(Translating) the Scholia to the Iliad

[Music] Welcome to Lesky, a podcast on new ideas in Ancient Greek Studies. I'm your host, Johanna Hanank, and I'm a Classicist at Brown University. Scolia are dense, tiny, sprawling, ancient and medieval notes that him and the manuscript margins of our classical texts. Scolia seem to occupy a kind of strange hidden and plain sight space in the field. These notes are sometimes our most direct link to how the ancient themselves read the same text that we study, and yet we rarely teach students how to use and access them. By the time you hit grad school, you're somehow expected to know what they are, why they matter, and how to read them. But in reality, none of this is very intuitive, and a lot of it can be overwhelming and frustrating. When I was in graduate school, just starting my dissertation work, a book came out that made all this kind of information much more accessible. Eleanor Dickie's 2007 Ancient Greek Scholarship, a guide to finding, reading, and understanding Scolia commentaries, lexica and grammatical treatises from their beginnings to the Byzantine period. That book does just what it says on the tin. It serves as an in-road to the complex ancient scholarly traditions and provides practical advice about how to access them, right down to the standard editions. I remember that when I mentioned to one of my advisors how helpful I found Dickie's book, he agreed and noted with some awe that it was a remarkably altruistic work. In other words, Dickie had done a great service to the field, and especially to its younger practitioners like me, by offering an actual road map into these traditions. My guest for this episode, Bill Beck, has now also produced a remarkably altruistic work of scholarship. Bill is a member of a team that has a contract to produce a multi-volume translation of the Scolia to the first 12 books of the Iliad. Bill's translation of the Scolia to Books 1 and 2 has recently appeared, and it's going to be an immensely useful resource for classes of all levels of experience, and for scholars in other fields whose work brings them into contact with the ancient scholarly traditions. Bill's own volume contains a lengthy introduction that surveys the general lay of the land when it comes to the Homeric Scolia, and in this episode you're going to be hearing him explain just what the different kinds of Scolia are, what kinds of material they comment on, and what sorts of idiosyncrasies they have, at least from our perspective as modern readers of the Iliad. He'll also be letting us in on the unique challenges of translating Scolia, challenges that are quite a bit different from those of translating the Homeric poems themselves. By the way, if you are, however interested in hearing more about the world of Homeric translation, let me just flag that we do have two Lesky episodes dedicated to it. Season 1, Episode 6, translating the Iliad with Emily Wilson, and Season 1, Episode 15, translating the Odyssey with Daniel Mendelssohn. Those, incidentally, are two of the podcasts most downloaded episodes. Bill Beck is an assistant professor of classical studies at Indiana University. He has research focuses on our Kate Greek epic and ancient Homeric scholarship. He is the co-editor of the ancient Scolia to Homer's Iliad, exegesis and interpretation, which came out with Oxford in 2021, and the author of the ancient Scolia to Homer's Iliad, a translation volume one, which appeared with Cambridge in 2025. He is currently completing a monograph on the Iliad's representation of the first nine years of the Trojan War, provisionally entitled "10 Years in Troy" 51 Days at Ilios, the Iliad in the Trojan War. Just a quick note that I've put some references in the show notes for this episode, and yet another brief reminder that Lesky is on Instagram at Lesky Podcast, which is where I post announcements of new episodes, so consider giving us a follow there. Now, I'd like to welcome into the Lesky Bill Beck. The next voice you'll be hearing is his. I was writing a dissertation on the Iliad, and I was interested in sort of the critical history of two ideas. I was interested in a lot, sort of, too much in my dissertation, but at the time I was looking at two ideas. One of them was this idea that Achilles's absence from long structures of the poem is a construction problem for the plot. I was also interested in this idea that the question of what was happening for the first nine years of the war, and I was looking at the critical history of both of these questions, and that took me to the, you know, through all sorts of American scholarship, it took me to the analysts, and then I thought if I'm going to go back 200 years, maybe I'll go back even further. And so I became aware of the Scalia, and started digging into them, and I pretty quickly realized I didn't really know what I was looking at. I wasn't sure of the date of a lot of the material I was looking at. I wasn't sure how, with the related to one another, I wasn't sure of its transmission history. And so, sort of the further I got into my dissertation, even though I really didn't have very much to do with the Scalia at all, the more interested I became in the Scalia as a phenomenon. And when I tried to learn more about it, I found that most of the studies that were available were quite specialized. To an extent that I found sort of difficult, you know, as a graduate student, difficult for me to get a handle on what I was dealing with. Especially because, you know, this wasn't my primary research area. I was writing a dissertation that had meant hands full already. So I was sort of looking for something quick to just give me a sort of a guide through to Scalia, and I wasn't