The Orphic Collection, Volume I: The Hymns

Editorial Note

The text

The Greek is Abel's, Orphica (Leipzig: Freytag; Prague: Tempsky, 1885), pages 57–102, read page by page from the scan of that edition at magnification — never from an OCR layer. It is printed diplomatically: Abel's accents, breathings, iota subscripts, elisions, punctuation, capitalisation and line-numbering are reproduced as they stand, including where they are odd — the (sic) lemmas described below, the two impossible line-numbers, the unaccented ἁς at LXXX.6, the breathing missing from αγγελιῶτι at LXXVIII.3. A plain misprint is the one exception. Where a sort is simply the wrong letter — οἰστροῖσα for οἰστροῦσα, Ὀλίμπου for Ὀλύμπου, and five others, all listed in the Closing Matter — the correct form is printed and the misprint recorded there. Seven of those; and two places where a mark is missing rather than wrong, which are printed as the page has them, because a missing accent is not certainly a misprint. (This paragraph described the policy backwards until the final run, which is a reminder that an editorial note is a claim like any other.)

Two things Abel's page does that this edition does not. He closes every fumigation rubric with a full stop; the rubrics here have none, consistently through the volume. And his running heads carry the numerals of the hymns on the page; here the running heads are uniform.

The apparatus

Translated from Abel's, entry for entry, in his conventions: the printed reading, then the editor who proposed it, then `]`, then what the manuscripts have. `codd.` is the manuscripts; `corr.` marks a correction adopted; a lemma with no editor after it is Abel's own change. There are 482 entries and, split at his em-dashes, 611 separate readings.

Abel's apparatus is by his own statement a selection. He closes his praefatio: Integrum apparatum criticum maiori Orphicorum carminum editioni reservavi — “a complete critical apparatus I have reserved for a larger edition of the Orphic poems.” Nothing should be inferred from his silence. Hymn LXXXIII draws no entry at all, the only hymn in the book that draws none; that means Abel reported nothing, not that there was nothing to report.

Abel writes (sic) eighteen times, and it is not an independent flag: in every one of the eighteen the form in the apparatus differs from the form in his own printed line — by accent (XXXII.2, XXXIV.4, LXXXI.1, LXXXVII.11), by case (IV.3, XLV.5, L.1, LIV.4), by the movable nu (XXXII.6, LXXI.4, LXXXI.4), by elision (LXXVII.3), or by spelling, gender or word (VII.2, XVIII.18, XLIII.7, LVI.2, LIX.15, LIX.17). He is reproducing each conjecture as its editor gave it, in the citation form, while the verse prints what the line requires. Both forms are printed here as he prints them.

Two of his apparatus line-numbers exceed their hymn's line count: XXXIX, ten lines with an entry numbered 11, and LXXXVII, twelve lines with an entry numbered 13. Both are printed as he prints them and explained in a note. The marginal numerals of the verse — which stand in the right margin of every page of his book, recto and verso alike — are followed in preference to the apparatus wherever the two disagree.

The editors named

By number of readings, over 611: Hermann 260, Abel 132, Wiel 36, Lennep 13, Ruhnken 10, Pierson 10, Lobeck 8, Dinner 6, Sanctamandus 6, Stephanus 5, Slothouwer 5, Gesner 3, Casaubonus 3, Dorville 3, Schneider 2, Canterus 1, Portus 1, Porson 1 — and nine further names at three or fewer, which the tally above omitted until the final run: Heringa 3, Schenkl 2, and Leopardus, Koene, Valckenaer, Bentley, Scriverius, Mitscherlich and Schrader once each. Twenty-seven names in all.

Two of these this edition cannot identify. Wiel is the more important — third in the whole apparatus, and responsible for the first word of the first hymn. Abel names him once, in the praefatio, among the recentiores post Hermannum critici: praeter Vossium (1805) et Wielium virum de Orpheo optime meritum (1853. 61. 62. 66. 68. 78) — “besides Vossius and Wielius, a man who has deserved excellently of Orpheus”, with six dated contributions, 1853, 1861, 1862, 1866, 1868 and 1878. No first name, no titles, no place. Dinner, with six readings, is not named in the praefatio at all, and the volume has no index of viri docti. Both are left as Abel leaves them.

Sanctamandus is explained by the same page: Abel had copied out some of his unpublished observations from a Bodleian codex, which is why he appears in the apparatus with no printed work behind him. Porson appears exactly once, at LXXXIV.8, and his correction restores a formula the collection uses twice elsewhere.

The translation

Strictly line for line: every English line renders the Greek line facing it, and enjambment is kept even where it reads oddly, because the suspension is often the hymn's whole rhetorical effect. The register is literal and unrhymed. Compound epithets are rendered as compounds — of splendid form, watery-pathed, bud-faced, bull-driver — rather than smoothed into English idiom, because the pile-up of them is what a hymn in this collection is.