THE OD YSSE Y.*
THESE two volumes belong to the "Scriptorum Classicorum Bibliotheca Oxoniensis," and have all the merits of the series, excellent scholarship, set off by good paper and print and a modest price. Mr. Allen stands very high among textual critics, and this specimen of his work is made particularly valuable by the completeness of his apparatus criticus. He has examined all the extant manuscripts of the Odyssey, with three exceptions, and among those—a specially interesting feature of the edition—is a large collection of papyri. Of these there are twenty-six enumerated, and distinguished, as is usual, by a letter and number. (A. Gothic " P " is the mark by which they are known.) The peculiar value of these is, of course, their antiquity. The oldest of the other codices goes back to the tenth century ; one belongs to the eleventh, one • to the twelfth, and twelve to the thirteenth. The moat venerable of the papyri is the Hibeh. This is ascribed to the third century B.C. ; one belongs to the second and one to the first. These, it is true, are but small fragments, but the papyri of the first, second, and third centuries of our era are numerous, and in some instances of considerable magnitude. The largest is No. 448 of the " Oxyrhynchus Papyri," containing xxii. 31—xxiii. 242, 713 lines in all. The whole contain about 2,200 lines, or more than a sixth of the Odyssey. The note- worthy thing about the text which they exhibit is that it is in accord with the traditional text. We go back seventeen centuries and find just the same Homer to which we have been accustomed. Taking the large fragment mentioned above, and comparing it with the edition of .T. F. Bothe (1836), we arrive at some quite interesting results. Bothe is free in the use of his asterisks and his uncial. This verse is to be rejected because it is repeated from elsewhere ; another is manifestly spurious ; of a third be writes: " Adeone delime quenquani ut taut absurda putet ab Homero profecta ease P " But they are all found in this third-century papyrus. Of course this does not demonstrate their genuineness ; but it means something. It means probably that the Homer which we read is the same that the world has always read. The editor of a gigantic work which has recently appeared to put an end to the " time of our ignorance " tells us, in effect, that we cannot be sure of the Greek classics before the Middle Ages. It is something to be able to answer : " Here are some verses written by a scribe in, say, B.C. 250, and they are just the same as are to be found in our editions of to-day."
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