t h e c la s s i c a l r ev i ew 291

NOTICES

G o s t o l i ( A. ) (ed., trans.) Omero: Margite. (Testi e Commenti 21.)

Pp. 96. Pisa and Rome: Fabrizio Serra Editore for Istituto di μlologia
classica, Università degli Studi di Urbino, 2007. Paper, €32. ISBN:
978-88-6227-082-3.
doi:10.1017/S0009840X08002941
The book contains a nineteen-page introduction, bibliography, testimonia and fragments with
critical apparatus (the fragments also with loci similes and facing translation), a half-page list of
dialectal and prosodic features, and nineteen pages of commentary. The introduction surveys the
metre and content of the Margites, its date, title, language, attribution to Homer, poetic genre,
connection with Colophon and transmission.
The only novelty in the text is that the non-verbatim fragment in Theodorus Metochita (if it is
one), 4 G. = 6 West, is reconstructed as a trimeter, . For the
sake of completeness G. includes, under the heading ‘falso creditum’, what John Glucker claimed
as a fragment in Pl. Apol. 39ab. There would have been more to be said for including the
anonymous hexameter fragment about a vagina quoted by Hippolytus, Ref. 5. 8; when I argued
recently that it might be from the Margites or from comedy (CQ 58 [2008], 370–5), Walter
Burkert reminded me that he had already proposed assigning it to the Margites over twenty years
ago in H.P. Duerr (ed.), Die wilde Seele. Zur Ethnopsychoanalyse von Georges Devereux
(Frankfurt, 1987), pp. 40–2.
On the basis of the twelfth-century Aristotelian commentator Eustratius’ statement that
Archilochus was one of three authors who referred to the Margites and attested to its Homeric
authorship, G. dates the poem to the eighth or early seventh century; but such a datum cannot
safely be taken at face value. Then, to accommodate the claim in the Suda that both Margites and
Batrachomyomachia were the work of Pigres, the brother of Artemisia, she postulates a later
redaction by that exotic μgure (whom she incomprehensibly dates to the late μfth/early fourth
century). She follows J.A. Davison in thinking that the vocabulary of the papyrus fragments suits
a later period than the archaic, while holding that Aristotle and other sources are referring to the
earlier Margites. There is, however, no evidence to suggest the currency of more than one version
of the poem.
Much more interesting is her treatment of fr. 1 (G., W.), the lines about an old bard coming to
Colophon, often taken as the poem’s incipit. The bard was presumably identiμed as Homer and
represented as having told the story of the nincompoop Margites; according to the Certamen the
Colophonians showed o¶ the place where the schoolmaster Homer had begun his poetic career
by composing the Margites. G. (pp. 22–5, 71–3) sees the lines as analogous to the passage about
the blind poet from Chios in the Delian Hymn to Apollo, composed (or added) by a poet
adopting the persona of Homer and instructing the audience how to respond to future enquiries
on the poem’s authorship. The claim would be that this work treasured at Colophon was actually
by a poet from elsewhere. The fragment would not have stood at the very beginning of the
prologue, perhaps even in an epilogue.
G. is unaware of my Loeb edition of 2003 (Homeric Hymns. Homeric Apocrypha. Lives of
Homer). She quotes Tzetzes’ Chiliades (or Historiai) from the antiquated edition of Kiessling
(1826) instead from that of P.A.M. Leone (1968), which has di¶erent line-numbering. The book
is accurately printed, though two scholars’ names are mis-spelled in the apparatus to fr. 8c.
All Souls College, Oxford M.L. WEST
martin.west@all-souls.ox.ac.uk

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