exactly finding that. So I thought, you know, the best way to get to grips with this corpus would be to translate it. And obviously that was not something I could do just on the side while writing my dissertation. I mean, I did, in graduate school, I had some wonderful colleagues and we were able to put together a little reading group of Scalia in breaks from dissertation writing. But, you know, that didn't last. It didn't get us too far through the corpus. But so I applied for a full-bright working with Eleanor Dickey, who was so supportive of this project and really, really helpful in all phases of it. And very fortunate to get that. Went to the UK for a year, worked on the translation to book one of the Scalia. Completed that, and at that point, Eleanor told me, you know, you should really apply for a, you know, you should really write a proposal for a contract. So I did that and in the process of writing the proposal and dealing with the, talking with the editor, I realized that other people where I was, I was living in Oxford at the time. And Adrian Kelly, Oliver Thomas and Tom Phillips, had already had a plan to produce a translation of the Scalia to the Eleanor. So Eleanor put me in touch with them. And then the result of that was that we were, the four of us were going to team up to translate the first four books, the Scalia to the first four books of the Eleanor, which to my, she granted the time, meant that I was going to have to translate not just book one, but the second book of the Scalia. And I thought, I don't know when I'm going to find the time to do this because I need to finish my dissertation, et cetera. But then I went to Athens for two years on fellowships at the American School, finished the Scalia to book two. And so I was able to do the bulk of the work, sort of in my graduate years, and then coming back to it recently to finally revise it. So now, yeah, where Adrian Kelly was involved in the first volume, he's now stepped aside, I think he has many, many other projects. And we've brought in Charlie Baker, who's finishing his D-Phil at Oxford right now. And so the four of us will have a contract to produce the first four volumes, which will take us through the first 12 books of the Eleanor. I do want to keep working on the Scalia beyond that, but I think we'll sort of sit tight to let the other volumes come out first. Yeah, that makes sense. It kind of reminds me. I mean, what you're saying about the time investment, it's sort of like this idea that you get into cities that you can't just have a developer navy on the side. It sort of leaves you, in fact, it leaves you no room to do anything else at all. Yeah, so then what I found with this, yeah. Yeah, I can imagine. Well, could you, for the listeners, maybe begin by just explaining since you, as you noted, it is hard to dip your toe into the Scalia. And they will say that Eleanor Deke's volume on the transmission of ancient texts and the scholarly, ancient scholarly apparatus around the text is probably, you know, is a hugely helpful resource for people who are looking to start here. But maybe you could just say a few words about what this corpus or what these corpora look like when we say the Scalia, what are we, what are we even talking about? Yeah, so a couple of ways of answering that. So I guess the most basic answer is that the Scalia that we have are, you can think about how they're presented on the page and how we actually have them today. We have them primarily as marginal and interlinear comments on medieval manuscripts of the Iliad, but the more important factor that we're generally concerned with is their origins of the Scalia and how they come onto those places in the manuscripts. And these, when we're talking about Scalia, typically we're talking about extracts of ancient scholarship that are compiled in antiquity or in late antiquity. It compiled again and again and again and eventually transmitted a Scalia in the manuscripts that we have. So for the Iliad Scalia, there are a couple of ways of breaking them up. I talk about this in the introduction, but you can break them up just basically by age. So we have the Scalia, Ricanthiora or basically Scalia from the Byzantine period, especially 10th century onwards. Or the Scalia Vettera, the old Scalia, which is Scalia that has roots in antiquity. And those terms are very vague, which can be useful and a little bit confusing as well. But for the school. of Vettara, which is the scolia that I work with. Typically, they're also broken down in terms of the sort of scolia. So we have scolia myora, the greater scolia, which generally refers to the so-called grammatical scolia. And then there's the scolia minora, which generally refers to the D scolia. And I'll talk about each of these in a second. But scolia myora, this is what Aerobsa in his seven-volume addition of the scolia is editing. And this has two components. There's what's known as the VMK, which is from a German acronym for the format and commentary. And then there's the exegentical class of scolia. The format and commentary basically consists of four, a compilation of four scholars from the between the first century BC and the second century CE. All of whom were very important in establishing the constitution of the Herald text. This exegentical scolia are a compilation of two or three, perhaps more, commentaries of their quote unquote exegentical nature. So these are our commentaries that are interested primarily not in what is the reading of the text, but what does the text mean? Why is the text saying this? What is the motivation for the character to do this, etc? So the more literary critical that we might think of it in that way. The kinds of questions that I think most