seem for the most part to validate Turners assertion that 'during the Roman period in Egypt (especially in ii AD) the view seems to have taken root that if punctuation was present in the exemplar it was the scribe s duty to copy it.'17 The use ofpunctuation is, however, a more complicated situation than that. We have seen repeated indications throughout the survey that, whatever the scribal practice, readers added their own points of distinction routinely as they made use of the book. In fact, in many of these manuscripts a majority of the punctuation dots are plausibly attributed to a later reader or readers. An interesting question to ask is then whether, once a reader's punc17 Turner and Parsons 1987, 10.Turner 1980, 92 puts forward, however, the exact opposite opinion: 'Punctuation, even in the best texts, tends to be regarded as not forming part of the paradosis; it is what the scribe inserts.'

36

Scribes i n O x y r h y n c h u s : Scribal H a b i t s , Paradosis, a n d t h e U n i f o r m i t y o f t h e Literary R o l l

tuation had been added, a subsequent copyist felt the duty to copy these marks as well. Since there is no sign of gradual elaboration ofpunctuation over time, but rather the continuing sense of a bare-bones punctuation system to which readers added marks as necessary, I infer that the scribes generally ignored readers* marks when copying. In practice, this most likely means that the scribe copied the main periodic points of distinction (i.e., those marked by paragraph! in the papyri, including the rare cases where the paragraphi are added in correction by a reader), but felt free to attend to or ignore lesser divisions of the syntax as seemed fit or expeditious.18 The survey yields only the sparsest evidence on other aids to lection. Still, a few tidbits may be worth mentioning, as they lend further, if inconclusive, support to the view that some lectional signs were often considered part of the paradosis. Thus, the texts written by scribe #A7 show differences in the use of elision marks and in the placement of diaeresis (and in the deployment of accents in general), as though these features came from the exemplar; scribe #A24 offers, similarly, an interesting example of difference in the addition of ra^-adscript. By this I do not mean to deny that later readers often added elision marks, breathings, accents, and adscripts, just as they added punctuation; accents and breathings in particular, if abundant, are normally the addition of a later hand or hands. The question before us, however, is whether, in the usual case, a lectional sign apparently by the original hand is likely to be a mark added at the scribe s own initiative, or a mark copied from the exemplar. That is, are we studying scribal habits or are we tracing the progress of the paradosis? From the (admittedly thin) evidence here, it appears that, in the Roman period at least, the tendency was to copy from the exemplar at least some lectional marks. Since, as is the case with punctuation, there is no sense of a gradual elaboration or accumulation of such marks, it is likely that here too lectional aids were copied only under certain circumstances, such as when they appeared part of the original copy (and not a readers addition), or when the marks seemed particularly useful. Once again, we see here surprisingly broad discretion residing in the hands of the copyist, even while recognizing that, in general, this seems to have been a discretion of elimination. In the case of both punctuation and lectional aids, it seems that the scribe copied from his model the essentials, but remained attentive to the need to reproduce a clean, unencumbered text. Before leaving the survey, a final note. The small number of identified scribes among the literary texts from Oxyrhynchus is worth remark. True, the common scripts are far less likely to be securely identified (compare for instance disagreements over the identity of scribe #A23, a relatively distinct script), and the totals are no doubt lower than they would 18 As usual, one cannot be dogmatic.The Hellenica Oxyrhynchta (842, not part of our survey) shows that even in the case o f the demarcation of the main period, scribal choice can c o m e into play. A second hand writes col. % and the top half o f col. vi o f t h at papyrus, and seems to follow a different set o f principles for the addition o f the paragraphus (from the introduction to 842: / paragraphus is found in vi. 10 marking a transition which the first hand would have ignored*).

Scribes with Multiple Surviving; Rolls: Summary and Evaluation

37

otherwise be. Still, less than fifty identifications, comprising only a bit more than 100 of the 1500 published Oxyrhynchus literary papyri (most of which belong to a two-century span), are still fewer than one might expect. Turner s assertion that 'a limited number of scribes has been engaged in writing the texts of Greek literature' at Oxyrhynchus,19 barring future evidence to the contrary, must be ruled out of court. 2.2.1 Excursus: Format changes in mid-roll Against the conclusion that column width was determined by a scribal tool, and was thus uniform for a given scribe, may be placed a few examples where a substantial shift in format is discernible within the roll. The first eight columns of Iliad 5 survive intact in 223+PKoelnV 210 (plate 18), and while the last seven are approximately to one size from column to column, the first column is much narrower: roughly 16 cm20 against about 21 cm for the rest. This text, written on the back of a document in a good-looking, but bold and hardy severe-style script, is neither formal nor terribly neat, and in general the scribe is none too painstaking in his attention to matters of format. Thus, the column-to-column measurement at the top rarely matches that at the bottom (due to a slope at the left margin that is not parallel from column to column), and the height of the written column shifts considerably over the extent of the columns preserved (see further under §2.4). In general the column widths do match, though with minor variation; column one, by contrast, is significantly more narrow. The circumstance is easily explained by the surmise that the column-to-column width proved, by column 2, too narrow for the longest hexameters, and that the scribe thus immediately adjusted the target width. If so, however, he is not then working to a preset measurement for all hexameter texts in the way that the earlier examples seemed to imply. A second example of an initial column to a different size may be found in 2750 if we agree with Turner that the hand matches that of 2101.21 In 2750 we find preserved the first column of Xenophon's Cywpaedia, and in 2101 several columns from later in the first book (4.15ff., plate 8). But here, if this is in fact one roll, the initial column is wider: roughly *7.1 cm for the column in 2750 as against about 5.6 in the four intact columns of 2101, with also a wider intercolumn (2.65 cm versus about 2.0).The hands have very much the same feel; but the script is formal ('Biblical majuscule'), with several minor differences between the fragments. These differences may be the result of a tiring hand and duller pen, or they may indicate two different scribes writing this script in the canonical fashion. On

19 Turner 1956,143. 20 At some point in the life of 223, the initial column was torn vertically, and the first part of the column was replaced by new papyrus, with the first few letters of each line rewritten m a crude hand. This damage complicates any statement about the exact measurement of the original column, but that the first column was substantially narrower than the rest is not in doubt. 21 See the introduction to 2750, with references there cited.

38

Scribes in Oxyrhynchus: Scribal Habits, Paradosis, and the Uniformity of the Literary Roll

the other hand, the differences in format are profound, for not only does the column width differ, but the scribe of 2750 writes a larger script than 2101 (3.5 + mm versus 3.0) on considerably wider leading (5.2 mm versus 4.45). Either column 1 is written to a substantially different aspect, or the pieces belong to two rolls; overall, I find the evidence too ambiguous for secure judgment. More striking will be the mid-roll shift in format that appears in PHarr 12+3666 (Plato, Ale. 1). I have seen the PHarr fragment only in photograph, but there can be little doubt that the fragments are written by the same hand; the identification is fairly guaranteed not only by striking agreement in particulars and the feel of the script, but by the unusual text (Alcibiades 1, otherwise unexampled among the papyri).The column widths, however, differ substantially between the two papyri. The two columns of PHarr 12, perhaps columns 13 and 14 of the roll, have fewer than 14 letters in each line, which calculates to a width of about *5.35 cm. The fragments of 3666, a dozen or so columns later in the roll, contain on average about 20 letters per line, and the column width can be measured (fr. 3) at 7.3 cm.The intercolumn also differs, at roughly 2.0 cm in PHarr and 1.6 in 3666; the column-to-column widths thus measure *7.35 as opposed to 8.9 cm.The POxy editor (H.M. Cockle) attributes the shift from 14 to 20 letters per line to gradual compression by the scribe: A + doubt the scribe feared he would run out of space and became less generous in spacing his letters.7 But this position is untenable: not only do the physical measurements of column width differ, but, if the scribe's concern was to fit more into his space, why does the leading shift from 5.05 mm (PHarr) to 6.35 (POxy; all fragments) and the lines per column from 37-8 to 34?22 Moreover, the shift is not gradual: 3666 fr. 1 follows only 11-15 columns after the PHarr fragment, yet already a dramatic shift in letters per line is apparent (14 to 18.5); 3666 fr. 3, however, follows at a considerable distance from 3666 fr. 1 (40-55 columns), yet shows only a small change (from 18.5 to 20.5 letters per line).The latter variation is the sort found commonly enough between columns, and need not imply any difference in physical width (see §2.4.1). The three fragments of 3666 show then substantial agreement among themselves but disagreement with the PHarr fragment in column width, intercolumn, and leading between lines, and perhaps also in height of column (this last difference is not certain, since both are estimated and, at *21.2 and *18.4-9, less considerable).The script is handsomely executed, the text is good; nothing suggests an inferior or casual production. It is hard to know what to make of this example. One could of course suppose that the two papyri belong to different rolls produced by the same scribe.23 But even should this be so, the strong variation between 22 Such is the best reconstruction. The number of lines per column, and thus the height of the roll, is however somewhat problematic. See comments under 3666 in Appendix 2A. 23 Powell, in his introduction to PHarr 12, notes that 'punctuation is by a later hand in brownish ink.' If he intends to include paragraphes and dicolon, the fragments exhibit yet another difference, for paragraphus and dicolon are written in black ink by the original hand in the fragments of 3666. (Unfortunately, no high dots survive in

How Did the Scribe Copy the Text?

39

rolls remains contrary to the previous evidence. Here, clearly, is an example of a scribe writing in two different formats, be it one roll or two.This example will at the very least stand as a strong corrective to any thought that scribes were altogether uniform in practice. Finally, let us examine two examples that are both interesting in their own right and that shed perhaps a little light on this set of problems. In 2092 (Pindar, Olympian 2) a change ofscribe occurs in the lacuna between line 46 and line 54.The second scribe writes to a different leading (5.15 to 5.65 as against 4.75), but not enough survives to allow a comparison of physical height or width of column. This example serves, however, to remind us that the writing of a text proceeds over considerable time and might easily be interrupted, with concomitant changes when the work was resumed. In this case, the scribe changed; in another case, though, the change might well be one of instruments, which, under the current hypothesis, would imply a change in format. A confusion in measurement may also account for a similar circumstance that arises in the case of a nonOxyrhynchite papyrus, the British Museum de pace roll (MP 1272, PLondLit 131). In this casually written papyrus, columns are not always painstakingly regular: column 39, in particular, is wider than any of the rest. Yet with fair consistency columns 1 to 28 are clearly meant to be written to a narrower width (of slightly under 6 cm), and the later columns to a wider width (7 cm). Interestingly, the column-to-column width for the earlier columns is also 7 cm, and fairly exact (at least at the top of the column). It is unclear whether one scribe is at work (so Bell, Mandilaras, and I am inclined to agree), or two scribes are writing in a similar script (so Kenyon, Milne). Either way, however, the shift to a wider column, unless simply owing to a change of instrument, may well be the result of confusion in the measure, with the scribe mistaking the 7 cm mark, earlier used to define the left of the next column, as the mark intended to define the right edge of the current column. 2.3 How Did the Scribe Copy the Text? Implicit examples for and against line-by-line copying In trying to think through how scribes went about copying literary texts, scholars often too often — fall into debating the hypothesis that dictation was a common component in professional copying.24 The debate has centred on supposedly 'aural' or supposedly Visual' scribal errors. Yet both of these constitute a difficult proof, since the circumstances giving rise to one or another error may vary. 'Aural' errors, for example, may be influenced by

3666.) In my view, this would tip the scale towards the conclusion that the fragments originate from separate rolls. Attempts to investigate the point have, however, been frustrated by the inability of the library staff at Birmingham to locate the PHarr fragment. 24 The classic statement of the dictation hypothesis is Skeat 1956, much debated ever since; further discussion and bibliography is found in Pettimengm-Flusin 1984.

