Aus den Untersuchungen zum Wiener Palimpsest des Grammatikers Herodian I: Prolegomena

Abstract

Herbert Hunger’s discovery of fragments of the De prosodia catholica of the grammarian Aelius Herodianus (2^nd c. AD) in a palimpsest of the Austrian National Library in Vienna sixty years ago opened up new possibilities for recovering this important but lost ancient work on the accentuation of the Greek language. It has been hitherto known only through epitomes and quotations by later authors. The fragments survived in ten folios of an early-tenth-century manuscript, but have for centuries been hidden underneath a later script. About 1200, the text of Herodian was removed by scraping and washing off the original script and the parchment was re-used for a new copy of the Life of St. John Chrysostom (ÖNB Codex hist. gr. 10). In 1967 Hunger published an edition of passages that he managed to decipher using ultraviolet light. Still, a larger part of the palimpsest remained illegible. In the last 25 years new efforts have been made to decipher the Vienna Herodian fragments, the so-called Herodianus Vindobonensis. An international team of five classical scholars has been charged with the task of continuing the research started by Hunger. In cooperation with leading specialists in the field of the digital recovery of palimpsests various state-of-the-art methods of imaging and image processing have been applied to render the erased Greek script visible. Over the past several years the classicists have made considerable progress in deciphering and examining the fragments. They are preparing a full critical edition with translation and an extensive commentary. Since the text is still illegible in many places, new digital, technical and physical approaches are going to be applied. While the recovery and the decipherment of the text are ongoing, some parts of the palimpsest, where the undeciphered gaps have been reduced very substantially, are going to be published in a preliminary version (text, translation, commentary). The present article contains the prolegomena to these preliminary publications.