readers tend to be interested in is provided by the exegentical scolia. Whereas if you're a textual critic, you definitely want to go to the VMK or this format and commentary. The other branch is the scolia myora, which is also sometimes referred to as the D scolia. And the D scolia is another compilation that has all these different component parts coming from different places and different times. So the base of the D scolia is the glossary of the home-americ poem, which is to say they go through nearly every word of the Iliad and tell you it's Coenay equivalent. These are really interesting because you can see that it has roots in the ancient, like the classical classroom where that's how you're learning, you know, you're learning how to parse the Iliad is the way that you're learning language. So we have the glossary. We have a collection of Zetemata, so literary critical questions about the Iliad. You know, why is the word mainist, the first word of the poem? Why does crises curse the trotions? These kinds of questions. And then you have the mythographist, home-americist, is the writer of a writer who tries to explain all the mythological references in the Iliad. So that gets incorporated into this compilation. And then we have the hypotheses, the summaries of all the books of the Iliad. So summoning the antiquity takes all those component parts together and puts them into a new compilation that becomes the basis of the D scolia. So one of the things that makes the scolia difficult is just we're looking at so many different sources from so many different time periods and in the process of compilation a lot changes and a lot of these things get fused together and mixed around. So it makes it a little bit difficult to figure out what's why. What is the earliest scholarship that seems to be absorbed into this tradition? The earliest scholarship that leaves a real impression on a scolia is probably that of synodatives of Ephesus. So this is the producer of one of the first critical editions of the Iliad. Unfortunately, he didn't leave a commentary with his editions. So all we have is his edition with the critical sign that he invented to attend that edition and that was the obelisk, so a little line. And that line is used to represent verses that he didn't believe belonged in the text. So synodatives is chief librarian of Library of Alexandria in the third century BC. But I mean going back a little bit further we hear of the texts of the editions of Rihanna's of Crete or Intimic As of Caliphon. But there are such shadowy figures in terms of what we hear about them in their editions or their texts of the Iliad. And then I suppose the oldest component of the scolia you could regard as the glossographic component of the D scolia. So all of those synodatives basically that are being provided because those have early roots. But I think the version that we have is certainly inflicted by a later compiler as well. So in terms of the foreman commentary, the DMK, Aristarchus is not one of the foreman, but he's clearly important for that tradition. Could you say a little bit about Aristarchus and his home Eric scholarship? Yeah, so Aristarchus is the big name that I've certainly left out. So he sort of looms behind the VMK. So and you can get a sense of that if you look into what are the specific sources of the VMK that we have. So the earliest to our Didamus and Ariston Icus. And so Didamus writes a work called on the Aristarchian recension. So he's just looking at the editions of Aristarchus on the Iliad and the Odyssey and he's saying why what are the choices that Aristarchus made and how do those relate to other editions that we have. Aristonicus has a work called on their critical signs of the Iliad and the Odyssey. So what he's doing there is he's looking at Aristarchus as commentaries and he's explaining why Aristarchus made certain annotations in his text. So those two are huge sources for us for our ability to recreate Aristarchus' scholarship which we do not have surviving in its original form. And then we have Nick and Orr who writes a text on the punctuation of Homer. And he's sort of coming from the school of Aristarchus but not exactly Aristarchian in the sense of Didamus and Aristonicus. And then Herodian is the fourth component and he works on the accentuation and pronunciation of the Homeric text. Yeah, actually I have a question about Nick and Orr which is that I was just struck in your introduction by this line where you mentioned that Nick and Orr worked in the field of punctuation. And he got this, a lot of these guys have these wonderful nicknames including Didamus of course but in the case of Nick and Orr his work in the punctuation studies earns him this nickname, Ostigmatias, the punctuator. Could you maybe explain to me a little bit, why is punctuation such a big deal? Yeah, that's a good question. It's a big deal in ways that I found out when working on the translation because I feel like we're so used to our edited texts that we can forget all of the ambiguities that are possible if you're reading a text that has no punctuation and potentially no spaces, no work divisions. But when you're looking at the Iliad through the eyes of one of these critics, you're alive to all sorts of possibilities of meaning and implications that you want to avoid. So I can't really think of very specific examples but there are certain cases where if you don't put a comma here, you could have a certain implication that speaks very negatively toward Agamemnon or just giving the wrong impression of something or I mean probably the most important case is if you think of the problem to the Iliad and you think of the phrase de Astre Tilea Tabule and the Will of Zeus was