Mythographus Homericus

Mythographus Homericus, the "Homeric Mythographer",[1] is the unknown writer of a text of tales collected from Greek mythology that are transmitted in two manuscript traditions.

Writings

In one, they are found among those scholia on the works of Homer transmitted in Byzantine manuscripts as the so-called "D-scholia".[2] In the other, recently recovered manuscript tradition, a 3rd-century CE papyrus, conserved at Berlin,[3] of the source or one based on it has provided a parallel text, confirming the text offered by Mythographus Homericus.[4] There are several fragmentary papyri, four of them from Oxyrhynchus, providing additional evidence. They date from the first or second to the fifth century CE; seventy-seven fragments relating to Iliad 18-24 were published in 1995 as P. Oxy. LXI 4096.[5]

In distinction from the texts interspersed among the Homeric D-scholia, where the actual individual authors are submerged in sources that are merely cited as scholia, the papyrus text preserves the original format in which these summary histories were transmitted.[6] They follow the canonic Homeric text, with headwords or lemmata that link them to the relevant Homeric line. Most of them are brief accounts of an episode or etiologies of names, genealogies or explanations of an Homeric term; they do not provide a grammarian's gloss.[7]

See also

Notes
  1. The pseudonym for this anonymous writer was coined by J. Panzer, De Mythographo Homerico restituendo (Greifswald, 1892).
  2. M. Van der Valk, Researches on the Text and Scholia of the Iliad, vol. I (Leiden 1963) 303ff.
  3. PBerol 13282.
  4. F. Montanari, "Gli homerica su papiro: Per una distinzione di generi," Filologia e critica letteraria della grecità (Ricerche di filologia classica II, Pisa 1984) 125-38; Montanari, "Revisione di PBerol 13282. Le historiae fabulares omeriche su papiro," Atti del xvii congresso internazionale di papirologia (Naples 1984) 22g-42; Montanari, "Filologia omerica antica nei papiri," Proceedings of the XVIII International Congress of Papyrology (Athens 1988) 1.341-44; M.W. Haslam, "A New Papyrus of the Mythographus Homericus," Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists 27 (1990) 31-36.
  5. M.W. Haslam in T. Gagos et al. The Oxrhynchus Papyri, vol. lxi (London, 1995); the papyrus fragments of Mythographus Homericus are discussed by M. van Rossum-Steenbeek, Greek Readers' Digests?: studies on a selection of subliterary papyri (Leiden: Brill) 1997:92ff.
  6. M. van Rossum-Steenbeek 1997:85; the Mythographus Homericus is discussed and set in the context of the subliterary genre of mythological handbooks, by M. van Rossum-Steenbeek, Greek Readers' Digests?: studies on a selection of subliterary papyri (Leiden: Brill) 1997:85-116.
  7. General comments and a major bibliography of Mythographus Homericus are offered in M.W. Haslam, "A New Papyrus of the Mythographus Homericus," Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists 27 (1990) 31-36.


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