Harry Schmidt
Sep 5, 2018 · 1 min read

I only received the galleys a fortnight ago (I am presently examining code-switching in restroom graffitoes at St. Catherine’s), but already I can say that I have not seen a more artless butchery of the textual tradition since Grimm’s woebegone Anserina.

A fuller treatment will have to wait for my review in BMCR, but D.’s devil does not lurk in the details.

To summarize: D.’s appeal to lectio difficilior could only have succeeded if he had made out a colorable claim to the inclusion of his reading in the stemma, or else justified its absence on paleographic or linguistic grounds. For instance, in this wiser era we stubbornly preserve the לֹא in Exodus 20:14’s לֹא תִנְאָף in spite of its total senselessness; its elision would be a great relief philosophically and theologically but finds no support in the received tradition.

D.’s eisegetical interpolations must be rejected precisely because they impose a nonexistent order on a received text whose popularity is wholly due to the anarchic joy of its oral reperformance. One can hardly imagine a troupe of Maenadic preschoolers, fully in the throes of Dionysus’s offering of grape juice and crackers, belting D.’s stanzas in perfect diacope.

D.’s seniority in the discipline will, sadly, encourage a robust uptake of this carmen et error. I can only hope that a future and more mindful generation will return to the vulgate, imperfect as it is.

I can say that D. is energetic, and I offer a line from my own studies to encourage his upcoming edition of Wheels: agitate celerius, pervenies!

    Harry Schmidt

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    An ex-academic, classicist, and amateur algorist who splits his reading time between number theory and archaic Greek lyric poetry.