fulfilled. The question is how do we take that right? Do we take that with the preceding line or the preceding part of the line in which humans are being made into food for animals? Is that the Will of Zeus being fulfilled or do we have to take it with what goes next? Zeus is well was being fulfilled from the time when Achilles and Agamemnon began to quarrel. That's a matter of punctuation. It's also obviously a matter of interpretation but the editor by punctuating the text to certain way gets to decide how we will be disposed to take that passage. So these four men of the VMK commentary or the VMK tradition here, they're working between Alexandria and Rome are our main centers of scholarship. So how then does their work get picked apart and constituted as school year? Like at what point do we think that people are going to like these various commentaries monographs and then annotating the text around the page in this way? This is a big question that I don't have a precise answer to. I think some point between the fourth and sixth century is most likely that people that someone is wanting to compile all the major works of textual criticism, especially going back to Aristarchus on the Iliad and so they choose these four authors which makes sense. I mean it covers the editions of Aristarchus, the commentaries of Aristarchus, and then punctuation and accentuation. So they compile all of those works together some point maybe fifth, sixth century CE into another sort of super compilation and then that becomes the basis from one of the core components of the school year. So is the transition from scroll or roll to codex an important part of that story? Do you think or is that incitement? I will say almost certainly it is but I do not have an knowledge to answer that. Well could you also maybe say a few words about what do we find on papyrus in terms of this kind of scholarship? Yeah so we find some really interesting things on papyrus for the way that they relate to our what we have in the school year. So we have a papyrus from I think now is it the fifth century CE that seems to be basically any abridged version of one of the sources of the exegetical school year that's showing us that the exegetical school year which are likely coming from commentaries written in the first to fourth century CE we really can't be very precise but one of those commentaries is in circulation in the fifth century and being extracted and sort of summarized as a separate commentary that circulated on Papyrus. We also have commentaries on Papyrus, both just whole text commentaries and also commentaries that are marginal alongside the text of the Iliad from the first, second, third centuries BC and beyond, telling us about the scholarship of Aristarchus. So one of the commentaries that I translate in the translation is clearly-- is very engaged with the scholarship of Aristarchus specifically is talking about it, what he has in his editions, what he says in his commentaries. So it's not exactly related to the sources of our schoolia, but you can see clearly a relation between them. So when you're writing, copying, and manuscript, it seems like it's kind of an easier project logistically in some ways to add little annotations around the side, then it is with a printed book. But could you maybe say a little bit about the history of printed editions of schoolia in modernity? Sure. So yeah, this really begins in 1788 with the first printed edition of the Venergist A and the Venergist B. So the-- the Venergist A or A is our best witness to the VMK schoolia, and the Venergist B is one of the main witnesses, especially to the exogetical schoolia. So when this comes out in 1788, this is a huge deal for the history of Homeric scholarship, largely because of the way that especially a scholarly like FA wolf responds to it. And for him, I mean, we might talk about this a little bit later, but for wolf, the schoolia are a really important insight into the ability of the ancient critics, and he regards that as-- he doesn't hold them in very high regard. And also about the state of our text in antiquity. And for him, this is further confirmation that these texts were highly unstable as how he sees them. And so he has-- I think he refers to them as-- he says the ancient critics disagree to an extraordinary extent on the Constitution of the text. From my perspective-- so if we're looking into the question of what the schoolia can tell us about the text of the Iliad, there are sort of two perspectives on this going back from wolf. The perspective of the hardcore oralist would be that what we see in the schoolia, the variations that we see there, the variants, are the last gasp of the oral-- tradition of oral composition and performance that when we see variations in wording or in case or would have you, that those are evidence of the final stage of oral composition. For another scholar, maybe a more textually inclined scholar like myself, I see this as kind of the opposite as sort of the indication of the remarkable stability of the text by the early Hellenistic period. And when I think about the question of the textual stability of the Iliad, I as a sort of a dated reference. But I sometimes think of the-- maybe five, 10 years ago, there was that internet phenomenon of the dress of two different colors as it blew or as it gold. And I feel like scholars of different persuasions see the textual variability attested to by the Iliad, by the Iliad schoolia, rather. And some of them will say this shows clearly that the poem was being performed in composition orally to a quite a late date, whereas other scholars would say the exact opposite, looking at the exact same evidence. And it just shows you the different