Table Of ContentMyths on the Margins of Homer
Trends in Classics –
Supplementary Volumes
Edited by
Franco Montanari and Antonios Rengakos
Associate Editors
Stavros Frangoulidis · Fausto Montana · Lara Pagani
Serena Perrone · Evina Sistakou · Christos Tsagalis
Scientific Committee
Alberto Bernabé · Margarethe Billerbeck
Claude Calame · Kathleen Coleman · Jonas Grethlein
Philip R. Hardie · Stephen J. Harrison · Stephen Hinds
Richard Hunter · Giuseppe Mastromarco
Gregory Nagy · Theodore D. Papanghelis
Giusto Picone · Alessandro Schiesaro
Tim Whitmarsh · Bernhard Zimmermann
Volume 124
Myths on
the Margins
of Homer
Prolegomena to the Mythographus Homericus
Edited by
Joan Pagès and Nereida Villagra
For the preparation of this book, the editors have received funding from the project
FFI2016-79906-P (AEI / FEDER, EU) granted by the Government of Spain, the project AGAUR
2017SGR1253 granted by the Government of Catalonia, and funds granted by the Portuguese
national funds through FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P., in the scope of the
research project UIDB/00019/2020 and in the scope of the individual post-doctoral scholar-
ship SFRH/BPD/90803/2012.
ISBN 978-3-11-075115-4
e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-075119-2
e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-075123-9
ISSN 1868-4785
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021950275
Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie;
detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.
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Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck
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Contents
List of Tables and Figures VII
Joan Pagès and Nereida Villagra
Introduction 1
Part I: The Historical Context of the Birth of the Mythographus
Homericus
Jordi Pàmias
Panzer, the Mythographus Homericus, and fin de siècle German
Scholarship 17
Part II: The Text
Fausto Montana and Franco Montanari
The Ecdotic Problem of the Mythographus Homericus: Some Thoughts on the
Scholiastic Side 31
Filippomaria Pontani
Notes on the Manuscript Transmission of some Fragments of the Mythographus
Homericus on the Odyssey 57
Part III: The Mythographical Work
Joan Pagès
Aetia and Foundation Myth in the Mythographus Homericus: Some Examples
from the Papyri 75
Nereida Villagra
Towards an Edition and Commentary of the Mythographus Homericus on the
Odyssey 109
VI Contents
Part IV: The Mythographus Homericus in Context:
Intertextuality, Parallels and the Study of Myth
Johanna Michels
The Varying Correspondence between the Mythographus Homericus Corpus
and ‘Apollodorus’ the Mythographer 133
Robert Scott Smith
The Myth of the Mythographus Vergilianus 157
Lowell Edmunds
Heracles’ Sack of Troy in Mythographus Homericus (D schol. Il. 20.145) 195
Afterword
Robert Fowler
Afterword 217
List of Contributors 227
Index Nominum et Rerum 231
Index Locorum 237
List of Tables and Figures
Tab. 1: Panzer’s synoptic table. 20
Fig. 1: Panzer’s stemma of the mythographical testimonia of the MH. 21
Tab. 2: Aetia in the Hamburg Papyrus 199. 88
Tab. 3: Authorities in the historiae of the MH on the Odyssey. 112
Tab. 4: Melampus’ historiae in the V scholia. 119
Tab. 5: The Apollodorus’ subscriptions. 135
Tab. 6: Other historiae with close verbal correspondence to the Bibliotheca. 135
Tab. 7: Historiae with few verbal correspondence that appear to be paraphrases of the same
texts. 136
Tab. 8: Historiae with parallels to the pars deperdita of the Bibliotheca. 136
Tab. 9: Some examples of historiae with perceived correspondences due to common source
use. 137
Fig. 2: Hypotheses on the relationship between the Apollodorus’ subscriptions and the
Bibliotheca. 138
Tab. 10: Explicit references and Zitatennester in Bibl. 2.1–33 (2.1.1–2.3.2). 145
Tab. 11: The order of the Twelve Labours. 148
Tab. 12: Apollodorus’ subscriptions and other historiae linked to the Bibliotheca in the first
two books of the D scholia on the Iliad. 152
Tab. 13: Daphnis narratives in Servius Danielis. 183
Tab. 14: The palace revolution. 198
Tab. 15: The walls and the builders. 201
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Joan Pagès and Nereida Villagra
Introduction
Researching the Mythographus Homericus:
methodological perspectives
The idea of the existence of a Mythographus Homericus (henceforth MH) was first
formulated in 1892.1 Johannes Panzer studied the scholia to Homer and con-
cluded that the historiae that appear embedded in the scholia had to go back to a
mythographical work.2 Some decades later, the edition of several papyri with
mythological historiae threw new light on his hypothesis: such a work did indeed
exist. The papyri showed that it had the format of the hypomnema,3 but the com-
mentaries dealt with strictly mythical matters. More than a century after Panzer’s
thesis and around eighty years after the first identification of a papyrus with the
MH,4 we still lack a comprehensive edition and commentary on this text. Suffice
it to say that since the 1980s, several scholars have alerted us to this need. So
Albert Heinrichs in 1987:5
The most remarkable corpus of myths in this category, both for its importance and its inac-
cessibility, are the mythographic scholia to the Iliad and Odyssey, which contain several
hundred “mythical narratives” (historiae). This vast collection of myths, collectively known
as the Mythographus Homericus since 1892, circulated as a separate book in antiquity (at
least from the first to the fifth century), but it has never been published as a single entity in
modern times.
