The Broken Left Margin: Editing an Aeolic Papyrus
You are preparing the editio princeps of a single-column papyrus, P. Cair. inv. 27/4, which preserves fourteen lines of Sapphic stanzas. Lines 1–3 are intact; from line 4 the left margin is broken away, and in lines 4–9 between two and five letters are lost at the start of each line. At line 7 a surviving fibre could be the foot of rho, gamma or tau. Two supplements are in circulation. One gives a dative plural in -οισι, the dialect form you would expect in a Lesbian melic text; the other gives -οις, the epic-Ionic form, and would place a word beginning with a vowel immediately after the stanza's anceps position, producing hiatus. Line 11 carries a small marginal sign that may be a critical mark rather than a letter. Your supervisor wants text, apparatus and a written defence of every supplement inside a fortnight, and the press reader has asked whether the fragment may be called 'Sappho' at all, or only 'an Aeolic lyric fragment'.
1. Which supplement should you print, and which kinds of evidence are decisive rather than merely supportive?
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Print the -οισι form, bracketed, and let the apparatus carry the argument rather than the text alone. Reason in a fixed order of authority. Metre is decisive only if it excludes a candidate: the Lesbian line tolerates resolution in some positions and is anceps at the fifth element, so -οις is not metrically impossible, merely awkward - metre cannot settle this alone. Hiatus is a strong but not conclusive objection: hiatus after the anceps is avoided in Lesbian lyric, yet it does occur, and one instance cannot carry the weight of a whole supplement. Dialect is the weakest single criterion and the strongest cumulative one: -οισι, psilosis and recessive accent belong to a bundle that marks a text as Lesbian, and importing an epic-Ionic ending requires a positive reason - a quoted or recomposed passage - that you do not have. Sense must break any remaining tie: if only the -οις form yields a construction the poem's grammar supports, print it and obelise instead of supplementing. Write the entry as 'suppl. ed. pr.: alii aliter', describe the fibre in the palaeographical commentary, never print an unbracketed supplement, and never let a supplement migrate into a translation as if it were transmitted.
2. How does the marginal sign at line 11 change what you write in the introduction?
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First establish what the sign is, and refuse to decide from a photograph: examine it under magnification, compare ink colour and stroke order with the main hand, and check whether it sits in the intercolumnium or in the margin proper. If it is a critical mark of Alexandrian type - an obelos, a diple, or an apostrophe used for colometry - then the roll passed through a scholarly edition at some point, and three consequences follow. (1) The line divisions on the papyrus may be editorial rather than authorial, so you cannot use the column layout as evidence for stanza structure without argument. (2) The text has a transmission history worth a paragraph in the introduction: it is not a random private copy. (3) You must describe and, if possible, reproduce the sign, because a later reader who sees the plate will want to know why line 11 differs. If, on the other hand, the ink is a stray stroke or a later pen trial, say so in one sentence and move on. The error to avoid is silent deletion: suppressing a mark you could not interpret destroys evidence for the next editor.
3. How would you answer the press reader's question about attributing the fragment?
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Answer that the evidence licenses a genre and a dialect, not an author, and that the catalogue must say exactly that. Dialect plus metre yields 'Lesbian melic'; the stanza is shared with Alcaeus, so the stanza itself cannot decide. Attribution must then rest on content: a female speaking voice, address to girls or to a bride, myth handled through Helen or the wedding of Hektor and Andromache, the vocabulary of desire. Absent such markers, publish as 'adespoton Lesbium' with a note 'Sappho vel Alcaeus'. Two further checks must be made before any name is printed. First, a Hellenistic imitator composing in Lesbian dialect would betray itself through prosodic and morphological lapses - one anomaly in a poem of fourteen lines is enough to raise it. Second, a single striking word is not a signature: hapax forms recur in both poets and in the later tradition that quotes them. Recommend the conservative formula and explain in the introduction why it is conservative; a name attached on one word is the kind of claim a reviewer will test and break, and the edition has to survive that reviewer.