The Homer Multitext Project

The Homer Multitext Project (HMT) is a new edition that
presents the Iliad and Odyssey within the historical framework
of its oral and textual transmission.
The project begins from the position that these works,
although passed along to us as written sources, were originally
composed orally over a long period of time. What one would
usually call “variants” from a base text are in fact evidence of
the system of oral composition in performance and exhibit
the diversity to be expected from an oral composition. These
variants are not well refl ected in traditional modes of editing,
which focus on the reconstruction of an original text. In
the case of the works of Homer there is no “original text”.
All textual variants need to be understood in the historical
context, or contexts, in which they fi rst came to be, and it
is the intention of the HMT to make these changes visible
both synchronically and diachronically. The fi rst paper in our
session is an introduction to these and other aspects of the
HMT, presented by the editors of the project, Casey Dué and
Mary Ebbott. Dué and Ebbott will discuss the need for a digital
Multitext of the works of Homer, the potential uses of such
an edition as we envision it, and the challenges in building the
Multitext.
The works of Homer are known to us through a variety of
primary source materials. Although most students and scholars
of the classics access the texts through traditional editions,
those editions are only representations of existing material. A
major aim of the HMT is to make available texts from a variety
of sources, including high-resolution digital images of those
sources. Any material which attests to a reading of Homer –
papyrus fragment, manuscript, or inscription in stone – can and
will be included in the ultimate edition. The HMT has begun
incorporating images of sources starting with three important
manuscripts: the tenth-century Marcianus Graecus Z. 454
(= 822), the eleventh-century Marcianus Graecus Z. 453 (=
821), and the twelfth/thirteenth-century Marcianus Graecus
Z. 458 (= 841). Marcianus Graecus Z. 454, commonly called
the “Venetus A,” is arguably the most important surviving copy
of the Iliad, containing not only the full text of the poem but
also several layers of commentary, or scholia, that include many
variant readings of the text. The second paper in our session,
presented by project collaborators W. Brent Seales and A. Ross
Scaife, is a report on work carried out in Spring 2007 at the
Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana to digitize these manuscripts,
focusing on 3D imaging and virtual fl attening in an effort to
render the text (especially the scholia) more legible.
Once text and images are compiled, they need to be published
and made available for scholarly use, and to the wider public.
The third paper, presented by the technical editors Christopher
Blackwell and Neel Smith, will outline the protocols and
software developed and under development to support the
publication of the Multitext.
Using technology that takes advantage of the best available
practices and open source standards that have been developed
for digital publications in a variety of fi elds, the Homer
Multitext will offer free access to a library of texts and images,
a machine-interface to that library and its indices, and tools
to allow readers to discover and engage with the Homeric
tradition.

References:
The Homer Multitext Project, description at the Center for
Hellenic Studies website: http://chs.harvard.edu/chs/homer_
multitext
Homer and the Papyri, http://chs.harvard.edu/chs/homer___
the_papyri_introduction
Haslam, M. “Homeric Papyri and Transmission of the Text”
in I. Morris and B. Powell, eds., A New Companion to Homer.
Leiden, 1997.
West, M. L. Studies in the text and transmission of the Iliad.
München: K.G. Saur 2001
Digital Images of Iliad Manuscripts from the Marciana Library,
First Drafts @ Classics@, October 26, 2007: http://zeus.chsdc.
org/chs/manuscript_images