40

Scribes in Oxyrhynchus: Scribal Habits, Paradosis, and the Uniformity of the Literary Roll

subvocal murmuring of the scribe; a supposedly 'visual' error like haplography25 could result from clipping the text through inattention, including aural inattention, rather than from literal parablepsy. A collection of 'aural* and Visual' errors in the Oxyrhynchus samples seems therefore at best difficult, at worst pointless, and I do not propose to take that path here. Rather, I wish to focus attention on a different aspect of scribal copying (and a critical question for the study in chapter 3), namely, whether in producing a literary text, the scribe copied line by line from his model. E.G.Turner, in his 1956 article 'Scribes and Scholars of Oxyrhynchus,' argued against the dictation hypothesis by adducing 'the way in which scribes will write smaller at the end of a line or alternatively will space out their letters widely in order to produce a certain line length.This seems more natural when explained as due to the scribe following the lay-out of his exemplar by eye than to his writing down a dictated oral section that must often have required a break in the middle of a word.'26 Clearly, then, Turner sees the scribe copying his exemplar, line by line, to the same number of letters per line. (The physical width of column in the copy will naturally differ, however, inasmuch as the script of the copy is horizontally more or less compact than the original.) For evidence,Turner presents in a footnote a transcription of two lines from an unpublished historical text that shows the final letter squeezed above the first line, and the last three letters of the next line widely spaced. I have not seen the example, but anyone who has studied the literary papyri will be familiar with scribes' constant efforts to adjust the horizontal spacing of a prose text to regularize the right margin. Adjustments of this kind can be quite clumsy on occasion, and though sometimes a cause is evident (accommodating a lengthy syllable, correcting a mistake in copying, skipping over an irregularity on the papyrus surface), often it is not, and the slip must be put down to awkwardness - unless, with Turner, we suppose these slips to be evidence of the copying procedure. Do irregularities in horizontal spacing imply line-by-line copying from the model? The question is not, in my view, strictly answerable. For any given example of irregular spacing, one can imagine some circumstance, including inattention or whim, that might govern the irregularity. I at any rate have not found examples that unequivocally suggest line-by-line copying on the basis of the horizontal spacing alone. Nor must one suppose line-by-line copying an inevitable procedure, despite obvious benefits. Potential difficulties arise as well: how, for instance, does the scribe keep an even right margin when copying in a 'mixed' script with a large differential between wide and narrow letters from an exemplar written in a regular, round script (where the horizontal spacing is more uniform)? And 25 So argued as early as Schubart 1921,83-4.There are errors that seem indisputably visual: e.g., at MP 1433 (PRyl 1.60, Polybius, 2nd~3rd cent. AD) the scribe writes 0121$%03. for 0101$%0' (line 20); at MP 1148-2 (PBerol 21224, Odyssey 22,2nd cent. BC) the scribe writes otaot[ot for ot 4'$'$' (line 250); at MP 852 (PVindob G26753, Iliad 10, 1st cent. BC) $]540 &(6 for $540 1(6 (line 25).The last example will, however, show how difficult such judgments arc, for the same scribe in just the previous line makes what gives every appearance of aural (mixed with visual?) error, writing $%.$* for 01.$* (line 24). 26 Turner 1956,145.

How Did the Scribe Copy the Text?

41

how do corrections suggested by collation, whether expansions or contractions, become incorporated into the text without throwing off the line divisions? On the other hand, scribes were very clever in such matters, and one should hesitate to underestimate their craftsman abilities. It would be a mistake to insist on too rigid a system, without allowing the scribe occasional variation in the line divisions as he makes adjustments. Still, if irregularities in horizontal spacing allow no firm conclusion, how should we proceed? I see two avenues of approach. First, and certainly the more profitable, will be a look at certain types of scribal error. If the copy is made line by line from the model, a mechanical error should often leave its mark. If letters are dropped, as by haplography, we expect a shorter line (or perhaps two or three shorter lines until the adjustment is made). If letters are added, as by dittography, an unusually long line (or lines) should result. If an entire line drops out, the number of letters should approximate the line length for that column. And so forth. In §2.3.1 and §2.3.2 I list examples appearing to demonstrate that the line length of the copy either does or does not match that of the exemplar. The second approach, much more limited in scope, will be to look at papyri of prose works with exactly the same text, to see whether among the Oxyrhynchus papyri there are closely related witnesses with line divisions that are identical (§2.3.3). 2.3.1 Copying the Text: Examples of scribal error that imply an exemplar of same or similar line length 16+696, 16 col. iii, line 3 (Thucydides, 4.39.1).The scribes eye skips from $" oqc "-$4& to a second $" 6- & "-04# later in the sentence, omitting several words. The corrector writes (" 4 above the line and adds the missing words in the upper margin. There are 47 letters omitted, very probably two lines at the same line length as here. (The column averages 21.75 letters per line, but at the top of the column 23—5 letters per line are usual.) Yet one cannot be certain: 3 lines of 15—16 letters may have been skipped, for instance; or the scribe's eye may have jumped laterally as well as down the column. 454+PSI II 119 (Plato, Gorg.). Additional fragments of this roll were published in R. Pintaudi 1977.The relevant passage here is his col. ii, fr. c line 6 (Gorg. 472b): 6

[27 ]( 0 [(]% 40 [8$59,]

Owing to the recurrence of 8$59,, a goodly portion of the sentence is omitted following this line: - :06';90$5! $97 otxtot 7 (997 !5110%0'( -"6&"( (% >+3;=. Line-by-line copying is suggested by the inference that in the exemplar 8$59, twice came at the line end. On the other hand, the three lines supposedly omitted are slightly short (46 letters, thus 15.3 letters per line against an average of 17 in this column and almost 18 overall). Once again, we cannot exclude the possibility of two lines at 23 letters in the model. Though more suggestive than conclusive, the slip at 454 col. i line 9 (Gorg. 507c) will, however, help the case for an exemplar with matching lines.

42

Scribes in Oxyrhynchus: Scribal Habits, Paradosis, and the Uniformity of the Literary Roll

wc 9

[(1(2"% $3 &0 ;] ( & ;(9"% [:6 6&1$[&]0 :$&06[$]% 7 π

09003 [%]$-

2.3.2 Copying the Text: Examples of scribal error that imply an exemplar of different line length 227, col. iv line 14 (Xenophon, Oec. 8.23). The scribe omits four letters by haplography, writing [;('] &$5& $54)% for ;(' &$5&$5 (5 $54)%.The resulting line is not noticeably short. The full text, at 16 letters per line, is unlikely, but not however impossible, at this column width. (The column averages under 13 letters per line; 15 letters is the maximum in col. iv, but one of the other columns preserves an odd line with as many as 16.) 231, line 9 (Demosthenes, de Cor: 229, plate l).The papyrus reads &$['(5-] |&7:: 5:(6.$5!7'& 5:$97B0=[#:] against &$'(5&7! $5!7! &7! 5:(6.. 5:$97B. ol the medieval tradition. If the words '()* #* have dropped owing to homoeoteleuton, they have left no mark by way of shorter lines. On the other hand, the words are not necessary, and the papyrus text may well represent a variant (preferred in fact by some editors). 700, line 4 (Demosthenes, de Con 17).The scribe writes :(6"%&( for 5:(6.$%&(, a mere slip.

44

Scribes in Oxyrhynchus: Scribal Habits, Paradosis, and the Uniformity of the Literary Roll

4

[%*+c 6+"] %(*B"6( D%(*2+ ["6( ,(&-]

There is no sign of any adjustment of lines to accommodate the error. 882, line 8 (Demosthenes, inAristog. i 47).The similarity of 03 and $3 causes the scribe to skip over ' $3, which he subsequently inserts above the line. (Since $3 is in lacuna, we cannot be sure that $3 was written, especially given its omission in some manuscripts, but the editor's supposition seems at least very likely.)

8

•4 [05*]

[$*])+" (%("6E" "-$1-"(& !" +[&'(]

The line shows no sign of being shorter than its neighbours. Though the omission is brief, the uncorrected line contains 27 letters, near the top of the range for this column. (The minimum number of letters per line is 24, the maximum 28, with an average of slightly more than 26.) 1016, line 40 (Plato, Phdr. 227d). Above the line the text scribe has added several words, perhaps omitted by homoearchon (o-). \#$%! 7 =% 7] 1(6 (% &!'()-

40

$% 9$1$' ;(' $)4)$

[+& ,(& '- 4/$;$&]F7 $& $" +36(,: (codd. $F$" +# ;B)+&, G)4)' +D" +D64?)

The words, though Platonic in style, are not strictly necessary. However, since in several preserved columns there are no signs of collation, and since the insertion brings the text close to the traditional one, a mechanical error is the natural assumption. If so, 15 letters have been omitted, without disruption to line length, in a text of 22 letters per line in this column, and 20 letters per line overall. Some support for a copy made from a differently formatted exemplar may be also found in the mysterious addition of 1$* -" in line 179. The word, which makes no sense, is expunged from the line, which is no longer than its neighbours. (All line lengths are deduced from letter counts; I have not seen this papyrus.) 1 0 1 7 , col. iii line 16 and col. iv line 1 (Plato, Phdr. 239a, plate 7). Dittography of 06= is occasioned by the start of a new column. At the end of col. iii $*4 is written, and subsequently cancelled, while at the beginning of col. iv, the full word, $*4 $"4&, is written. iii, 16

[']&(["+]&(" $*(06-"-$*» (column division)

iv, 1

[$*4] $"4& ("(),- )&)"+-

How Did the Scribe Copy the Text?

45

Both lines are written to the line length usual in this papyrus (18-19 letters); without 06=, the final line of col. iii would be short (15 letters in a column ranging from 16 to 22). Now one might suppose that $*4-1 $"4& was so divided in the original, and that the copyist cancelled 06= and moved it to the next line to avoid splitting a word between columns. If this were so, we should expect, on the hypothesis of line-by-line copying, the line at iv.l to be somewhat long; but that is not the case. 1377, line 5 (Demosthenes, de Cor. 167). Following >+3;$30(01(&, the preposition %$*& has fallen out of the text (the scribe's eye skips from & before % in 8$590';&(!2(' :06' to & before 6 in %$*& 6+D6+"). 5

&=' 8$5905!(!2(' &$+&=%

Line lengths for this and the lines following are no shorter than usual. 2095, col. i line 10 (Herodotus, 1.9). %(*$06(& is written in the wrong place, then cancelled. 10

14

[6( ffjapecTai (5&';( :[(60!&(' ;(']

Though the lines are only partly preserved, there is no suggestion of an adjustment to make up for this 8-letter intrusion. 2 0 9 7 , col. ii line 4 (Herodotus, 1.65). If we assume that >(0&;$3+"6+0 is omitted after H$+"6+0 by homoeoteleuton, then the 12 letters are not enough to form an entire line (which here average 1 6 - 1 7 ) , and we should expect, but do not find, some shortening of lines. 26

0:' [1](6 ;$+["]&$[! ;('] 7-

But the word is not strictly necessary and the papyrus may represent a variant text. 2101, col. iv, line 19 (Xenophon, Cyr. 1.4.19, plate 8). A different kind of example arises here. At line 19, :$9) '$' is interpolated from several lines above (line 16), due to -%&0! preceding and 0%&$' following in both cases. (In the transcription, I omit several later corrections.) 16

jrcoc 760 $5%&0! : [+-]

;$ &+& $"6+& $/- * ,(,$&"+& $/- +& $;(319

;(' 0;0'%

"+"6$0* %+;> F+& $"&$' - %7 &$% Si 0#7

46

Scribes in Oxyrhynchus: Scribal Habits, Paradosis, and the Uniformity of the Literary Roll

Given the narrow column, is it plausible that a scribe would have made this error if he were copying line by line from an exemplar with these line divisions? That is, would a scribe copying a line beginning %$%&0! and ending 0%-(&$') be likely to pick up -"6$0 from near the end of a line above, where 0%&$' falls in the next line? If he was copying line by line, why did he continue to copy :$9) '$' without immediately realizing his error, even though in the putative exemplar the line divides, and the copied line should therefore divide, after :$-? Far more likely is that the exemplar was written with different lines. Other slips by this scribe support the same conclusion. A t col. iv line 35, 0%7! is inadvertently omitted without resulting in a short line. At col. iii line 34, &$&0 is apparently written twice (if the reconstruction is correct) without swelling the number of letters per line. (Both of these instances were later corrected.) 2102, col. ii line 22f. (Plato, Phdr. 243a, plate 9). Instead of the received text, ;B)+0 +36+c $+4' eßac, the scribe writes (and a second hand mistakenly corrects): 22

; 0![&] 0&5 $! ;+)++

23

$54 08(c 0% %75!'%

TOC

Though $5&$! is not entirely necessary for the sense, the omission is more likely the result of a mechanical error, owing to the repetition of-oc $5-, than a variant. If so, the lines show no sign of adjustment to length. 3 2 3 3 , fr. A line 7f. (Isocrates, Antid. 74). The received text, (99' 49$'* 0'40!'% :6$0'9" 7%, is too long for the lacuna, and seems to have suffered some omission. The obvious solution is haplography as follows, with the eye skipping from 0'(40!'%) to 0'(9$ 7%). 7

[ ';6$'!]

