Introduction: “The Homer That We Hold in Our Hands”

The Bodleian Library in Oxford holds annotated copies of the Iliad and the Odyssey that once belonged to Gerard Falkenburg of Nijmegen (1538–78).Footnote ¹ Falkenburg purchased these volumes in Venice in 1565 and scribbled distinctive notes in the margins (fig. 1). Similar comments are found in the first full modern commentary on the Homeric poems to reach print, compiled by Obertus Giphanius (1534–1604) and published in Strasbourg in 1572.Footnote ² Giphanius was accused of plagiarism on other occasions. But his apparent appropriation of these notes is of special interest to the history of early modern scholarship because both Falkenburg’s marginalia and Giphanius’s edition bear witness to a kind of Homeric philology that is usually thought to have emerged only centuries after the Renaissance.

Figure 1. Annotated flyleaf in Falkenburg’s Iliad. Homer, Iliad. Venice, 1524. Bodleian Library, Oxford. Auct. R.V.5.

Modern Homeric philology is often said to have begun in 1795 when Friedrich August Wolf (1759–1824) declared in his Prolegomena: “The Homer that we hold in our hands now is not the one who flourished in the mouths of the Greeks of his own day, but one variously altered, interpolated, corrected, and emended from the times of Solon down to those of the Alexandrians.”Footnote ³ Wolf believed that the Homeric epics emerged ca. 950 BCE as short songs. Committed to memory by generations of rhapsodes, they were performed and inevitably altered by them for audiences that “did not care about knowing for certain who had composed each and every thing.”Footnote ⁴ They were first sung as continuous epics under Solon and then written down in the sixth century BCE under the Pisistratids. As “philosophers, sophists, and . . . educated men” began to interpret the epics, written but highly divergent copies proliferated.Footnote ⁵ The poems were emended to something like the form found in the oldest surviving medieval codices, our vulgate, by the third and second centuries BCE. This was done by the scholars in the Library of Alexandria; Aristarchus (ca. 217–145 BCE), in particular, gave this vulgate its “general appearance and manner.”Footnote ⁶ Wolf felt he had demonstrated that what are known as Homer’s epics, the “entire connected series of the two continuous poems is owed less to the genius of him to whom we have normally attributed it, than to the zeal of a more polite age and the collective efforts of many.”Footnote ⁷

Wolf probably got a lot wrong.Footnote ⁸ Scholars now generally believe that the Iliad and the Odyssey were composed around 700 BCE by one or more poets working in an oral tradition.Footnote ⁹ Many would say that, to a significant extent, they were fixed through writing at this time.Footnote ¹⁰ The interaction between the written text and continuing oral performances is a vital question on which evidence is lacking. Some standardization may have taken place in the sixth century BCE, and while early papyri and Homeric quotations in fourth-century BCE authors indicate much textual variation, there is a “firm point of reference.”Footnote ¹¹ A stable text emerges from the Library of Alexandria around 150 BCE and certain features of this were probably determined by Aristarchus.Footnote ¹² But where Wolf believed that ancient critics looked to restore not “what Homer sang, but what he ought to have sung,” the Alexandrians are now credited with the comparison of texts, not just conjectures: Homers postdating this “transmissional watershed” seem more closely and organically connected to those circulating before it.Footnote ¹³ Wolf’s bleak notion of the broken link between our Homer and the genius of the poet who gave life to the epics no longer appears convincing. Yet Wolf gave modern philology its first tools for investigating the question of the poems’ origins and transmission.

Wolf’s theory, presented as revolutionary, had clear forerunners as far back as the seventeenth-century querelle des Anciens et des Modernes. In that context François Hédelin, l’abbé d’Aubignac (1604–76), offered the “paradox” that: “there was never a man named Homer. . . . The Iliad and the Odyssey are nothing other than a medley, a collection of many short poems by different authors that have been joined together.”Footnote ¹⁴ Wolf’s view of the poems was also consonant with his contemporaries’ historicism. Three decades earlier, Robert Wood (1717–71) had speculated that: “Could Homer have heard his Poems sung or, recited, even at the Panathenaean Festival . . . he would have been offended at the Elegance, perhaps the Affectation of the Attic Accent.”Footnote ¹⁵ The issue of whether “writing was known to Homer” was as vital for Wood as in the Prolegomena.Footnote ¹⁶ Wolf innovated with new kinds of evidence to probe these well-established questions. He drew on the ancient glosses, or scholia, in the margins of the Venetus A and Venetus B codices of the Iliad, first published by Villoison in 1788.Footnote ¹⁷ The scholia maiora, as they are known, are Byzantine compilations of excerpts from lost critical works on Homer.Footnote ¹⁸ They contain a wealth of information about ancient critics’ opinions on individual textual problems. With them, Wolf identified successive eras of ancient Homeric criticism and drew conclusions about how the text had changed during each. Extracting what Wolf called “the internal critical history of the poems” from this mass of material was an intricate methodological operation, by which he “transferred criticism of Homer [from “the realm of belles lettres”] into the expanding realm of professional scholarship.”Footnote ¹⁹ Thus emerged the famous philological Homeric Question.

This later history is usually considered irrelevant to sixteenth-century Homeric studies. With the exception of a few suggestive nods, accounts of the Homeric Question typically looked no further back than d’Aubignac for its beginnings. Yet Luigi Ferreri recently showed that early modern scholars became intrigued by the textual history of Homeric poems from an early point. Renaissance humanists were drawn to a clutch of ancient sources on the Pisistratean recension, the story that, as George Chapman (ca. 1559–1634) put it, Homer’s “verses were sung disseuered into many workes; one calde the battaile fought at the fleete . . . another Hectors redemption: an other the funerall games, &c.,” until Lycurgus, or, more commonly, Pisistratus, stitched them together.Footnote ²⁰ Ferreri calls this the “first phase of the Homeric Question”: the history of the text is investigated per se, rather than touched on indirectly as in the context of the seventeenth-century querelle or eighteenth-century primitivism. In this respect, Renaissance philologists were close to Wolf, though “it was only after Wolf that the investigation of the poems’ composition abandoned the study of external testimonies and began to concentrate on internal analysis of the poems.”Footnote ²¹ In inventing the “internal analysis” that would be his legacy to modern philology, Wolf was driven by historical and philosophical questions. Yet Ferreri’s own reappraisal of early modern interest in Homer’s text makes it meaningful to ask whether this philological innovation, so formative for subsequent classical scholarship, could have emerged in a humanist context long before these questions came into play.

A hitherto-unnoticed strand of sixteenth-century Homeric philology suggests that it could. Isaac Casaubon (1559–1614) observed in 1583 that it might not be possible to obtain Homer’s poems “in a correct form even if we have very ancient manuscripts, since it is likely that they were written down very differently from the form in which they were composed by him.”Footnote ²² Three decades later, Daniel Heinsius (1580–1655) described the text of Homer passed on from antiquity as “a mere phantom born in the library, where each one arbitrarily alters, transposes, or deletes to suit his own whim.”Footnote ²³ These observations have been understood as precocious insights rather than as part of any philological trend. Even Ferreri, who situates them in the “first phase of the Homeric Question,” does not quite do justice to the critical quality that sets them apart from the gathering of sources on the Pisistratean recension.Footnote ²⁴ This essay aims to show that both Casaubon and Heinsius drew on the work of some sixteenth-century philologists who, even without the scholia maiora, saw that evidence of specific cases of textual variation in antiquity could be used to anatomize the history of Homer’s texts; they started applying internal analysis. The conclusions of Casaubon and Heinsius suggest the direction Homeric studies might have taken if this type of Homeric philology had been properly taken up at that time. A Homeric debate might have emerged out of a radical text-critical agnosticism about the epics, and unconnected to questions about Homer’s authorship of them or his potential illiteracy. To this unfulfilled possibility, Falkenburg’s notes, Giphanius’s edition of Homer, and the vagaries of time and place all made crucial contributions.

Giphanius’s Homer: A False Start in the Homeric Question

Obertus Giphanius is known to modern scholars as the plagiarist-editor of Lucretius.Footnote ²⁵ This is both apt for this story and misleading. Giphanius was no mere plagiarist, though he was spectacularly vilified as one in a prefatory note by Denys Lambin (1520–72) to his third edition of Lucretius: Giphanius was “reckless . . . presumptuous . . . impudent . . . ungrateful . . . insolent . . . a thief . . . treacherous, deceitful, faithless, and to be more explicit, black . . . an impostor,” and again, Lambin summing up a little superfluously, “not only a thief . . . but insolent, shameless, rude, and worthy of any insult you like.”Footnote ²⁶ Even Giphanius’s enemies thought Lambin had overshot the mark, while Justus Lipsius (1547–1606), who was more sympathetic to Giphanius, told a friend he suspected Lambin was getting senile.Footnote ²⁷

The accusation was that Giphanius had plagiarized Lambin’s 1563 text of Lucretius in his own edition of 1565.Footnote ²⁸ Lambin wrote: “I was astonished, reader, barely three or four pages in. Practically all that is correct in that Lucretius is mine, and yet this man passes over those points in silence, or praises them maliciously, or else shamelessly claims them as his. If he can anywhere seize the opportunity to find fault with me, there he scoffs at me most insolently, and plagues me for it most excessively.”Footnote ²⁹ What Lambin presents as miscreant philology was not fundamentally divergent from the usual practice in textual criticism of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries: “if an emendation was printed in a previous edition, it was often considered unnecessary to record the name of its author.”Footnote ³⁰ Giphanius was working within accepted conventions, whether he handled them elegantly or not. Contemporaries and many later editors approved of his rejections of some of Lambin’s bold emendations, and Giphanius carried on collating new manuscripts in preparation for a revised edition.Footnote ³¹

Giphanius’s Homer was a different kind of project. The first Homer edition he had a hand in was printed in Basel by Eusebius Episcopius.Footnote ³² The press had brought out large-format editions of Homers in Greek, but this was its first foray into the lucrative domain of bilingual editions.Footnote ³³ It reprinted Henri Estienne’s text, the most sophisticated one to date, and, facing it, the most recent ad verbum translation.Footnote ³⁴ Giphanius compiled detailed indexes and probably had overall responsibility for the edition. Evidence points to this first Homer being published around 1570, when Giphanius moved from Venice to Strasbourg.Footnote ³⁵

Giphanius’s contribution was more prominent in what appears to have been a second edition of the Homer printed by Théodose Rihel in Strasbourg in 1572 and often reissued.Footnote ³⁶ Its main new feature was a commentary by Giphanius. It was the first complete one by a modern scholar to reach print, yet readers were told that its comments were “valde brevia” (“very short”) due to commercial pressures. Giphanius also added a concise “Ad lectorem” (“To the Reader”) at the start of the Iliad. This was a remarkable little preface, so original in its insights as to seem puzzling considering the commercial haste that otherwise marks the edition. Anthony Grafton drew attention some time ago to its “short but suggestive history of Homer’s text” as one of those notable isolated foreshadowings of Wolf’s theory.Footnote ³⁷ Giphanius’s account, like the later comments by Casaubon and Heinsius, stands out from the histories of the text commonly woven by contemporaries from external sources. It is distinguished, in particular, by two brilliantly novel proposals.

