The project concerns the scholarly activity that was devoted to iambos in antiquity. Iambos was one of the pre-eminent poetic genres of ancient Greek literature. Its heyday was in the seventh and sixth centuries BC with the poets Archilochus and Hipponax. Iambic poems could cover a wide variety of topics, from the scurrilous, defamatory, and abusive to the pondered and serious – though it was the former that was thought throughout Greek literary history to embody the idea of the genre. Academic study of iambos began early on: the first such works which we know of were two exegetical works on Archilochus written by Aristotle and Heraclides of Pontus in the fourth century BC. The last scholar who could examine whole iambic poems directly was John Tzetzes, who must still have had access to a copy of Hipponax in the twelfth century AD.
The overall objective of the project was to gain a comprehensive, multi-faceted understanding of this scholarly activity on iambos across time. In order to do so it examined the various categories of evidence that are available for it. There are pieces of information on scholarly works on iambos in texts written by other authors (what Classicists call the 'indirect tradition'); these are especially useful for the earliest period of scholarship, in the late Classical and Hellenistic period, from which no relevant primary evidence survives. Fragments of papyri of the works of Archilochus and Hipponax provide valuable information on the editorial form in which these poems circulated in the Hellenistic and Roman period: from the internal organisation of these editions - the division of poems between the various volumes and the order of the poems within individual volumes - to corrections of copying errors and the apparatus of critical signs which scholars used to convey knowledge about the poems and individual lines. Some of the papyri also preserve marginal annotations written by readers, which range from the interpretation of individual words to variant readings found in other manuscripts.
Excavations in Oxyrhynchus, in Egypt, have retrieved fragments of two commentaries, one to Archilochus and one to Hipponax, which offer valuable information on the way ancient critics approached and explained iambos. There are also two other interesting papyrus fragments: one of them is a lexicon to iambic poetry, and the other - a very ancient manuscript for Classical standards, from the third century BC - is a comparison of verses of Archilochus with verses of ancient Greece's most revered poet, Homer. Dictionaries of literary Greek compiled in Late Antiquity and in the Byzantine period relied extensively on earlier scholarship on individual authors and genres, and the lexicon written by Hesychius of Alexandria is particularly noteworthy on this count: well over 100 of its entries can be connected with the text of the archaic iambic poets, and accordingly, the interpretations given by Hesychius for those entries can be traced back to earlier commentaries and sometimes combined with each other to unroll before our eyes an articulate discussion of a given passage. Finally, as mentioned above, John Tzetzes quoted Hipponax extensively, often giving his own interpretations of the verses he was quoting, and sometimes relying on earlier interpretations which he must have had access to. The project examined all of these categories of evidence individually before combining them into an account of the phenomenon in its complexity, contextualising it in the broader reality of ancient literary scholarship.
The project's importance is twofold. On the one hand, a better understanding of ancient interpretations of these texts helps us better understand the texts themselves. On the other, a contextualised, diachronic study of the interpretation of literature in antiquity provides a valuable insight into the continuity (and the lack thereof) in the task of the literary scholar. Reflecting on ancient interpretative practices helps us reflect on our own while giving us a more nuanced understanding of the past which we study. Such a project is also relevant in that it illuminates the tradition of literature and culture which proceeded in multifarious streams from antiquity - over two and a half millennia ago - through the Roman and Byzantine empires to the present day; a rich tradition which still fertilises European and worldwide thought in the twenty-first century, and (hopefully) beyond.
