Defining Authorship, Debating Authenticity

Problems of Authority from Classical Antiquity to the Renaissance

Roberta Berardi, Martina Filosa, Davide Massimo, Roberta Berardi, Martina Filosa, Davide Massimo

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9783110684667
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This volume explores the themes of authorship and authenticity – and connected issues – from the Classical Antiquity to the Renaissance. Its reflection is constructed within a threefold framework. A first section includes topics dealing with dubious or uncertain attribution of ancient works, homonymous writers, and problems regarding the reliability of compilation literature. The middle section goes through several issues concerning authorship: the balance between the author's contribution to their own work and the role of collaborators, pupils, circles, reviewers, scribes, and even older sources, but also the influence of different compositional stages on the concept of 'author', and the challenges presented by anonymous texts. Finally, a third crucial section on authenticity and forgeries concludes the book: it contains contributions dealing with spurious works – or sections of works –, mechanisms of interpolation, misattribution, and deliberate forgery. The aim of the book is therefore to exemplify the many nuances of the complex problems of authenticity and authorship of ancient texts.

Part 1: Attribution

Semonides or Simonides? A Century–Long Controversy over the Authorship of a Greek Elegiac Fragment

(Simonides, fr. 8 W. = frr. 19–20 W.2)

Elisa Nuria Merisio

1 Introduction

The attribution of Archaic Greek lyric fragments proves to be complicated because of the very nature of these poems and of the way they have come down to us. The fragmentary condition of most poems – which is often quite apparent but sometimes cannot be safely assumed because the fragment seems to be complete – is the main difficulty in determining their authorship, both in the case of verses preserved in Late–antique anthologies or in other authors’ works and in the case of the ones included in papyri discovered many centuries later, which are often incomplete and full of lacunae. An additional difficulty lies in the peculiar character of Archaic Greek poetry, which often makes modern style and content–oriented criteria unsuitable.

An elegiac fragment quoted in a Late–antique anthology and included in a papyrus found at the end of the 20^th century is a case in point. The attribution process of this fragment has turned out to be complicated and highly controversial and perhaps it has not yet come to an end.

Joannes Stobaeus, a 5^th–century learned compiler, quotes a poem consisting of elegiac couplets and having the lemma Σιμωνίδου (4.34.28) in Book 4 of his Anthologium under the rubric περὶ τοῦ βίου, ὅτι βραχὺς καὶ εὐτελὴς καὶ φροντίδων ἀνάμεστος (How life is short, miserable and full of concerns). The text, included by M.L. West in the section dubia of the first edition of Iambi et elegi Graeci ante Alexandrum cantati (West [1972]) as fr. 8 of Simonides, is quoted below:

ἕν δὲ τὸ κάλλιστον Χῖος ἔειπεν ἀνήρ·

“οἵη περ φύλλων γενεή, τοίη δὲ καὶ ἀνδρῶν”·

παῦροί μιν θνητῶν οὔασι δεξάμενοι

στέρνοις ἐγκατέθεντο· πάρεστι γὰρ ἐλπὶς ἑκάστῳ

ἀνδρῶν, ἥ τε νέων στήθεσιν ἐμφύεται. 5

θνητῶν δ’ ὄφρά τις ἄνθος ἔχῃ πολυήρατον ἥβης,

κοῦφον ἔχων θυμὸν πόλλ᾽ ἀτέλεστα νοεῖ·

οὔτε γὰρ ἐλπίδ᾽ ἔχει γηρασέμεν οὔτε θανεῖσθαι,

οὐδ᾽, ὑγιὴς ὅταν ᾖ, φροντίδ᾽ ἔχει καμάτου.

νήπιοι, οἷς ταύτῃ κεῖται νόος, οὐδὲ ἴσασιν 10

ὡς χρόνος ἔσθ᾽ ἥβης καὶ βιότου ὀλίγος

θνητοῖς. Ἀλλὰ σὺ ταῦτα μαθὼν βιότου ποτὶ τέρμα

ψυχῇ τῶν ἀγαθῶν τλῆθι χαριζόμενος.