After the story of Pisistratus’s recension of the epics, Giphanius introduces a new idea.Footnote ³⁸ In Josephus’s Against Apion 1, he finds the theory that vestiges of the epics’ “earlier disarray” remain in the text, at points where the poems seem contradictory.Footnote ³⁹ Quoting this, he proposes that it may have been such traces that J. C. Scaliger had recently described as nonsense in Homer.Footnote ⁴⁰ Josephus’s passage and Giphanius’s use of it are important. Josephus says: “They say that . . . Homer did not leave his poetry in writing, but that it was transmitted by memory and afterwards put together from the songs, which is reason for the many discrepancies [διαφωνίας] in them.”Footnote ⁴¹ This is the oldest, and perhaps the only independent testimony that Homer did not record his epics in writing. Giphanius does not comment on the poems’ oral transmission, which he may have doubted. But he takes from Josephus a crucial suggestion: odd things in the poems can be seen as evidence of unusual circumstances of transmission. By linking this to J. C. Scaliger’s critique of Homer, he sets a key precedent. In the seventeenth-century querelle, aesthetic objections to the epics will often be grounded on their artificial pasting together.Footnote ⁴² D’Aubignac’s famous thesis is a version of this: that Homer’s epics are such a mess is proof that such a poet “never was.”Footnote ⁴³ The same suggestion that Giphanius took from Josephus makes the texts’ history part of the discussion on Homer during the querelle. Josephus will also become crucial to theories about the poems’ oral nature, which start appearing in historical writings around 1590.Footnote ⁴⁴ By the late eighteenth century, the two debates — on Homer’s quality and on orality — will converge in the primitivist attitudes formative for Wolf. In his use of Josephus’s passage, then, Giphanius signals a turn in the history of the Homeric Question that has been little appreciated.

Yet Giphanius’s history goes on, and builds up to a second proposal that is even more noteworthy. He tells his readers that Pisistratus’s recension was believed to include inauthentic material; that “grammatici,” beginning with Aristotle, emended the text; and that Aristarchus, the most exacting of these critics, marked many verses with the obelus (i.e., as spurious). He adds that Plutarch, in De audiendis poetis, disagreed with some of Aristarchus’s excisions. And then, from the fact that verses expunged by Aristarchus are quoted by “Aristotle and others,” but are not “in our manuscripts today,” he deduces that those authors must have “used different editions, we that of Aristarchus.”Footnote ⁴⁵ With a surprising succession of fresh arguments, he comes to anticipate Wolf’s conclusion. His anticipation was historically significant. Wolf was aware of Giphanius’s proposal, and saw himself as building on it.Footnote ⁴⁶ Giphanius’s edition was remembered primarily for this conjecture. It was still cited as a novel idea by J. R. Wettstein in 1684, and then challenged in Ludolf Küster’s Historia critica Homeri in response to him.Footnote ⁴⁷ By the time Villoison and Wolf were writing, the only views on the issue remained those of Giphanius and Küster.Footnote ⁴⁸ Ferreri and Grafton note this, but neither emphasizes the precocity of Giphanius’s inference or its failure to impress his contemporaries. This deserves greater attention. Giphanius’s precocity is explained only once it is appreciated that Homeric philology began to break new ground in the sixteenth century. While the minimal impact of his edition restricted the development of this new philology, it was not a foregone conclusion.

The first question is how Giphanius got there. Others had asked what happened to Homer’s texts after Pisistratus’s recension. Joachim Camerarius (Kammermeister, 1500–74), “the foremost German philologist of the sixteenth century since Erasmus,” mentioned the epics’ ancient emendations in the prefatory material to his 1538 commentary on Iliad 1.Footnote ⁴⁹ He also collected basic information on ancient Homeric critics, having found many of them brought up in Athenaeus’s Deipnosophistae, a work of ancient criticism he used in his commentary. In 1566 Gulielmus Xylander (Wilhelm Holtzman, 1532–76) published a twin commentary on Plutarch’s De audiendis poetis and the pseudo-Plutarchan De Homero.Footnote ⁵⁰ He referred to the volume as his Plutarchomerica, placing the emphasis on Plutarch as a Homeric critic. Xylander used the statement in De Homero that “the school of Aristarchus” was responsible for the epics’ division into books as the occasion for a five-page history of the Homeric text.Footnote ⁵¹ He used the Byzantine commentary on Homer by Eustathius of Thessalonica (ca. 1115–95/96), first published in 1542–50, and particularly an account of Homer’s text preceding Eustathius’s notes on Iliad 1.Footnote ⁵² Explorations of the ancient critics Athenaeus, Plutarch, pseudo-Plutarch, and Eustathius were making attitudes to Homer’s text more historically informed by the mid-sixteenth century. This was the context for Giphanius’s preface.

Camerarius and Xylander used ancient criticism like any other source as they pieced together their history of the text, looking for nuggets of direct information. But, as Wolf would show, much more could be gleaned from such sources by inference from reports on ancient variants. When Giphanius arrived at his conjecture about Aristarchus’s edition, he became one of the first scholars to see this potential clearly. Giphanius knew the Plutarchomerica, and had this book in mind when he wrote about Plutarch’s disagreements with Aristarchus. In De audiendis poetis, Plutarch notes four lines in Iliad 9 not found in the vulgate and claims that Aristarchus wrongly “removed them out of fear.”Footnote ⁵³ Giphanius mentions this testimony in his comment on Il. 9.457, placing an asterisk next to Plutarch’s vague “φοβηθεὶς” (“out of fear”) and noting that Plutarch “praises them and quotes from them in Coriolanus.”Footnote ⁵⁴ His comment absorbs the findings of Xylander on De audiendis poetis.Footnote ⁵⁵ In his preface, Giphanius goes beyond Xylander by extrapolating two conclusions from the report about the history of Homer’s text: not everyone in antiquity agreed with Aristarchus’s interventions; and if Aristarchus excised these lines, and they are not in the vulgate, then the vulgate must be reliant on the Aristarchan edition. When Wolf uses textual discussions in the scholia to reconstruct the history of the text, he does exactly the same thing. Indeed, having excavated from the scholia a fuller picture of Aristarchus as critic, he uses this specific testimony to reach the same conclusion. Led to Plutarch by Xylander, Giphanius unexpectedly anticipates Wolf.

There is more behind Giphanius’s anticipation of Wolf’s position than an inspired encounter with one source. He mentions Aristotle as using a non-Aristarchan Homer, alluding to Agamemnon’s threat in Il. 2.391–93: “whoever I see willingly holding off from the fight by the beaked ships, for him there shall be no hope of escaping the dogs and birds of prey.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Giphanius notes ad loc: “Aristotle in Politics III quotes this passage, and after ‘birds of prey’ adds the half-line ‘for death comes with me’ [πὰρ γὰρ ἐμοὶ θάνατος] . . . This half-line is not extant in our manuscripts. On this, see supra, in the preface.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Camerarius had made a similar point in his 1540 commentary on Iliad 2. Giphanius did not discover this variant, but neither did he conjure internal analysis out of thin air, since Camerarius conjectures “that [Aristotle] used different texts of this poet.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Yet Giphanius takes his and Xylander’s work a major step further. Combining individual testimonies into a larger picture, he asks what story the Homeric variants can tell. Neither scholar had used these variants to write the history of the poems, but Giphanius’s synthesis and his move from individual textual discussions to the history of ancient scholarship brings him close to Wolf’s “internal critical history.”

When Camerarius and Xylander light upon these variants they consider their history.Footnote ⁵⁹ Similarly, Camerarius notes on Il. 2.408–09 — where Homer says that Menelaus joined Agamemnon’s sacrificial feast uninvited “for he knew how busied his brother was” — that “some grammarians [i.e., Demetrius of Phaleron] had athetised the reason supplied . . . as an interpolated and superfluous [superuacaneam] observation.”Footnote ⁶⁰ He reflects on what they may have judged superfluous, ending: “But let us leave this and countless other things to the exacting studies of grammarians.”Footnote ⁶¹ He analyzes the athetesis as an ancient practice; whether it results in a better text is of little interest to him. Giphanius knew his analysis and echoed it: “They obelize this verse as superfluous [superuacaneum] and spurious, at least in my view, correctly. It is indeed very weak; see the Preface.”Footnote ⁶² Though he chooses between variants on an aesthetic criterion, Giphanius bases his decision on the history of the text: by referring the reader to the preface, he cites the historical origin of inconcinnities in the text. He reorganizes and transforms Camerarius’s and Xylander’s historical impulse by explicitly setting up the transmission history of the epics as the framework for looking at variants. In this way, he arrives at a principle for dealing with Homer’s text that he then applies to other cruxes. Longinus’s athetesis of Il. 1.296, reported in Eustathius’s commentary and not noted by these scholars, is discussed by Giphanius using a similar cross-reference.Footnote ⁶³ Textual problems are tied systematically to the history of Homeric scholarship.

Even on the basis of this limited evidence, one can see that Giphanius’s edition could have offered a new paradigm for Homeric studies in this period. Grafton identifies two schools of thought on textual criticism among Giphanius’s contemporaries.Footnote ⁶⁴ Those belonging to the “French school” like Denys Lambin and Jean Dorat (1508–88) “were great believers in conjectural emendation.”Footnote ⁶⁵ For them, textual criticism was a matter of personal judgment and talent; the critic could rely on these to locate textual problems and propose solutions. By contrast, philologists like Pietro Vettori (1499–1585) thought that the critic must eschew “arbitrary attempts at conjectural emendation” without the aid of “old and incorrupt manuscripts.”Footnote ⁶⁶ According to Grafton, Vettori was “less interested in emending the text than in using the best manuscripts to expunge other critics’ emendations.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Such critics queried the source of the variant, and considered its historical status rather than its perceived soundness. For the French philologists, Homer’s epics were no different from other texts, but those of Vettori’s persuasion had to rethink their task in relation to Homer.Footnote ⁶⁸ The poems’ textual life in antiquity posed different questions for them. They had to investigate ancient variants rather than medieval manuscripts, and ask which version of Homer from antiquity corresponds to the one “we hold in our hands.” When it was clearly articulated in Wolf’s Prolegomena, this rethinking revolutionized what philologists did with Homer and gave the epics a singular place in the discipline. Yet Giphanius clearly takes the same approach to Homer’s text, and is the first to suggest that the process of editing Homer can turn, via a sustained historical analysis of variants, into an exploration of the peculiar conditions that brought the extant poems into being. To the historically inclined early modern critic, Giphanius’s edition could have opened exciting prospects.

Instead, contemporary Homeric scholarship went a different way. Jean de Sponde (1557–95) produced the century’s landmark Homeric commentary in 1583. Though he used Giphanius’s edition, Sponde treats ancient variants as textual alternatives, not as historical data.Footnote ⁶⁹ His preface shows that he failed to comprehend Giphanius’s innovation, for his account of the text reverts to an assembly of references to the Pisistratean recension.Footnote ⁷⁰ Most of the scholars who consider Homer’s text over the next decades are no different. According to Ferreri, the first phase of the Homeric Question eventually tired as Renaissance philologists went over the same round of such references. The turning point that Giphanius’s edition could have marked was never realized, and the internal analysis that it offered was ignored in Homeric studies.

Early modern philology may have been unprepared for Giphanius’s innovations. But this can only be part of the truth. In fact, Giphanius himself did little with his own insights. His preface, for example, offers no exposition at all of his original text-critical methodology. To understand and follow it, contemporaries would have had to analyze his conclusions closely. He wrote under pressure of time and admitted that this restricted the commentary. His promise in the “Ad lectorem” to say more in the Odyssey about verses missing from the vulgate was never kept, and the Odyssey commentary again apologizes for its brevity “due to certain reasons,” Giphanius adding in a special note that some supplementary observations had to be left out as the pages had been set.Footnote ⁷¹ Giphanius’s groundbreaking textual argument was cut off perhaps by a glitch in production.

