The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Latin Textual Criticism

Abstract The original, ‘autograph’ texts of the writers of ancient Greek and Roman literature are long lost, and the texts presented in modern ‘critical editions’ such as those of the Oxford Classical Texts, Teubner, or Budé series, although they draw on painstaking scholarship carried out over many centuries, are far less certain than those of most modern literature. Ancient texts were transmitted by being copied and recopied by hand, and in the process both accidental errors and deliberate alterations accumulated, often leaving the text in a very ‘corrupted’ condition in the earliest copies from which modern editors have to work, which are typically more than a millennium removed from the originals. Textual criticism is the discipline that examines whatever ‘witnesses’ to an ancient text are available and tries to identify errors in its transmission and, so far as possible, establish its original form. Most of what we know about the ancient world comes from written sources, and textual criticism is therefore fundamental to the study of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Latin Textual Criticism covers textual transmission in antiquity and the Middle Ages, the history of textual criticism and some of its most important practitioners, and methodological and practical aspects of textual criticism and editorial technique. It includes four case studies and, unlike most other treatments of the subject, deals also with textual criticism of ancient inscriptions and papyri.