lens the rich scholars are looking at these texts. And as with the dress, people don't really tend to change their opinion. Exactly. Yeah. Different lenses. So what, then, in terms of modern editions of the schoolia, what is your source text that you're working with? What is the edition that you translated from? So I worked with Hartmut Erebs' seven volume edition of the schoolia myora. And so what he's trying to do there is reproduce the archetypes of two branches of manuscripts. He's trying to reproduce the archetype of the Vennitus A. And he's trying to reproduce the archetype of BT. So the B manuscripts and the T manuscripts and the archetype, he calls C. So he's trying, in his edition, is trying to get back to those archetypes. I, in our team, we also wanted to sort of go a bit beyond Erebsa because Erebsa understandably is volume is 3,000 pages long. He had to be a little bit selective. So he cut out almost all of the D-scolia. And we wanted to bring some of that in, but of course, it doesn't make sense to translate all of the D-scolia because most of it is glossaries. And you can't translate two synonyms into English, very effectively. So we cut that out, but we brought in all of the schoolia from the mythographies of America's and most of the Zaita meta. So in the translation, even if something isn't in the main text, I usually have put it in the footnote. And so for the D-scolia, I'm largely using the addition of Vantiel. What were the principles that you agreed upon as a team for how your translation would actually look on the page? Because it seems like there were probably a lot of choices that went into that. There were so many choices. And I would say we met several times, and we always made ground rules that as soon as we made them, I then broke, because I found one of the main struggles with this was just trying to be consistent, because you can try to make a rule. But then you realize actually the reader really needs to see this or really needs to know this. Or this has to be shown in Greek. There needs to be a footnote here. I would say, yeah, that was one of the biggest struggles in dealing with the translation is just trying to stay consistent because for my own sanity, for our own sanity, I think we wanted to just have certain ground rules. We're always going to do this this way. But in practice, there was very, very hard to hold on to. So there was a lot of dialogue with the members of the editorial team. But unfortunately, it was always a case-by-case basis. Well, could you say maybe a bit about also your principles of translation? What was your strategy? What kind of register were you going for? I think of these translations, sort of schools of thought, about fornication versus domestication, and how naturally are you trying to render this or how much are you trying to keep some sense of word order of the original-- those kinds of things. What were some of the principles of translation? Yeah, it's difficult because the school is not trying to be an elegant text. So it's hard to translate it a text that's meant for people with a lot of background knowledge. It's hard to reproduce that in a way that is intelligible. One thing I really did struggle with was the way to translate the homeic text itself. Because often, in English, we're not going to reproduce every single word in the Iliad, every aura or a day or a te, or any of these particles. However, in the school, they're often talking about just a singular particle. And so you have to translate that. You give the Greek as well. But generally, you want to show what they're talking about to an audience that might not have Greek. So it means that I had to be super literal when translating Homer to a degree that I didn't love. But nobody's coming to me for a translation of the Iliad. That's obviously not why they're reading this. So I thought, it's OK for me to be overly literal there. With the school itself, I think a lot of my translation practice changed dramatically over the course of my time working on it. When I started, I was a graduate student. And I think my translation reflected that in many ways, because I was eager to show. The audience from my translation from the very beginning was Ellen Ordicki in that I was presenting her drafts. And wanted-- she really didn't know me very well, of course, at the start of it. And so I wanted to prove to her that I knew every single word and knew how the octet of works and how the subtractive works and all of that. And so I was overly literal in the beginning. And of course, I moved away from that. And so draft, or draft, or draft, or draft, I really actually just needs to be readable to the primary focus there. And I think in general, the audience I had in mind was a graduate or undergraduate student who wouldn't necessarily need to know Greek, but probably knows some Greek in order to make this useful to them. And all of my decisions were basically made with that audience in mind. But of course, inevitably, you have multiple audiences in mind all the time. That's I'm sure you've experienced. As you were translating, did you find yourself at any point-- I mean, feeling like you entered in a particular disagreement with what the school asked was saying? Oh, yeah. Absolutely. And that was another challenge is that sometimes they take words in very different ways from how we typically take them. So in the program, please. there's the verb proeopsin, which we would translate as heralds fourth or proeopto, and they translated as pro before and eopto to harm. So something that is harmed prematurely. So these heroes were sort of sent to 80s before they were tied, before they ought to have died. And of course, things like that present trial and challenges, because