060*'% (99[ $9$'!]

[0'9$ 7%] .67!2(' %*+[0 5 (!]

There is no sign of any adjustment to the line length. fr. C line 51. Haplography also seems to explain the omission of 10,0

(in 0.1-cm interwls)

that literary prose texts are more uniformly written in narrow columns than are documents, letters, or 'sub-literary' texts like commentaries. Still, the strict definition of the boundaries demonstrated in the chart above is impressive, even startling. At a glance we can see, for instance, that the editor of 3881 (Thucydides), who writes of a 'fairly narrow' column of 6.5 cm, relies on a mistaken impression; or that the editor of 4027 (Aeschines), who writes that the 'column width at 8 cm is wider than is often found for oratorical texts,' misses the critical point.The chart makes clear a normative range of 4.3 to 7.5 cm for the columns of a literary prose text, with particular denseness in the range from 4.7-6.9 cm.

102

Formal Characteristics of the Bookroll

Aside from this normative group (fully 90% of the sample), there is a small group of texts with widths in the range 8-9 cm; this group contains however only 14 examples (8%). Finally, there is a tiny group (4 examples, 2%) with exceptionally wide columns in excess of 10 cm; and a lone example of exceptional narrowness under 4 cm. Can we analyse the groupings further? A first question will be whether column widths differentiate themselves by grade of book production. Is there evidence that a bookroll de luxe has columns that are narrower or wider? Or does a substandard production have column dimensions that are distinguishable from other bookrolls? At once we face a difficult question, for it is by no means obvious how best to judge which examples are more or less de luxe. The dangers of circularity of argument are profound. Use of criteria such as size of margin or column height - often adduced as evidence for an expensive or substandard bookroll - would beg the very questions we are trying to answer. (As we shall see, assumptions in such matters are often mistaken.) Though subjective, the clearest general indicator I can discern is the style of script, which at least accords with a known fact: that scribes (the major expense of an ancient book) were paid by the quality of writing.24 I have therefore divided the sample set into three classes of script: (1) formal, semi-formal, or pretentious, (2) informal and unexceptional (but for the most part probably professional), (3) substandard or cursive. Full details are laid out under 'style' in table 3.1. Before the reader reviews these divisions, it is important to note that I do not employ 'formal' in the strict palaeographic sense used by Turner.25 We are concerned here not with the definition of scripts per se but with the type of book that the scribe thinks he is writing. Thus, a truly formal majuscule script will be classed together with a script that, if less strictly formal, nonetheless has clear pretensions to elegance. Decoration will be far more important than it was in Turners classification.26 On the other hand, a script that Turner would define as 'formal mixed' will fall into the second class if it is of an everyday, non-calligraphic variety.27 Now this sort of classification is admittedly rough, and I should be surprised if palaeographers agreed with every assignment. Still, the great majority of these functional assignments are clear enough.281 do not think that disagreements will be so substantial as to vitiate the conclusions, which are based upon quite general tendencies. 24 Edidutn Diocletiani de pretiis rerum vetuilium, col. vii 39—41; cf.Turner and Parsons 1987,1-4. 25 Turner and Parsons 1987,20-2. 26 GLH #4c (=Roberts 1955), where a student (perhaps an apprentice scribe) first writes sample lines in a plain script, and then a line in a more formal script with serifs, demonstrates that addition of decoration could be a matter of scribal choice. 27 Turner's primary examples of the 'formal mixed' style, his numbers 14,42,46, would all fall into my second class. See Turner and Parsons 1987,22. 28 We cannot avoid the trap of subjectivity ofjudgment, but the uncertainty of assignation can at least be quantified. In table 3.1,1 have marked as dubious all the examples where I am unsure, or where, in my estimation, others might dispute the designation. These number 46 in a sample of 317; thus, more than 85% of the assignations seem to me unlikely to be questioned. (Results in the comparison set are similar: 18 of 96 seem possibly questionable; thus, 82% of the assignations seem straightforward.)

Dimensions of the C o l u m n : Widths

103

In chart 3.2.1b I divide column widths schematically by script class. Examination of the chart prompts four immediate observations. (1) Papyri written in substandard scripts Chart 3.2.1b Prose c o l u m n width, by script formality O x y r h y n c h u s sample, 181 e x a m p l e s

(each square represents one papyrus)

(1) Formal, semi-formal, pretentious, 55

3.0

3.5

4.0

4.5

&· · 'I ·· ··

• •• • 5.0

(2) Informal and unexceptional,

examples

•••• mmum ••••• 5.5

107

•

•

6.0

6.5

7.0

7.5

8.0

8.5

9.0 ...

>10.0

6.0

6.5

7.0

7.5

8.0

8.5

9.0...

>10.0

6.0

6.5

7.0

7.5

8.0

8.5

9.0...

>10.0

• •m •• •• •• •• • •• II

examples

& · · · · • • • • • • • •• 3.0

3.5

4.0

(3) Substandard

3.0

3.5

4.0

4.5

5.0

5.5

or cursive, 19 examples

4.5

5.0

5.5

are heavy in wider widths (only 4 fall below 6.3 cm), and close to half are either on the top edge of the normative range (c. 7.5 cm) or above that. (2) The better-written papyri are noticeably lacking in aberrant examples, including the marginal group at 8-9 cm. In particular, the upper edge of the normative range (7.0-7.5 cm) almost disappears. (3) For papyri written in unexceptional scripts (informal but for the most part probably professional), the edge of what appears normative seems to map to the particularly dense part of the range in chart 3.2.1a, that is, from a bit over 4.5 to a bit above 7.0 cm. (4) Almost all of the small group at 8-9 cm is located among papyri in unexceptional scripts. The last two statements will be seen as in part corollary to the first two. These observations support the impression, which will find little argument, that a well-defined notion of normative range for column width did in fact exist. The more formal the production, the more strictly the width conforms to a single range: only 3 of 55 fall outside the range 4.3-7.1 cm among better-written examples. For papyri written in a script below the everyday professional standard, by contrast, almost half (9 of 19) fall at the edge of or beyond that width. Unexceptional manuscripts both for the most part clearly conform to what is conventional and just as clearly witness a minority population of aberration from the conventional.

104

Formal Characteristics of the Bookroll

The evidence from the comparison sample, displayed in chart 3.2.1c (full details in table 3.IB at the end of the chapter), exactly corresponds with the Oxyrhynchus evidence. Chart 3.2.1c Prose c o l u m n width, undifferentiated Comparison sample, non-Oxyrhynchite, 27 examples (each square represents one papyrus) • • • • 3.0

3.5

4.0

4.5

5.0

5.5

6.0

6.5

7.0

7.5

8.0

8.5

9.0 ...

>10.0

Like the Oxyrhynchus data, the comparison set falls mostly within the range of 4.7 to 6.9 cm; a few scattered examples occur at the very edges of this range; a couple of examples fall in the 8-9 cm group; and there is one example above 10 cm. Of the better-written examples, all ten fall at 6.6 cm or below; of the three substandard examples, all three fall at 6.5 or above. There is, in short, reason to suppose that the specifics here isolated are widely distributed in time and place, and not peculiar to Oxyrhynchus. The evidence of the more formal bookrolls is particularly intriguing, since formal scripts of close similarity are widely distributed about the Mediterranean, and therefore are most confidently associated with meticulously trained - that is, professional - hands. This statement is particularly true of the calligraphic majuscules - one thinks, for instance, of PDura 1, whose majuscule script is in no way distinct from Egyptian parallels.29 We may be tempted to try to associate a more strict definition of a 'standard' width with more 'professional' productions, and a less strict 'standard' to the more 'private.' Closer analysis does not, however, support such a hypothesis. Chart 3.2.Id displays the results if we recast the net so as only to capture calligraphic majuscules of the 'Biblical' and 'Homeric' (or 'Roman') Chart 3 . 2 . I d Prose c o l u m n width, formal majuscules only Oxyrhynchus sample, 11 examples (each square represents one papyrus) • • 3J3

mm Ü

ÏÔ

4l

i

5J3

t

mm 33

• 6X)

(

65

7H

7Ü

8X)

83

9.0 ...

>10.0

types. The subgroup at 8-9 cm disappears (perhaps, however, a statistical quirk), but otherwise this smaller group shows no perceptible tightening of a sense of 'standard.' Similarly, one may wonder whether the mixed results found in the 'unexceptional' group of scripts result from the lumping together of copies produced professionally and privately; that is, whether there is a standard of production followed by professional scribes to which non-professionals do not always attend. Strictly the question is unanswerable, since in most

29 Cf. Roberts 1955, 16.

Dimensions of the Column: Widths

105

cases it is little more than a guess as to whether or not a copy is professional. Once again, however, one can resort to an argument based on script types. A well-defined type of script prevalent in the later second and third centuries was that dubbed 'severe5 (der strenge Stil) by Schubart.30 Related scripts can assume a variety of forms, but here I will consider the style narrowly, in the form exemplified by plates 83-5 in Schubart's Griechische Paläographie and plates 14, 42; 27, 50, 70 in Turner and Parsons.31 A bookhand so well-defined, it is often assumed, is best explained as the result of professional training. And indeed stichometry, the only very clear indicator of a professional copy, will lend some support to the claim, for most of the papyri in the sample containing stichometric signs are written in a severe script.32 In chart 3.2.le the column widths are summarized for papyri written in severe style scripts (with sigla to indicate how well the script is executed). Chart 3.2.le is more sparse than the overall charts (cf. 3.2.1a, 3.2.1b[2]), but the general contours are clearly the same. Chart 3 . 2 . l e Prose c o l u m n width, severe style only Oxyrhynchus sample, 62 examples

• 3.0

3.5

4.0

(• = a fine example,

11 4.5

••

•

5.0

5.5

•

• — unexceptionalf

•

• ••

•

6.0

•

• •

•

•

•

6.5

• = a careless or crude

+ 7.0

7.5

• 8.0

8.5

9.0...

>10.0

example)

Nothing here encourages the notion that 'professional1 productions are more strict in definition than the group as a whole (which, substandard examples aside, may in any case be almost entirely 'professional' in origin). Do the widths change over time? In charts 3.2.If and 3.2.1g, I divide column widths by date in two different schematics ('median' and 'composite,' definitions below). These two sets of tables tell the same story. In the second century, where the sample first gives adequate representation, the density is much higher among narrower widths. Taking 6 cm as the dividing point (as the visual schematic encourages us to do), the median date chart at c. AD 150 shows 39 examples in the range 4.3-5.9 cm but only 15 in the range 6.0—7.5 cm:

30 Schubart 1925,124fF. 31 Schubart 1925; Turner and Parsons 1987. 32 223+PKoeln 2 1 0 , 1 8 0 5 + 3 6 8 7 , 2 0 9 1 , 2 0 9 3 , 3 1 5 5 . For stichometry as hallmark of a copy 'professionally made and paid for,' see Turner 1980, 95. Turner and Parsons 1987,16 bring up the possibility that running stichometric totals might become part of the paradosis, but then give good reasons to reject the idea.

106

Formal Characteristics o f the Bookroll

Chart 3.2.If Prose column width, by median date O x y r h y n c h u s sample, 181 examples (Each square represents o n e papyrus at the m e d i a n o f the date range; a papyrus o f A D 1 - 1 0 0 is listed under A D 50, o f A D 5 1 - 1 5 0 under A D 100, and so forth. W h e r e necessary, I r o u n d d o w n w a r d ; thus a papyrus dated to A D 151-300 is listed under A D 200.) c. 50 3.0

BC

3.5

c. AD 3.0

,

c. AD 3.0

3.5

c. AD

50

4.5

(

4.0

3.0

7.0

7.5

(

6.0 ~~

1 6Ü"

1 I x T

^7.5

6.0

6.5

7.0

7.5

• • %• • 7.5

4.5

4.0

8.5

9.0 ...

