Michael A. Tueller (Arizona State University)
Planudean Margins and Book 7 of the Palatine Anthology
In comparison to the Palatine Anthology, The Planudean Anthology has suffered from its compiler’s editorial intervention. Most obviously, by re-ordering its epigrams under a series of subject headings, Planudes destroyed a great deal of information about the order of epigrams in the master anthology, by Constantine Cephalas, that underlies both collections. This destruction has generally been regarded as pretty complete.
In this paper, I examine one book of the Palatine Anthology (AP) as found in its Planudean witness, and show that it can, in fact, provide us with valuable information about the underlying order of the Cephalan anthology.
The first half of AP 7 is thematic in its ordering, and it is usually not too difficult to determine the theme being followed at any given point. The first section, 7.1–55, features poets’ tombs, followed by a section on philosophers, scholars, and sages, 7.78–135. Between these two sections, however, there is a curious amalgam, including epigrams on poets and philosophers (though in the reverse of the expected order), along with a few on Themistocles and others.
It is this inconsistency that my paper primarily addresses. To lay the groundwork for my analysis, the paper first demonstrates the principles underlying Planudes’ ordering scheme. While those principles are different from those found in our primary manuscript, P, they are not inscrutable, and can in fact be shown to be quite consistent. In the first part of the paper, I use a number of marginal issues in Planudes’ manuscript (Pl) to clear up some apparent inconsistencies and also demonstrate how Pl’s marginalia relate to its body text. To give just one example, I show that two epigrams in Pl’s section IIIa 6, numbers 11 and 12 (AP 7.516 and 360), should be reversed, preserving the numerical order that Pl inherited from Cephalas.
In the paper’s second part, I deal with a number of poems that appear in the margins of Pl, including all of 7.69–74, to show that the probable intended order underlying Planudes’ A exemplar had AP 7.69–71 following immediately after 7.55, while AP 7.72–74 were intended to appear in the neighborhood of 7.235–237, to which they directly connect in subject. The placement of AP 7.75–77 is necessarily more speculative, as these either do not appear in, or appear only in other parts of, Pl. The paper ends, however, by addressing the possibilities for these.
The most important conclusion we can reach from this analysis is that Pl’s A exemplar seems to have had the material in AP in a configuration that explains, but is clearly earlier than, the order we find in P. This should cause us to value the witness of that exemplar more highly when we consider the order of the epigrams we find in the Palatine Anthology. When we apply this new understanding of Pl to the evidence already known from P, we can gain additional insight into the strategies followed by Cephalas and his successors in the construction of the poetic book, including which circumstances would provoke tight editorial control and which would not, resulting in poems simply duplicating the ordering of their earlier find-spots or even drifting into miscellanies.