Minos

Note on this Edition

How the volume was made

The Greek was taken from the Perseus Digital Library’s digital transcription of Burnet and cut into Burnet’s lines by reading every line-end from the photographs of his page, in the impression described in the Editorial Note. Accents, breathings and iota subscripts were read on the sharpest image of each page that the scan provides, and a doubtful mark was settled by setting it beside sure examples of each form on the same page. The section letters and line numbers in the margin were computed from the Stephanus divisions rather than copied, and were then compared with Burnet’s margin, page by page, across the 352 lines of the dialogue. Burnet’s way of running short exchanges together, with the speakers’ names after a dash, was reproduced line by line, and the English follows it.

The dialogue was made in one block, all thirteen of Burnet’s pages. The block was checked by four independent reviewers: two, dividing its pages between them, compared the Greek and the apparatus with the page images letter by letter, one compared the English with the Greek clause by clause, and one checked every fact and reference in the notes. Each finding was examined again against the evidence before it was adopted, and not all were adopted. What that check caught is recorded at the end of this Note.

The volume was then read through again as one text, since a check made clause by clause cannot see some kinds of error: a word rendered one way here and another way there, a recapitulation that states a step in other words than the step itself, a rendering that departs from the earlier volumes of the series. The translator read the whole, and four further reviewers read it independently: one for the consistency of terms across the whole book and with the earlier volumes, two for sense, omissions and continuity in its two halves, and one for the Editorial Note against the scan of Burnet’s volume. The Introduction, the Key Words of the Dialogue, the Outline and the Glossary were then written from the finished English, and three more reviewers checked them, claim by claim and citation by citation, together with the corrections made in the final reading.

What the final reading caught

It found some seventy points in the English and its notes that the block check had passed, most of them small, and several more in the Editorial Note. They fall into a few classes.

The largest class was renderings that had not been brought into line with the earlier volumes of the series or kept to one English word within this one. The set answers were made the series’ own: Phēmi is “I say so” (316c, as at 318a), and Ou moi dokei and Ouk emoige dokei “I do not think so” (313c, 314e). Orthōs is “rightly” at 319a too, where the draft had “incorrectly”; ethelein is “be willing” at 321a, as at 315e; apodeixis is “proof” (315d) and dēloun “reveal” (319c), as at 314a–b. The rare word for Minos’ relation to Zeus, synousiastēs, is now “one who is with” (319e), so that it is heard with “come to be with” (319c) and “this being with” (320b); the draft’s “companion” was also the speaker’s label. Hoi politikoi are “statesmen” and their writings “statesmen’s writings” (317a), and epistasthai is “know how” wherever the infinitive is understood (317b).

Some renderings changed the sense or missed the Greek. In Hesiod’s last line poleōn is the epic genitive of “many”, not of “cities” (320d), as a published translation had taken it. Homer’s line on Minos now reads “was king, nine-yearly confidant of great Zeus” (319b, 319d), so that the reader can see how Socrates takes “nine-yearly” with “confidant”. Socrates’ reply to the companion’s first question is “Is there anything in which law differs from law” (313a); oikēsis poleōs is “the administration of a city” (321b); the questioner at 321c is hypothetical, “if someone should ask us”, as at 321d; Minos “used to come to be with Zeus” (319c), a recurring meeting; and the last sentence names “our souls” as its subject and speaks of “what is good and what is poor” in them (321d). Several phrases that followed a published translation more closely than the Greek requires were reworded (315b, 316e–317a, 317e, 318b, 318e–319a, 320a–b). In the notes, the musical nome is described as LSJ describes it (318b), the reading of F and Stobaeus at 317d is described more exactly, Plutarch’s report that Minos was always ill spoken of in the Attic theaters was added (318d), and the date of Thespis is given as the Suda gives it (321a). The spelling of the volume was made American throughout, as in the series.

In the Editorial Note, the contents of Burnet’s volume and of its first part were corrected, and the date of the impression is now drawn from the publisher’s list. The spaced points and the colon inside A’s readings are described as Burnet uses them; the place of Stobaeus’ quotation was found (317c–318a); the sign ÷ is explained from Burnet’s practice in the Laws; and the Alexander cited at 313a2, whom the draft named Alexander of Aphrodisias, is left unnamed, since his works were searched without finding the quotation.

What remains undone

The Alexander whom Burnet cites at 313a2 for the wording of the companion’s question has not been identified; the Editorial Note reports him as Burnet does. The number of Stobaeus’ excerpt within his chapter on laws has not been found. A few marks at the limit of the scan are printed as they were read: the separators in the apparatus at 315a3 and 315d1, which print with a tail, as colons, and the marks at 317b7, 317d5 and 317d7, which print without their tails, as question marks, since all three close questions.

The apparatus is Burnet’s alone. It has not been collated against the manuscripts, and readings proposed since 1907 are not reported. The translation follows Burnet’s text even where later scholars would print something else.

The notes are a reader’s aid, not a commentary. They were chosen to explain what the English cannot carry, and they label the more doubtful interpretations as such. The question of who wrote the dialogue is set out in the Introduction but not argued; a reader who wants the scholarly debate will need a commentary.

The checks described above were made by independent reviewers working from the same page images. The volume has not been read by a specialist outside the project, and a reader who finds an error is asked to report it.

The record of the blocks

The notes that follow were written when the block was finished, and are kept as a record of what its check found. Where the final reading changed something they report, the text above says so.

Block I: 313a–321d (Burnet pages 1–13)

How it was made. The whole dialogue was made as one block. The line-ends were read from the photographs of Burnet’s pages and the words cut from the digital transcription to match; the typesetting was extended to Burnet’s run-in exchanges, in which a speaker’s name follows a dash inside the line and the dash stands, as Burnet prints it, either at the end of a line or at the head of the next. The English was drafted against the Greek with the rulings settled with the publisher at the start: nomos “law” every time, ta nomizomena “what is accepted” and nomizein “accept”, in the register of the series.

What the check caught in the Greek. The text and the apparatus were found to agree with Burnet’s pages letter by letter, and the thirty marks that had been doubtful in transcription were all confirmed as read: among them a rough breathing that prints like an acute on short vowels, A’s dicolon in two readings, and the misprints “om A”, “om F” and “a 3” kept as printed. Two points of layout were corrected: Homer’s words run into the prose at 319b4 are letterspaced in Burnet, and the first verse line at 319b5 is set deeper than had been measured.

What the check caught in the English. About forty-five points were corrected. Two page joins had carried words across the turn of Burnet’s page (316c, 317e), and five Stephanus letters stood a word or two late (313c, 314a, 316b, 317a, 317b). At 317d the English had translated Boeckh’s conjecture “distributes” instead of the infinitive Burnet prints; at 321c “to the body” had been left out; “the things in themselves” at 321d, a philosophical term, became “the things within them”; the past conditions at 313c–314a were given their tense; and seven renderings were brought into line with the series, among them “make a mistake” for examartanein, “the opposite”, “equally” and “trainer”. Four phrases that followed a published translation were reworded.

What the check caught in the notes. Five errors were corrected: Lycaea is a place, not the festival of Zeus Lycaeus; the Talos who runs round Crete “three times a day” is Apollodorus’, not Apollonius’; the oath by Zeus of Friendship in the Phaedrus is Phaedrus’ own, not Socrates’; Homer does not name Europa; and a transliteration was wrong. The notes on the women who poured offerings, on the musical nome, on Marsyas and Olympus and on the drinking laws of Sparta and Crete were made to say only what their sources say.