SECTION A: INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND 1. Framework
3. Methodology
3.1 Establishing a Text
In order to conduct an analysis of Achilles Tatius’ language use, it was first important that I had a suitable edition of the text. As mentioned in the Literature Review, the two most recent published editions of Leucippe and Clitophon are Vilborg’s (from 1955) and Garnaud’s (from 1991). Despite Garnaud’s being the later edition, which includes more recently discovered sources, I have chosen to use Vilborg’s edition for the following reasons: a) Vilborg is more transparent when deciding between variations in the textual tradition, b) his apparatus gives details of all significant variants, c) his introduction, apparatus and commentary are in English, which is more accessible to me and enables me to clearly follow his motivations,108 and d) Vilborg’s edition is the same as that on the online Thesaurus Lingua Graecae (TLG).
107 Beta Code transliteration is method of substituting polytonic Greek characters with Roman script and punctuation developed by David Packard in the 1970s. While early concordance software, such as the DOS-based Oxford Concordance Programme (OCP) catered for use of Beta Code and for specifying alphabets and character sets to suit the needs of Ancient Greek, newer programmes like Concordance and WordSmith fail to account for this in quite the same way, though they are far superior in other respects.
For more on this see the TLG Beta Code Manual (http://stephanus.tlg.uci.edu/encoding/BCM.pdf)
108 South African Language Policies post 1994 have side-lined teaching of European languages in favour of indigenous South African languages and English. See Ministry of Education 2002 and Foley 2004.
31 The discovery of papyrus fragments containing portions of Achilles’ work from as early as the 2nd century AD has enabled scholars to redate Achilles’ text to the second half of that century rather than the 5th or 6th century as was previously thought.109 The earliest extant manuscript (MS W) is from the 12th century, which leaves a substantial break between the original time of writing and the composition of this manuscript, and necessarily leaves room for much error. Whenever I speak of the “text of Achilles’
Tatius”, therefore, it must be understood that I really mean “the text as it has been handed down to us and as we can best reconstruct it”. This is unfortunate and means that all linguistic analyses must be made with this limitation in mind, but it is a problem that plagues all investigations of historic languages and the situation for Greek is much better than it is for many other ancient languages. As it is, Achilles’ text is better preserved than that of the other Ancient Greek novels, with 12 full manuscripts and another 11 containing sections or excerpts known at the time Vilborg composed his edition.110 In addition, 7 papyrus fragments have been discovered containing parts of Achilles’ text (though only 3 were known to Vilborg). The papyrus fragments date from between the late 2nd and the 4th centuries AD, composed much closer to the date of the original, and are therefore crucial for comparison with what is found in the manuscripts.111 It should be noted, though, that Vilborg considered the papyrus fragments known to him as representing a different branch of the tradition from the manuscripts, and they do only make up a very small section of the total text.112 So, while the information they provide is valuable, it is also limited.
Vilborg gives a thorough analysis of the textual transmission and the history of the manuscripts and papyrus fragments of Achilles’ text which were known to him.113 I need not repeat this information here, but he believed that all the extant manuscripts descended from a single archetype and he identified two chief branches (or families) of the manuscript tradition, along with a third branch to which only one partial manuscript belongs. The first branch, family α, contains the manuscripts he calls W, S, P, M, A, B, C, K and D. The second, family β, contains manuscripts V, H, O, Q, N, E, R, G, L, U,
109 Rohde 1900 had dated him to the mid-5th century (Morales 2001: xiv). For more on the dating question, see Morales 2004 xiv-xv, Willis 1990: 75-76 and Plepelits 1996: 388-390.
110 Vilborg 1955: xviii (2 additional partial manuscripts were known to Garnaud)
111 Vilborg 1955: xv-xvi; Willis 1990: 75-76
112 Vilborg 1955: xxxv; see also Willis 1990: 77-79
113 See Vilborg 1955: xv-lxxvii
32 T, X and Z. The last, branch φ, contains only manuscript F (which is incomplete).114 I will follow Vilborg’s sigla throughout. The numbers Π1 to Π7 are given to the papyrus fragments.115
Vilborg’s intention was to try and create an edition that was as close to Achilles Tatius’
original version as can possibly be reconstructed. This is an impossible task, and Vilborg recognises this, but says:
I have endeavoured to reach a text as near as possible to the archetype. I have avoided adopting conjectures where the tradition gives an intelligible text, even in cases where, from the point of view of language or sense, the conjecture is an improvement. I have not seen as the object of this edition to improve the text of the writer but to establish the best ancient tradition.116
Where there is divergence in the manuscript tradition, Vilborg has generally sided with whatever is presented in the majority of manuscripts, but he has given family β preference over family α where a decision must be made between the two. He says, however, that “the superiority of β is neither absolute nor undisputed” and “the α- tradition must everywhere be taken into consideration”.117 He does this by listing the variants in his apparatus. He has also used manuscript F as an “arbitrator” and so
“where αF or βF agree, [he has] generally accepted their reading”118. This will be important when I discuss manuscript variations in my statistical analyses.
Despite Vilborg’s edition being available on the TLG, it cannot be downloaded.119 Their thorough search tools mean that much research can be done with the text online (as will be discussed below), but it was important that I also had access to a raw digital version of the text which could be searched for particular tokens or strings using concordance software. As a result, I created my own version of Achilles’ text in Beta Code. I achieved this by downloading an open source XML version of Rudolf Hercher’s (1856) edition, which is out of copyright and available for download (but far inferior to
114 For more on the manuscripts, see Vilborg 1955: xlv-lxxii
115 Vilborg 1955: xv-xvii. A full list of all papyrus fragments is given in O’Sullivan 1980.
116 Vilborg 1955: lxxxv
117 Vilborg 1955: lxxxv
118 Vilborg 1955: lxxxv
119 Permission was requested for access to a copy of their text for research purposes and was denied.
33 Vilborg’s).120 I then manually updated the version I had downloaded to match Vilborg’s, using a print version of his text.
In searching for examples of particular forms in Achilles’ text, I used a combination of my recreated edition run through concordance software (a program called Concordance, developed by R.J.C. Watt,121 and the TLG edition analysed using the TLG’s own online search tools (more detail on this below).