And Alan Cameron in 2004:6
A careful comparison of the mythographic Vergil scholia and MH might well repay the ef-
fort. Indeed it is one of many aspects of these scholia that would probably repay systematic
1 Panzer 1892.
2 Lünstedt 1961; van der Valk 1964; Montanari 1988, 341–344; Montanari 1995, 74–77; van Ros-
sum-Steenbeek 1998, 85–118; Cameron 2004, 52–69; Dickey 2007, 26; Higbie 2007; Kenens 2012,
160–164; Delattre 2016.
3 Gärtner 1999; Grenfell/Hunt 1903, 63–65; Haslam 1990, 1996; Kramer/Hagedorn 1984; Luppe
1984, 1993, 1996a, 1996b, 1996c, 1996d 1196–97, 1997a, 1997b; Merkelbach 1956; Parsons 1974,
15–19; Schubert 1995, 15–46; van Rossum-Steenbeek 1996; 1998, 278–311.
4 Pfeiffer 1937.
5 Heinrichs 1987, 243.
6 Cameron 2004, 191.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110751192-001
Joan Pagès and Nereida Villagra
investigation with the aid of modern tools. But the major problem in conducting any such
comparison has hitherto been the lack of anything even remotely resembling a modern edi-
tion of the Mythographus Homericus. Paradoxically (and tantalizingly) enough, they were
not included in H. Erbse’s magnificent seven-volume edition published under the title Scho-
lia Graeca in Homeri Iliadem (Berlin 1969–88). In fact the last edition was also the first, that
of Janus Lascaris (Rome 1517).
It is clear then that a commented edition of the MH, independent from the D scho-
lia is a desideratum long-awaited. The current book is to be seen as the prole-
gomena to such an edition. It gathers the papers presented at the international
workshop ‘Mythographus Homericus 125 Years after Panzer: From Scholia to Pa-
pyri and to the Digital Era’, held in the Faculty of Arts of the University of Lisbon
16–17 November 2017, plus a chapter by Lowell Edmunds, who generously joined
this project afterwards, and an afterword by Robert Fowler, who unfortunately
could not attend the workshop but kindly accepted our invitation to participate
in this publication.
The objective of the workshop was to discuss the premises and the methodo-
logical issues of the edition and commentary of the MH from different perspec-
tives. We, as organizers, considered that it was vital to open a debate on the hy-
brid nature of this text, which is to be placed precisely at the crossroads between
scholarship and mythography. Such a text needs to be assessed from, at least,
three different philological disciplines: textual criticism on Homeric scholarship,
papyrology, and mythography.
Indeed, the present book, as a collective volume, intends to reflect diverse,
even opposing opinions. Such diversity is, in part, a consequence of the complex
nature of the text but also of the difficulty of giving an unambiguous definition
of the MH: the term is used to designate the Imperial commentary or commen-
taries on the Homeric poems which can be postulated on the basis of the papyri,
but at the same time it applies to the corpus of fragments attributable to this work,
an archipelago of texts in different states of transmission and showing different
levels of homogeneity. The volume is structured in four sections in an attempt to
bring to the fore the diversity of approaches as well as the need of a commented
edition.
The first part of the book is dedicated to the historical background of Johan-
nes Panzer and the birth of his thesis on the MH. A preliminary chapter about the
origins of the research on the MH was needed in order to place the whole issue
within the history of modern philology. It seemed fundamental to us to delve into
the genesis of the concept of the MH, which refers certainly not to an author but
to the product of a long process of ancient and medieval scholarship that can be
traced through the story of its material evidence (papyri and scholia), as well as
