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Corinna D. L. Page: Corinna. (Supplementary

Paper No. 6.) Pp. 88. London: Society for the
Promotion of Hellenic Studies, 1953. Paper, 12s.
6d. net.

J. A. Davison

The Classical Review / Volume 5 / Issue 01 / March 1955, pp 33 - 35

DOI: 10.1017/S0009840X00169586, Published online: 13 February 2009

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 THE CLASSICAL REVIEW 33
has squeezed out Schroeder's excellent Temporum Indices and all but the first
of the nine sections of his Studiorum Pindaricorum Conspectus.
The preparation of this book has been long and harassed, and Snell craves
the reader's indulgence for any consequent inconsistencies. A reviewer must
judge what he finds, but it would be unjust to end without emphasizing that
this welcome edition's faults are wholly outweighed by its merits.
Trinity College, Cambridge D. S. ROBERTSON

CORINNA
D. L. PAGE: Corinna. (Supplementary Paper No. 6.) Pp. 88. London:
Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies, 1953. Paper, 12s. 6d. net.
O F all the additions which papyrology has made to our knowledge of Greek
literary texts, the poems of Corinna are perhaps the most puzzling; and it may
be surmised that it is only their lack of literary grace which has saved them
from becoming the subjects of a bibliography as extensive as that which has
grown up round Alcman's Partheneion. In English, apart from Mr. J. M.
Edmonds's collection of the testimonia and fragments in Lyra Graeca, iii, the only
works of any importance on Gorinna are Mr. Lobel's article in Hermes (lxv
[1930], 356 ff.), challenging the traditional view of Gorinna as an elder con-
temporary of Pindar's, and Sir Maurice Bowra's attempt to identify the nine
daughters whom Corinna ascribed to Asopus {Hermes, lxxiii [1938], 2136°.,
now Problems in Greek Poetry [1953], 54 ff-)- So Professor Page's thorough study
of the fragments will be very welcome to all students of Greek lyric poetry;
and it may be hoped that their gratitude will also be extended to the Society
for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies for publishing this pamphlet on a topic
of very limited interest in its series of Supplementary Papers. We have long
needed some outlet for papers which are too long for publication in the regular
classical periodicals and yet too short for publication as books; and pamphlets
of the present size and format seem admirably adapted to the requirements.
My only complaint of the production of this pamphlet is that it seems not to
have been found possible to provide any index, whether of authorities (which is
made more necessary by the failure to arrange the fragments incertae sedis in
alphabetical order of sources) or of the principal passages from other authors;
a concordance with Diehl (whose numeration is given with each fragment),
and perhaps with Edmonds as well, would be very helpful.
The monograph has four main parts: on the text (pp. 9-45), the dialect and
orthography (46-60), the metres (61-64), and the date of Gorinna (65-84).
There are also two short appendixes, on political, social, and economic condi-
tions in Boeotia about 200 B.C. (85-86), and on the metre of the first nine lines
of the Berlin papyrus (87-88). The section on the text naturally begins with
the Berlin papyrus (B.K.T. v. 2, No. 284), which is unfortunately no longer
available for inspection; Professor Page thanks Mr. Lobel for the loan of a
photograph (9), but he remarks that the photograph 'is fading; numerous
alleged letters are illegible in it' (10), so that, though his transcription is very
detailed and as reliable as such a thing can be, it is not possible to feel that all
the readings are so certain as to be taken as final. Then we have the short and
perplexing fragment published by Vitelli in 1934 (now P.S.I, x, No. 1174);
4598.5.1 D
34 THE CLASSICAL REVIEW
there is no evidence that Page has had access to anything but the published
information about this. Next we have restored texts, with translation and
comments, of those parts of the papyri which are reasonably intelligible; the
restorations are in the main those of Diehl, but Page leaves several passages
unrestored, expressing justified dissatisfaction with the previously accepted
supplements on grounds of space or sense or both. His conclusions on problems
of interpretation too are conservative; for example, he firmly rejects Bowra's
attempt to find Plataea, Ghalcis, and Thespia among Corinna's Asopides,
pointing out that there is no evidence in the text as it stands for a 'Boeotian
list' of Asopus' daughters, as opposed to a 'Peloponnesian list' (25-27, espe-
cially 27, n. 1). In his treatment of the Orestes fragment (P.S.I. 1174, B) there
seems to be some special pleading about Orestes' connexions with Boeotia, the
point of which becomes plain later (45) in the conclusion that 'there is no
reason to believe that Corinna narrated any but Boeotian stories'. However,
before we reach this conclusion, we have worked through a very complete and
entirely satisfactory rehandling of all the fragments of Corinna which are
known from later sources; they do not add up to very much at the best, and
they throw no light at all on the fundamental problem of Corinna's date.
Except for the jejune Suidas article, the testimonia (such as they are) appear only
incidentally; it would perhaps have been better if they too had been set out
systematically, so that the student could see at a glance how shaky a foundation
the traditional view of Corinna's date rests upon.
The section on dialect and orthography, like that on the text, is admirably
thorough, and makes good use of the datable Boeotian inscriptions of the fourth
to first centuries B.C.; no conclusion is drawn in this section, whereas in that on
metre the final paragraph, headed 'V. General Conclusions', leaves the reader
with the impression (reinforced in the last words of the final chapter, p. 84)
that Corinna's systematic use of 'polyschematist' choriambic dimeters may be
adduced as evidence that she must be later than the mature Attic drama of the
'last few decades of the fifth century'. Though it is certainly true that, so far as
our knowledge goes, the extensive use of such dimeters in the choruses of
tragedy begins in the latter part of that century, Page's argument seems to me
to err in supposing that Corinna (who is writing a very different type of lyric
from that of tragedy) must have learned from Euripides and his contemporaries
the systematic use of a metre which already appears exceptionally in the frag-
ments of Sappho and Anacreon, and which, if there is anything in the argu-
ments of Meillet (Les Origines indo-europeennes des metres grecs, especially chapter
v), comes as near as any known Greek metre to primitive Indo-European usage.
The argument from silence can be pressed too far in both directions; on this
point a plain non liquet is safest. The fourth chapter, on Corinna's date, in which
the evidence is collected and summed up, makes it abundantly clear that there
is no worthwhile evidence for putting Corinna earlier than the middle of the
third century B.C., the terminus post quern suggested by the orthography; this is
just as likely an explanation of her absence from the Alexandrian canon of
lyric poets as the only plausible alternative—that her works were forgotten
soon after they were written, and came to light again in the late third century,
or even later. This chapter, with its study of Corinna's dialect (which is shown
to have been not a genuine 'vernacular' but a literary dialect with occasional
vernacular elements) and style, will attract the most general interest, and we
may be grateful for Page's clear statement of the position, and for the soundly
 THE CLASSICAL REVIEW 35
based scepticism of his general conclusion, 'that there is not sufficient evidence
available from internal and external sources to establish the date of Gorinna
with certainty'.
University of Leeds J. A. DAVISON

