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quarter of the seventh century BCE. In the narrated tale of Bellerophon (Iliad vi.155–203), which introduces the trope of the “fatal letter”, with its message sealed within the folded tablets: “Kill the bearer of this” the written tablets are an anachronism in a narrative of an event that was supposed to have occurred generations before the Trojan War, centuries before writing had come to Greece. The “Fatal Letter” episode thus helps date the earliest possible recension of the version of the epic that we read to after the Greeks used writing, in the mid-eighth century BCE.
Inevitably, texts from the oral tradition would have existed in a multi- plicity of variants, which would eventually have been transcribed, and from which a standard text would eventually have been established. Homeric quo- tations by Plato and Aristotle, both of whom wrote in the fourth century BCE, show considerable variants which could be the result of reading or hearing variant texts; however, philosophers, orators and historians from this transitional period often quoted from memory, with all its limitations, rather than from a written text, making it impossible for us to know wheth- er variants in their Homeric quotations are reflective of textual variants or the vagaries of recall. With memory valued as high or higher than a written text it appears that textual precision may not always have been appreciated at this time. Further evidence of textual variation of Homer is documented in the 680 Homeric papyri of a total of 3026 literary papyri, the percentage of Homeric papyri reflecting the popularity of Homer in education.57
The first critical edition of Homer was prepared by the Greek grammari- an and literary critic Zenodotus of Ephesus, first superintendent of the Li- brary of Alexandria, who was at the height of his reputation about 280 BCE, during the reign of Ptolemy II. Working without an established tradition of philology, Zenodotus collated numerous formal manuscripts of Homer preserved in the library, deleted or obelized doubtful verses, transposed or altered lines and introduced new readings. It is probable that he was respon-
57 Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship: From the Beginning to the End of the Hellenistic Age (1968), pp. 104-117. Reynolds & Wilson, Scribes and Scholars, 3rd ed (1991), pp. 4-7.
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