8J3

8.5

9.0 ....

>10.0

8.0

8.5

9.0 .. .

S10.0

8.0

8.5

9.0 .. .

>10.0

• •

•

•

(

!

!

5.0

• • • a • I • • • • • &mm mm 5.5 6.0 6.5

•

7.0

• • • ••

• 4.5

•

• • • mm m mmm mmm

5.0

5.5

• • • •

• • 6.0

•

6.5

7.Ü

• •

~~8 . ( P " 8 . 5

9.0 .. .

>10.0

4.0

• 4.5

• • • ••• • • •• • 5.0

• • • ••• 5.5

•• •• • • • • • mmm • •• • • • • • • • 6.0 6.5 7.0

•• • 7.5

• ••

•

8.0

9.0 ..

>10.0

• 8.5

250

•

• ••• • • • •

• •

• • • • • • •

1

1

3.5

4.0

4.5

5.0

5.5

6.0

6.5

4.0

4.5

5.0

5.5

6.0

6.5

•

• •

•

mi

7.0

7.5

8.0

8.5

9.0. ..

>10.0

7.0

7.5

8.0

8.5

9.0...

>10.0

300 •

3.0

3.5

>10.0

200

3.5

r. AD

8.0

Î50

3.5

c. AD

t ^

• • 5.5

5.0

III

• • 3.0

6.0

too

3.5

c. AD

5.5

•

4.5

• 3IE

5.0

!

4.0

1IB

c. AD

5.5

(

4.0

• 3.0

5.0

1

1 3.5

(

4.5

4.0

•

Dimensions of the Column: Widths

107

Chart 3.2.1 g Prose c o l u m n width, by composite date O x y r h y n c h u s sample, 181 examples ( T h e date is c o m p o s i t e in the sense that e a ch papyrus can appear several times if the date range is greater than 50 years; thus, the squares at 8.5 c m for 5 0 - 1 B C and A D 1—50 are a single papyrus dated to 50 BC—AD 50. E a ch square represents o n e papyrus.) 50-1

BC

3.5

3.0

AD

4.0

4.5

5.0

6.5

7.0

7.5

8.5

8.0

3.5 AD

4.0

5.0

4.5

3.5 AD

• • 5.5

4.0

•

• 5.0

4.5

3.5 AD

•

••

7.0

6.5

•

•••• 6.0

•

m 4.0

4.5

• 5.0

• • CC III & & & &

•

•

• • C & C • • &

5.5

6.0

7.5

8.0

8.5

9.0 ...

>10.0

C •

• C CCC 6.5

7.5

8.0

& 8.5

& 9.0 ...

>10.0

••

•

8.0

8.5

•C II I

C, C

8.0

8.5

H B ! 7.0

C C C C C C C C

• C

C CC 7.0

6.5

7.5

C C 9.0...

>10.0

151-200 CC • • C • • • C CCC C • &

• 3.0

C|

I, 6.0

5.5

101-150

• C •• I • 1•

3.0

>10.0

51-100 • •

3.0

9.0 ...

•

1-50 •

3.0

6.0

5.5

3.5 AD

4.0

•

• •I &• • IIIII •1 1• • • •

4.5

5.0

• &

5.5

6.0

C C C C

C C C C CC C

C C C

7.0

6.5

7.5

C C C

C

9.0 ...

>10.0

9.0...

C C >10.0

201-250

•

• C C • & C C C CC C mm C CC C CC

• • • • •• C 3.0

3.5 AD

3.0

4.0

4.5

5.0

5.5

6.0

• 7.0

6.5

7.5

8.0

8.5

251-300

3.5 AD

4.0

,•

C • • Bill

C C • Bill

• •

C C C CCCCCCC 'I I I I I I I I I I

4.5

5.0

5.5

6.0

6.5

4.5

5.0

5.5

6.0

6.5

II

I,

II

C C II

C

7.0

7.5

8.0

8.5

9.0 ...

>10.0

7.0

7.5

8.0

8.5

9.0...

>10.0

301-350

• 3.0

3.5

4.0

C

108

Formal Characteristics of the Bookroll

that is, fully 72% have narrower columns.33 As we reach the third century, the balance begins to shift towards a wider format (showing an evenness of narrower and wider formats in the chart at AD 200), and in the latter part ofthat century, wider examples prevail: in the median date chart at c. AD 250,9 examples fall within 4.5-5.9 cm and 20 examples within 6.0-7.5 cm; that is, 69% exhibit wider columns. Though I am well aware of the difficulties that plague the dating of literary texts, the tendencies here seem too strong for coincidence.34 In any century of the Roman era, it was acceptable that a scribe choose to write at any point within the boundaries of the normative range (4.5-7.5 cm). But the diagrams above do seem plausibly to chart a seesaw of fashion: from a preference for narrower columns in the second century to a preference for wider columns in the third. The comparison sample is too sparse in prose texts to graph meaningfully over the centuries. Still, the Ptolemaic subset of the comparison sample, though not statistically viable, is suggestive. All five of the measurable Ptolemaic prose examples are wider than 6 cm (all in fact fall within 6.5 and 7.2 cm), as are all but one of the 12 prose examples collected by Blanchard in his study of third-century BC bookrolls.35 To the seesaw of fashion we can therefore add, speculatively, that somewhat wider columns were preferred in Ptolemaic times. This accords with the Oxyrhynchus data for the first and early second centuries AD, where the chart displays an evenness of distribution that may well reflect the intrusion of a newfangled preference for narrower widths into the oldfashioned staple of the somewhat wider column. I propose, then, an analysis of prose column widths into three classes. Prose column width class I (narrow), which measures from c. 4.5 to 6 cm, is common throughout the Roman era; but this class seems to have been particularly fashionable in the second century. Class II (somewhat wide), which measures from c. 6 to 7.5 cm, is also common throughout the Roman era; but this class seems to have become particularly fashionable in the third cent u r y ; a n d — s o far as p r e s e n t e v i d e n c e a l l o w s — m a y w e l l h a v e b e e n t h e d o m i n a n t class i n

Ptolemaic t i m e s . Class III (wide), which measures c. 8 to 9 cm, is uncommon, and too sparsely represented to localize temporally. Examples beyond the bounds of these classes are very exceptional.

33 In my analysis on the more preliminary sample at Johnson 1992a, 172,1 had omitted this observation, because the tendency seemed not quite definite given the size of the sample. But this surely was overcaution: the tendency is strong even in that more limited sampling, with 24 of 35 (69%) falling within the narrow group (Johnson 1992a, 243). 34 The proportions also remain remarkably stable as evidence is added. The sample here contains half again as many prose examples as the preliminary sample presented in my dissertation, and yet the ratios are unchanged: for AD 150, the narrow widths comprise 69% in the dissertation, 72% here; for AD 250, wide widths comprise 71% in the dissertation, 69% here. 35 Blanchard 1993,35. A couple of his examples are exceptionally wide.

Dimensions of the Column: Widths

109

3.2.2 Intercolumn and Column-to-column Width in Prose Texts A curiosity at once presents itself when we compare column widths to widths measured from column to column in prose texts. The conspectus, displayed in chart 3.2.2a, is more or less predictable. Though more diffusely distributed than the column widths, the Chart 3.2.2a Prose column-to-column width, undifferentiated Oxyrhynchus sample, 99 examples (each square represents one papyrus) •

•

•• • • •••

• ••

••

•••••••••••••• •

• •

»um

9

mm

m m mm • • • • • • • • • • a • 55

•••

• • • • • • 6JÖ

65

• •

••

•

•

•

9.0

95

mmmmmmmmummuummmmmm»m m

7K

75

8K

85

•

•••• 10.0

•

• 1Ö5

•

>11.0

(in 0. t-cm intervals)

column-to-column widths retain a strong sense of normative boundary: in broad terms, from 6.3 to 9.0 cm, with particular denseness in the area from 7-8.4 cm; the small cluster at 9.5-10 cm will be seen as a reflex of aberrantly wide column width class III. But — and here is the curiosity - analysis by date shows surprisingly little definition within this broad normative range. Charted by median date, the widths look as displayed below. Now if we Chart 3.2.2b Prose c o l u m n - t o - c o l u m n width, by median date O x y r h y n c h u s sample, 99 examples c. AD 55

6.0

c. AD • 55

50 6.5

8.0

• ••

•• 65

9.5

10.0

105

>11.0

7.0

•

•

•

' • 8.0

75

1 95

i 10.0

105

>11.0

10.0

10.5

>11.0

10.0

105

>11.0

• • 85

• (9.0 ·

• m • m m m • •• m mm • • • 65 7.0

•

•

•

• ••• • ••••

7.5

• •

8.0

8.5

•

•

9.0

95

9.0

95

200 m

6.0

9.0

150

6.0

c. AD

85

100

m

5.5

75

• ' • 6.0

c. AD

55

7.0

;

675

•

•

•

7.0

•

•

• • • ••• • 75

• • 8.0

• • 85

•• •

110

Formal Characteristics of the Bookroll

c.AD

55

6.0

6.5

7.0

7.5

8.0

I

.

,

,

,

6JÖ

65

c.AD

I

55

250

8.5

9.0

9.5

10.0

10.5

>11.0

1Ö5

>11.0

300

7X)

75

8JD

85

•

(

9K

95

(

(

100

(

attempt (as the chart visually encourages) a division at about 7.8 cm, examples falling to either side of this boundary are roughly equivalent as the chart moves through the centuries. The seesaw of fashion that has column widths move from (perhaps) broad in Ptolemaic times to narrow in the second century to broad in the third is simply not reflected among the column-to-column widths. The only significant movement is a tendency to avoid the most narrow widths - those below about 7.2 cm - as the turn is made into the third century. This tendency mirrors the broader column widths characteristic of the third century, but is at best a partial reflection ofthat fashion; and the tendency to more narrow column widths in the second century is only weakly evidenced if at all.36 Why the column-to-column widths do not fall into distinct classes in the manner of the column widths will become apparent from a study of the intercolumns. Chart 3.2.2.C summarizes the evidence on intercolumn widths. Examples appear to split broadly into Chart 3.2.2c Prose intercolumn width, undifferentiated Oxyrhynchus sample, 99 examples (each square represents one papyrus)

1.0

1.5

2.0

(in 0.1-cm

25

3.0

intervals)

two groups, one at or slightly above 1.5 cm, the other at or slightly above 2.0 cm.The thin groupings at the edges (at c. 1.2 cm and 2.5 cm) are probably best analysed as the ragged 36 Isolating the c.AD 150 group that bunches at 8 cm and comparing that with the group from 6.5-7.5 cm will yield impressive numbers - 10 'narrow' vs. 19 'wide' examples — but is hard to justify; a straight split of the data at 7.8 cm, aberrant examples to one side, yields the ratio 20 to 17.

Dimensions of the Column: WidthXHeight111

edges of the two main classes. (The analysis at §2.4.1 does not support the notion of a significant difference over an interval of only 2-3 mm.) The split between the groups becomes more evident if we chart - see 3.2.2d - how the narrow and wide intercolumn groups divide over time. We look in vain, however, for definite associations between Chart 3.2.2d Prose intercolumn width, by Oxyrhynchus c. AD

m m

1.0

270

1.0

a,· 2.5 2.0· · •.•

•

3.0 "

3.0

150

1.5 c. AD

25

100

1.5 c. AD

date

•

'l5 c. AD

median

examples

50

m

LÖ

1.0

sample, 99

2.0

2.5

3.0

2.0

2.5

3.0

2.0

2.5

3.0

ZÖ

25

XÖ

200

• ••

1.5 c. AD

m

250

m

» II ·&

1.0

1.5

f. AD L0

15

300

narrow or wide intercolumn and any given era. The slight preference for the narrow intercolumn in the c. AD 250 group might tempt one to the hypothesis that, even as it became fashionable in the third century to widen the column size, the intercolumn tended to contract. The column-to-column width would thus exhibit no distinct movement, as the narrower intercolumn would compensate for the wider column. Still, the tendency is

112

Formal Characteristics of the Bookroll

slight and based on thin evidence; moreover, no such tendency shows up elsewhere, and there is in particular no tendency to wider intercolumns in the second century as a counterbalance to the narrow columns characteristic of that century. A safer position, and probably closer to the truth, is simply to note that the absence of any tendency of a narrow or wide intercolumn to associate itself consistendy with a narrow or wide column will naturally tend to flatten the curve of the graph. Chart 3.2.2e, which omits examples at the borders between the width classes, makes the point. Chart 3.2.2e C o l u m n a n d intercolumn associations (Oxyrhynchus sample) Intercolumn w i d t h narrow (1.2-1.7 cm) narrow (1.2-1.7 cm)

+ + + +

w i d e (2.0-2.7 cm) w i d e (2.0-2.7 c m )

Column width

Examples

n a r r o w (4.2-5.7 c m )

15

w i d e (6.0-7.5 c m

17

n a r r o w (4.2-5,7 c m )

23 19

w i d e (6.0-7.5 cm)

Worth note at this juncture is, however, one fairly strong association with the intercolumn. In chart 3.2.2f the intercolumn widths are charted by script formality. Study of this chart shows a fair preference among better-written manuscripts for a wide intercolumn (22 examples fall at or above 2.0 cm, 13 below); note also that in better-written Chart 3.2.2f Prose intercolumn width, by script formality

Oxyrhynchus sample, 99

examples

(1) Formal, semi-formal, mm • • • • • • • •

••

To

Ts

• •

•

-.

