From jfgannon@cloud9.net Sun Sep 17 18:05:44 2000 Received: from mxu4.u.washington.edu (mxu4.u.washington.edu [140.142.33.8]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW00.05/8.9.3+UW99.09) with ESMTP id SAA122796 for ; Sun, 17 Sep 2000 18:05:43 -0700 Received: from russian-caravan.cloud9.net (russian-caravan.cloud9.net [168.100.1.4]) by mxu4.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW00.02/8.9.3+UW99.09) with ESMTP id SAA13706 for ; Sun, 17 Sep 2000 18:05:43 -0700 Received: from cloud9.net (jfgannon.dialup.cloud9.net [168.100.203.180]) by russian-caravan.cloud9.net (Postfix) with ESMTP id 4B8397634E for ; Sun, 17 Sep 2000 21:05:03 -0400 (EDT) Message-ID: <39C56A38.1ACB9827@cloud9.net> Date: Sun, 17 Sep 2000 21:04:56 -0400 From: "J.F. Gannon" X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.7 [en] (Win95; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: classics@u.washington.edu Subject: Re: pigeon hole legend References: <200009171927.PAA25906@ccat.sas.upenn.edu> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Thucydides presents an interesting instance. The author seems to have written a preliminary "unit" that corresponds to our book 1 and then organized his material in units that correspond to years. Our mediaeval tradition shows a grouping that after the first unit, which it treats as book 1, combines the author's annual units into larger combinations to make our books 2-8. These "books" are not really logical units. This arrangement can hardly have anything to do with the physical requirements of the mediaeval codex. It must have preceded it. It does suggest the intervention of an editorial activity interested in groupings into convenient lengths that are at least partially independent of content. The arranger did not ignore the division into years but also did not make it the sole basis of his arrangment. Otherwise there would have been a book for each year. Not did he group closely related units together where that would have produced a book of great length, say by combining the contents of 6 and 7. But there is no way of telling how many rolls Thucydides used to record his work originally. One might also consider Plato's Republic. The division into ten books is not really based on content and cannot go back to a Platonic arrangement into subdivisions justifiable by content, nor can it depend on the requirements of the codex. What is it based on? The obvious answer is convenience for reproduction and readership of the Republic as for Thucydides' work. But multiple divisions, all fairly convenient, would still have been possible. Perhaps a famous library grouping had an influence and let to uniformity by influencing reader's expectations and thus the manufacturers of books. Consider the apparent influence of Aristarchus on the text of Homer as to the number of verses in each book if not as to the division of books. J.F. Gannon David Lupher wrote: > Mike Sullivan writes: > >I had thought that the length of "books" was determined by the reasonable > >lenght of one papyrus roll. That is, that too long a roll was just too > >unwieldy. A variation of Jim's explanation. Are there any ancient sources? > > Of course! "Mega biblion, mega kakon." Callimachus. > > By the way, this prompts me to float a question I have about a statement > made by the estimable John Gould on p. 2 of his useful book "Herodotus" > (St. Martins, 1989): "As some point after his death, preferably in the > altogether different world that followed the death of Alexander the > Great in 323 B.C., Herodotus' narrative was divided into nine 'books,' > and these in turn into sections and subsections..." > > Am I misreading Gould, or is he suggesting that a 5th or 4th century > "edition" of Herodotus' book---"longer, almost certainly, that anything > else yet written in the world" (James Romm, "Herodotus," Yale Press, > 1998, p. xv.)---would have been loaded onto one humongous, lap-breaking > roll? Why does Gould assume that only in the "altogether different" > Hellenistic world would long works have been divided up into several > rolls ("books")? Were Hellenistic laps more delicate than classical > ones? I'm not disputing the standard claim that the naming of > the Herodotean "books" after the Muses is quite late---Roman period, > acc. to Romm, p. 10. I'm just wondering about Gould's apparent > contention that the (or a) division of "ta Herodotou" (Aristotle's > name for the whole work: Poet. 1451b---when was "Historiai" first > attested as the name of the book?) did not occur until well over > a century after Herodotus' death. > > Rummaging around books within reach, I've just found Gould's assumption > stated more fully, along with a handy statement of the "convenience" > theory of the length of papyrus rolls, on p. 47 of Harry Y. Gamble's > excellent book "Books and Readers in the Early Church: A History of > Early Christian Texts" (Yale, 1995): > The length of a papyrus book roll (as distinct from the > standard unit of manufacture) was to some extent variable, > with a mean of seven to ten meters. Short works took less > space, but the upper limit was rarely transgressed. The > maximum length was a function not of manufacture, since rolls > of any length could be constructed, but of convenience to the > reader. A roll of more than ten or eleven meters was too > cumbersome for the reader to handle....The ordinary length > came to be closely prescribed by custom. In the Hellenistic > period and later, the subdivision of extensive works of > literature into books (tomoi, libri) was determined as much > by the conventional length of the book roll as by considerations > of content. Older long works (such as those of Herodotus, > Thucydides, and Homer) had divisions imposed on them, and > authors of long new works made their own divisions by taking > the customary length of rolls into account. Thus the physical > unit of the roll tended to function also as a literary unit. > > Gamble cites here two articles I don't have handy: F.G. Kenyon, "Book > Divisions in Greek and Latin Literature," in "William Warner Bishop: > A Tribute," ed. H.M. Lyndenberg & A. Keogh (Yale, 1941), 63-75, and > John van Sickle, "The Book-Roll and Some Conventions of the Poetic > Book," "Arethusa" 13 (1980): 5-42. Does either Kenyon or van Sickle > provide evidence that the "standard" size of the papyrus roll was > fixed only in the Hellenistic period? And does either suggest what > a copy of the "Iliad" or the works of Herodotus or Thucydides would > have looked like ca. 400 B.C.? > > David Lupher > Classics Dept. > Univ. of Puget Sound .