Ovid, Heroides 3, 5, 9, 16: manuscripts, text, interpretation

III.14 (a) Seneca, Agamemnon: manuscripts, text, interpretation.

III.14 (b) Ovid, Heroides 3, 5, 9, 16: manuscripts, text, interpretation.

NB University teaching is given in only one of these subjects each year. It is envisaged that candidates for Greats in 2008 will normally offer 10(a) Seneca rather than 10(b) Ovid. University teaching on 10(a) Seneca, Agamemnon will be available only in the year 2007/8; in 2006-7 the teaching will be on 10(b) Ovid, Heroides 3, 5, 9, 16.

These options are designed to give students concrete experience of Latin manuscripts, an understanding of the history of textual transmission, and an initiation into the fundamental and endlessly absorbing detailed study of Latin texts. The palaeographical part of the course will introduce students to the basics of Latin palaeography, with the opportunity to read manuscripts from the 5th century to the 15th, in capitals and minuscule (e.g. Caroline, Beneventan, gothic, humanistic).

Heroides. The transmission of the Heroides themselves reaches us in the form of one 9th-century manuscript, and a host of others in different scripts from the 11th and subsequent centuries, with part of poem 16 transmitted only in a printed edition of the 1470s. The course will use images of MSS of the Heroides, and some original MSS in the Bodleian.

The Heroides (or Epistles) receive increasing attention as the enthusiasm for Ovid’s poetry spreads; as letters, they raise questions about the nature of writing, and in their concern with classic myths they place themselves provocatively within literary history. Those studied for this paper are from Briseis to Achilles, Oenone to Paris, Deianira to Hercules, and Paris to Helen. The collection as a whole is one of the most corrupt in Latin poetry and has also raised questions about authenticity (of whole poems, and of passages therein). The classes will present the variants found in the manuscripts, and concentrate on assessing these and the conjectures made over the centuries, many of them by giants of scholarship such as Heinsius, Bentley, and Housman. We will consider questions of authorship and genre as well as the minutiae of language, metre and style. Can we draw up a stemma to account for the differences between manuscripts? What sorts of errors are scribes most likely to make in copying? What are the limits on Ovid’s boldness in using Latin and deploying the elegiac couplet?

Recommended reading: L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars (Oxford, 3rd edn. 1991).

Teaching: University classes.