pindar and theocritus in the 16 th century
Lampridio to Benigno, lives of Pindar and metrical information, he found an incomplete but powerful prose dedication by Callierges to Musurus, with a missing leaf, breaking o V in mid-sentence to end inconsequentially with the metrical notes. The text gives praise to Benigno as mediator and Chigi as financier, but moves to greater praise of Musurus, cut short just as he promises that Pausanias, Strabo and Xenophon will follow Pindar. They did, but not from Callierges, but the Aldine and Giuntine presses. Another exotic find followed. When Pausanias appeared from the former in 1516, it bore another stately dedication, by the editor, Musurus, to Janus Lascaris. Examination shows that quite large parts of this are lifted from Callierges’s dedication of Pindar to Musurus. Flattery of Chigi is transferred literally to Lascaris. Plagiarism? Really? Or, since the words had originally been addressed to Musurus, was he free to use them for his own purpose? Who can say? But it seems to me another piece of evidence that the scenario of competing patrons and presses is all wrong. The number of competent Greek editors, compositors and printers, the market for Greek books as a whole, were too small. The complex events are more easily understood if we see the partic- ipants as collaborating, helping each other, making the most of the money and means that sometimes erratic patronage provided. Fogelmark’s long pilgrimage through the 1515 Pindar, to bor- row James Henry’s words about Aeneidea , has turned up a mass of fascinating fact. If sometimes wrong (he suggests that Callierges read aloud while composing type himself, forgetting the age-old function of the copy-reader, more likely here Callierges to a Greek compositor), he is more often right, and if repetitious, only like the Bellman, ‘What I tell you three times is true’. He has carefully iden- tified six compositors, using paper evidence as well as traditional punctuation as guide. Watermarks, rather faint, are reproduced with equal care, and the alternation of paper-stocks between presses charted by colour-coding. The great mass of information, textual, physical and historical, is set out in generous, almost sumptuous typographic form, even to the extent of reproducing both the variant settings in their entirety, for which the publisher deserves as much credit. It is as grand a piece of Greek typography as Proctor’s Odyssey (Oxford, 1909) .
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