But hurried publication is not the only culprit for the problematic transmission of his novel insights. Things begin to look more complicated if one considers what Giphanius does say about the text his edition reprints from Henri Estienne’s Poetae graeci principes heroici carminis (1566).Footnote ⁷² Like his contemporaries, Giphanius hails this Homeric edition as “omnium emendatissima” (“the most correct of all”).Footnote ⁷³ Estienne’s text was another milestone in Homeric studies because he made judicious use of two new sources. The most important was the editio princeps of Eustathius, which featured a better text of Homer than those that had appeared earlier.Footnote ⁷⁴ The second source was a previously unknown “vetustissimus codex” (“very old codex”), the Genevensis 44.Footnote ⁷⁵ Comparing these new sources with the eighteen previous printed editions, Estienne corrected grave inaccuracies in grammar and syntax with great ingenuity, and added punctuation accordingly. He took justifiable pride in having rescued Homer from a generation of editors who had read “swine” for “sons,” and had garbled any number of simple words by merging them with adjacent particles or by missing apostrophes. Estienne’s emendation was clearly based on “sense rather than Überlieferungsgeschichte [history of transmission].”Footnote ⁷⁶ He took the same approach as Sponde, and his preface offered no account of the author or the vicissitudes of his poems, but launched straight into an explication of textual problems and solutions. History played little part in his brand of philology. It is striking that less than a decade later Giphanius has only unqualified praise for Estienne’s edition, despite the fact that he is doing something completely new with Homer’s text. He seems to lack the zeal, or possibly the full philological awareness, to theorize his position, and present his methodology as a challenge to the direction Homeric studies had taken with Estienne.

Yet Giphanius’s methodology directly challenged Estienne in its use of Eustathius. Estienne’s approach made the minimum of the Byzantine commentary. Eustathius’s comments contain material of exactly the same kind as the ancient scholia, since he quotes from the same works as those excerpted in Venice codices. The commentary is thus a trove of information on ancient debates about Homer’s text and variants attested by ancient authors. Estienne saw little use in this material, and barely mentioned it in the notes that detail his procedure with the text. It is of little interest to him whether a variant comes from a medieval codex, Xenophon (fifth century BCE), or Porphyry (third century CE), or whether an ancient critic is known to have proposed it.Footnote ⁷⁷ But historical investigation of Eustathius’s commentary was the logical next step in the analysis of variants that Camerarius and Xylander had demonstrated. They had worked on Athenaeus and Plutarch, who touch on the Iliad and Odyssey in passing. With Eustathius, by contrast, it was possible to pursue a systematic, historically driven inquiry using the evidence collected in his commentary. Estienne did not see this, for he was a different sort of textual critic. But this is precisely what Giphanius begins to do. While his innovation looks like a reaction to Estienne, he himself says nothing to suggest it. In his Homer, a new textual attitude and a text squarely conflicting with it are made happily to cohabit.

Giphanius does not articulate his approach in the commentary any more than in the preface. The shorthand “vide praefat.” (“see the preface”) is the closest one comes to a statement of his working methods, and it is far from sustained. It only happens with the lemmas discussed, which are all in the first two books. Even the comment on the all-important variant in Iliad 9 fails to give a link to the preface. It appears that Giphanius only started thinking about the text as he composed the “Ad lectorem.” A draft of comments on both poems appears to have been followed by the preface, by revisions to the commentary on Iliad 1–2, and then by a less successful attempt to revise the Odyssey commentary. It was only with the “Ad lectorem” that things started falling into place, a flash of insight late in the production process. He was moving in this direction earlier and something like the novel use of Eustathius from the beginning cannot have been an afterthought. Though Giphanius fails to connect this to the original ideas in his preface, both demonstrate the same avant-garde textual thinking. To understand the nature of that thinking, and to account for its transformation into the startling but oddly half-aware originality that came with the preface, Giphanius’s commentary needs to be examined.

Giphanius’s Method

Giphanius has already emerged as heavily dependent on the philological findings of others. This is traditional in commentary, but a quick comparison with earlier Homeric commentators will help to illustrate how different his commentary was. Three Homeric commentaries appear to predate Giphanius’s: Melchior Wolmar’s (1497–1561) on Iliad 1–2 (1523), those by Camerarius on the same books (1538, 1540), and Johannes Hartung’s (1505–79) Prolegomena to Odyssey 1–3 (1539).Footnote ⁷⁸ All three re-create courses on these books and aim at a full explication. They combine various objectives: linguistic help, rhetorical analysis, comparisons with Latin texts (especially Virgil), mythography, and exegesis. Where relevant, they introduce ancient and modern scholarly opinions, with Camerarius and Hartung starting to use Athenaeus and the mainly linguistic D scholia, or scholia minora. The purposeful voice of the preceptor is ever audible in the choice of lemmas and orchestration of interests and sources. The commentators conduct the argumentation, intervene, and draw conclusions. Giphanius’s commentary is very different. Like the others he collects allusions to Homeric loci in ancient texts, particularly in Virgil, but also Strabo, Pausanias, or Pliny the Elder. He includes discussions of Homer in antiquity and, sparsely, the D scholia. Yet this all seems more like found material than organized research. Giphanius explores none of his primary sources exhaustively, and very few with consistency. The rationale for his choice of lemmas is erratic, and the commentary thins out drastically by the second half of the Odyssey. Such haphazardness suggests little planning or control over the critical discourse. Where his predecessors set out to explicate, Giphanius gathers and hoards material for the reader’s benefit, as though still in the publishing-venture mindset of his first Homer.

The hoarding is best exemplified in his extensive use of works by contemporary philologists, which Philip Ford identified as one of the commentary’s salient features.Footnote ⁷⁹ He mines these works for points that touch on Homer with more diligence than he does anything else.Footnote ⁸⁰ Though Giphanius rarely acknowledges these scholars,Footnote ⁸¹ his commentary is largely a patchwork of observations by them, redrafted and arranged to follow the text. Where his comments can be set against their sources, his intervention often seems to consist in little more than editing, rewording, and condensing.

Giphanius’s ideas on Homer are lost in an abundance of derivative material and quotations from primary texts. He chooses sources committed to historically grounded philology, and all but anthologizes the second volume of Vettori’s Lectiones, which emphasized Homeric exegesis. Vettori compares ancient sources to understand semantic cruxes in the epics and Homeric presences in later authors. Giphanius shows, on the contrary, little immersion in the allegorical approaches favored by his contemporariesFootnote ⁸² ; witness his treatment of a passage that Ford uses as a litmus test for attitudes to Homeric allegory.Footnote ⁸³ Homer’s description of the cave of the nymphs at Od. 13.97–112 was lavishly allegorized by Porphyry (234–305 CE), in a work that became required Homeric reading in the sixteenth century. Giphanius comments: “Many wrote of this harbour and the cave of the Nymphs, but also Porphyry’s little book is extant today, on which Scaliger: ‘Truly how many idle things does Porphyry write of the harbour in Ithaca?’”Footnote ⁸⁴ Note how Giphanius speaks through Scaliger. The commenting voice is plural, passive, and oblique. Giphanius works by reference and inference, and with minimal original contribution to the issues at stake. The commentator is a reader with philological predilections, not an independent thinker.

Giphanius’s work on the text was likely to be similarly borrowed. Ford sees his unusual emphasis on textual matters as “valuable evidence” of an increasingly “critical attitude toward the Homeric text, doubtless stimulated by Henri Estienne.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Sometimes Giphanius notes variae lectiones in earlier editions, but more often he reports ancient variants like Plutarch’s testimony. Notices of variants in Hartung’s Odyssey and the textual discussions of Camerarius and Xylander must have all served as models. Yet his special emphasis on Homer’s text and his apparent innovations had other precedents.

Johannes Hartung is one very likely possibility. Hartung was an important Homeric philologist and professor of Greek at Heidelberg and Freiburg. An early teacher and commentator on Homer, he reputedly had, when he was a young soldier, always carried the poet with him like Alexander the Great.Footnote ⁸⁶ Contemporaries mentioned an unpublished complete commentary on Homer, and an epigram appended to his image after his death declared that, “As much as he owes to Eustathius, so much does Homer owe to me.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Hartung published the Locorum decuriae, four miscellanies amply drawn on by Giphanius.Footnote ⁸⁸ In them, Hartung followed Vettori by comparing sources to discuss many of the topics that had attracted philologists since Poliziano: lapses in ancient authors, unattributed or falsely attributed quotations in ancient texts, and obscure words and antique habits. Ancient texts elucidate ancient texts in a historically conscious manner. Homer features prominently, and since these works were serially published from 1559 to 68, they engaged critically with both Eustathius’s commentary and Estienne’s edition.

The printer compared Hartung to “ten Aristarchuses” for expunging errors from the “remains of many ancients.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Hartung does pinpoint omissions and errors in ancient authors’ quotations of other texts, or, conversely, in the transmitted text of the author they quote. But his attitude to textual variation is more original. The first chapter in each Decuria is “Of Variant Readings.” Hartung explains: “I would point out to the reader that they are not instantly to think one or the other reading corrupt and in need of correction. They should rather know that most discrepancies arise either because different versions existed in the past, or on account of those who, quoting passages from some source, distorted them for their own uses, content to give the sense in some way, but not the meter or individual words. Whichever of the two it is, then, one is to explain it either by historical reasons, or the license of those quoting. Elsewhere, nevertheless, passages are obviously in need of emendation. One judges these for oneself.”Footnote ⁹⁰ Variants are not simply to be chosen between, but investigated as carriers of textual history: Hartung does not just do this, like Camerarius or Xylander, but theorizes it. He transforms a philological instinct into a concrete principle. And while Giphanius is the one who draws out the implications of the principle specifically for Homer, many of Hartung’s key examples are also Homeric. For instance, in the first Decuria, Hartung notices that two lines quoted by Aristotle in Historia animalium differ substantially from the Homeric vulgate at Il. 9.539–40: Aristotle has, “he nurtured a lone-living wild boar, nor did it resemble / a grain-eating beast, but a wild thing of the woods,” instead of, “he raised a white-tusked lone-living wild boar / that worked many ill things.”Footnote ⁹¹ He concludes: “Compare . . . the Homeric verses with Aristotle’s quotation and you will understand that in the past there were different copies and variant readings, as I have also pointed out above.”Footnote ⁹² What is important is not Aristotle’s Homer, but the existence of different Homeric texts in antiquity. Giphanius’s perspective is even longer. Variants outline the texts’ history and emendation metamorphoses into an archaeology of texts.

Hartung makes another revolutionary contribution to Homeric textual studies when he observes that Eustathius quotes a further variant of these verses from Strabo.Footnote ⁹³ This variant’s resemblance to Od. 9.190–91 makes him revise his thinking: “The passages were pasted together more than once from different places, deviating throughout from one another on certain words.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Exacting scrutiny of Eustathius’s testimony has given him a precise understanding of this sliver of Homeric textual history. It has brought him to conclusions that may have proved too nuanced for Giphanius’s grand sweep toward the bigger picture, since Giphanius passes this crux by. Yet Hartung is a vital precedent for Giphanius’s historical use of the textual evidence in Eustathius.

It seems natural to posit a direct line of influence from Hartung to Giphanius. And yet Giphanius does not mention Hartung’s key examples or anchor his theory in what he draws from Hartung’s work. He never highlights Hartung’s distinctive textual approach, and even discards a subtle textual analysis by him to adopt a cruder one, as he does when he follows Camerarius on Agamemnon’s threats in Il. 2.391–94.Footnote ⁹⁵ So Hartung does not straightforwardly pave the way for Giphanius’s textual innovations, in spite of the latter’s many debts to him.Footnote ⁹⁶ Giphanius’s notes also draw attention to a class of variants Hartung was only marginally interested in: reports of ancient emendations. Hartung has very little to do with atheteses of spurious verses or readings linked with named revisers, information that was clearly very important to Giphanius. Of the philological works Giphanius names, Hartung’s Decuriae is by far the most textually focused. But if it was not the source of the historical thinking that shaped his textual approach, something else was.

Giphanius and “The Most Learned Jurist Gerard Falkenburg”

Giphanius omits mention of one very relevant source: Gerard Falkenburg’s marginalia on Homer, which survive in his autograph copy in the Bodleian. Though largely ignored now, the superb Hellenist Falkenburg was known to contemporaries as “Graece ad miraculum eruditus” (“wonderfully learned in Greek”).Footnote ⁹⁷ His sole outing in print was the 1569 editio princeps of the vast and linguistically challenging Dionysiaca, a hexameter epic by Nonnus of Panopolis (fourth/fifth century CE). Falkenburg was a copious annotator of books, including his two Homer volumes.Footnote ⁹⁸ For a brief moment in the mid-sixteenth century, these books were critically placed to make a mark in the development of Homeric scholarship.

