Homeric scholarship is the study of any Homeric topic, especially the two large surviving epics, the Iliad and Odyssey. It is currently part of the academic discipline of classical studies. The subject is one of the oldest in education.
Ancient scholarship
Scholia
Scholia are ancient commentaries, preserved in the margins of manuscripts. The term marginalia includes them. Some are interlinear, written in very small characters. Over time the scholia were copied along with the work. When the copyist ran out of free text space, he listed them on separate pages or in separate works. The works of Homer have been heavily annotated since antiquity. The number of manuscripts of the Iliad is currently (2014) approximately 1800. The papyri of the Odyssey are fewer in number but are still in the order of dozens. The inventory is incomplete, and new finds continue to be made, but not all these texts contain scholia. No compendium has collated all of the Homeric scholia. Following the principle of economy for the allocation of scarce publication space to overwhelming numbers of scholia, the compilers have had to make decisions about what is important enough to compile. Certain types have been distinguished; scholia have lines of descent of their own. Eleanor Dickey summarizes the most important three, identified by letter as A, bT, and D.
A, "the Venetian scholia", are the scholia of Venetus A, a major manuscript of the Iliad, dated to the 10th century, and located in the Biblioteca Marciana (Library of St. Mark's) of Venice. The sources of the scholia are noted at the end of each book. There are basically four. The hypothetical original text of the scholia, a manuscript of the 4th century CE, is therefore called, in German, the Viermännerkommentar (VMK), "four-man commentary", where the men are Aristonicus, Didymus, Herodian, and Nicanor. Their comments, and these scholia, are termed "critical". A-scholia are found in other manuscripts as well. Venetus A contains some bT scholia. The bT-scholia have come down to us through two sources: the 11th century T, the "Townleian" scholia, so designated because the manuscript, Townleyanus, was once in the collection of Lord Townley, and a lost manuscript, b, whose descendants include the manuscript known as Venetus B. The bT manuscripts descend from an earlier manuscript, c. The bT-scholia are termed exegetical, as opposed to critical. The D scholia, or scholia Didymi, named erroneously for Didymus, are the earliest and largest group. They occur primarily in the 9th century Z manuscript (Rome, Biblioteca Nazionale), and the 11th century Q manuscript, but also in some others, such as A and T. The D scholia were once thought to be the work of the 1st century BCE scholar Didymus; they are now known to go back to 5th and 4th century BCE school manuscripts, pre-dating the Alexandrine tradition, and representing “the oldest surviving stratum of Homeric scholarship.” Some are also called the scholia minora and the scholia vulgata, the former name referring to the short length of many. These are glossaries. Among the non-minor scholia are mythological (allegorical) aetia, plots, and paraphrases, explaining the meanings of obscure words. The order of precedence and chronological order of these Iliad scholia is D, A, bT, and other. Material in them probably ranges from the 5th century BCE (the D scholia) to as late as the 7th or 8th century CE (the latest bT scholia). The same scheme applies to the Odyssey, except that A scholia, mainly of the Iliad, are in deficit. There are no printed works publishing all the scholia on the Iliad and Odyssey. Only partial publications according to various principles have been possible. The first was that of Janus Lascaris in 1517, containing the D-scholia. Some subsequent works concentrate on manuscripts or parts of them, others on type of scholia, and still others on books of the Iliad, or source. Larger compendia are relatively recent. One that has already become a standard is the 7-volume compendium of A- and bT-scholia by Hartmut Erbse. Volumes 1–5 are reserved for a number of books of the Iliad each, amounting to some 3000 pages, approximately. The last two volumes are indices. And yet, Dickey says of it. “The seven volumes of Erbse’s edition thus represent only a small fraction of all the preserved scholia ...,” from which it can be seen that the opinions, elucidations and emendations to the Iliad and Odyssey in manuscript texts far outweigh those texts in numbers of pages.
Classical scholarship By the Classical Period the Homeric Question had advanced to the point of trying to determine what works were attributable to Homer. The Iliad and the Odyssey were beyond question. They were considered to have been written by Homer. The D-scholia suggest that they were taught in the schools; however, the language was no longer self-evident. The extensive glossaries of the D-scholia were intended to bridge the gap between the spoken language and Homeric Greek. The poems themselves contradicted the general belief in the existence and authorship of Homer. There were many variants, which there should not have been according to the single-author conviction. The simplest answer was to decide which of the variants was most likely to represent a presumed authentic original composition and to discount the others as spurious, devised by someone else.
Peisistratean edition
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