2l

m ••••••

pretentious, 35 examples

•

3F

(2) Informal and unexceptional, •

56 examples

&· • • • &••• •• • 1.0

1.5

2.0

2.5

3.0

(3) Substandard or cursive, 8 examples m 1.Ö

m O+

"275

30"

Dimensions of the Column: WidthXHeight113

papyri exceptionally narrow intercolumns, of under 1.5 cm, are avoided. Similarly, of papyri written m fine majuscules, fully eight of nine have wide intercolumns. Yet how the wide intercolumn - seemingly a deliberate design preference - maps to the column-tocolumn width is telling. Taking the majuscules as examples: in four cases (25 Demosth., 8 4 4 Isoc., 2 7 5 0 Xen., 3 4 4 7 Strabo), a somewhat wide column combines with the wide intercolumn, yielding quite a wide column-to-column measure; but in four other cases (227 Xen., 2 1 0 1 Xen., 3 3 2 7 Thuc., 3 6 8 5 Plut.), the wide intercolumn joins with a narrow column (three of four quite narrow) to create a middling column-to-column measure, since the two in effect cancel one another out. This sort of interaction seems characteristic of the relationship, or lack thereof, between intercolumn and column width for the sample as a whole. The comparison set is thin in examples where a full intercolumn is preserved (only 16 prose examples), but seems to accord with the Oxyrhynchus data: certainly the same sense of normative range (falling wholly within 7.0 and 8.9 cm for column-to-column widths; and almost wholly within 1.3-2.5 cm for the intercolumn). In particular, the comparison set shows the same strong tendency (four of five examples) for well-written papyri to prefer a wide intercolumn. Ptolemaic examples are too few to allow much comment. Perhaps worth mention - but the numbers are tiny - is that Ptolemaic examples seem to prefer narrow or very narrow intercolumns (all five fall below 2 cm, and two, at 1.0 and 1.3 cm, are among the narrowest intercolumns to survive; prose examples in Blanchards study [1993, 35] seem to confirm this tendency). I propose, then, an analysis of intercolumns into two groups: prose intercolumn width class I (narrow), which centres around 1.5 (1.2-1.8 cm); and class II (wide), which centres slightly above 2.0 (1.9-2.5 cm).These classes tend to associate neither with a particular date nor with any column-width class; in fact the only association seems to be a tendency among editions de luxe to favour a wide intercolumn, and to avoid an exceptionally narrow one. The reader may be interested to learn what associations do not help define classes in the analysis of widths. Perhaps unexpectedly, I find no discernible tendencies among literary texts written on the verso (though the examples are few); a study of texts author by author shows no discernible patterns;37 a study of text by genre shows discernible tendencies only among, perhaps, philosophical texts, a point to which I will return at §3.8.

37 Table 3.1 has some interesting conjunctions whose significance is, however, doubtful. Most striking among these is a fair-sized group of manuscripts of Plato written to similar or very similar widths, all except one dated to the second century; suggestively, four of seven contain marginal scholia of some sort. These are:

114

Formal Characteristics of the Bookroll

3.2.3 Letter Counts in Prose Texts Finally, let us briefly consider the letter counts per line in prose texts. Since the letter count is a function of the horizontal spacing of the script and the width of the column, we will expect some normative range. Chart 3.2.3a does show some sense of a 'normal' range, at Chart 3.2.3a Letter counts for prose texts Oxyrhynchus sample, 183 examples (each square represents one papyrus)

• •

•• • • • • • • • • • •

•• • • • • • • •• • • • • • •

• • • • •

• • • • • • • •

• ••

• •

•

9.0

11.0

13.0

15.0

17.0

19.0

21.0

(in OA-cm

23.0

25.0

27.0

mm

(

•••

29.0

•

>39.0

intervals)

roughly 13 to 24 letters per line, but it is quite rough indeed, with the edges of the norm considerably more ragged than for the physical width. Why this is so can be seen immediately from a look at table 3.1.Taking the narrow physical range from 4.25-4.7 cm, we see that the number of letters per line varies dramatically, from about 10 to 24. There is in short no consistent correlation between width of column and letter counts. Yet no one will suppose that the scribes counted letters as they went along, so perhaps none of this is to the point; the issue raised in chapter 2 was whether letter counts might reflect consistent line-by-line copying of a text. Since, as demonstrated, multiple volumes of an author are at least sometimes copied to the same format, one might hope that the letter counts cluster in such a way as to suggest descent, in copies made line by line, from a common omnibus edition. Chart 3.2.3b will dispel any such fancy for all authors but Plato, for in general the letter counts range widely for a given author. Letter counts do not show significant clustering by script type or date.

POxy

1808 3678 2102+PTurner

229 1809 3326 3672

Col. (cm) 4.75 *4.8 7 4.85 -4.9 4.9 4.9 4.9

Col .-col. 6.75 *7.0 7.15 ~6.7 7.0 7.0 ~7.2

Intercol. 2.0 2.2 2.3 1.8 2.1 2.1 2.3

Respubliai (scholia) Phikbus Phaedrus Piiaedo (scholia) Phaedo (scholia) Respubliai (scholia)

Leges (3rd cent.)

None of the scripts show particular likeness. It could nonetheless be that we have here a local fashion, or the product of an associated group of scribes, for the example of 2092 Pindar Ol. (where both scribe and style change in mid-column) will prove that scribes working side by side wrote in different styles of script.The conjunction may, for all that, be no more than coincidence, and thus its relegation to this footnote.

Dimensions of the Column: WidthXHeight115

Chart 3.2.3b Prose letter counts, by author (each square represents o n e papyrus) Aeschines, 26 examples •

••

9.0

11 0

•

••

•

• •

•••

13.0

&

mmmmrn

15.0

•

m mm

17.0

••

21.0

19.0

uu 23.0

25.0

>39.0

27.0

29.0

25.0

27.0

29.0

>39.0

23.0

25.0

27.0

29.0

>39.0

23.0

25.0

27.0

29.0

>39.0

27.0

29.0

Demosthenes, 26 examples u 9.0

u

11.0

u

•• 13.0

15.0

Herodotus, 2 î examples u• • • 9.0

11.0

13.0

11.0

17.0

15.0

13.0

u

• • • • •• •

21.0

19.0

u• • • • •

Isocrates, 1 examples • ( 9.0

u

• • • • • •

17.0

••

15.0

19.0

• 17.0

23.0

•

•

•

• •

•

•

21.0

• 19.0

• • • •

••

•

21.0

•

Plato, 37 examples • •

• •• • 9.0

11.0

• • ••••

••• 13.0

15.0

•

• •

17.0

• 8• • •• 19.0

>• •

•

21.0

23.0

•

,••

25.0

•

>39.0

Thucydides, 46 examples • •

9.0

•

•

, •

11.0

13.0

Xenophon}

11.0

••

u uu

• • • •

15.0

m u ••• • • 1 • • • • • mm • • • •

• • •

17.0

19.0

13.0

21.0

23.0

25.0

27.0

29.0

>39.0

(

15.0

•

•

17.0

•

21.0 "

23.0

25.0

27.0

29.0

>39.0

25.0

27.0

29.0

>39.0

•

19.0

•

Miscellaneous authors, 13 examples • • •

9.0

11.0

• mm

IB

7 examples • • •

9.0

• • muu

•

13.0

•

15.0

17.0

•

,

19.0

21.0

• , •• 23.0

•

3.2.4 Column and Intercolumn Widths in Verse Texts The account of widths for verse texts will be much briefer, and we should take a moment to reflect on why that is. First, there are some limitations to the data. Column and intercolumn width for a verse text will be a rather rough statistic; even where measurable, the figure will represent no more than a crude estimate, since the line ends are irregular. Column-to-column widths will be of more potential interest (see §3.2), but are

116

Formal Characteristics of the Bookroll

unfortunately both few and often based on very rough calculation. Only 9 of 134 verse examples allow even an approximate measurement for the column-to-column width. Second, given our dependence on the column widths, there is the obvious problem that the width results predictably and necessarily from the verse length and the horizontal spacing of the script. How can one sensibly speak of types or fashions when the size of the written block is not fully under the control of the scribe? Thus, the theoretical basis on which we might expect division into meaningful types is slim. In the event, discernible groupings are usually explainable on more or less mechanical grounds. Chart 3.2.4a presents some promising possibilities for type definition, particularly around 8 - 1 0 and 1 1 - 1 3 cm. Examination of chart 3 . 2 . 4 . b shows at once, though, that the two subgroups probably reflect little more than the fact that trimeter and other verses average significantly fewer letters than a hexameter verse, and thus tend to a smaller width. The shorter trimeter verse usually translates to c. 8—11 cm, the longer hexameter usually to c. 1 1 - 1 4 . There remains a small but not tiny group of hexameter verses written to the smaller width (chart 3.2.4b), but this says no more or less than that some hexameter verses are written in a small script. Other aberrations likewise simply reflect scripts that are unusually small or large. Chart 3.2.4a Verse c o l u m n width, undifferentiated Oxyrhynchus sample, 130 examples (each square represents one papyrus)

m 6.0

7.0

• • ••

•• • • • • 8.0

• •• ••

•• •••

9.0

• • •• • • •• •• • • • • • • • • • 11.0

10.0

12.0

•• • • • •

•

13.0

• I 14.0

•

• 15.0

• < 16.0

• 1

• • • ••

17.0

18.0

• •

>19.0

(in 0.2-cm intervals) Chart 3.2.4b Verse c o l u m n width, by genre Oxyrhynchus sample, 130 examples (each square represents one papyrus) Epic (hexameter),

11

examples

•• 6.0

7.0 Drama

m

8.0 (trimeter),

m mm

•• • 9.0

10.0

m m

• •• 11.0

• • ••• •• • ••• • • • • • • • • 12.0

13.0

7.0

8.0

12.0

13.0

•

•

• • •

• •

•m

• • •

14.0

15.0

16.0

17.0

18.0

>19.0

• 14.0

15.0

16.0

17.0

• 18.0

>19.0

31 examples

mm • • •m •

•

• •

6.0

•

9.0

10.0

11.0

D i m e n s i o n s o f the C o l u m n : W i d t hXHeight117

Other, Î6 •

6.0

examples

7H

8H

'

m

, '

'

iÖ

•

1ÖÖ

'

' •

llÖ

12~Ö

m

a

13H

•

Î4~0

(

•

FPJ0

•

ÜTÖ

at

I7I)

a

18.0 >19.0

Chart 3.2.4c presents another pattern of seeming interest, which again can be explained as a function of the script size. We see there a noticeable correlation between the more formal scripts and the wider column widths. But this, on reflection, is no surprise, Chart 3.2.4c Verse c o l u m n width, by script formality O x y r h y n c h u s sample, 130 e x a m p l e s (each square represents o n e papyrus) (1) Formal, semi-formal,

