BMCR 2009.04.09: Rosen on Nicolosi, Ipponate, epodi di Strasburgo

Anika Nicolosi (trans.), Ipponate, epodi di Strasburgo -
Archiloco, epodi di Colonia (con un'appendice su P. Oxy. LXIX 4708).
Eikasmos, 14.  Bologna:  Pa\tron Editore, 2007.  Pp. 396; pl. 1.  ISBN
978-88-555-2914-3.  [euro  ]30.00 (pb).

Reviewed by Ralph M. Rosen, University of Pennsylvania
([email protected])
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Anika Nicolosi's has published an impressively erudite, elegantly
produced edition, with text and exhaustive commentary, of several
fragmentary poems by Archilochus and Hipponax. Three famous fragments
(amounting to barely 125 lines of legible text in all) are subjected to
detailed scrutiny here -- the so-called Strasbourg Epode(s), a choice
piece of poetic invective variously attributed by scholars to
Archilochus or Hipponax (in recent editions printed as Hipponactean
dubia, frr. 115-117W and 194 Degani), the "Cologne Archilochus" (frr.
196 + 196aW), and the "New Archilochus," which refers to the fragment
of Archilochus recently published by Dirk Obbink in 2005 (P.Oxy. 4708).
The last item is arguably the most exciting, both because it is a
recent addition to the corpus of fragments and for what it adds to our
understanding of Archilochean poetics, but Nicolosi only treats this
fr. in an appendix, presumably because it came to light too close to
the publication of her own edition for her to offer a fuller study.

Nicolosi's choice of frr. seems rather random: nothing in particular
unifies them beyond the fact that two of them are invective poems, and
all three were written by poets who were lumped together in antiquity
as "iambographers" (though, interestingly, none of the frr. examined in
this edition are actually in iambic verse). It is easy to imagine
various thematic selections from these poets (one might, for example,
collect poems that attack a single target, or constitute psogoi -- the
"Lycambes-Neobule poems" for Archilochus,  to which the Cologne
Archilochus would belong, or the "Bupalus poems" for Hipponax), but
Nicolosi makes no attempt to explain why she decided to bundle these
particular frr. together in one volume.  No startling revelations about
these frr. emerge from the commentary, although this is not surprising,
given the amount of scholarly attention (with the exception of the new
Archilochus fragment) these relatively few lines have already received.
The questions and controversies are familiar enough: did Hipponax in
fact pen the (unattributed) Strasbourg epodes? Are the two frr. 115W
and 117W (116W is only an illegible scrap), which come from the same
papyrus, actually from a single poem? Did Archilochus in fact compose
the Cologne epode, or was it a later forgery? What do we do with the
poet's "I" in that epode? Should we read the poem autobiographically,
or generically? Nicolosi assiduously discusses all the evidence for,
and scholarship on, such questions. This is undoubtedly useful in
itself, but in the end our conception and understanding of these
fragments remains more or less the same as it was before. She
rehearses, for example, a century of thematic and linguistic arguments
that point to, reasonably enough, Hipponactean authorship for the
Strasbourg epodes over against an earlier tradition (beginning with its
first editor, Reitzenstein) attributing them to Archilochus, though
this has long been more or less the communis opinio. In the case of the
Cologne Archilochus, once again, all the arguments about authenticity,
literary dynamics, and the relationship between frr. 196aW and 188W,
are expansively presented, but with little new to offer.

In terms of what Nicolosi explicitly sets out to do, however--to offer
a full, updated commentary on these texts, while affirming or
discarding various scholarly approaches to them--there is little to
complain about. This is clearly a work of consummate philological
skill, which anyone with even a passing interest in these fragments
will want to consult. With its thirty pages of bibliography and
extensive indices all trained on what amounts to a handful of verses,
one can truly say that Nicolosi leaves no stone unturned.