DR. RUTHERFORD'S THUCYDIDES.*
DR. RUTHERFORD'S edition of the Fourth Book of Thncydides is the boldest and most original work put forward by an English scholar for many years, and were his views to gain acceptance, would undoubtedly mark an epoch in the history of textual criticism. The importance of his edition does not lie in this or that ingenious emendation or happy explanation, but in the drastic principles which he applies in his revision of the text, and the lengths to which they carry him. It is not Thucydides himself, Dr. Rutherford contends, who is to blame for the crabbed obscurity and impossible grammar that are found in so many passages of his History ; nor is their presence to be accounted for by saying that at the time he wrote, language had not yet reached a stage of development to give expression to his ideas ; but they are simply the work of the interpolator, and should be excised bodily from the text,— a proceeding that would give us a very different Thucydides from the one with which we are familiar.
Dr. Rutherford prepares the way for his theory by an able dissertation on the style and diction of Thucydides. It is hard, he says, " to credit that one who of all men has shown himself capable of great and simple and transparent thought, should fail just in this faculty of great and simple and trans- parent thought when he comes to express himself in language, and that he should so fail not uniformly, nor even in passages in which ideas of an abstruse or abstract kind are dealt with, but that his lapses should be merely occasional, happening only now and again, at times when no reason can be seen for them." And be protests against letting such passages pass unchallenged as justifiable in Thncydides, who for his great merits of another kind is to be allowed occasional lapses into utopian syntax. So far from Thucydides being a careless writer, Dr. Rutherford finds evidence of an almost Macanlayese precision in his frequent repetitions of words and phrases, rather than leave any doubt of his meaning. Other charac- teristics of his style to which Dr. Rutherford calls attention are his accurate use of the middle voice, his habit of using ironicam, with a noun instead of a simple verb, as mos aloiht croreiotau for xxin,, and his fondness for accumulating participles • 430TETAIAOT TETAPTH. The Fourth Book of Thucydides. A Revision of the Text, illustrating the Principal Causes of Corruption in the Manuscripts
of the Author. By William Gunion Rutherford, LL.D., Head-Master of Westminster. London: Macmillan and Co.
one upon another,—this latter habit involving a we'd/Nov; glpeso'hoyiec which Dr. Rutherford himself admits has often given rise to misunderstandings, and corruptions. To this extent at least, the style of Thncydides is not entitled to Dr. Rutherford's encomium that it is simple but powerful, a fitting weapon for a vigorous understanding dealing in an unaffected way with events and the lessons to be derived from them.
Having dealt with some characteristics of Thucydides' style, Dr. Rutherford proceeds in his second dissertation to expound his remarkable theory of interpolation. The old manuscripts, be reminds us, besides the text, contain a great mass of interlinear and marginal comment, consisting of glosses and scholia, and even of scholia upon scholia, for all which he has invented the convenient generic term " adsccipt." Nothing, of course, could be more natural than that the late and ignorant copyist should confuse the text and adscript, and interpolation has always been recognised as a possible source of error. Hitherto, however, it has been recognised as an occasional, and not as a common source of error; but looking at Dr. Ruther- ford's revision of the text, there is scarcely a page in which he does not affect to discover some such interpolation. One thing he does not explain quite satisfactorily, and that is why Thucydides should have been subjected to an exceptiobal amount of interpolation. Was it that his own style was not so simple after all, and that the Trotivov; ApccxuAoyicc of which Dr. Rutherford speaks was often too much for the copyist, and made him think Thucydides capable of anything? Dr. Rutherford does, indeed, hint that a large number of interpo- lations may be due to the fact that Thncydides once served as a Byzantine school-book, with the result that the text would be buried in a mass of puerile and unnecessary ex- planation. He is far, however, from limiting this source of error to Thucydides, for speaking of the faculty of detect- ing such interpolations, he tells us no one ought to judge before going through the weary .rpolrotpagactili of attempt. ing to solve the many problems raised by a great body of scholia, such as those on Aristophanes. By so doing, he is to become so familiar with the look and habits of the ancient annotators, Alexandrine, Romano-Greek, and Byzantine, as to be able with comparative certainty to recognise them even in the guise of their betters. From which it is clear that he by no means confines this interpolation to Thucydides, and it will be interesting to see what influence he allows it in his promised edition of Aristophanes.
