May 19, 2004

• Trojan Horse of a Different Color

  
  

  With Troy making history at the box office, I (having not yet seen it) have enjoyed the many reviews of the film, the actors, and so forth.  As a point which has absolutely nothing to do with the intended subject of this blog, I would like to state for the record that spoilers are great for me.  Because of the way I process stimuli and data, when I see a film I am generally overwhelmed the first time through.  I miss important dialogue when I get distracted thinking about lighting, camera angles and why the director did the scene this way instead of that ... the more I know about the film before I go in, the better I'm able to enjoy it. 

  
  

  I've seen several blog/reviews which take exception to the handling of The Iliad's storyline.  And that caused me to reflect on a subject that I enjoy.  Reliability.  Bibilographically speaking The Iliad is considered by scholars to be the second most reliable document of antiquity.  Bibiliographic reliability refers to the degree of confidence we have that the version of the document we possess bears at least some resemblance to the original.  Bibliographic reliability does not answer the question whether or not the text of the document is true.  There are no extant copies of original documents of antiquity, we have manuscripts, laboriously copied manuscripts.  What we know is that over time variations crept in as the texts were either deliberately or otherwise altered in the copying process. 

  
  

  We look at several factors to see whether we can make a determination about the original wording of the text.  We look at how much time passed between the authorship of the document and the manufacture of the oldest copies we possess.  This makes sense, the less time between authorship and copy, the less opportunity there has been for changes to be made.  We look at how many copies we possess.  Where we would hope for the first test to be a small number, with this second test we want a very large one.  The more copies we have, the more we can compare them to see which is most likely the original wording.  And then the sub-category of the second test is to examine the variants - are we looking at things like spelling or the change of a single word which doesn't significantly affect the meaning of the passage in question, or are there larger discrepancies, passages added or subtracted which complicate the process of attempting to determine what the original text was like. 

  
  

  The Iliad was composed approximately 800 BCE.  The oldest surviving copies date from approximately 200 AD.  A span of a thousand years.  We have approximately 650 copies of the epic and between those copies are variants so wide that scholars translating it from Greek literally must chose between major plot lines with no more than their personal preference to guide them.  And keep in mind that The Iliad is the second MOST reliable document we possess. 

  
  

  My Great Books of the Western World collection contains the Annals of Imperial Rome by Tacitus.  If you've studied anything of ancient history, you've been exposed to Tacitus whether you knew it or not because he is a prime source of information.  Tacitus wrote his history about 116 AD.  The first six books of that work exist today in one manuscript copied in 850 AD.  Books 7-10 are lost.  Books 11-16 are manuscripts dating to the 11th century.  I would be willing to bet that although Tacitus is a primary source of information, no one ever told you that the information you were being taught is not considered reliable. 

  
  

  Another book that students of Ancient History refer to widely is Flavius Josephus' Jewish War.  I have a copy on my shelf - okay actually, it's in a box, but I have one.  Josephus was paid by the Romans to construct his history in about 100 AD.  We have 9 Greek manuscripts which were copied in the 10th, 11th, and 12th centuries. 

  
  

  So when you view the film Troy, keep in mind that just because the story you see on the screen may or may not closely resemble the story you read in high school, that doesn't prove that it's less faithful to the original.  Maybe the screenwriters used a different manuscript or chose a less well known variant ... or maybe this is a case of the copyist inserting a new spin on the subject.  Either way, I'm planning to look this horse in the mouth.  (In between ogling Brad's biceps and Sean's ... well, everything.)

  • 5:52 pm
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