The man from Chios said one thing best: “As is the generation of leaves, so is the generation of men”. Few men hearing this take it to heart, for in each man there is a hope which grows in his heart when he is young. As long as a mortal has the lovely bloom of youth, with a light spirit he plans many deeds that will go unfulfilled. For he does not expect to grow old or die; nor when healthy does he think about illness. Fools are they whose thoughts are thus! Nor do they know that the time of youth and life is short for mortals. But you, learning this at the end of your life, endure, delighting in good things in your soul.¹

At first glance, the poem seems to be complete, but the unusual presence of a pentameter at the beginning has led scholars from the Renaissance onwards to assume that at least one initial hexameter was lost. Camerarius attempted to reconstruct exempli gratia the allegedly lost line as follows: οὐδὲν ἐν ἀνθρώποισι μένει χρῆμ᾽ ἔμπεδον αἰεί.² Moreover, the particle δέ at the beginning of the first line seems to fulfil a connective function, either continuative or adversative, and not an inceptive one.³ The suggestion that one or more initial lines were discarded by Stobaeus when quoting the passage is well–grounded, since his quotations are grouped by themes and such poems often featured some ‘private’ information at the beginning that was not relevant considering the general character of the Anthologium.⁴

2 A Century–Long Authorship Controversy

However, until the publication of P. Oxy. 59.3965 in 1992 (see section 4 below), the main problem associated with this poem did not lie in its fragmentary nature but rather in its authorship. As noted above, the poem was included by West as fr. 8 of Simonides in the section dubia,⁵ but since the 16^th century this fragment has been assigned to many different poets, leading to a century–long authorship controversy. The main reason behind this controversy lies in the name attributed by Stobaeus to the author of the couplets, i.e. Σιμονίδης. The phonetic similarity of the names of two Archaic Greek poets called Σημονίδης and Σιμονίδης – the former, Semonides of Amorgos, being a iambic poet⁶ thought to have lived earlier than the latter, Simonides of Ceos,⁷ the author of poems covering a variety of genres, including monodic poetry and epigrams – has caused the two poets to be confused since Antiquity. While their names are still clearly distinguishable in a 1^st–century BC papyrus that features works by Philodemus of Gadara,⁸ they overlapped at least from the 2^nd century onwards, probably also owing to the phonetic phenomenon known as itacism, which began in the Hellenistic period and spread widely during the Roman Empire.⁹ In his Anthologium, Stobaeus himself associates the lemma Σιμωνίδου with both fragments for which Semonidean authorship has been firmly established (e.g. Stob. 4.34.15 = fr. 1 W. and Stob. 4.22.193 = fr. 7 W., the well–known satirical account of different types of women) and fragments which are unquestionably from works by Simonides (e.g. PMG 521 = Stob. 4.41.9 and PMG 522 = Stob. 4.51.5). Even though in the 9^th century AD George Choiroboskos, a Byzantine grammarian, had pointed out the different spelling of the names of the two poets,¹⁰ the two continued to overlap over the subsequent centuries. Nor did the editors of the earliest printed collections of ancient Greek lyric poets make any distinction between the two. Stephanus ascribed all the poems having the lemma Σιμωνίδου, including iambs, to Simonides of Ceos¹¹, whereas Crispinus, followed by Winterton, explicitly placed the iambic poems along with the elegiac fragment among the works of the iambographer of Amorgos.¹²

It is worth mentioning that in 1823–1824 Giacomo Leopardi translated fr. 1 W. by Semonides and the elegiac fragment handed down by Stobaeus. The two poems, respectively Dal greco di Simonide (no. 40) and Dello stesso (no. 41),¹³ are included at the end of Leopardi’s Canti, the collection of his poems. Following Stephanus’ edition, the Italian poet always identifies ‘Simonides’ with the poet of Ceos, as E. Pellizer has convincingly demonstrated (see Pellizer [1976]).

In the 18^th century the two poets were still confused and only in the 19^th century, following the development of Classical philology in Germany, was the distinction between them more clearly established. T. Bergk once again made a conscious attempt to ascribe the disputed fragment to the iambic poet Semonides of Amorgos¹⁴ (fr. Sim. 85 in his collection Poetae lyrici Graeci). This attribution was supported by U. von Wilamowitz–Moellendorff, who strongly argued for a Semonidean authorship in Homerische Untersuchungen (1884)¹⁵ and in Sappho und Simonides (1913),¹⁶ where he further elaborated on the topic. H. Diehl included the poem as fr. Sem. 29 in his Anthologia lyrica Graeca and W. Jaeger spoke of ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part 1: Attribution
• Part 2: Authorship
• Part 3: Authenticity
• List of contributors
• Index