6.0

(2) Informal

6.0

aa 9.0

a, • 10.0

and unexceptional,

7.0

8.0

(3) Substandard

9.0

52

10.0

or cursive, 26 •

• "Ü

a

examples m

m

• • • • • • • •

•

III

I

15.0

16.0

17.0

18.0

>19.0

14.0

15.0

16.0

17.0

18.0

>19.0

Ï4JÔ

Q5K

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • 11.0 12.0 13.0 14.0

•

II

••

examples

11.0

12.0

13.0

examples

I

•

I

CC CC | C BB • 8K 9JÔ IÖÖ

7J3

52

m m

mmm

a 8.0

7.0

pretentious,

•

I

l l l l l l l III QJ0 Ï2S) "UÖ

m

ïil

i

TTÖ 18.0 >19.0

since many of the more formal scripts are also unusually large. The pool of examples is smaller, but even so there is a remarkable lack of obvious groupings among the column-tocolumn and intercolumn widths (charts 3.2.4d, e). At first the narrowness of the columnto-column measurements may seem striking: since verse intercolumns are generally Chart 3.2.4d Verse c o l u m n - t o - c o l u m n width, undifferentiated O x y r h y n c h u s sample, 39 e x a m p l e s (each square represents o n e papyrus)

•I I _

9.0

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

I

C IIBBBBBBBBBBB 10.0

IIH

12.0

13.0

I I I

14.0

IÊÛ3

(in 0.2-cm

16H

I

•••• 3JK

I 18H

C 19.0

20.0

II

•

•

21.0 >22.0

intervals)

c. 2-4 cm, and verse columns are c. 8-14 cm, one expects the column-to-column measure to range more or less evenly over c. 11-17 cm, with greatest density in the area about 1316 cm. Instead, there is (in addition to some density at 15-17 cm) a principal group ranging from 10—14 cm, with particular denseness centring around 12-13 cm.Yet this too turns out to be mechanistically determined. What is not predictable is that the percentage

118

Formal Characteristics of the Bookroll

of dramatic texts is much higher in the column-to-column, sample than among column measurements (almost half as opposed to less than a third); thus, the shorter verse category is overrepresented in the chart. What is more predictable is the survival rate: for very broad examples — since the papyrus is more likely to have broken away - the chance of adequate survival is much less than for narrower examples, and thus narrow widths show up more often in the column-to-column chart. Chart 3.2.4e Verse i n t e r c o l u m n w i d t h , undifferentiated O x y r h y n c h u s sample, 38 examples (each square represents o n e papyrus) • • •

1.0

1.5

2.0

2.5

3.0

3.5

4.0

(in 0. t-cm

4.5

5.0

5.5

6.0

6.5

>7.0

intervals)

In a manner analogous to prose intercolumns, there does however seem to be a tendency for poorly written texts to prefer quite narrow intercolumns (of under 3 cm), perhaps for reasons of economy. Contrarily, the two widest intercolumns (6 cm) both appear in an édition de luxe; and there may be some slight tendency for better-written manuscripts in general to prefer the wider intercolumn (8 of 12 are 3 cm or above). But the sample here (chart 3.2.4f) is thin. Chart 3.2.4f Verse i n t e r c o l u m n width , by script formality O x y r h y n c h u s sample, 38 examples (each square represents o n e papyrus) (1) Formal, semi-formal, pretentious, 12 examples t

TO

,

1.5

m •

m • • • • • •

2.0

2.5

(2) Informal and unexceptional,

m

to

13

ZÖ

25™

370

33

•

ÏÔ

(

45

{

5K

,

53

m •

6Ä)

63

ÉlIT

17 examples

m

m m m »

3Ü

35

4JÖ

45

5K

55

6Ï>

65

>7QJ

J

ÎÔ

• 43

,

55

(

6K

,

>TÖ~

(3) Substandard or cursive, 9 examples m • • &

TÖ

|·

15

.·

To

•

.

23

* »

3K

35

5X)

65

The comparison sample (displayed in chart 3.2.4g), which is rich in verse texts, requires but a few comments, since in the main the tendencies are as noted above. Column widths in the comparison set occur with denseness at c. 11-14 cm very like that in the

D i m e n s i o n s o f the C o l u m n :WidthXH e i g h t

119

Oxyrhynchus sample, but differ in a noticeable sparseness below 11 cm. Still, this circumstance serves only to confirm an earlier point, that the group at 11-14 cm is a reflex of the hexameter, since the comparison set by happenstance almost entirely comprises hexameter texts (86%). Chart 3.2.4g Verse c o l u m n width,

undifferentiated

C o m p a r i s o n sample, n o n - O x y r h y n c h i t e , 64 e x a m p l e s (eac h square represents o n e papyrus)

••• a

6.0

7.0

8.0

9.0

10.0

11.0

12H

(in 0.2-cm

•

• • • • • • • 13H I4-) Ï5Ï)

• (

•• 16H

•

t

ÏTQ

18.0

• >19.0

intervals)

Finally, a word on examples in the comparison set predating the Roman era. With the exception of the odd Timotheus papyrus (MP 1537, late fourth century BC, a verse text written as if prose to a width of 23.1 cm!), all Ptolemaic papyri in the sample have a column-to-column width falling strictly within the range 11—15 cm, and 8 of 13 fall in the range 12-13 cm. Ptolemaic examples also show unusually narrow intercolumns: Timotheus to one side, 15 of 18 have intercolumns of 2 cm or less (and the three exceptions are all from the first century BQ.Yet in both cases, the ranges are also particularly dense among Roman-era papyri, and the seeming uniformity here may, given the small number of examples, be coincidental. Examination of the verse widths with attention to genre, author, date, and texts written on the verso reveals no discernible patterns. Table 3.2 at the end of the chapter provides a full list of widths associated with verse texts. 3.3 Dimensions of the Column: Height The height of the column could vary tremendously. In the Oxyrhynchus sample (chart 3.3a), the extremes sweep from 10.8 to 29.3 cm (and from 10.05-28.2 cm in the comparison set), while the normative range encompasses a fairly continuous set of examples from about 12 to 27 cm, with particular denseness over what remains a broad range, roughly 14 to 24 cm.

120

Formal Characteristics of the Bookroll

Chart 3.3a C o l u m n height, undifferentiated O x y r h y n c h u s sample, 151 examples (each square represents o n e papyrus)

•

10.0

12.0

14.0

•••••

16.0

••••

18.0

20.0

(in 0.2-cm

22.0

24,0

26.0

28.0

30.0

intervals)

To determine what groups within the range may in fact be significant, I will follow the now familiar course of testing the data against other parameters. (Full details on column heights will be found in table 3.3 at the end of the chapter.) The separation of prose and verse examples causes a more intelligible pattern to emerge at once: Chart 3.3b C o l u m n height, by prose and verse (each square represents o n e papyrus) (1) Prose, 97 examples

10.0

12.0

14.0

16.0

18.0

20.0

22.0

24.0

26.0

28.0

30.0

26.0

28Ü

30.0

(2) Verse, 54 examples »

m

••

10.0

12.0

• • • •• ••••

14.0

16.0

•

•

18.0

• • ••

2ÔÔ

•

22.0

••

24.0

A large group at 16 to 20 cm is almost entirely dominated by prose examples (except at its lower edge), and in the area above 16 cm generally prose examples outweigh verse far in excess of the 2:1 ratio of the sample. For the moment, I would like to focus on a corollary observation, which is that verse examples concentrate elsewhere, namely, in the region from 16 cm and below. Nearly half of the verse examples fall within this region (25 of 54; as against less than one-fifth of prose examples). Now it is useful in and of itself to recognize that verse texts tend to a shorter height of column. But the observation can be refined in three ways. First, among verse examples with shorter heights, 11 of 27 are dramatic texts. Moreover, these shorter dramatic texts constitute most of the drama in the sample: 11 of a total 15 texts of tragedy and comedy fall within the region from 16 cm and below. Second, verse texts with shorter column heights seem to tend generally to an earlier date (see chart 3.3c). From c.AD 100 or before, 63% (10 of 16) have a short column (16 cm or below);

Dimensions of the Column:WidthXHeight

121

second-century verse texts are roughly even; from c. AD 200 or later, only 33% (6 of 18) have a short column. Interestingly, the comparison set does not support the Oxyrhynchus Chart 3.3c C o l u m n height, verse texts only, by m e d i a n date Oxyrhynchus sample, 54 examples (cach square represents one papyrus) c. 50 BC 10.0

12.0

14.0

16.0

20.0

22.0

24.0

26.0

28.0

30.0

20.0

22.0

24.0

26.0

28.0

30.0

18.0

20.0

22.0

24.0

26.0

28.0

1 30.0

18.0

20.0

22.0

• 24.0

26.0

28.0

30.0

20.0

22.0

24.0

26.0

28.0

30.0

20.0

• ,22.0 • 24.0

• 26.0

28.0

30.0

18.0

•

c.AD 1

• 12.0

10.0

14.0

10.0

12.0

• • 16.0

14.0

c.AD 100 m 10.0

• •

MM

•

12.0

18.0

•

c.AD 50 )

16.0

14.0

•

16.0

•

c.AD 150 •

10.0

mu 12.0

•

•

14.0

16.0

• • 16.0

• 18.0

(

16.0

• 18.0

20.0

22.0

24.0

• 26.0

28.0

30.0

18.0

20.0

22.0

24.0

26.0

28.0

30.0

•

•

•• • •

• 18.0

•

• •

c.AD 200

m m 10.0

12.0

•

14.0

•

•

•

c.AD 250 • 10.0

12.0

14.0

12.0

••

•

•

c.AD 300 10.0

•

14.0

16.0

evidence: Roman-era examples from that sample, though few (14), show no tendency towards shorter height at all. The thin sample makes it unclear, however, whether statistical caprice or a local fashion is responsible. The comparison set does, however, allow a third, related observation. Three verse texts with short column height from Oxyrhynchus are among the earliest literary texts found at that site (first century BC).The comparison set shows a similar tendency among very early texts. Of 19 texts predating the Roman era, more than half are at or about 16 cm or below, and none exceed a column height of 22 cm. The tendency is especially marked among texts of the first century BC: five of six papyri from the comparison set (and all three Oxyrhynchus examples) fall at 16 cm or below. The

122

Formal Characteristics of the Bookroll

prevalence of short columns among verse examples appears to result, then, from (1) a general tendency among Ptolemaic verse texts; (2) a general tendency among early Roman-era texts (though this tendency may, perhaps, be idiosyncratic to Oxyrhynchus); and (3) a tendency in all periods to write texts of tragedy and comedy with shorter columns (at least at Oxyrhynchus; the comparison set does not have enough examples). The configuration of prose and verse texts seen in chart 3.3b encourages one to think that prose examples below 16 cm may also be a definable class apart from the norm. Now this need not be so, since these examples may be no more than spillover from the main group. But as it happens, the group, though small (14 examples, plus several clustering at the boundary), shows definable characteristics. First, once again the examples tend to cluster by date, with the second century an attribute of all but two. Second, the group is particularly dense in finely written examples (10 of 14 fall within the pretentious-to-formal classification). It seems, then, that in the second century one idea of an elegant prose manuscript included the shorter column as a prominent feature. Though the preference among better-written manuscripts for a short column is particularly marked among prose texts, chart 3.3d will bear witness to the generality of the proposition. Better-written manuscripts seem to prefer overall a shorter range of column height, of roughly 11-21 cm (with scattered examples at 23-5), as opposed to a normative Chart 3.3d C o l u m n height, by script formality O x y r h y n c h u s sample, 151 examples (each square represents o n e papyrus) (1) Formal, semi-formal, pretentious, 55 examples

m m m

10.0

12.0

14.0

m u m m 16.0

18.0

(1) Informal and unexceptional,

10.0

12.0

14.0

u

u 20.0

24.0

26.0

28.0

30.0

22.0

24.0

26.0

28.0

30.0

76 examples

& · · · · · · • •&

16.0

22.0

18.0

20.0

0) Substandard or cursive, 20 examples •

•

1ÔÔ

• ,V2J) •

KÖ

M1 6 ·5 · , 18H ·

•

•

2 0 0•

•

2ZÔ•

•• 24H

26.0

•

28.0

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range among other manuscripts of about 14-26 cm. Of particular interest is the distribution of the taller manuscripts. The better-written class contains 7 examples above the noticeable break at 21-2 cm (13%), while the everyday class contains 28 examples (37%), and the substandard class 7 (35%). Closer examination of the very tallest examples

Dimensions of the Column:WidthXHeight

123

shows that three of four are written on the back of reused papyrus, two in rather crude hands. In fact, none of the tallest dozen in the sample qualify for the broadly defined class of finely written papyri. This set of observations is of particular interest since it flies in the face of what we might presume from modern aesthetics of book production. Thus, the editor of 1806 Theocr. Id. speaks of a 'handsome manuscript' with 'tall columns,' which seems presumptive, since my reconstruction suggests a middling height of 19 cm; the editor of 2694 Ap. Rh. suggests that the 'extreme length of column' as well as the script shows this to be a roll of'outstanding sumptuousness;' and the editor of 3 3 7 6 Hdt. suggests *a tall imposing roll' for this well-written example, as though tall and imposing were ideas that necessarily go together. In fact, the column of 3 3 7 6 , at 23.5 cm, is unusually tall for an elegant manuscript.38 The plain fact is that the height of finely written examples tends to stay within what is normative for professional copies; where that principle is violated, the clear tendency for such manuscripts is to prefer a shorter column, and to avoid a taller. There remains only to examine the overall change in column heights by date. Examination of chart 3.3e will show that while a shorter column seems somewhat more prevalent earlier (the examples are sparse), a taller format apparently takes hold in the second century and comes to predominate in the third. Just as the tendency towards shorter columns (under c. 16 cm) is driven primarily by verse texts, as discussed above, so the tendency Chart 3.3e C o l u m n height, by media n date O x y r h y n c h u s sample, 151 examples c. 50 BC m IÖÖ

1ZQ c.AD

TÖÖ

10.0

16H

18H

, •

.