THEOGNIS
AURELIO P E R E T T I : Teognide nella tradizione gnomologica. (Universita di
Pisa: Studi Classici e Orientali, iv.) Pp. xii+396. Pisa: Libreria
Goliardica, 1953. Paper, L. 4000.
THIS interesting work, though failing in its major thesis, is of value in clarifying
points about the indirect tradition of Theognis, and in raising issues concerning
interconnexions of pieces in the corpus Theognideum. Peretti argues that the
sylloge was compiled in the sixth century A.D., or, perhaps at Byzantium, in the
age of Photius and Arethas (s. ix/x), by some gnomologist who picked excerpts
out of several large and small anthologies similar to and partly coextensive with
Stobaeus and Orion, all such anthologies deriving ultimately from a post-
Isocratean Hellenistic selection made, under Stoic and Cynic influences, from
Theognis' poems, subject to some distortion and to much admixture of alien
pieces.
Peretti contends that, from the fourth century B.C. onwards, every ancient
quoter of Theognis quotes at second or remoter hand while the direct
manuscript tradition perished. Now in any literature most quoters cite most
poets only from anthology pieces or other secondary sources: but poetical
works can exist for long periods unquoted, and even unread. Our oldest and
completest manuscript of Theognis, A, lurked without known posterity or
citation for about a millennium (see D. C. G. Young, Scriptorium, vii (1953),
p. 4), as did the Episdes of St. Clement of Rome or the Hebrew text of Yeshua
Ben Sira. But Peretti is far from proving that Athenaeus knew Theognis only
at second hand. Of his nine citations six may plausibly be held to come from
anthologies, being associated with other pieces cited by other authors in asso-
ciation with them. It is therefore obvious, Peretti claims (p. 93), that Athenaeus
did not get his other quotations (which no one else cites) by another route: the
erotic and convivial citations (993-6, 997-1002) must have come from a
Jewish source concerned to denigrate Greek culture. For the riddle 1229-30
Peretti offers no explanation. Many will think it likely that the omnivorous
Athenaeus, interested in Theognis from anthologies, also dipped into a book of
him in the Alexandrian library, from whose pinakes probably derives the Suda's
notice of the Megarian's various collections amounting to 2,800 lines.
Carriere (1948) argued that our sylloge is a fusion from a fifth-century B.C.
Athenian collection and a first-century A.D. Alexandrian collection, with some
sequences in common, fused and rearranged by a seventh-century monk.
Peretti finds unplausible (p. 379) such an activity at such a date. But the sixth
and tenth centuries are unplausible also, for other reasons. Our sylloge has
1,422 lines, of which 10 are added to the direct manuscript tradition from
Stobaeus or Athenaeus. Up to the tenth century A.D., the date of A, we find no
more than 270 verses quoted or alluded to by some 87 sources (including some
Latin, but not the Hebrew Koheleth). Stobaeus bulks far the largest, with 189