Preface

For most philologists working on ancient Greek poetry, the Parian Marble is not usually a final destination, but a series of stopovers. Indeed, a chronological list is hardly the kind of thing that one reads from beginning to end. Hence, the common tendency to approach the inscription as a repository of information and to mine it for specific dates of people and events. Only the few specialists in the field of ancient chronography would see the inscription as a text in its own right. This book will do precisely that: look at the Parian Marble as a continuous text, with eyes trained for philological and literary criticism.

My interest in the Parian Marble was initially prompted by its mention of a great number of poets and literary events (though not always those that one might have expected). Was that a regular feature of ancient Greek chronography? What attitudes towards the literary past does the selection of poets reveal? How was the information acquired, and to what extent can we trust it? My chapter on literary history (Chapter 6 below), which gives this book its title, takes up these questions. The emphasis on dating literary matters is, in my view, connected to the purpose and original location of the inscription. In my first chapter, after looking into the history of the discovery of the inscription and its study, I endorse and expand the hypothesis that it was displayed in a Parian site related to literary activities, such as the Archilocheion. Admittedly, the Parian Marble belongs to the family of ancient Greek chronography, but the counting down of years and the striking interest in poets set it in a sui generis category. Thus, in Chapter 3, I examine the literary genre to which the Parian Marble belongs. Chapter 4 analyzes the textual qualities of the inscription. The way the Parian Marble conceptualizes time is treated in Chapter 5.

The Parian Marble is the earliest extant instance of ancient Greek chronography, yet neither a critical edition nor a line-to-line commentary has been published since Jacoby’s work. [1] The text I offer in Chapter 2 is intended to make a contribution towards that end. With the optimism of a past era, Jacoby included many supplements, some of them long and speculative. This calls for reconsideration, especially in the first forty-five lines of the inscription, which survive only in a transcription of 1628. [2] There is a point of principle regarding restoration. Conjectures build on what is attested elsewhere. The Parian Marble can, however, be proven wrong at times. Occasionally it contains unorthodox dates and figures otherwise unknown, none of which we could have guessed; conjecture can hardly provide the unexpected. Extensive restoration poses also a practical problem. Supplements tend to become canonical, especially when cited in translation, and to acquire authority similar to what was actually written on the stone. I decided therefore to avoid substantial restoration, in the hope of giving more by giving less, and thus encourage further work on the text of the Parian Marble. For those who are not very familiar with ancient Greek, I offer a literal English translation with some epigraphical marks, reminders of the conjectural character of the text.

This book deals with a text surviving on stone, but is written for non-epigraphists. Similarly, it addresses non-specialists in ancient chronography, even though focusing on a chronicle. I have tried to spell out some of the conventions and basic knowledge that professional epigraphists and chronographers take for granted, in the hope of making this fascinating text accessible to both students and scholars working on classical Greek history, literature, and archaeology.

Unacknowledged translations are my own.