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281)

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• 22Q)

, • 24H

28Ü

30.0

28.0

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a , · · , · · , I4H 16H I8H 20X3

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100 m mm

m 1Ö0

205

50

12.0 c.AD

•

t

14~0

1 m

12.0 c.AD

mm

{

12.0

14.0

Ï6X>

m 18Ï>

20.0

m m 22.0

m 24H

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38 Schubart 1921, 59 supposes that taller rolls were more expensive, and links the tall height of roll to his assertion that finely written rolls showed a proportion of 2:3 for column height : roll height (on which see below, § 3.5, esp. chart 3.5d).The evidence here does not accord with his claim, which Schubart supports with a lone ancient example together with examples drawn from modern book production.

124

Formal Characteristics o f the Bookroll

c.AD

10.0

12.0 c.AD

10.0

150

14.0

200

12.0 c.AD

10.0

18.0

• •

•

16.0

18.0

250

JL2 c.AD

m m

14.0

•

1Ö0

16.0

, •

,

I4H

16~Q

18H

14.0

16.0

•

. •

300

12.0

•

m • ••,••

18.0

20.0

22.0

24.0

26.0

28.0

30.0

26.0

28.0

30.0

m

•

•

20.0

22.0

24.0

m m

m m • • • • • •

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26.0

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towards taller columns (over c. 21-2 cm) in the later period results almost entirely from prose texts (compare chart 3.3e with chart 3.3c). For the second century, shorter columns seem characteristic for a group of prose texts, as I have discussed, but the fashion appears to have faded by the third. Verse texts also seem no longer to prefer shorter columns by the third century (chart 3.3c), but the tendency, given the few examples, is less clear. Middling heights (16—21 cm) are fairly constant across the sample, except for a noticeable drop in the third century in which, to repeat, some preference for quite tall columns comes into play. Most of what the comparison sample adds to the discussion has been remarked along the way, but it may be worth observing that the Roman-era examples, though sparse, seem to confirm a shift towards tall columns (over 21-2 cm) beginning in the second century. To summarize. I propose three broad classes of column height. Column height class I. Under 16 cm. This format is particularly common among verse examples (especially drama, or especially early) and well-written prose examples of the second century.39 Height class II. From 16—21 cm. Common in all periods. Height class III. Over 21 cm. This format is avoided among Ptolemaic texts, and among well-written manuscripts of all periods; but seems to have become fashionable among unexceptional prose texts of the second and, especially, the third century. I have already (§2.5) presented reasons for attending to measured height and not lines per column. Examination of the lines per column in both samples shows a continuous range from 25 to 50, with no noticeable tendency to particular

39 Blanchard 1993,31-2 presents convincing evidence for the prominence of column heights shorter than 16-17 cm among 3rd-century B C cartonnage (17 of 23 examples, by his measurements). Most, but not all, of these are verse.

Dimensions of the Column: Width X Height

125

groups within that range; extreme examples are 18 and 64 (details in table 3.7 at the end of the chapter). Perhaps worth mention is how abrupt the edges of the normal range are: under 25 lines and over 50, examples become suddenly sparse. The low end of the range (25 and below) is dominated by verse examples, in keeping with the analysis just above. 3.4 Dimensions of the Column: Width X Height We now come to consider the written area as a block, and to ascertain whether the conjunction of width and height is meaningful. Since at every step prose and verse texts have divorced themselves from each other in matters of format, the two will be considered separately. 3,4.1 Width X Height: Prose texts Among prose texts there seems little to recommend an overall arrangement of column blocks by height, width (column or column-to-column), or proportion of width to height. Ordering the data by column width or height gives a general impression that shorter heights tend to associate with narrower columns, and taller heights with wider columns, but more detail to the pattern is difficult to see. Arranging heights by the classes of width defined in section §3.2.1, however, throws much into relief, and I have therefore chosen this arrangement for table 3.4 at the end of the chapter. The width classes differentiate themselves strongly for both short and tall height classes. About a third of narrow columns (width class I) are also short (height class 1), whereas only one-twentieth of wide columns (width class II) are short. Conversely, fully one-half of wide columns are tall (height class III), whereas only a fifth of narrow columns are tall (and of that fifth, half the examples are at the upper edge of the class definition, at 5.5 cm or above). For columns of medium height (class II), the results are more mixed, but a similar tendency dominates: most narrow columns fall in the lower (i.e., shorter) half of that class (16 of 22), but most wide columns fall in the upper (i.e., taller) half of the class (10 of 17). In sum, then: a short column, particularly one below c. 16 cm (class I), was very likely also to be narrow; a tall column, particularly one above c. 21 cm (class III), was likely also to be wide, and very unlikely to be more narrow than 5.5 cm. Now we may think it natural to combine a narrower column with a shorter height and a wider column with a taller. But the example of verse (where a shorter column is most frequent though the lines are necessarily long) should persuade us that convention, and not nature, is at work here. The exceptionally consistent association between narrow width and short height merits closer attention. As Chart 3.4.1a shows, 13 of 15 Oxyrhynchus examples with short columns also fall within the narrow width class. The comparison set has few examples, but seems to verify this tendency.The chart also makes obvious the strong link between these narrow, short columns and script style. In 9 of 13 examples from Oxyrhynchus, and in all

126

Formal Characteristics of the Bookroll

Chart 3.4.1a Short columns (up to 16 cm, height class I, by width) Style

Col. width (cm)

Col.-to-coL

Col. height

Plutarch Xenophon

1 1

3.2 -4.5

5.7 -6.1

**10.8 *11.5

Isocrates Aeschines

2 1

4.6 4.7

-6.7 ~7.2(?)

*13.5 13.6

1 1? (2?) 1 2 1 2 1 1? (2?) 2 2? (1?) 1

*4.7 4.75 4.8 4.85 5.1 5.1 5.4 5.45 -5.6 6.5 7.0

*7.4 6.75 >6.3 7.1 7.7 *7.1 7.6 7.85 -8.1 8.1 9.6

*14.8 *15.1 13.2 15.1 14.7 *16.0 *14.8 *15.5 *12.9 14.6 **12.9

4.8 4.95 5.5 **6.3

-7.3 6.95 7.0 **8.2-8.6

14.4 15.9-16.3 *14.25 *14.5

7.5 (7.1-7.9) 7.9

10.0-10.1

POxy Contents 1. Oxyrhynchus set, 15 examples 3685 0226+PSI XVII Congr 8 + PSI 11.1197 0704 2404+ PLaur III/278 3327 1808 4047+4051 2102+PTurner 1 4041 0463 2749 0026 4035 3435 3895

Thucydides Plato Aeschines Plato Aeschines Xenophon Thucydides Demosthenes Aeschines Demosthenes Thucydides

2. C o m p a r i s o n set, R o m a n - e r a , 4 examples 1566 1233 1564 0478

Xenophon Hyperides Xenophon Herodotus

1 1 1 1

3. Comparison set, early Ptolemaic, 2 examples 0088 (3rd cent. BC) 1388 (3rd cent. BC)

Anaximenes

3

Plato

2

-6.5 (-6.0-7.0) -6.5 (-5.9—-7.1)

14.4

of the (few) examples in the comparison set, the script style falls into the top class. The earlier observation that better-written manuscripts tend towards shorter height can now be refined: in the Roman era one design style with pretensions to elegance made use of a noticeably short column with narrow lines. That this set of conventions did not obtain before the Roman era is, however, also suggested by the comparison set. The two early Ptolemaic examples diverge from the Oxyrhynchus set in these respects: (1) the script style is by no means elegant; (2) the short column has a wide width. That at least the latter may have been general is suggested by Blanchards study of third-century papyri from

Dimensions of the Column: Width X Height

127

cartonnage: the three other examples he lists with a column height of 16 cm or less are also wide (i.e., 6 cm or more).40 In general, the evidence does not tempt one to subdivide the papyri further into smaller groups. Since column width, intercolumn, and column height all fall within fairly strict ranges, certain coincidences of agreement are statistically likely. A good example can be found in width class II at a height of c. 25-6 cm.There, four papyri have column widths of 6.3-6.5 cm, and a column-to-column measure of 8.0-8.2 cm; moreover, all four carry the text of either Herodotus or Thucydides. Still, assigned dates range from the first to the third centuries, without much overlap, and script styles range from very fine to quite poor; the likelihood that this 'subgroup' has significance seems slim. Two groups in table 3.4A nonetheless press themselves upon our attention. Among class I widths, a group of five manuscripts share a height of 16.7-17.3 cm, a width of 4.7-4.9 cm, and a column-tocolumn width of 7.0-7.2 cm (227 Xen. Oec., 3326 PL Resp1809 PL Phd3672 PL Lg., 2550 Lycurg. in Leocr.; 881r,v PI. Euthd., Ly. might also be claimed for this group); with the exception of 3672, all of these could plausibly be assigned to the early second century.41 A second group, which is perhaps less certain, appears in the middle of the list of class II columns, measuring 6.4-7.1 cm wide, 8.4-9.0 from column to column, and 20-1 cm high (460 Demosth. de pac698 Xen. Cyr., 3447 Strabo, 1619 Hdt., 3679 PL Resp.; 3156+ 3669 PL Gorg. and 27 hoc.Antid. might also be included); to this one may add a smaller set with the same column and intercolumn parameters, but a somewhat shorter height of 17 to 19 cm (3837 Ach.Tat., 2751 PL Resp., 1250 Ach. Tat.). Examples from this group date mostly from late second to early third century. In both of these groups, the match of column dimensions is, then, striking. Yet if the two groups are significant, what in fact is being signified? If the conclusion to chapter 2 is correct, the agreement in widths should mean that the scribal tool of measure was the same. Possibilities include then that the tool was inherited and shared; or that a given group of scribes (such as master and apprentices) cut the tool to same standard; or that the tool of measure (since the parameters were restricted) simply happened to be the same for unrelated scribes. We may then have here evidence of a scribal group; but — especially sincc the hands bear so little resemblance within the groups — the wiser course may be to chalk these up to chance.

40 Blanchard 1993,35.The widths listed there for the Phaedo piece (MP 1388, Blanchard #14) are not right; though column width is unusually variable, the columns fall roughly in the bounds of 5.9-7.1 cm, with an average of about 6.5 cm. 41 Some of these we have seen before (above, n. 37) in a collection of seven Platonic manuscripts, mostly second century, with similar column and intercolumn widths. If the current analysis is correct, one of these (2102+ PTurner 7) must now be struck from the earlier list (the column height cannot be ascertained for the other three). One can also now suggest at least two non-Platonic additions to that group (227 Xen. and 2550 Lycurg.). Neither of the two new texts has the scholia suggested as a possible attribute of the earlier group; and one (2550) is possibly to be excluded since it is an incomplete manuscript (perhaps then a writing exercise).

