Mythical Stories in the Ancient Notes to Homer’s Odyssey
We are pleased to announce the publication of the translations of mythical stories found in the D (V) Scholia to Homer’sOdyssey—the first systematic translation in a modern language. A great deal of thanks goes to a former student at the University of New Hampshire, Camden Roy (Classics, Religious Studies 2022), who translated the stories from the scholia to Odyssey 11 as his senior project. His translations were uncommonly smooth and precise for an undergraduate. More information about this student’s experience translating the scholia can be found here in another (more exciting!) blog post.
As with the D Scholia to Homer’s Iliad (published on Canopos in 2023), these narratives serve to explain or expand upon references to mythical figures and episodes mentioned briefly or allusively in the text of Homer’s epic. They similarly draw on the most important mysterious figure in Greek mythography, the so-called Mythographus Homericus (abbreviated MH: more below). There are fewer stories in the Odyssey scholia compared to the mass found in the Iliad scholia (44 to 133) and they are unequally distributed, with no complete story told before book 11. In fact, the largest number of stories comes from Odyssey 11, which includes catalogs of heroes and women encountered by Odysseus in the underworld. The disparity in the number of stories in the Odyssey scholia compared to those of the Iliad may be due to the fact that the Iliad was far more widely read; after all, we have about three times as many papyri that have lines from the Iliad as from the Odyssey (Cribiore, Gymnastics of the Mind, 2001: 194). We also know from papyrus distribution that book 11 of the Odyssey wasthe most commonly read (along with book 4; Cribiore 2001: 196), so it may be that the stories in the scholia were meant to facilitate reading and—more likely—fill out the mythological understanding of those readers, most likely students.
The Odyssey scholia are important for another reason: they are tied to the most mysterious ancient work of mythography, the so-called Homeric Mythographer (Mythographus Homericus), the name given to the ancient but anonymous collector of stories keyed to Homer’s texts. Because of the consistency of stories found in the scholia, it was long suspected that the D Scholia drew from a pre-existing collection of stories, but a discovery of a set of eight papyri in Egypt confirmed those suspicions once and for all. As we note in the introduction to our translation (p. 3):
This set of papyri (PSI 10.1173 = #56 van Rossum Steenbeek, 3rd c. AD), which once formed a book of mythological stories in the Odyssey,allow us to see that, at least for books 11 (line 321) through 14 (line 327), the extended mythographical stories in D Scholia and the papyrus line up in the same order, with no omissions, with nearly the same language, and with the same source references (that is, “The story is in so-and-so”). In other words, PSI 1173 confirms that, in the 3rd c. AD, the collection known as the Homeric Mythographer was circulating separately as an aid for reading Homer’s works and a way to expand the mythological knowledge of those readers.
Readers who want to learn more about the MH will face a bit of a challenge finding accessible discussion, but one would benefit from reading the summary chapter in M. van Rossum-Steenbeek, Greek Readers' Digests?: studies on a selection of subliterary papyri (Leiden: Brill) 1997: 85-116. A book devoted to the subject is Myths on the Margins of Homer: Prolegomena to the Mythographus Homericus, ed. by Joan Pagès and Nereida Villagra. The translators are indebted to Joan and Nereida for their work on the MH for comments on an earlier draft of the translations. Their work in this area has been groundbreaking.
As always, the directors of MANTO, Canopos, and the Greek Myth Lab remain committed to increasing access to these collections of mythical stories to non-Greek speaking readers. If you have any suggestions for future work in this area, do let us know!