Falkenburg is responsible for the single emendation Giphanius proposes in his commentary. In Od. 13.222–23, the goddess Athene appears to Odysseus, “resembling in form a delicate young man, an ἐπιβώτορι [from epibōtōr (keeper?)] of sheep, as the sons of kings are.”Footnote ⁹⁹ Giphanius notes that the word epibōtōr exercises Eustathius, and quotes Hesychius’s suggestion that it means “rider” because “the sons of kings first learned to ride on the backs of rams,” citing Vettori’s approval in the Lectiones.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ He continues: “If this is true . . . the text should read ‘ἐπιβήτωρι’ [sic, i.e., ἐπιβήτορι, from epibētōr]; for ‘ἐπιβήτωρ,’ also used elsewhere by the poet, is one who rides a horse or a ram, and corresponds better to Hesychius’s ‘rider.’ This emendation was suggested to me by my compatriot, the most learned jurist Gerard Falkenburg.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ Though Giphanius only acknowledges Falkenburg this once, his debt to the extant marginalia is pervasive.

The two scholars studied law under Jacques Cujas (1520–90) in the early 1560s, moving then in the same circles between Bourges, Paris, and Orléans.Footnote ¹⁰² Their Homeric conversations must have taken place later. The dedicatory epistle of Giphanius’s Iliad was written in April 1572, and that of the Odyssey the following September. Both sets of annotations draw extensively on Vettori’s 1569 Lectiones. Falkenburg also quotes at one point from Xylander’s 1570 translation of Plutarch’s Moralia. Xylander brought out the Homeric texture of Plutarch’s writing, identifying quotations from Homer and cross-referencing them to Estienne’s edition. Judging by his marginal references to the Moralia, Falkenburg must have used Xylander to read Homer against Plutarch. Giphanius, as will be seen, likely inherited this research strand from Falkenburg. Since Xylander’s Plutarch obtained its privilege on 16 August 1570, this late point is the terminus post quem for Falkenburg’s notes, and hence almost certainly for the exchange between the two men.Footnote ¹⁰³

A surprising amount is known about them around this time, partly through a series of letters exchanged between Janus Dousa (1545–1604) and Victor Giselinus (1543–91), scholars associated with Plantin’s press, just like Falkenburg.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ In 1568–69 Giselinus was organizing the publication of Dousa’s epigrams, which attacked Giphanius mercilessly.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Dousa believed that Giphanius had deceitfully got possession of the philological remains of their mutual friend Lucas Fruterius (1541/42–66), and may have suspected that he would plagiarize them, though Giphanius never did.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Falkenburg met Dousa at this time and the two struck up a friendship. Giselinus wrote that Falkenburg was happy to write a prefatory poem for the volume, despite being “favourably disposed towards his countryman [i.e., Giphanius] and friendly with him.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Falkenburg sent a copy of the book to Venice where Giphanius was sure to see it. Even though Falkenburg was helping others in the smear campaign against Giphanius, the two men seem to have been in contact and on amicable terms. Falkenburg probably bought one of Fruterius’s controversial annotati from Giphanius at this time.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

This was in late 1569. Both men’s situations would soon change. Giphanius was in Strasbourg by May 1570. Falkenburg may have met Thomas Rehdiger (1540–76) in Antwerp in July 1569, and was under his patronage by January 1571 and until January 1576, mostly staying in Cologne.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Giphanius and Falkenburg maintained contact and even visited together during these years, and a visit not long before the Iliad’s publication in April 1572 must set the scene for their conversations about Homer.Footnote ¹¹⁰

A number of possibilities suggest themselves. Equipped with the recently published Moralia and Lectiones, Falkenburg may have annotated his Homer independently, or been prompted by his compatriot’s first Homer. He may have shared his ideas before Giphanius started his commentary, or while the work was being done. He may have lent Giphanius his Homer, just as he had got hold of Fruterius’s marginalia for personal study. Or he may have transcribed his annotations for him, like Jean Dorat, who sent Falkenburg his observations on Nonnus with some anxiety about being cited.Footnote ¹¹¹ A livelier kind of exchange is narrated by Dousa in a posthumous tribute to Falkenburg, published in 1582. When Falkenburg and Dousa first met in 1569, the latter apparently expounded his “lectiones & explicationes” on Tibullus and Propertius. But because their scholarly conference had been made sweeter by a quantity of wine, Falkenburg later wrote to Dousa to ask him “for them or, better, for you yourself.”Footnote ¹¹² Dousa promptly sent them, keeping a copy of this letter, which he published in the 1582 tribute volume to his friend. The volume seems partly a pretext for publishing these observations.Footnote ¹¹³ With manuscripts circulating so freely, there are various ways that Falkenburg and Giphanius could have shared ideas. Many of them would be a prelude to publication, and all are haunted by the possibility of plagiarism.

Giphanius’s debt to Falkenburg is great and virtually unacknowledged. By the winter of 1571–72, the latter was undoubtedly familiar with the allegations about Giphanius’s scholarly ethics, above all through Lambin’s attack. Falkenburg may have seen sharing his observations with Giphanius as a possible route to publication, but he certainly understood the porous distinction between publication and plagiarism. Three years later, in a letter to Lipsius, Falkenburg reports that he has had “nothing from our Giphanius about his Aulus Gellius.” He observes that Giphanius had been harshly treated in Dousa’s poems, though fails to note that his own prefatory poem opened the collection.Footnote ¹¹⁴ One finds no suggestion that their (evidently resilient) friendship soured after the publication of Giphanius’s Homer.Footnote ¹¹⁵

Falkenburg’s marginalia reveal much more about the nature of Giphanius’s debt and give this exchange a place in the history of the Homeric Question. Unacknowledged and sometimes jumbled beyond recognition, these notes enabled Giphanius to see well beyond the philological work he himself could have conducted. The technical gap that separated the two scholars played a crucial part in their interaction. In 1571–72, Falkenburg was well positioned to make an impressive intervention in Homeric studies. His research could have shown contemporaries that certain methodologies brought out uniquely interesting results for Homer, and that Homeric textuality could be examined in new ways. Giphanius, who had nothing like his compatriot’s exposure to Greek sources, became the beneficiary of these methodologies during his hasty composition of the commentary. He had enough vision to turn them into a nexus of surprising conclusions and the bare bones of a radically new attitude to editing Homer’s text. But under his stewardship, the methodologies themselves reached print in a manner that was patchy at best. The break between vision and method was sharper than readers of the edition could ever bridge, and thus rather than trace a new path, his Homer was destined to remain a philological curiosity.

Falkenburg’s Homer and Giphanius

Examined side by side, Falkenburg’s Homer and Giphanius’s edition have a great deal to tell. First of all, they confirm that it was Giphanius who drew on Falkenburg’s marginalia and not vice versa. A telling example is the locus Falkenburg proposed to emend. He writes: “If old grammarians are to be believed . . . in the past, noble and fortunate boys first learnt to ride on the backs of rams. Hesychius: ‘the sons of kings first learned to ride on rams.’”Footnote ¹¹⁶ He cites Vettori and not Giphanius, who, following Falkenburg’s own suggestion, later shifted the focus onto the operative word. It seems unlikely that Falkenburg would take pains to ignore his one personal contribution to the commentary he was making notes on. The annotation must predate the commentary, and suggests that the two men continued discussions after Falkenburg’s notes were drafted.

The intellectual debt lies heavily with Giphanius. He often takes the general idea from Falkenburg’s observations, but not their detail or purpose. In this same note, he says simply that epibētōr, “used elsewhere by the poet, is one who rides a horse or a ram.” Yet Falkenburg would not have put it quite like that. He had not located an exact parallel with rams, which would have decided the argument. He did find epibētōr used of horse-riding, in a passage describing the Trojans as “riders [from epibētōr] of swift-footed horses,” which he underlined;Footnote ¹¹⁷ and he was able to corroborate this unique instance with an intriguing use of the same word to describe porcine intimacy, likewise underlined: “a wild boar, mounter [from epibētōr] of sows.”Footnote ¹¹⁸

Typically, Giphanius has no time for inconvenient philological minutiae. Elsewhere, more obvious blunders result from his distortions of Falkenburg’s research. In Il. 8.377–78, Hera and Athene disobey Zeus and join the fray, enraged to recklessness by Hector’s victories. Menacingly, Athene says she wants to see if Hector “will be glad, with us two appearing.” The masculine dual participle “προφανέντε” (“us two appearing”) reads, more appropriately, “προφανείσα,” i.e., feminine dual, in Eustathius’s text.Footnote ¹¹⁹ But Eustathius still observes that this is a “solecism” because the word is in the accusative, yet stands alone in the sentence like a genitive absolute. He offers a literary interpretation: the syntactical bouleversement reflects Athene’s irate state of mind. The grammatical variant and Eustathius’s memorable take on the syntax both catch Falkenburg’s attention.Footnote ¹²⁰ Giphanius follows, though with a garbled version of Falkenburg’s note, which shows that he has not gone back to Eustathius, for he has not realized that the commentator is not even aware of the reading “προφανέντε.”Footnote ¹²¹

This is the distinct pattern in Giphanius’s borrowings of the notes on Eustathius. Giphanius never checks Falkenburg’s references against Eustathius, and often fails to recognize the Byzantine commentary as the source. In Eustathius’s discussion of “κακοῖσι δόλοισι” (“evil tricks”) in Il. 4.339, Falkenburg finds the commentator differentiating between “good and evil guile,” an argument he summarizes in the margin. He also reads the proverb “God does not recoil from good guile,” and notes: “On good guile, there is the proverb.”Footnote ¹²² Eustathius’s name is not given. This is what Giphanius, clearly unaware of the comment’s source, makes of it: “Good and evil guile are different in law. On good guile, there is the proverb.”Footnote ¹²³ Even when Giphanius knows Eustathius to be the source, he relies on Falkenburg’s extant summaries. For example, Falkenburg probes Eustathius’s convoluted discussion of Il. 9.378, where Achilles says he values Agamemnon “ἐν καρὸς αἴσηι” (“like a kar”), or perhaps “ἔγκαρος αἴσηι” (“like an enkar”).Footnote ¹²⁴ He tidies up the various arguments mentioned, names his source, and also inserts a reference to Plutarch’s Quaestiones convivales.Footnote ¹²⁵ Giphanius, now also naming Eustathius, translates the points from Falkenburg’s summary, adding the reference to Plutarch.Footnote ¹²⁶ Tellingly, he leaves out a confusing annotation that is impossible to understand without going to Eustathius. These slips make it clear that Giphanius’s debt is to a version of the observations that is at least faithfully copied from the extant marginalia.