128

Formal Characteristics of the Bookroll

A final group, or rather set of subgroups, is to my mind somewhat more persuasive, since it accommodates to a known phenomenon. By way of example, consider 2095 and 3383. These papyri, both containing Herodotus, are written to near exact agreement in column width, intercolumn width, and column height. The match of author as well as column dimensions recalls the example, already discussed (§2.1.3), of the matching set of Aeschylean rolls that survive under the rubric of 2159-64,2178-9, and 2245-55.Though many plays, and presumably at least several rolls, are represented among the fragments, all these Aeschylean rolls are written to an identical set of dimensions. The point cannot be proved, but one wonders whether 2 0 9 5 and 3 3 8 3 (one of Herodotus, book 1, the other of book 8) were similarly written as two rolls of a set designed to match. Chart 3.4.1b summarizes all reasonably exact pairings among the Oxyrhynchus sample (and cf. §2.1.19 on 3 4 3 6 Dinarch. in Dem. + 3 4 3 7 Dinarch. in Phil, both by scribe #B1 and possibly from the same roll). Chart 3.4.1b Rolls possibly f r o m a m a t c h e d set Pairs showing agreement in widths, height, and author Date

Col. height (cm)

Col. width

Herodotus, 1 Herodotus, 8

101-200 151-250

*23.5 **23.5

~7.5 7.5

—9.45 *9.5

3376 3382

Herodotus, 1-2 Herodotus, 8

101-200 151—250

5.5 *5.4

7.45 *7.4

3841

Demosthenes,

101-200

**22.0

*7.3

*9.0

151-250

*22.8

7.3

*8.9

*10.1 *10.1

*11.9 **11.7

POxy

Contents

2095 3383

23.5 *24.25(?)

Col-to-col.

adv. Lept.

0232

Demosthenes, in Tim.

2181 3667

Plato, Phd. [Plato],Ale. ii

151-200 201-300

*21.7 *23.25

1808 2102+PT«mer7

Plato, Resp. 8 Plato, Phdr.

151-200 151-200

*15.1 15.1

4.75 4.85

6.75 7.1

In sum, the papyri show the following tendencies: (1) a short column is almost always narrow, and a large percentage of short, narrow columns are also written in fine scripts; (2) a tall column is usually wide (and is rarely written in a fine script); (3) groups with matching column dimensions are mosdy lacking or fortuitous, but a few may be significant. So much is true for the Roman era. For the early Ptolemaic period, design conventions seem to be different. On present evidence, one can define: (4) early Ptolemaic papyri with short columns seem to have a wide, not narrow, width.

Dimensions of the Column: Width X Height

129

3.4.2 Width X Height:Verse texts Verse manuscripts will arrange themselves differently. In the analysis of column heights verse examples strongly divided themselves in almost every possible way from prose examples despite the fact that column height has no obvious dependency on whether the example is prose or verse. In another sense, of course, a dependency does exist, for verse examples are as a group distinctly wider in their column than prose manuscripts, and the aesthetic effect cannot be the same (see §3.0). One expects a different set of conventions, and indeed this is what the papyri show. Once again, the analysis will be partly frustrated by the sparseness of column-tocolumn measurements in the sample. Even with the small number in front of us, however, certain tendencies are recognizable. In table 3.5 (at the end of the chapter), I have listed verse examples by proportion of column-to-column width to height, beginning with those examples whose width significandy exceeds their height. This fact — that a significant number of examples have a width larger than the height - should alert us to how different is the look of the verse column. None of the prose examples exceeds a proportion of 1:2 for width to height of column, and the most exaggerated prose examples exhibit a proportion of 1:5. Verse examples, by contrast, are rarely so tall and thin as to fall below the 1:2 proportion. The groups that are most likely significant are those most noticeably distinct to the ancient reader, namely, those papyri with columns that are oblong (in the sense that the column-to-column width exceeds the height), or roughly square, or noticeably tall and thin (for a verse text, that is). In short, here as elsewhere trends are mostly discernible at the extremes, precisely because the areas away from middle ground are more marked as design styles, and hence the ones most likely to go in and out of fashion. The first group, where the column-to-column width exceeds the height, would have been the most striking to the ancient reader, and is most strictly definable here. Almost all examples (10 of 12) are written in fine scripts (2226 Call. Hymn, could also be urged as such), and almost all are dated to some part of the second century. In the comparison set, the lone Roman-era example is also in a fine script and from the second century. Setting aside 223 + PKoeln 210 II. (an extraordinary verso text we have encountered before; see §2.2.1, §2.4.1), the uniformity is such that a distinct fashion seems more than usually likely.42The second group, of columns that are roughly square, serves by contrast to confirm the first group: for columns with the appearance of a square (an appreciable visual difference) no longer share the character of the oblong group, containing a preponderance neither of fine scripts nor of a 42 An objection may be lodged that the preponderance of fine scripts is predictable irom the width of the column, since a fine script is often larger, and thus in a verse example necessarily results in a longer line.That the scribe intentionally exaggerates the width for these short columns is, however, suggested by the very wide intercolumns, which are consistently among the largest. Still, the fact that writers of fine, large scripts choose a short column format is in any event exacdy to the point.

130

Formal Characteristics of the Bookroll

second-century date. The square group does show some tendency towards an early date (4 of 7 are from the first century BC or AD, and similarly for the comparison set), but the number of examples is small. At the other end of the visual spectrum are verse columns that are noticeably tall and thin (exhibiting a width to height ratio of 1:2). This group is, like the first group, almost entirely from the second century, but, unlike the first group, contains no fine scripts and a large proportion of substandard examples. It seems reasonable to infer that, at least in the second century, noticeably short and wide verse columns had particular cachet, whereas a tall and rather narrow verse column seems to have had an inelegant feel. Note too how these conventional associations differ from those attaching to prose columns, where, for example, short columns of especial narrowness were the height of elegance in the second century. The fairly rich set of Ptolemaic examples in the comparison sample is for the most part evenly distributed among the various formats (see table 3.5B). An exception may be the tall and thin group (with a width to height ratio of 1:2), which contains a striking group of early Ptolemaic Homeric texts, all written in unexceptional hands. The group is surprising, since (1) the long hexameter line means that the script must be exceptionally compact and the column height exceptionally tall for the 1:2 ratio to obtain; which dovetails with a second observation: (2) tall column height (of over 21 cm) is generally avoided among Ptolemaic texts, and in fact these six examples constitute most of the tall Ptolemaic columns in the sample.That tall and thin Homeric texts are a distinct and deliberate design type seems, then, very likely. In summary, then, the column-to-column block of verse texts seems less well defined than the column block of prose texts. Still, at the extremes, some tendencies are definable: (1) oblong columns where the width exceeds the height are strongly associated with elegant manuscripts, especially of the second century; (2) the converse case, where the verse column is noticeably tall and thin, is associated with inelegant manuscripts in the second century; (3) that same case, oftall and thin columns, seems however commonly chosen as a design for unexceptional Homeric manuscripts in early Ptolemaic times. 3.5 Upper and Lower Margins Upper and lower margins are a vexed topic, more so than seems generally recognized. The extremities of a papyrus fragment are almost always broken, and the researcher will find it difficult to decide which edges are original and which are not. Even a clean edge might be the result of later trimming, particularly if the text shows signs of reuse, I have used as guides the following considerations: (1) extent of a (more or less) continuous edge, (2) recurrence of a given depth over more than one column, and (3) a clean, apparently original, edge with the topmost (or lowest) horizontal fibre unbroken (this last is rare, and can only be applied where the papyrus has not been reused). At the end of table 3.3 I set

Upper and Lower Margins

131

out more specifically the criteria I have used in deciding whether a given margin is fairly certainly, probably, or possibly complete (in the tables, probably complete margins are marked with '?/ possibly complete with '??'). The criteria are conservatively applied; time and again I question a margin that the editor assumed to be full, and in the end only three papyri from the Oxyrhynchus sample (and seven from the comparison set) are allowed as certain examples where top and bottom edge both remain intact. Even so the judgments will be decidedly fallible, and I offer here a couple of examples to help the reader feel the problem more keenly. The intermittent upper margin of 844 Isoc, Pan. measures as follows: 844 col. 7 col. 8 col. 9

3.1 cm 3.2 cm 3.1 cm

col. 10 col. 29

3.0 cm 3.2 cm

Now had these columns been the only ones preserved, I would have marked down 3.0-3.2 cm as the probable upper margin. As it happens, though, other columns survive whose upper margins measure as follows: 844, col. 1 col. 31

4.4 cm 4.0 cm

col. 32 col. 47

4.3 cm 4.0 cm

I consequently believe, but cannot even now be certain, that the full upper margin was probably closer to 4.0—4.4 cm. Even more disquieting is the example of 3663 It. Here one finds, in column 6, a lower margin of 3.4 cm fairly continuous over a 9-cm extent, and, in column 7, a 3.0-cm margin over fully 11 cm. It might seem safe to conclude a probable lower margin of somewhat over 3 cm for this papyrus. In column 12, however, I measure a margin of 4.1 cm. The evidence for margins is therefore even more uncertain than usual, and, as it is also less bountiful, one must be extremely careful. Still, I do believe that the 'certain' and 'probable' categories are generally very probable indeed. As there are questions one would dearly like to answer, I will at least make the attempt. The first question concerns the commonly held view that the lower margin is uniformly greater than the upper in a well-written roll.43 Some editors have also seen fit to invoke the 2:3 rule of upper to lower margin advanced by Turner as a rough guide to the margins of codices.44 I have argued on aesthetic grounds that such a transference is

43 E.g., Kenyon 1951,60; Lameere 1960,134-5. 44 E.g., the editors of 3550 and 4028 (in both cases inappropriately, as the margins are not intact).This principle is unfortunately sometimes invoked in reconstruction of the roll height.

132

Formal Characteristics of the Bookroll

unfounded (§3.0). What does the evidence show? (See chart 3.5a.) Now only three of the Oxyrhynchus examples are confidendy held to be intact at top and bottom. Of these, two (233 Demosth. in Tim., 2101 Xen. Cyr. (plate 8), the former written on the back of a document) show a lower margin that is larger than the upper margin, though neither is very close to the proportion 2:3 (one is 6:7, the other 3:4). The other secure example (2102+P7wraer 7 PI. Phdr.) has a lower margin that is smaller than the upper. If we consider examples where an intact upper and lower margin is at least very probable, ten examples have a larger lower margin, and three do not. None of the examples, however, shows a ratio under 7:10. Spreading the net wider to include all possible examples shows a similar distribution (the lower margin is larger for 18, not for 7). The comparison set shows the same tendencies: 4 of 10 examples have a lower margin of same or greater size than the upper, all as it happens Ptolemaic and all certainly intact; only 2 examples, neither certain, show a ratio under 7:10. Note also that several very handsome rolls appear to have a lower Chart 3.5a Ratio o f upper t o lower margin (The list includes all rolls where the full roll height is possibly (*??'), probably ('?') or definitely extant; the percentages give, respectively, the ratio of upper to lower margin and the ratio of column height to roll height. Under 'r/v* texts marked with V are those written on the verso, and texts marked with 'r x' are recto texts whose verso was later reused.)

POxy

Contents

r/v

Column height (cm)

Upper margin

Lower margin

Upper + lower

Col. + roll ht.

1. Oxyrhynchus sample, 25 examples 4047+4051

Aeschines

13.2

1.8(??)

3.1(B)

58%

73%

0021

Riad

15.8

1.5(r?)

2.5(2)

60%

80%

0230

Demosthenes

24.2

1.4(??)

2.2.(11)

64%

87%

2100+3891+ 4109

Thucydides

18.5

3.9(?)

5.6(2)

70%

66%

4030

Aeschines

1.9(??)

2.7(??)

70%

80%

2101

Xenophon

16.2

3.9

5.3

74%

64%

2223

Euripides

16.2

2.8(?)

3.8

74%

71%

3882+

Thucydides

*18.2

3,1