OUSEION - Memorial University's Digital Archives Initiative ...

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 219
of Photios. ") Full examination of Photios' excerpting methods would
weigh the papyrus Althaimenes against the papyrus Aeneas to yield a
messier conclusion. but Brown does not even mention the latter in his
Introduction. A further schizoid symptom is that the Althaimenes papyrus
is not mentioned at all at the relevant place in the commentary.
The section on "Language and Style" has limited value. Despite appropriate
caveats about our having Konon only through Photios.
Brown comments on none-too-remarkable points of. purportedly Kononic.
morphology. orthography and syntax. Some comments are otiose
at best. such as those on perceived irregularities in usage of the genitive
absolute. I. at any rate. can see nothing remarkable when .. a genitive
absolute occurs instead of a circumstantial participle or subordinate
clause." Neither purported instance of a genitive absolute having "subject
or object identical with the subject or object of the main verb" illustrates
quite that. One of them. moreover. is a misquotation that conflates
segments of two separate sentences.
A brief survey of the textual and editorial history of Photios and Kanon
closes the Introduction and ushers in the text. translation and commentary.
which I shall now consider seriatim. albeit with some inevitable
blurring of categories. References to the text will be by Diegesis and
Brown's line number.
Konon's work figures prominently in the editorial history of the
Bibliotheca. for it was in preparing a projected edition of Konon and
other Photian mythographers for Teubner's Mythographi Graeci that
E. Martini found that only two mss. (Marcianus gr. 450 and 451. designated
A and M) have independent value. This determination underlies
Jacoby's Konon in FGrH and Henry's Bude Bibliotheca (Konon is in Vol.
3. 1962). Brown collated A and M again. from facsimiles. As might be
expected, the exercise yielded few new readings. There are occasions
when Brown apparently saw something different from what Henry or
Jacoby did. If some of these are attributable to misprints or other flaws
in Jacoby's work. others bespeak a greater confidence or acuity than
does Henry's occasional" ut vid." The papyrus aside. there is. as Harder
noted. a sense in which there is no real text of Konon. just Photios' adaptation
thereof. Brown intermittently recognizes some of the implications
for the would-be editor of Konon but without indicating that they
translate into any general editorial principle or policy which would differentiate
him from. say. Henry who had the less elusive goal of editing
Photios. Brown's implicit assumption that he is editing. translating and
commenting upon the text of Konon frequently bars him from grammatical
and lexical possibilities afforded by the graecitas of the centuries
between Konon and Photios.