Other mishaps arose from the shape of the book. Next to Il. 6.260–61, Falkenburg writes what looks like an etymology for oinos (wine) in Il. 6.261: “from onein, hence also food is called oneiata.”Footnote ¹²⁷ This is another quotation from Eustathius, who in fact argues that Homer is punning on this false etymology, and offers more plausible ones.Footnote ¹²⁸ Falkenburg has copied his discussion in full on the flyleaf at the back of his Iliad. But Giphanius only reproduces the first note, and thereby unwittingly inverts Eustathius’s point, which he fails to recognize.Footnote ¹²⁹ Falkenburg, it seems, did not transcribe his notes for Giphanius. A similar hiatus occurs in Od. 4.505–11, where the death of Locrian Ajax is narrated. Poseidon tears away the rock Ajax is holding onto, and Homer concludes: “thus he perished, as he drank the salty water.”Footnote ¹³⁰ Falkenburg enters here an extract from Synesius’s (ca. 373–ca. 414 CE) epistle to Euoptius: “Death by water is also the death of the soul. Synesius in Epistles.”Footnote ¹³¹ Giphanius promptly regurgitates it.Footnote ¹³² Yet Falkenburg is not interested in this abstruse reference per se. On the flyleaf at the back, he copied a longer version of the quotation, followed by Eustathius’s observations: “The ancients say that this verse appears in no edition because of its paltriness, and are surprised that it escaped obelism by Aristarchus. It is not the expression, but the idea which is paltry. . . . For ‘as he drank the salty water’ is out of place, and to say it was wholly silly and lacking in gravity.”Footnote ¹³³ Synesius shows Falkenburg that a verse that some ancients considered spurious because it made little sense could have a point: adding spiritual annihilation to Ajax’s physical death, the verse could show Homer anticipating later beliefs about the soul.Footnote ¹³⁴ Synesius’s agreement with Aristarchus on the verse’s authenticity gives a new depth, but also adds historical complexity to the textual problem reported by “the ancients.” There is an unmistakable congruity between Falkenburg’s research on this ancient variant and the ideas that led Giphanius to his groundbreaking conclusions. Yet Giphanius himself, ignorant of Eustathius’s comment, neither knew nor published Falkenburg’s penetrating textual argument. His cavalier way with some of these notes meant that Falkenburg’s scholarship was not transmitted fully, and this proved critical for the loss of Falkenburg’s textual methodologies.

As far as Eustathius is concerned, Giphanius simply goes through the marginalia and rephrases the quotations that Falkenburg had extracted. This was not how he worked with other material. Falkenburg’s Homer had a formative impact on the commentary. Toward the end of the Odyssey, where Giphanius has fewer and fewer lemmas, entries based on Falkenburg’s marginalia continue with the same regularity: five out of twenty entries for Iliad 1 draw on them, yet the proportion rises to seven out of a total of twelve in Odyssey 20–24. As the Odyssey represents the least polished part of Giphanius’s work, this suggests that Falkenburg’s notes, the only complete running commentary among Giphanius’s sources, were the core around which he built his own. Sometimes Giphanius absorbs the notes into comments from other sources, as with many of Falkenburg’s references to Plutarch. At other times he consults the resources Falkenburg had used. Several truncated references in the marginalia to Hartung, Vettori, and the Plutarchomerica are identified by Giphanius and expanded.Footnote ¹³⁵ But Giphanius also draws on these sources independently. Falkenburg clearly determined the philological orientation of Giphanius’s commentary by pointing him toward particular kinds of material. Falkenburg’s reference grid of Xylander’s Plutarch, Hartung’s Decuriae, Vettori’s Lectiones, and Eustathius coincided substantially with that of Giphanius.

The works in Falkenburg’s reference grid point to a vibrant philological interest in the Homeric poems at this time. Published in close sequence, the Decuriae, Xylander’s Plutarchomerica and Moralia, and the 1569 Lectiones show scholars becoming excited by ways into the epics other than allegory, and by ancient Homeric criticism that does not take allegory as its axis. Such comparative philological approaches to Homer were not exactly new, having been common in the Florentine Academy, and central to the commentaries of Camerarius and Hartung.Footnote ¹³⁶ But a different kind of application marks their pursuit around this decade. The works in question concentrate on Homer without primarily setting out to study the epics: philology is discovering Homer’s centrality to its own practice.Footnote ¹³⁷

That Homer was the literary model par excellence was a leitmotiv from the beginning of his rediscovery in the Latin West. These philologists are finding what his omnipresence as a point of reference in ancient culture means for the most technical kind of scholarship and its methodological implications for historically grounded exegesis and textual criticism. This kind of philology appealed to Falkenburg as evidenced by his marginalia on various authors and from comments he appended to his 1569 Nonnus. Falkenburg is familiar with all the instances where Poliziano had touched on Nonnus in his comparative Miscellanea.Footnote ¹³⁸ But he also regularly consults Hartung’s recent work on Homer. Nonnus’s epic, which constantly adopts and adapts the Homeric poems, and on occasion refers to Homer by name, was Falkenburg’s own schooling in Homer’s philological inevitability. To explicate Nonnus’s idiom and literary assumptions, and to do this confidently enough to suggest textual emendations, Falkenburg had to delve into unexplored literary parallels and ancient scholarship on Homer, just as some of his contemporaries were doing. By 1570–71, the convergence of such philological approaches on Homer, conjoined with his own fresh experience with the Dionysiaca, seems to have motivated him to take his volumes to his desk and see what he could make of recent developments. This decision would be one of the main reasons why this philology predominates in Giphanius’s Homeric commentary, and possibly even explains why he conceived the commentary at all.

Falkenburg’s Homeric Scholarship

To understand Falkenburg’s Homeric scholarship, one must first look at his exegesis. This is a direct point of contact between him and Hartung. References to the older scholar dot a number of books annotated by Falkenburg.Footnote ¹³⁹ In his Nonnus, he shows himself a keen observer in particular of Hartung’s use of ancient criticism to understand Homer. Encountering the phrase “ὄρθριος . . . χορδή” (“orthrian chord”) at Dionysiaca 3.242, he recalls that Hartung had compared various ancient critics’ explications of this musical term, which also comes up in Il. 11.11.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Falkenburg imports these in his own note.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Another Homeric discussion from the Decuriae illuminates Dionysiaca 5.366: “ἡμιφανὴς τάδ’ ἔλεξε” (“he elexe [from legō] this, half-visible”).Footnote ¹⁴² Here Falkenburg considers the argument that the verb legō in Homer does not mean “to speak.” It was Hartung who had observed that Eustathius interprets legō in Il. 2.435 as “to sit, or lie down, from legō [to lie], which also gives us lektron, i.e., the bed/couch.”Footnote ¹⁴³ Falkenburg is not convinced. Looking more thoroughly at Eustathius, he finds that the commentator contradicts himself later, when he says that legō in Il. 20.244 “clearly means ‘to speak’”; this interpretation surely applies, Falkenburg decides, to Nonnus’s phrase.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ More often than he makes use of Hartung’s observations, Falkenburg borrows his tools. Developing Hartung’s methodology, he elucidates Nonnus’s Homeric idiom by extensive excursions of his own into ancient scholarship. In such work he can supersede even the methodical Hartung. Scrutiny of ancient scholarship showed Falkenburg that a range of philological questions remained to be asked of the Homeric texts. Though he shared, and was indeed led to this discovery by other contemporaries, his answers could be more exact and impressive than the best in this kind.

When Falkenburg focused on Homer’s epics themselves, he was able to take this discovery further. In the Bodleian volumes, he refines the point about legō,Footnote ¹⁴⁵ and tails Hartung on other exegetical cruxes that take ancient criticism as their point of departure.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ More importantly, his familiarity with a wide spectrum of ancient criticism generates new Homeric questions. On a flyleaf at the front of his Iliad Falkenburg notes unexpected features of Homer’s lexicon that he has gleaned from various ancient critics (fig. 1). He reads, for instance, in Macrobius, that the word “τύχη” (“fortune”) is not found in Homer, and in Eustathius, that Homer has one word (“δέμας”) for live bodies and another (“σῶμα”) for dead ones. He does not simply exhume these statements, but works his way through the poems testing their accuracy. Fascinated by the methodological openings that ancient criticism makes available, he turns his reading of these volumes into an opportunity to join in the discussions of ancient scholars, and fine tune their assertions about Homer. The originality of his work on the epics inheres in the sheer meticulousness with which he pursues these scholarly trails from antiquity.

It is worth watching him at work on the exegesis of “στέφανος” (stephanos, “a crown or wreath”). The word arises as a crux when Falkenburg becomes intrigued by a claim in the ancient scholia on Pindar that Homeric heroes are never crowned: “And they say that the poet did not even know the word stephanos , witness the fact that it is nowhere used by him. For he has stephanē [garland], but not stephanos: ‘some of them had beautiful garlands [from stephanē].’”Footnote ¹⁴⁷ The underlinings are those in Falkenburg’s Pindar (fig. 2). In the margin, he rewrites and references the Homeric line Il. 18.597. He finds, however, evidence against the scholiast. In Il. 13.736, a line he quotes at the top of the page, stephanos does appear in the collocation “στέφανος πολέμοιο” (“ring of battle”). Falkenburg looks up the D scholia to secure the interpretation of this unusual phrase, corroborates it with an imitation in Lucan’s Pharsalia 1.321, and concludes: “Only in this sense is stephanos found in Homer.”Footnote ¹⁴⁸ A final comparison shows him that Hesiod uses stephanos and stephanē differently. His exacting insistence on comparing more and more sources and making distinctions in the argument is striking. Equally important is the lateral interest in Homer when dealing with other Greek texts, which marks philology around this time.

Figure 2. Annotation on the hypothesis preceding Nemea 1 on page 357^v of Falkenburg’s Pindar. Pindar. Ὀλύμπια. Πύθια. Νεμέα. Ἴσθμια. Μετὰ ἐξηγήσεως παλαιᾶς πάνυ ὠφελίμου καὶ σχολίων ὁμοίων. Frankfurt, 1542. Leiden University Library 756.D.16.

When he annotates Homer,Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Falkenburg marks up both “στέφανος πολέμοιο” (Il. 13.736) and “καλὰς στεφάνας” (Il. 18.597), and adds this to his list at the front of the Iliad (fig. 1): “the word stephanos is not found in Homer of a garland of flowers, but of a ring of men (Il. 13 [p.]149). Stephanai (Il. 18 i. f.) See the scholia on Pindar at the beginning of Nemea.”Footnote ¹⁵⁰ But his research does not stop here. Reaching Il. 1.470, he remembers that a scholion on stephanos in Theocritus’s Idylls 3.21 discusses the appearance of the cognate verb stephō in this line from the Iliad: “‘to crown or wreathe’ [stepsai, from stephō] is to make full, as in Homer, ‘young men crowned [epestepsanto, from epistephō, from stephō] the craters.’”Footnote ¹⁵¹ As Falkenburg works his way through the poems, this suggestion deepens his grasp of Homer’s semantics. The verb, which appears more frequently than stephanos, leads Falkenburg on to more Homeric discoveries. With the help of Athenaeus, he is able to penetrate a complex metaphor in Od. 8.170, “god crowns [stephei, from stephō] his appearance with words”: “For what those ugly in their appearance lack . . . is made up for by the soundness of their speech.”Footnote ¹⁵² Falkenburg’s way of ascertaining the semantic contours of this word complex is methodical, discriminating, and indefatigable. But it is also focused. Homer’s ubiquity in ancient criticism means that the more closely such material is examined with Homer in mind, the more possible it is for different original findings to join up into a larger picture. The greatest strength of Falkenburg’s work is that it looks toward such broader conclusions on Homer, whether they concern lexicon, realia, or textual irregularities.

This thread of analysis winds its way to Giphanius’s comments. The losses, however, are more telling than what gets transferred. Giphanius takes on the explication of the complex metaphor, a useful self-standing observation.Footnote ¹⁵³ But he leaves out all of Falkenburg’s other painstaking comparisons. Just before his Iliad commentary, Giphanius has an insert, largely based on Falkenburg, of “Words and things not found in Homer.”Footnote ¹⁵⁴ This list includes words like “τύχη” (“fortune”) or “ὀργή” (“wrath”), notable absences from Homer’s lexicon, all taken from Falkenburg’s flyleaf, but not his more arcane distinctions, such as that between stephanos and stephanē. On the other hand, Giphanius’s note on “ἄμπυκα” (“head-band”) in Il. 22.469 refers to Pollux’s Onomasticon on female ornaments, which include, the reader is told, “stephanē, which Homer mentions elsewhere.”Footnote ¹⁵⁵ The Onomasticon is consulted by both Falkenburg and Giphanius. Since this passage interprets stephanē in Il. 18.597, Giphanius is either reproducing a fragment from Falkenburg’s research trail, or spinning off from it to give his readers a useful item of information. He is aware that Falkenburg is engaged in a deeper investigation, but has no interest in following him down obscure byroads of comparative philology to engage in intricate detail with little obvious payoff. The omission of this particular insight from the first printed commentary on Homer was probably of little consequence for Homeric studies. Yet it is just this sort of byroad that brought Falkenburg to some of this period’s most original probings of Homer’s text. It is time to come to these, and to their imperfect transmission to and through Giphanius’s commentary.