do I translate the lemma inaccurately? And if so, then I have to place a footnote, explaining like the word actually means something different, but this is how the critic is understanding it. So there's difficulties like that all the time, where the critics just understand, they're taking either their constrained words differently than we do. They're taking phrases together that we would take apart or vice versa. So you had disagreements, minor, and major all the time. In terms of the exogetical school, what we were talking about is the more literate critical school, the more, you know, that's how they might read tests today. What kind of major concerns do you see the school I asked having in those notes? Yeah, the exogetical school are really interesting because they seem to be interested in every aspect of interpretation. And one of the things I find fascinating about them is that they are willing to ask all sorts of questions, all sorts of questions that really wouldn't even occur to us, you know. Asking why about everything, you know, why does the Homer, why does Homer make this choice? Why does the character make this choice? And I think that often, you know, they can result in some fast-cil interpretations, but it often results in some really interesting ideas that really haven't occurred to me before in some cases. In general, they are very didactic in their orientation. So they're really wanting to teach their reader, or rather they're wanting to claim that Homer is an educator. And so, of course, there is this idea and antiquity that Homer is the educator of the Greeks. You know, he's the greatest poet and therefore the greatest educator. But I think the exogetical critics take this idea really seriously. And so, you know, I've gone through as much of the corpus as I can and tried to collect as many of the lessons on the text as I could. And they have over 300 lessons that they pull out from the Iliad and 250 of them are ethical lessons. So, you know, a major problem that interpreters of the Iliad dealt with for a long time is how do we make this poem that is, you know, extremely violent, full of impulsive characters? How do we make this conducive to the morality of, you know, our readers today? And one of the ways the exogetical scolid did that is, yeah, by sort of arguing positively for the didactic orientation of the text. So, every sort of detail you can imagine they're willing to pull out and say, "Homer is trying to show us something here." So, you know, the second death in the Iliad, the Greek who dies or a kin, who dies because he's bending down to dispoil the corpse of a capitalist. I think it is. And it says he bends down and exposes his ribs. And so then he gets killed as a result. And so, through this, Homer shows us that we should always be careful. So, you know, any opportunity to extract a lesson, they're going to take that. And they can also do that with negative example or rather a positive example. So, you know, if somebody prays successfully, this shows us the power of prayer. And so, yeah, they go through the text and just draw as much as many lessons as they possibly can. I know, I mean, I've worked with the tragic scolid a little bit. And I know that there, you get a lot of, like there's even particular symbols that they use in a tragedy when there's a referent to a sort of a part of a Homeric poem. And they pull in home or a lot there. But, you know, since these scholars are obviously, you know, like working in a, you know, later tradition and have awareness of these other texts, are they also thinking with, with other texts? Do they bring in parallels or illusions or anything from tragedy or anything else? Absolutely. They do. You know, so there's a lot of tragedy. Certainly there's a good bit of our, our staphonies. I'm thinking, though, that most of the time that I can think of when they're bringing in quotations, it's usually to show similarity or difference in usage. So, you know, they have this idea that, quote unquote, "addict authors omit lots of words." And so, Aristophanies will be their example for that. And so, they say, you know, if Homer is omitting words here, he's using an addict matter of speech. And then they'll quote Aristophanies to show that you don't need to actually, you can just sort of some words can be implied. So, are they using Aristophanies to think of as colloquial addorcism, basically? Exactly. Exactly. That's what I see it. Okay. One thing that also comes up is the interest or the commitment that the exegetical critics have to seeing a mimetic quality of the Homeric text, that Homer is matching his poetic form to the content of the poetry. Could you say a little bit about that interest of theirs? Yeah, I love this feature of the exegetical school. Yeah. So, one thing they'll, they like to point out is, yes, exactly this, that Homer is not just producing beautiful poetry, but he's also, you know, using his sounds, his rhythms, the word order to reproduce the content in some way, to sort of bring the world of the poem into the world of the reader more directly. And so, my favorite examples of this and sort of the most surprising to me at the time were with Tameezus. So, of course, and just various aspects of Homeric poetry, Homeric diction that we would just take to be, you know, a part of the oral tradition or sort of metrical convenience, things like that. So, for them, Tameezus always had the possibility to be mimetic in some way. So, if we have a simile, there's a simile where somebody butters an ox, and he's, the poets, is Tamee, Dia, rather than Dia, Tame. And so, they say, well, he's doing to the word exactly what the person in the simile is doing to the ox. Another case is where the