Dr. John W. R. Lundon

 
 

The Scholia Minora in Homerum:  An Alphabetical List

Dozens of fragments of ancient glossaries to the Homeric poems – so-called Scholia Minora in Homerum – have been found in Egypt, and most of the world’s important papyrological collections possess at least one, if not several specimens. They range from lists of words, chosen from a particular passage of the Iliad or Odyssey and jotted down on a separate sheet of papyrus, to professionally produced rolls or codices pertaining to one or more books of the poems. What they all have in common, though, and what distinguishes them from lexica, is the arrangement of their entries in the order of the Homeric text.

So far fragments of nearly ninety glossaries have appeared in a variety of papyrological series, journals, proceedings of congresses and Festschriften. As can be readily imagined, in their present form of separate, non-alphabetical lists, published in diverse places, the glossaries cannot easily be mined for the often valuable data they contain. Whoever wishes to know whether a given Homeric word is in fact glossed in one of these texts, where it is glossed and how, must first track down the various publications and then read through each in search of what they are after.

In a first attempt to remedy this situation and make this material available to myself and others, I compiled an alphabetical list of the lexeis, or Homeric words, glossed in the scholia minora. This appeared in Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 124 (1999): 25–52. Since the publication of this article, I have been able to incorporate hundreds of new entries from editions published or obtained subsequently. Moreover, and more importantly, I have now added the text of the entire entry, including the lexeis as they appear in the glossary, their translations, or metaphrases, and any other material accompanying these. The result is a single alphabetical index of each and every entry in all of the glossaries that have appeared to date.

I eventually plan to publish a version of the index in print, but in the meantime I thought it might be sensible to make it available in a provisional form. Electronic publication will also make it possible to keep the list up to date as new texts are published and old ones improved. It goes without saying that I shall be enormously grateful to people for bringing slips or deficiencies to my attention, and for ideas on how to improve any aspect of the list.

 

Please mail comments, corrections, additions to: John Lundon

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11.09.2008