Falkenburg’s Textual Scholarship and Its Transmission

The sources for the textual work in Giphanius’s commentary can be identified precisely. With very few exceptions, to be considered later, his textual lemmas correspond to points raised by Camerarius, Hartung, and Falkenburg. Apart from the point he takes from the Plutarchomerica (and including overlaps) four of them are found in Camerarius’s commentaries, eight in the Decuriae (five from the Iliad and three from the Odyssey), and twelve in Falkenburg’s annotations (eight in the Iliad and four in the Odyssey). To the last figure should be added the emendation in Odyssey 13, and the possibility of input for which no evidence survives. The textual focus of Giphanius’s commentary is clearly owing to Falkenburg, a large proportion of whose notes are devoted to textual observations. These notes prepared the ground for Giphanius’s novel conclusions on the text. More than any other aspect of his work on Homer, Falkenburg’s textual approach distinguishes his hereto-unnoticed contribution, not only from those of his forebears, but from what would be witnessed, at least in print, for a long time.

If uncompromising meticulousness was one defining trait of Falkenburg’s scholarship, its strong textual emphasis was another. One particular annotation captures the sort of philologist he was (fig. 3). Falkenburg has three notes on Od. 18.136–37, “the mind of earthly beings is such as the day that the father of men and gods brings to them.”Footnote ¹⁵⁶ In the wide margin on the right, he gives Cicero’s translation of these lines in a lost work, and the information that “Augustine quotes these verses in City of God, 5.7.” Below the text, he observes that the verses were imitated by Archilochus, and quotes the fragment on the testimonies of “Theon, [pseudo-]Plutarch, and Diogenes Laertius.”Footnote ¹⁵⁷ And in the narrow left margin, he squeezes in an interpretation: “we make ourselves like the circumstances, whatever they are.” All three notes respond to Xylander’s comment on De Homero 155, where pseudo-Plutarch quotes Archilochus’s imitation, or rather a mutilated version of it.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Xylander begins: “Archilochus’s verses seem not to scan, & it is very difficult to make guesses with this sort of thing. Nevertheless I recall reading them somewhere else, though I do not remember whether more complete or correct. But for the present I do not have the reference.”Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Falkenburg emends the fragment in his second note, tracing the sources where Xylander’s stamina ran out. Xylander then discusses an ambiguity in interpretation and quotes that of Eustathius: “whatever the circumstances are, such is also the mind . . . entirely making itself like the situation and shaping itself to the circumstances.”Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Falkenburg’s third note is a paraphrase of this. Finally, Xylander says that Cicero’s translation of this passage agrees with Eustathius’s interpretation, and quotes it, adding: “Refert hos uersus D. Augustinus lib. 5, cap. 7. de Ciuitate Dei.”Footnote ¹⁶¹ The wording of Falkenburg’s first reference echoes this. His response to Xylander gives the picture of a particular mind in action: one with an unmistakable text-critical flair. Falkenburg homes in on the fragment from the lost Cicero work, and notes the testimony for it. Then he expertly sorts out Archilochus’s text. The ambiguity in the sense that is Xylander’s central point has to be crammed into the remaining space.

Figure 3. Annotation on Od. 17.136–37 on page 159^r of Falkenburg’s Odyssey. Homer, Ulyssea. Batrachomyomachia. Hymni xxxii. Venice, 1524. Bodleian Library, Oxford. Auct. R.V.6.

The annotation reveals the dedication and proficiency of Falkenburg’s textual criticism, but also its nature. Like Xylander, Falkenburg avoids guesswork with Archilochus’s fragment and sets about looking for witnesses (indeed, as many witnesses as possible) in other authors’ quotations. Falkenburg was a scrupulous collator of texts. In the Bodleian Homer, he collated the Batrachomyomachia with an “exemplar impressum Venetijs anno M. CCCC LXXXVI” (“copy printed in Venice in 1486”).Footnote ¹⁶² He also collated an Italian manuscript of Heliodorus with a printed edition now in Leiden,Footnote ¹⁶³ and the epyllia of Colluthus and Tryphiodorus in a Basel edition he bought in 1569 with a “vetus codex” as well as the Aldine edition, carefully recording the source of each reading.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ For him, the investigation of textual witnesses was an enduring contribution to the text-critical study of an author, where ingenious conjectures were but transient things. Falkenburg says as much in the prefatory epistle to his Nonnus, where he explains his textual procedure in remarkably polemical terms. The edition was based on a single manuscript, owned by Johannes Sambucus (János Zsámboki, 1531–84).Footnote ¹⁶⁵ Addressing Sambucus, Falkenburg explains that there were many obvious problems in this manuscript:

Falkenburg places himself categorically on one side of the divide in text-critical approaches seen above. When Grafton says that “what [Vettori] detested above all was the practice of making emendations in a text without indicating that they had been made or identifying the sources that justified them,” he may as well have been talking about Falkenburg.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ Respect for the integrity of the textual witness as a historical document comes first: it is crucial to represent this faithfully, keeping emendations and conjectures identifiable as such. True to his word, Falkenburg relegated his “readings and conjectures” to the commentary. They were governed by principles of the same stamp. When proposing an emendation, Falkenburg gives priority to the readings of another manuscript (variants from an unidentified manuscript were communicated to him by Carolus Utenhovius) or quotations of Nonnus in other texts.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ One of these texts is Eustathius’s commentary, which, as already observed, Falkenburg uses more often as a guide to Nonnus’s language. But even then, one part of his mind seems always on the text: historically grounded exegesis permits informed conjecture.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ These conjectures, like the emendation suggested to Giphanius, consistently follow “the ductus litterarum preferring to change only one letter,” as Vettori proposed.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ The ideology set out in his epistle was one he was deeply committed to.

It was speculated above that someone with this text-critical outlook could not but harbor misgivings about Estienne’s new text of Homer. Indeed, “printers . . . who sprinkle the text with emendations from unknown sources” is not too far from a portrait of Estienne at work. In print, Falkenburg segues elegantly from his indictment of such editors to the (perhaps not entirely) innocuous anecdote about the man who believed the best edition of Homer to be “that which is least corrected.” But not long after the appearance of Estienne’s landmark tome, Falkenburg wrote privately to Vettori’s friend in Rome, Fulvio Orsini (1529–1600): “[Plantin] oversees the editing and follows what the manuscripts have . . . something for which I have little faith in certain French printers, who, over-eagerly seeking novelty, often arbitrarily change and rearrange anything they do not understand, an offense to be accounted more shameful and more dangerous than any other.”Footnote ¹⁷¹ Without naming names, Falkenburg leaves Estienne exposed to the sharp criticism. On his part, Estienne was conscious of Falkenburg as one of the most searching readers of his Greek texts. In 1574, he made Falkenburg the dedicatee of his edition of Apollonius of Rhodes’s Argonautica, an epic left out of the large-format volume of 1566.Footnote ¹⁷² Estienne explains that he applied similar textual procedures here as in that volume, or his “μεγαλογράμματον opus” (“large-format work”).Footnote ¹⁷³ He mentions his scission of words from particles mistakenly attached to them, and his “interpunctionem,” or adding of punctuation to the epics. The benefit of the latter, he says, is well known to Falkenburg. But the decidedly defensive passage that follows suggests otherwise: “To be sure, someone will object that this labour is not needed by everyone. I shall confess that to be true. For I know that Falkenburg (not to go far afield) can do without this sort of work; yet, in turn, I know this: that there are few Falkenburgs, that is, as practiced as he is in the reading of Greek poets, and able to bring to themselves such glory as he gained by his Nonnus.”Footnote ¹⁷⁴ Couched in the language of eulogy, Estienne imagines an urbane debate on the question of punctuation, casting the interlocutors in an entirely true-to-life opposition: Falkenburg insisting on the historical witness and Estienne himself on textual sense. It must be in the same spirit of polite disagreement that in this preface Estienne avoids discussing bolder conjectural emendations, even as he avoids claiming that his readings are confined to the apparatus.

This ideological clash underlies Giphanius’s insights on Homeric textuality, though it is nowhere explicit in his edition. For Falkenburg, Estienne’s “μεγαλογράμματον opus” was an inspiration to consider what more could be done with Homer’s text. He was looking closely at Estienne’s Homer, and noted many of his readings, including those Estienne considered representative of his contribution.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ He thought in depth about the text-critical procedure Estienne had followed, for he worked out that one particular lectio is from Estienne’s “vetus codex” without help from Estienne’s notes.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ An excellent piece of evidence shows how he thought it could be bettered. Estienne comments on “στεῦτο” (steuto) in Il. 18.191, “steuto [she promised] to bring him beautiful arms”: “many editions of the vulgate read seuto for steuto . . . but Eustathius and my manuscript confirm the other reading, as do other passages where steuto is used in the same way.”Footnote ¹⁷⁷ Falkenburg finds these other passages, but also the divergent case of Od. 11.584, where he notes from the D scholia that some ancients considered the verse spurious because its use of steuto is un-Homeric.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ He corroborates Estienne’s common-sense choice based on historical linguistics. This analysis leads him to information about interpolated verses. The more Falkenburg immerses himself in ancient scholarship on Homer, the more evidence he turns up that his epics are unlike other remnants of antiquity. The significance of this does not pass him by.

Falkenburg excavated ancient scholarship on Homer’s language, often while querying Nonnus’s text. In the process, he saw that ancient discussions tend to flip from exegesis into textual criticism. Eventually, it became clear to him that one of the great preoccupations of ancient criticism was the text of Homer. Estienne had gone to the variants scattered in Eustathius’s discussions to expand his template of textual options. The origin of Falkenburg’s interest in these variants was the opposite: his engagement with ancient scholarship, whose discussions he followed with uncommon dedication, brought him to them. The difference in what the two philologists made of Eustathius’s textual material could hardly be greater.

The argument that Od. 11.584 is interpolated, which Falkenburg quotes from the D scholia, is also reported in Eustathius.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ Falkenburg may well have read it there first, since almost all his textual notes stem from an open-ended exploration of the Byzantine commentary. These notes (some of which Giphanius was earlier seen to misunderstand) generally have something new to contribute: a new variant, another witness, or information that enriches his understanding of a crux. He turns first to Eustathius for points of textual interest, and adds to his findings by going to other sources if possible.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ The fundamental difference between his investigation and Estienne’s is the importance Falkenburg attaches to the textual witness. Not the aesthetic quality of Eustathius’s variants, but that they existed in antiquity interests Falkenburg. He does not come to Homer’s text to mend its problems, but because he has seen in Eustathius the possibility of identifying its historical-textual fault lines for the first time. His witnesses are ancient quotations that authenticate these variants’ historicity, not medieval codices. Falkenburg also wants to know how ancient critics dealt with these variants. Often prompted by references in Eustathius, he aligns different sources on the same ancient debate. The more accurately he can re-create these discussions, the more reliable their historical textual evidence. In 1570 Falkenburg can use such information more systematically than ever before. Charted by Xylander, the Homeric debates in Plutarch’s Moralia became a resource that could be taken into account in a regular manner, like Eustathius’s running commentary. The development was timely. Falkenburg’s fascination with ancient scholarship instantly drew him to Xylander’s book as he turned his attention to Homer. To another philologist, the textual discussions here might have seemed a repository of Homeric variants; for Falkenburg, they were an exciting historical document.

