Book Description

A series of nine introductory essays sets the process of annotating texts back into the various contexts from which the notes originally derive -- the scholar's study, the teacher's schoolroom, etc. -- and examines the ways in which annotations were inscribed into the rolls and codices. The last three essays (Part Three. "Select Annotated Texts") pay special attention to the copious tradition of annotations in Archaic Lyric and Iambic (Pindar, Bacchylides, Alcaeus, and Hipponax), Hellenistic Poetry (Callimachus and Theocritus), and Prose authors, distilling from the jejune entries the complex relationships between commentaries and the annotations. The Corpus proper, containing the Marginal and Interlinear Notes from the Greek and Latin literary papyri from Egypt, is arranged alphabetically by author (from Aeschylus to Xenophon) and the papyri themselves identified by their "Mertens-Pack 3" number (MP3); the Adespota, both poetry and prose, follow. The section with Latin is considerably shorter, as might be expected in the Greek-speaking East, but the notations to Cicero, Juvenal, and the texts of Roman law are, nonetheless, more often in Greek than Latin. The volume closes with a comprehensive list of annotated papyri (from MP3 23 to 2866, plus a few un-catalogued items) that summarizes the information contained in the Catalogue; a bibliography and a concordance between edition and MP3 number, and indices (Greek words, Latin words, hybrid Greek/Latin forms, and a general index of authors and topics covered) finish off the volume.