Many of the interpolations which Dr. Rutherford has pointed out for the first time at once command assent, and he has done well to excise them from-the text, and print them in pseudo-uncials in the margin ; but still, this process of excising supposed interpolations is a very delicate and dangerous one, and there are a good many excisions in the present case which will not readily be admitted. In the commonest case of in- terpolation, the gloss is taken into the text with the addition of ;cosi. This is what has happened in the phrase 13ovAO,ccevoc nerribcoce; zed Aft3citc.1; Faair, where AcAcirm; was originally a gloss upon 'COLT' cbcpecc, as appears from the fact that some manuscripts read Iccci= clzpce; 13eiScireq without the 'Gal. A less simple but transparent instance of interpolation is seen in the following : ;cal yelp Oc, pcievoy Or: a vroi ciggicrrccac oiaaz xeci s .r.x, where we have a mixture of the original text, Ovx srr, and the gloss upon it, dv favor. To give another instance : the text of Thucydides, Dr. Rutherford maintains, is dotted over with Akvfifor and AfiaAfirpeovror in every possible case and construction, which Thucy- dides never wrote, but which found their way first into the margin, and then the text, to explain who was referred to. A species of interpolation less easy to detect is where sen- tences and clauses which are genuine in their own places, are repeated by the copyist in places where they are quite out of harmony. In chap. 55 we read that the Spartans were engaged in a naval war, 2 nu. z_vry Ali:4ms); Jr; rd fci in-txupOupccyor tic; b■Ateric iv rig Solciad4 rr irprif,stv, a perfectly straightforward phrase ; but going on to chap. 63, we find XtZT' cciaperi-cpos vciaccyirrc; ;cod rd i?..7wric Tij; yro,cal; &s, bzcurrds Tic 1.461/401 irpieflY Tea; PL417161.401$ !s(uTx4 IXOCYC.4 1001.41(10LYTE; itisxdircu. The whole of this clause Dr. Rutherford would excise, because of the repetition, and because be argues that it is redundant and untranslatable. When Jowett says that TO boa.,ric is an accusativus pendens which may also be regarded as a remote accusative after irpx9i-pfer, Dr. Rutherford declares that he speaks in language which is " as much beyond my under- standing as the expression which he desires to explain." We cannot help thinking that -Jowett gives a very sound explana- tion of the passage, and that Dr. Rutherford is prejudiced against its grammar by the conviction that TO btxtirig is a copyist's repetition. We do not like to differ from him without having been through the Trpoirospcuszsvi to which he invites us ; but if rb rig yvedific be an unconscious harking-back to the similar phrase ..in chap. 55, we fail to see why Thucydides may not himself have been guilty of it just as much as the supposed copyist. We cannot help thinking that in this instance, as others, Dr. Rutherford has been too drastic in dealing with the text. The present volume only contains the revision of one book ; and seeing the number of instances in which Dr. Rutherford has either upset or shaken the received readings, it is eminently desirable that he should give us the remaining books as soon as possible, in order that we may know how much of our old Thucydides is left. Hitherto Dr. Rutherford's method has not obliged him to excise anything of real value, but there is no saying that it will be so in the other books ; and now that the interpolator is shown to have been at large, it is as well to know the full extent of the mis- chief he has done. How far Dr. Rutherford's conclusions will meet with general acceptance, it is a little too soon to say ; but in any case they will exercise a profound influence on the future study of Greek texts, and will constitute a striking monument of English scholarship.
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