Eustathius often records how anonymous ancients grappled with the textual problems they inherited. Falkenburg explored many reports of this kind. But he also saw that certain discussions afforded more concrete evidence on the processes that had turned these texts into so many infolded cruxes: they revealed how ancient editors had operated upon Homer’s text. Unlike Hartung, Falkenburg was drawn to reports of atheteses. The potentially spurious character of Od. 11.584 is one instance. In the note on death by water, Falkenburg considered Aristarchus’s non-athetesis of Od. 4.511 in a highly sophisticated way. He also noted Aristarchus’s athetesis of Il. 24.30: “he preferred her who furthered his fatal μαχλοσύνην [from machlosune (lustfulness)],” on the grounds that machlosune is a recent word.Footnote ¹⁸¹ Here Falkenburg’s information comes, as usual, from Eustathius.Footnote ¹⁸² Because he does not indicate his source, it is also omitted by Giphanius when the latter borrows this comment. The other points about athetesis escape Giphanius entirely. As a connection begins to emerge between Falkenburg’s interest in athetesis and Giphanius’s bold and brilliant conjecture about Aristarchus’s version, these losses become important.

Falkenburg did not see athetesis in isolation, but in context. He saw that some variants carried the names of ancient Homeric critics. A lectio he is the first to spot is “οὔδαλα δοίης” (“you would give offscourings”) for “οὐδ’ ἅλα δοίης” (“you would not give a grain of salt [to your suppliant]”) at Od. 17.455.Footnote ¹⁸³ Falkenburg is interested in its being the reading of Callistratus, and would have read in the sentence just before this in Eustathius that the vulgate’s reading is that of his contemporary, Aristarchus.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ Another new variant concerns Od. 4.74–75, where Telemachus admires Menelaus’s palace, exclaiming, “such, to be sure, is the courtyard of Olympian Zeus within: / so many things to make one speechless.”Footnote ¹⁸⁵ Eustathius directed Falkenburg to a discussion in Athenaeus, where it is reported that this version is that of Aristarchus, and that Seleucus later changed the first line to: “such objects, to be sure, must lie within the house of Zeus.”Footnote ¹⁸⁶ Athenaeus’s speaker prefers this, especially as “courtyard” is inappropriate for the interior space Telemachus is contemplating. Falkenburg notes these points and the reference to Athenaeus. He rarely draws conclusions in the marginalia. But one likely inference from these two novel observations, both of which Giphanius inherited, is that our version is that of Aristarchus.Footnote ¹⁸⁷ Certainly, by starting to match traces of ancient versions with individual ancient critics, Falkenburg is framing in small steps the question that will emerge fully formed in Giphanius’s preface: which of these versions is ours? Moreover, next to the second locus, he adds a reference to Plutarch’s De Cupiditate divitiarum. He finds the verses quoted here in the version of Aristarchus and the vulgate: like ours, Plutarch’s Homer seems to be Aristarchan.Footnote ¹⁸⁸ Falkenburg’s interest in Plutarch’s version as a point of entry into Homeric textuality is another crucial part of the scaffolding that will enable Giphanius to work his way from the evidence of De audiendis poetis to his famous hypothesis.

Falkenburg himself does not comment on the passage in Iliad 9 that was the basis for this hypothesis. Yet he is implicated in Giphanius’s reading of the Plutarchomerica, for he showed Giphanius how to take Xylander’s cue and read Homer against Plutarch.Footnote ¹⁸⁹ It is telling, moreover, that the observation that proved crucial for Giphanius bypasses Falkenburg’s key textual tool, Eustathius’s commentary. Falkenburg knew that contemporaries had sporadically discovered odd things about Homer’s text and that they did this by “internal analysis,” i.e., by considering how individual ancient variants reflect on the history of the epics. He knew about the strange form in which Aristotle quotes Agamemnon’s threats.Footnote ¹⁹⁰ He remembered, too, that Erasmus spotted a divergence between the vulgate at Od. 17.322–23, and Plato’s quotation in Laws 777a.Footnote ¹⁹¹ One suspects he noticed Hartung’s two intricate analyses of such loci. Yet in the Bodleian Homer, he shows little interest in tracing eccentric textual testimonies in an aleatory fashion. Ancient scholarship and primarily Eustathius form the nucleus of Falkenburg’s research. This focuses the novelty of his findings on Homer’s ancient editors, rather than the versions of Homer circulating in antiquity. More significantly, by systematically exploring Eustathius and the Moralia, Falkenburg arrives at a small yet critical mass of observations that turn internal analysis into a methodology for the first time. More crucial than his findings are the possibilities he unlocks by pointing to a category of material — ancient Homeric scholarship — and a way of looking at it.

Inventing this methodology was not just a matter of dedication. To identify what constitutes textual information is not the same as to catalogue it. Giphanius and Camerarius both reported, based on Athenaeus, that Demetrius of Phaleron had athetized as pointless the explanation of Menelaus’s unsolicited arrival at Il. 2.408–09. Giphanius also borrows Falkenburg’s reference to Quaestiones convivales on “the proverbial Menelaus” as an uninvited guest.Footnote ¹⁹² But he overlooks a further annotation. In the same text, Falkenburg discovers Plutarch suggesting, without mentioning the textual debate, that “Menelaus did not want to point to his brother’s omission by not coming, as fastidious people do.”Footnote ¹⁹³ Acutely, Falkenburg homes in on an interpretation that would save the verse from excision.Footnote ¹⁹⁴ The note Giphanius missed captures Falkenburg in the process of developing the instruments by which Homeric textuality can be studied. Rigorous and imaginative, his textual method is driven, as Wolf’s will be, by a powerful inferential capacity that transforms information into textual evidence, and individual examples into a new vision of how much it is possible to discover about the history of Homer’s text.

Without a doubt, this methodology is the origin of Giphanius’s emphasis on the ancient fortunes of Homer’s text. And yet, out of Falkenburg’s critical mass of textual observations, very few found their way to his edition. The rest were mangled in transmission or simply slipped Giphanius’s notice. The notes are not a full record of the two scholars’ conversations. More than any single particular, a way of thinking that was the outcome of Falkenburg’s detailed research must have energized Giphanius’s new attitude to the text. He himself conducted little such research. Of Giphanius’s textual lemmas, six do not correspond to identifiable sources. Three concern variants in previous editions.Footnote ¹⁹⁵ In a fourth, Giphanius mentions an emendation of Od. 4.84 by Zenon the Stoic (333–264 BCE), while a fifth discusses variant versions of Od. 14.112 associated with Aristarchus and Aristophanes of Byzantium (ca. 25–ca. 185 BCE).Footnote ¹⁹⁶ Falkenburg’s work must have opened Giphanius’s eyes to these testimonies in Strabo and Athenaeus.Footnote ¹⁹⁷ Eustathius also alludes to them, but Giphanius does not mention him. The final textual observation that must be Giphanius’s own, however, refers to Longinus’s athetesis of Il. 1.296, only known from Eustathius.Footnote ¹⁹⁸ Yet in what appears to be Giphanius’s one independent recourse to Eustathius’s textual testimony, the commentator goes, once again, unnamed. The persistent suppression of Eustathius’s name tells us one thing for sure: Giphanius, who did not once retrace Falkenburg’s steps through Eustathius’s commentary, had only the haziest notion of this source’s importance to the textual work in front of him. In seeing to print only a rough approximation of Falkenburg’s methods, he made it impossible for readers of his Homer to share and build on the new attitude to the text that it bodied forth.

The Homeric Question after Giphanius

This essay began with Isaac Casaubon and Daniel Heinsius as notable early modern forerunners of Wolf. Both these men were familiar with internal analysis. In 1611, Heinsius makes it clear that he is thinking of specific variants when he describes the Homer in our hands as a “phantom,” since he refers to passages in Aristotle and Plutarch that reveal the audacious “sordes et ineptias grammaticorum” (“drivel and inanities of the grammarians”).Footnote ¹⁹⁹ Ten years earlier, Casaubon had commented on Athenaeus’s report of just such a major intervention by Aristarchus.Footnote ²⁰⁰ Casaubon concludes here that “our manuscripts . . . were corrected against Aristarchus’s edition,”Footnote ²⁰¹ having famously speculated in 1583, on the basis of Josephus’s testimony, that the earliest form of Homer’s epics might be irrecoverable. Both these scholars would have come across Giphanius’s Homer. Heinsius may have even owned Falkenburg’s Homer before passing it on to his son. But they have to work out their textual tools from first principles. If these philologists are joining a conversation on Homeric textuality, it is one that happens in snippets across decades, down indistinct paths of transmission. The methodological coherence that Falkenburg’s work could have brought to the discussion, had it been genuinely disseminated, never materialized. The historical approach to textual criticism that might have been his gift to Homeric scholarship, a gift that had the potential to place Homer at the center of philological study, would emerge out of a very different discussion, two centuries later.

The radical intellectual refraction that happened with Giphanius’s edition is best encapsulated in his “Ad lectorem” itself. Along with its novel suggestions, Giphanius’s little preface lays before its readers an array of sources on the history of the epics. Chosen out of the palette put together by Giphanius’s predecessors, this material looks decidedly trite if compared with Falkenburg’s research on this topic. The internal analysis found in the Bodleian Homer comes with a vivid interest in the poems’ life in antiquity. Falkenburg was reading Homer alongside Aelian’s Varia historia and Lycurgus’s In Leocratem, sources that refer to the epics’ migration across the ancient world, their performances at the Panathenaea, and the Pisistratean recension.Footnote ²⁰² Contemporaries were already exploring these texts. Much more obscure is a scholion Falkenburg marks up in his Pindar on the rhapsode Cynaethus, who performed and interpolated Homer’s poems.Footnote ²⁰³ Another rare reference comes to light in Falkenburg’s text-critical statement of 1569. His anecdote about the “least corrected” Homer is from Diogenes Laertius. Diogenes reports that the philosopher Timon (ca. 320–230 BCE) once said that to find a correct text of Homer one should look for “ancient manuscripts and not already corrected.”Footnote ²⁰⁴ The story will feature often in the history of the Homeric Question,Footnote ²⁰⁵ but Falkenburg is apparently the first to single it out, perhaps while reading Sambucus’s 1566 edition of Diogenes.Footnote ²⁰⁶ The vicissitudes of Homer’s poems were certainly on his mind at this time. In his Greek Anthology, Falkenburg pauses over an epigram that refers to Pisistratus’s recension of the epics.Footnote ²⁰⁷ The volume was purchased in 1566, the publication year of Sambucus’s Diogenes, Xylander’s Plutarchomerica, and Estienne’s Homer, and annotated (at least partly) in Rome in 1567.

Soon after this, Falkenburg wrote to the Roman Orsini about printers who play fast and loose with Greek texts. This philologist and antiquarian helped shape Falkenburg’s Homeric inquiries in these years. Falkenburg may have noticed the scholion on Cynaethus in an Orsini publication that he watched going through Plantin’s press as he wrote his letter.Footnote ²⁰⁸ In Rome, Orsini had shown him two remarkable herms of Homer and Menander inscribed with epigrams on the poets and thought to have once decorated the villa of the author of Varia historia (fig. 4).Footnote ²⁰⁹ The future editor of Nonnus copied these poems at the back of his Anthology, realizing that one of them is also found within it.Footnote ²¹⁰ He would later incorporate an editio princeps of them in his note on a “praeclara mentio” (“honorable naming”) of Homer by Nonnus at Dionysiaca 13.50–51.Footnote ²¹¹ The fifth-century epic poet’s invocation of Homer as “the entire harbour of eloquence” is set alongside the third-century epigrammatist who calls him “the ageless voice of the whole world.”Footnote ²¹² The ubiquity of Homer across antiquity fascinates Falkenburg as it does other comparative philologists of this period. At Dionysiaca 25.253, Nonnus invokes Homer again, this time as “son of Meles.” To explicate the attribute, Falkenburg quotes pseudo-Herodotus on a legend that wanted Homer born next to the river Meles in Smyrna.Footnote ²¹³ He juxtaposes this testimony with an ancient object in Orsini’s collection: a coin from a colony of Smyrna showing Homer on one side and the river Meles on the other (fig. 4).Footnote ²¹⁴ This triangulation is an exact and suggestive parallel to his later alignment of ancient debates on the text. The seeds of a textual approach to Homer that might have offered a historical counterweight to Estienne’s were sown not far from Vettori’s sphere of influence. In the years leading up to the annotations, there seems to have grown in Falkenburg a profound fascination with the afterlife of Homer in antiquity, which was also a methodological fascination with how the material, literary, and scholarly remains of antiquity can shed historical light on one another. The visit to Rome was vital to this. But this was also the time when Falkenburg thought hard about the textual critic’s dues to history, and what ancient scholarship had to offer such a critic. This conjunction made Falkenburg a philologist who might have taken sixteenth-century Homeric studies somewhere new.

