Ancient Greece is often thought of as the cradle
of Western civilization — an idea that is problematic not least because
what we think of today as "Western civilization" in fact incorporates
elements originating in many different times and places. Why then is
ancient Greece
so often singled out
as its ultimate source? A determining factor is certainly the fact that
we have very detailed knowledge about Greek civilization going all the
way back to the 5th century B.C.E., while we lack such knowledge about
other civilizations. For example, we know quite precisely how Athenian
direct democracy functioned two and a half millennia ago, while we are
quite ignorant of political arrangements in most of the rest of the
world at that time; in particular, we know practically nothing of the
political institutions among the inhabitants of northern and western
Europe in pre-Roman times, though for all we know the institutions of
representative democracy which are often considered a hallmark of
Western civilization may in fact be more directly related to these than
to anything that took place in ancient Greece. The main reason for this
discrepancy in our knowledge about the past is the fact that the ancient
Greeks, unlike their contemporaries almost everywhere else, left us
detailed accounts of their institutions — as well as works of drama,
science, mathematics, philosophy and much else —
in writing,
which have been preserved to this day. Without a written record, we
would in principle still be able to observe the Parthenon, the Pnyx, the
Greek theaters, etc., but the archeologists would be able to tell us
relatively little about the uses these structures were put to; and
obviously they would not be able to reconstruct for us the details of
Greek philosophy, drama, science or political institutions.
The works of ancient Greek authors have been
preserved not as autographs of the authors themselves but because they
were copied over and over and over again by scribes, and because a few
of these copies — mostly dating to the medieval period — are still in
existence today in libraries where they are studied by scholars who
produce editions of these works. If you know Greek, you can read these
editions themselves; otherwise, you can read a translation made from one
of them (also, if you know a little Greek, you can enjoy an edition
with a facing translation). Either way, the indispensable link which
grants us knowledge of the words formulated by an author who lived in
the distant past is the extant, hand-written copy of the ancient work —
the manuscript.
Etymologically, the discipline of Greek paleography
(a word coined in the 18th century by Berard de Montfaucon, from the
Greek elements παλαιο- "old, ancient" + γραφ- "writing, script"+ -ια, a
suffix forming abstract nouns) should in principle encompass the study
of all writing in Greek from the past. In fact, the study of scripts
used on papyrus, on coins and medals, in inscriptions and in documents
is generally left to the separate disciplines of papyrology, numismatics, epigraphy and diplomatics, while the discipline of paleography
is defined as the study of bookhands employed on paper or parchment. In
practice, this means that scripts from the period before the appearance
of parchment books in the 4th century A.D. fall outside of the purview
of our discipline, which also generally limits itself to the period
before 1600 A.D., a date which is arbitrarily precise but which
coincides roughly with the point when hand-written books were
definitively eclipsed by printed ones.
If all copies produced by scribes were perfectly
faithful ones, modern editors could simply print the text offered by any
extant manuscript of an ancient author. The remaining copies would be
of interest only to bibliophile collectors (and to historians of the
period when the copies were made); and the ability to decipher scripts
of the past would be the only skill required of the editor. Learning
this skill is in fact the most basic aim of the study of paleography.
However, in reality, it is almost impossible for a human to copy a long
text without making at least occasional errors. In addition, since
scribes knew this about themselves and about their colleagues, when they
found an obscure or incomprehensible passage in the manuscript they
were copying, they often attempted to correct it, which in many cases
resulted in a compounded error or, even worse, produced situations where
several different wordings are attested but it is unclear which (if
any) of the attested wordings goes back to the original author. The
upshot is that every extant manuscript of an ancient author is of
interest not only to bibliophiles and to medieval historians, but also
to editors of that author, who cannot work from a single manuscript
source but must collect the available "variant readings" (ideally from
all extant manuscripts) and decide, in each case, which one is most
likely to be "original" (or conjecture a new one, if they all seem
mistaken). Conscientious readers of editions of ancient authors will
also want to take an interest in the manuscripts, because the decisions
made by the editor can and should be questioned. These decisions are
usually recorded in a
critical apparatus.
The information given there is normally accurate, and until recently
the only realistic option for a reader has been to assume that it was;
however, with more and more libraries making their manuscript
collections available on line, it is now feasible, and occasionally
desirable, for a reader to check the manuscripts themselves — provided,
of course, that she is able to decipher them.
In passages where the manuscript tradition is
divergent, how does an editor decide which reading is most likely to be
original? Basing such decisions on the merits of the readings themselves
alone is not very satisfactory, since in many cases their relative
merits are unclear. The purpose of the discipline of paleography, as
conceived by Bernard de Montfaucon (1655-1741) in his foundational work
Palaeographia graeca
(1708), was to give editors an objective criterion for their decisions
by studying the chronological development of Greek script, thus allowing
scholars to assign an approximate
date (and, ideally,
geographical location)
to each manuscript based on the style of its script. On balance, older
manuscripts will tend to have more genuine readings than more recent
ones (though this is obviously not always true, since a very recent
manuscript may be a very accurate copy of a very old exemplar, or may
incorporate variants imported from a very old exemplar; of course it is
also possible that a very old manuscript was copied very sloppily).
Nowadays editors like to base their decisions on a broader understanding
of how the text of their author was transmitted. They generally do this
by attempting to construct a genealogy (or "
stemma")
representing the transmission of the text, in which the extant
witnesses may be placed. This is achieved mainly by comparing the
readings of the extant manuscripts (and especially by observing common
errors); but obviously the ability to date the witnesses is still a
fundamental prerequisite, and being able to read them in the first place
is even more so.
Most people who study manuscripts are engaged in
some aspect of the philological work we have just described. However,
there are many other reasons why one might want to be able to read Greek
manuscripts; and paleographers generally do not like to think of their
field as a mere ancillary discipline serving the needs of textual
critics or historians. Manuscripts are indeed vehicles for the
transmission of texts, but they also have their own stories to tell and
are worthy of study in their own right. They are also artifacts (and
often works of art) which can tell us a great deal about to the times
and places in which they were produced (e.g. educational practices; the
circulation of ideas) and about the people and communities of people who
wrote, bought, owned, sold and read them.
If you work through the pages of this pathway,
reading the feature pages and practising your reading skills by
transcribing the included manuscripts, you will be able to read most
Greek manuscripts which are the object of the discipline of paleography,
as defined above. You will make better progress if you are guided by a
teacher, but the pathway is intended to function also as a tool for
self-teaching. You may start with the
first feature page, which deals with majuscule scripts.