Trojans are crossing the ditch in terror and fear of the Achaeans. And the Greek has Dia, and then in Greek the ditch and the stakes. And then it has Ebayson. So, instead of Dia Ebayson, they break up the constituent parts. And so, here they say, yeah, the words are being like thrown into confusion in the same way that the Trojans are thrown into confusion as they cross the ditch. We also see this with rhythm, or rather with meter. So, there's the most famous cases in per 12 when the Trojans are looking up at the sky and an eagle drops down a snake out of nowhere. And the snake is just arriving in front of them. And famously, that line ends once syllable to short, at least in our text it does. And so, the critics say, well, this is intentional. Homer is trying to cause consternation in the reader to reflect the consternation of the Trojans as seeing this arriving snake. So, you get all sorts of examples like that. We have it with just like, delectic rhythms. If something is moving quickly, they'll call attention to the fact that Homer is writing a delectic line to reproduce the speed. So, you know, I think this is something that critics are still interested in doing today is, you know, thinking about the sound quality of the idiot in the Odyssey and how that might be reproducing the content. But what we see in the exedetical school, yeah, is just that ratcheted up really, really to a strong degree. Kind of like he's like undergraduate close reading assignments for the absolutely. Yeah, so we will see a little iteration everywhere. Do you get any sense from the school of the personality of the scholars at all? Do we have any moments of something that might read is like sarcasm or humor or I remember from working on tragedy that there was kind of an idea that the story is going to be a little bit more interesting. Or is kind of an idea that did amiss was like a little bit grumpy. Do we get, do we really get any of that? I would say that for the scholars of the VMK, it's very hard to get a read on personality when they're really just saying, you know, this is the correct reading. And they don't really give a lot more than that. For the exedetical school, you know, obviously you can get more of a sense of the way that they're approaching a problem, the way they're thinking through the text, in the kinds of interest that they have. I mean, clearly the sources of the exedetical school, one of the things that are very interested in is piety. So most of the lessons they draw out from the Iliad are about proper worship of the gods. So clearly they're taking that very seriously. They praise Achilles every time he praises his use or when he listens to Athena, these are all lessons for us to be pious and to worship the gods correctly. Another thing there are at least some of these exedetical scholars are interested in is the superiority of the Greeks over the other nations certainly. And so that's one of the lessons they read into the Iliad that this is Greeks against barbarians, which is showing us the superiority of the Greeks in pretty much always. So I mean, you don't get a strong sense of their personality apart from what you might expect of a privileged man in the second century CE. Yeah, maybe I'm thinking more it's like a salty Irish monk thing on the lot inside. You know, maybe I have that in mind. Yeah, less like snark. Yeah, less of that certainly. Okay. Was there anything in reading this? So carefully with the care that that translation requires. Did you find your mind changed about anything, you know, in the Iliad, particularly books one and two, but maybe more broadly, even the Homeric poetry more broadly? I think certainly in small ways, the one that comes to mind would be in the beginning of book two. I guess I've never, I'm not sure actually what the critical consensus on Agamemnon's speech to the troops is in Iliad book two, but you know, certainly my reading on that had always been that Agamemnon is being shown there to be, to have a bad handle on his army and to be really misreading them. The critics, even though they're willing to be, they, you know, praise Agamemnon in various ways, they are also critical of him. They regard his speech to the troops. So this is, yeah, Iliad book two, Agamemnon gets the dream, telling him that he can take Iliad's now, and then he tells his advisors that he's going to tell the troops the opposite, and he wants them to restrain them if they flee. So then he gives the speech saying, you know, we all just need to go home. This is a lost cause. I've been to see it by Zeus. And the critics are very interesting for the way they read that speech because they're always looking for double meanings. And it reminds me of the way that we're more used to reading speeches in the Odyssey where, you know, when we see a Dizzy speaking in Nanasika, you realize he's sort of communicating two things at once, whether he's talking to a goddess or whether he's talking to a human girl. And in Agamemnon's speech, they're looking for these double meanings that on the surface, he's saying, let's go home. But he's not saying, let's go home, he's saying, let's flee. And therefore he's trying to show his troops. This would be a dishonorable choice. And so they go through the speech picking out those details that are showing us actually Agamemnon is really cleverly trying to get them to see that this is not the right move that they should actually want to stay. Which I'm not sure I entirely agree with it, but I think it's a very productive line of interpretation that Agamemnon actually has a decent rhetorical strategy rather than just a total misread of his army. And it's just that his army has failed to see his, you know, sort of double messaging. Earlier