Figure 4. Page 21^r of Orsini’s Imagines, showing sketches of antiquarian finds relevant to Homer. The herm (center left) and top-left coin are those seen by Falkenburg in Rome and referred to in his Nonnus commentary. Fulvio Orsini, Imagines et elogia virorum illustrium et eruditor[um] ex antiquis lapidibus et nomismatib[us] expressa cum annotationib[us] ex Bibliotheca Fulvi Ursini. Rome, 1570. British Library 551.e.6.

Falkenburg’s prolegomena to Homer, then, would have looked very different from Giphanius’s “Ad lectorem.” But this is not to underestimate what this little preface did. Giphanius gives no hint as to what brought him to Josephus’s Against Apion and its unique testimony that the epics were believed in antiquity to contain loose ends, reflecting their oral transmission.Footnote ²¹⁵ Reading it, it struck him that the Homeric nods J. C. Scaliger had recently made notorious corresponded to these loose ends. His idea threw the epics into a critical debate out of which they would emerge two centuries later as the rugged products of an illiterate society. This is how Wolf found them, and why he devised philological instruments to investigate their past. But when Camerarius, Hartung, Xylander, and Falkenburg began to take an archaeological view of the surface of Homer’s poems, it was not on account of any perceived roughness in them, but because of their historical attitude to textual variance. And Josephus’s testimony would have meant little to Giphanius, had it not been for their work, which made him think of textual irregularities as witnesses to an eventful history of transmission. With what seems to be a knack for pushing philological minutiae aside for the sake of a bigger point, Giphanius saw in Josephus not just confirmation of what these philologists were discovering, but a way to approach the more immediately compelling question of the apparent nonsense in Homer’s epics. Giphanius is fascinated in his commentary by Scaliger’s Poetice, unlike Falkenburg, whose annotations contain no references to this work. The cross-fertilization of mid-sixteenth-century textual criticism with Scaliger’s literary deconstruction was Giphanius’s own contribution and, perhaps fittingly, the part of the “Ad lectorem” that made scholarly history. His edition was crucial to the process by which, at a critical juncture, a textual debate morphed into a literary one, snatching Homer away from the philologists and making him the favorite of the world of belles lettres. To repossess him, philology had to wait until Wolf.

Pietro Vettori and the Homeric Scholia in the Sixteenth Century

There was only so much Falkenburg’s methods could do without the evidence of the Venice scholia. The scholia maiora surpass, in Wolf’s words, “in [their] critical and grammatical riches not only Eustathius but all the scholiasts of all the poets.”Footnote ²¹⁶ The Venetus A, or A scholia, focus particularly on textual matters. But the Venetus A and Venetus B had been in St. Mark’s Library long before Villoison rediscovered them.Footnote ²¹⁷ Sebastian Faesch saw them in 1678,Footnote ²¹⁸ and the manuscripts are recorded in the hands of such humanists as Cardinal Bessarion, Giovanni Aurispa, Guarino Veronese, Martino Filetico, Victor Faustus, and Scipio Tettius.Footnote ²¹⁹ Nor were the Veneti exclusive witnesses for these scholia. Guillaume Budé made use of a manuscript that contained both A scholia and bT scholia (i.e., those witnessed in the Venetus B and the Townley codex), though, as Filippomaria Pontani notes, this extraordinary source did not open any of the avenues Wolf traveled two centuries later.Footnote ²²⁰ Yet Budé’s manuscript might have changed Homeric studies in the hands of another philologist, and clearly the process of editing Homer in the sixteenth century was beginning to generate questions that could increase attention to the scholia maiora.

It is true that very few people had access to these precious marginalia or copies of them in the second half of the sixteenth century, yet one of those people was Vettori.Footnote ²²¹ As every transmission history of the scholia records, he had the Townley codex, then in Florence, copied for him, and his apograph, the Victorianus, still survives.Footnote ²²² It is also known that at some point he saw the Venetus A in St. Mark’s Library, since he indicated this when correcting a comment in the Victorianus.Footnote ²²³ Vettori was responsible for the first partial edition of the bT scholia in 1619, which was put together by a student of his own protégé, Ioannes Caselius, on the basis of a transcript that Caselius had made from Vettori’s apograph.Footnote ²²⁴ Vettori also made the scholia known to other scholars.Footnote ²²⁵ Explaining his decision to print the ancient scholia on Aeschylus, he wrote: “I do not think these scholia [declarationes] are for the most part to be looked down on for I see Eustathius . . . often relies on their testimony and carefully cites them. I believe many of them are extracts from authoritative commentaries, which were transferred to those codices of the poets for convenience, so that one might have the explanation of an unusual or old word, or of an ancient habit, ready to hand.”Footnote ²²⁶ This lucid account supplied early modern readers with an advertisement and a careful reconstruction of the origins of the declarationes in the margins of old codices. When he mentions Eustathius, Vettori is including the Homeric scholia without naming them. Those who realized that he was referring to something other than the D scholia would have wanted to know more. To such readers, Vettori gave the tantalizing information that Eustathius acted as a witness for many of those precious comments to which they had no access.

Vettori’s contribution does not end here. What is never mentioned in transmission histories of the scholia is that he inserted some of the bT scholia in his works. He used at least one in his commentary on Demetrius’s De elocutione, and at least twenty-three in the second book of his Lectiones.Footnote ²²⁷ It is with this publication of the Homeric scholia that their story comes to join that of Falkenburg and Giphanius. Falkenburg diligently collects and transcribes many of the scholia quoted by Vettori, indicating that they come from Vettori’s “vetus codex.”Footnote ²²⁸ Falkenburg knew that the use of these scholia was one of the novelties of Vettori’s 1569 Lectiones. Such declarationes had not featured in the first Lectiones of 1554, though Vettori inserted references to them in his 1582 revision.Footnote ²²⁹ His correspondence reveals that the Homeric scholia were very much on his mind during the period of the composition and publication of the new Lectiones.Footnote ²³⁰ Falkenburg would have noticed this material in the new philological work, or had it flagged for him by mutual friends like Sambucus and Rehdiger.Footnote ²³¹ Indeed, at some point Rehdiger acquired two manuscripts of Homer containing scholia, and Falkenburg may well have seen a codex with bT scholia known to Orsini as early as 1567.Footnote ²³² In other words, despite being inaccessible to many, there were by this time a number of scholars who found the scholia relevant, and potentially revolutionary, for the study of Homer. And Falkenburg was in a particularly privileged position for grasping their importance.

Falkenburg does not end his search for scholia with Vettori’s Lectiones. One of the sources he uses is a collection of ancient sayings by Arsenius of Monemvasia, the original owner of Sambucus’s manuscript. Arsenius was interested in Homeric exegesis, and appears to have been preparing an edition of scholia that never reached print.Footnote ²³³ His fascination spills over from one project onto the other, and under “Homer” he enters, not sayings from the epics, but paraphrases of four scholia maiora.Footnote ²³⁴ Falkenburg appears to have identified these four Homeric scholia as something of the kind. One of the declarationes Vettori quotes appears among Arsenius’s four, and Falkenburg uses Arsenius’s testimony to complete or emend the scholion in Vettori.Footnote ²³⁵ His textual alertness puts him on the right track: the material Arsenius cites must contain interpretations akin to the Homeric scholia. Thus, he also quotes from Arsenius an interpretation of why passion is figured by Homer as an “ἱμὰς” (“girdle,” but also “lash” or “leather strap”), a startling scholion on the Odyssey that, without this context, would seem an unlikely diversion from Falkenburg’s technical concerns: “‘He branded passion [ta erōtika] with the nature of an himas, because lovers do those things that deserve lashing, or because desire and the suffering it brings resemble a bond and a noose, or because passion consumes lovers inside all the way to the skin, and thins out their bodies by its intensity.’ Arsenius in the Apophthegms collected by him.”Footnote ²³⁶ Since the ancient scholia on the Odyssey had even poorer circulation than those on the Iliad, Falkenburg’s was a rare philological find. He must be aware that some of the material he takes from Eustathius has a similar origin, for he notes, referring to another Vettori scholion: “Eustathius records these things more clearly and fully.”Footnote ²³⁷ This changes the connection between Falkenburg’s textual approach to Homer and his interest in the scholia. They are not simultaneous and intellectually congruent pursuits, but his discovery of ancient criticism as an instrument that can change our understanding of Homer’s text. The precocious false start in the history of the Homeric Question is linked directly to a minor discovery of the Homeric scholia around 1569.

Sometimes the two converge. A bT scholion excerpted by Falkenburg concerns Homer’s ancient editors, focusing on the word “πτολίπορθος” (“city-sacking”) at Il. 2.278. Vettori notes that Cicero was under the impression that Homer uses the epithet to describe Odysseus, when in fact it usually describes Achilles. He then considers Il. 2.278, where Odysseus is referred to as “ὁ πτολίπορθος” (“the city-sacker”), adding: “An ancient scholion tells us that this was Aristarchus’s reading and that many erroneously remove the definite article. For the poet, knowing his own plan and thinking already of the outcome of that war ‘foretells the sacking of the city of which he would be the author.’” By quoting the scholion, Falkenburg isolates the textual aspect of Vettori’s discussion.Footnote ²³⁸ This scholion is part of the thinking that made Giphanius’s “Ad lectorem” possible. Yet Giphanius reworks the annotation, starting with Cicero’s opinion, then referring the reader to Vettori and finally to another use of the epithet in the poem.Footnote ²³⁹ Ancient scholion and textual point disappear.

Giphanius was only half-aware of Eustathius’s place in Falkenburg’s research, and a long way from understanding the text-critical value of these unpublished scholia.Footnote ²⁴⁰ He lacked Falkenburg’s acute sensitivity to textual evidence, and the clarity with which he saw the methodological potential in ancient scholarship. Yet Giphanius does take an interest in the scholia cited in Vettori’s essays that so fascinated Falkenburg, and which he himself sometimes quotes.Footnote ²⁴¹ As a result he publishes a small number of scholia maiora in the first printed full commentary on Homer. This fact has never made it into any history of the Homeric scholia. The first phase of the Homeric Question coincides with the first edition to print scholia maiora along with the text, under the authorship of a man who almost certainly did not see the connection.

The Bodleian Homer, the philological thinking it records, and the scholarly works and conversations it points to, show that philologists in the mid-sixteenth century were beginning to probe the elusive origins of Homer’s text by means of internal analysis. Camerarius, Hartung, Vettori, Xylander, Falkenburg, and Giphanius all started to see far-reaching historical import in shreds of textual evidence. In the Bodleian Homer, Falkenburg pursued this realization systematically, turning local insights into a methodology. He shared his work with Giphanius, in a move that could have brought the potential of this philology home to a broad readership. Indeed, Giphanius was able to articulate these philological investigations as a set of bold historical conclusions in an accessible publication. But if his compelling little preface made many subsequent scholars stop and think, his fundamental lack of engagement with the technical innovations he was responding to rendered Giphanius’s intervention more important for its failure to transmit those early modern innovations and give them visibility and an afterlife.