Scott Scullion - Böcker

Readers and scholars of contemporary literature in English and other languages generally do not have to worry very much about their source texts: what is published in book form is essentially what the author wrote, perhaps with a few uncorrected typographical errors. Readers and scholars of Latin and Greek literature are not in such a fortunate position. The texts presented in 'critical editions', such as the Oxford Classical Texts or the Teubner or Budé series, though the outcome of painstaking scholarship carried out over centuries, are by no means as certain as those of most modern literature. Ancient texts were copied and recopied by hand over the course of more than a millennium, and in the process both accidental and deliberate alterations accumulated, often leaving the text in a grievously 'corrupted' condition. The original, 'autograph' texts are long lost, and often our earliest copies are more than a thousand years removed from them. Textual criticism is the discipline that examines whatever 'witnesses' to an ancient text are available and tries to identify mistakes in its transmission and so far as possible establish its original form. Most of what we know about the ancient world comes from written sources, and textual criticism is therefore fundamental to the study of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Latin Textual Criticism is unprecedented in its scope and detail. It covers textual transmission in antiquity and the middle ages, the history of the subject and its most important practitioners, and methodological and practical aspects of textual criticism and editorial technique. It includes four case studies and, unlike most other treatments of the subject, deals also with textual criticism of inscriptions and papyri.

Albert Henrichs’ important and wide-ranging work on the Greek god Dionysos is well known to classical philologists and to all those interested in Greek culture and its modern reception. Fifteen fundamental studies of the most fascinating and compelling of Greek gods are reprinted in this third volume of his Collected Papers, together with a comprehensive index making the riches of Henrichs’ scholarship more readily accessible. The volume will thus become a basic work of reference. The papers are organised in four groups dealing with the identity and nature of Dionysos; his myths, cults, and iconography; maenads and maenadic ritual; and modern reception and understanding of Dionysos and the Dionysiac. Among the papers included are “Changing Dionysiac Identities,” “Myth Visualised: Dionysos and His Circle in Sixth-Century Attic Vase-Painting,” “Between Country and City: Cultic Dimensions of Dionysos in Athens and Attica,” “Der rasende Gott: Zur Psychologie des Dionysos and des Dionysischen in Mythos und Literatur,” “Dionysische Imaginationswelten: Wein, Tanz, Erotik,” “Greek Maenadism from Olympias to Messalina,” and “Loss of Self, Suffering, Violence: The Modern View of Dionysos from Nietsche to Girard.”