you were mentioning how the Skolia see this as a very tendentious poem in favor of the Greeks. Which is a reading, I think, that stands at odds with contemporary readings. But then also, you know, it's really interesting, this question of Agamemnon. I think Agamemnon, I think it came from even for me, just this semester where graduate students were saying that they don't understand why there is such a robust tradition from antiquity that sees him as such a great leader. From on their reading, he's like a total wet blanket in the Iliad. So maybe the Skolia are providing some insight into ways that you could read it a little bit more sympathetically. It's a really interesting point. Well, I'm wondering, what are you hoping that readers will get out of this translation? Who are you envisioning as your readership? What do you think it might enable people to do that they weren't able to do without a translation? Yeah, so I think, you know, there's a CCC panel going on this summer about the connections between ancient Skolia and I think specifically the American Skolia and other, not even just scholarly traditions, but just other cultural products from the imperial period. So one of the things I'm hoping is that we'll just be able to see how people are, you know, one, how we can situate this Skolia in its intellectual cultural context and how readers, how poets, how other critics are using this Skolia. One thing that, you know, remain in this book, certainly does a good job of doing, but I think there's room for more of this. It's showing the connections between how scholars are viewing tragedy or comedy against how they're reading the Iliad. So this is a Ninh Lese ancient critic at work, right? Exactly, yeah, exactly. You know, there's a lot of connections to be made because presumably many of these scholars are the same scholars or, you know, are certainly in conversation with one another, reading when another's works. So it'd be interesting to see, you know, how different traditions are using this material. In terms of who I see, reading this, you know, certainly undergraduates and graduate students in classical studies who do not have the time to sit down and read the Iliad Skolia, but it just, I think it in livens the texts that we have by bringing out new questions that we would not ever have thought to consider before. Yeah, I mean, I think certainly, you know, for people whose main focus is not Greek but are interested in these points of contact, like in, you know, Augustine early in Imperial Rome, I think it'll be really great. Also, you know, there's been that work lately, maybe not so lately, but in the last couple of decades on the Homeric exegesis and the origins of rabbinic tradition in Alexandria. Yeah, absolutely. These traditions are so interconnected in Alexandria at the time. Also, I mean, just speaking to the Latin side of things, I mean, I know that Joe Farrow was one of my professors at Penn and one of the things he sometimes talked about, and I know he wrote about, was the fact that Servius in his commentary on the Iliad seems to have been looking at Homeric Scholia, you know, or, you know, Homeric scholarship, but he had it available to him then as a kind of model for how he was going to be commenting on the Iliad. So that's just another area that hopefully could be opened up considerably by a translation. Well, I think it's a fantastic resource to have, and I think it'll be great to actually be able to, you know, as you're suggesting to teach with this, even undergraduates, to, for them to get a sense of the tradition, it's going to be hugely useful. I have been winding down each episode of the podcast this season, bill by asking people sort of amid current circumstances. What is there anything that you, in your off time, not that Homeric Scholia leaves you a huge amount of off time, but that you've been reading or listening to or watching or doing that has been bringing you some joy? Yeah, sure. So one of my favorite podcasts that I listen to these days is called "Totales Rankian," and it's a little bit silly, but it is two British primary school teachers who go through, they have two series. One is on the Roman Ambers, both Western and Eastern, and they go through and they have an episode on every single Roman Amber from the beginning to 1450-Berry, and they give basically an hour or two hours on each Emperor regardless of how short their reign is. And they have a very silly sense of humor, but it's actually extremely effective at getting across the history that many of us have never gotten. You know, there's so many areas of Roman history that one cannot cover in a lifetime. They also have a spin-off series on the American Presidents, and I have to say it has been very illuminating to see the history of poor Presidents we have had from the beginning. So there's been fun and illuminating lessons at the same time. Bill, thank you so much for coming on the podcast, and congratulations on the appearance of this volume. We're going to be looking forward here to future installments in the series. And it was great chatting with you. I learned a lot both from looking at the book and from talking to you, so thank you. Thank you so much. It was real pleasure. Thank you for joining us for this episode of Leski Podcasts. And special thanks for their support of the podcast to the Brown University Department of Classics and the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study. Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast so you never miss an episode. And we'd be grateful if you take a moment to rate the podcast and leave a review. It will help other listeners to find us. We look forward to you joining us again soon here in the Leski.