Editing Bacchylides (section)

===History===
The poems were collected into critical editions sometime in the late 3rd century BC by the Alexandrian scholar, [[Aristophanes of Byzantium]], who probably restored them to their appropriate metres after finding them written in prose form.<ref>Maehler 2004, p. 27</ref> They were arranged in nine 'books', exemplifying the following genres<ref name=c415/> (Bacchylides in fact composed in a greater variety of genres than any of the other lyric poets who comprise the canonic nine, with the exception of Pindar, who composed in ten):<ref>{{harvnb|Jebb|1905|p=43}}</ref>
[[File:Theseus Athena Amphitrite Louvre G104.jpg|thumb|right|"The relation of Bacchylides to Greek art is a subject that no student of his poetry can ignore" – Richard Claverhouse Jebb.<ref name="Jebb">{{harvnb|Jebb|1905|p=73}}</ref><br />[[Theseus]], visiting the underwater palace of his father, [[Poseidon]], meets with [[Amphitrite]], as witnessed by the goddess [[Athena]] and by some of the neighbourhood dolphins – here presented by the artist [[Euphronios]]. The underwater encounter is also the subject of a Bacchylides dithyramb.]]
*''hymnoi'' – ''[[hymn|"hymns"]]''
*''paianes'' – ''"[[Paean|paeans]]"''
*''dithyramboi'' – ''"[[Dithyramb|dithyrambs]]"''
*[[Prosodion|prosodia]] – ''"processionals"'' 
*partheneia – ''"songs for maidens"''
*[[hyporchema]]ta – ''"songs for light dances"''
*[[Encomium|enkomia]] – ''"songs of praise"''
*[[Epinikion|epinikia]] – ''"victory odes"''
*erotica – ''"songs of love"''

The Alexandrian grammarian [[Didymus Chalcenterus|Didymus]] (circa 30 BC) wrote commentaries on the work of Bacchylides and the poems appear, from the finding of papyri fragments, to have been popular reading in the first three centuries AD.<ref name="Campbell">Campbell (1982), p. 416</ref> Their popularity seems to have continued into the 4th century also: [[Ammianus Marcellinus]] (xxv. 4) observed that the emperor [[Julian the Apostate|Julian]] enjoyed reading Bacchylides, and the largest collection of quotations that survived up until the modern era was assembled by [[Stobaeus]] (early 5th century).<ref>Kenyon (1897): Introduction: xiv.</ref> All that remained of Bacchylides's poetry by 1896, however, were sixty-nine fragments, totalling 107 lines.<ref name="sl3">Slavitt (1998), p. 3</ref> These few remains of his writings were collected by [[Richard François Philippe Brunck|Brunck]], Bergk,{{sfn|Bergk|1853|loc={{in lang|la}}&nbsp;& {{in lang|el}}}} Bland, Hartung, and [[Christian Friedrich Neue|Neue]].{{sfn|Neue|1823|loc={{in lang|la}}&nbsp;& {{in lang|el}}}}{{sfn|Baynes|1878}} The oldest sources on Bacchylides and his work are [[scholia]] on [[Homer]], [[Hesiod]], Pindar, [[Aristophanes]], [[Apollonius Rhodius]] and [[Callimachus]]. Other fragments and 'notices' are sprinkled through the surviving works of ancient authors, which they used to illustrate various points they were making, as for example:<ref>{{harvnb|Jebb|1905|pp=74–76}}</ref>

[[image:P.Oxy. XI 1361 fr. 4.jpg|thumb|Bacchylides, ''Encomia'' fr. 5, preserved by a 1st-century BC or AD papyrus form [[Oxyrhynchus]] ([[Oxyrhynchus papyri|P.Oxy.]] 1361 fr. 4).]]

*[[Dionysius of Halicarnassus]] – frag. 11
*[[Strabo]] – notice 57
*[[Plutarch]] – frag. 29
*[[Apollonius Dyscolus]] – frag. 31
*[[Zenobius]] – frag.s 5, 24
*[[Hephaestion (grammarian)|Hephaestion]] – frag.s 12, 13, 15
*[[Athenaeus]] – frag.s 13, 16, 17, 18, 22
*[[Clement of Alexandria]] – frag.s 19, 20, 21, 32
*[[Stobaeus]] – frag.s 1, 2, 3, 7, 8, 9, 10, 20, 28
*[[Priscian]] – frag. 27
*Johannes Siceliota – frag. 26
*[[Etymologicum Magnum]] – frag.s 25, 30
*[[Palatine Anthology]] – frag.s 33, 34.

Fortunately for Bacchylidean scholarship, a papyrus came to light in Egypt at the end of the 19th century with a text of Greek uncials, which a local claimed to have found in a ransacked tomb, between the feet of a mummy. It was snapped up for a "preposterous" price by the Egyptologist [[Wallis Budge]], of the British Museum. Budge's plan to return to the museum with the papyrus was unacceptable to the British Consul and to the Egyptian Service of Antiquities so he resorted to desperate measures. In an elaborate plan involving a crate of oranges, switched trains and covert embarkations including a midnight rendezvous with a P&O steamship, he eventually sailed from the Suez with the papyrus dismembered and disguised as a packet of photographs.<ref name=sl3/><ref>Burnett 1985, pp. 1–2</ref> He presented his find in 1896 to [[Frederic Kenyon]] in the British Museum's Department of Manuscripts. Kenyon reassembled 1382 lines, of which 1070 were perfect or easily restored and, the following year, he published an edition of twenty poems, six of them nearly complete.<ref name=sl3/> Some more pieces of the Egyptian fragments were fitted together by [[Friedrich Blass]] in Germany and then followed the authoritative edition of Bacchylides' poetry by [[Richard Claverhouse Jebb]]{{refn|group=n|Jebb was also responsible for the expansion of Bacchylides's article for the [[1911 Encyclopædia Britannica|1911 ''Encyclopædia Britannica'']].{{sfn|Jebb|1911}}}} – a combination of scholars that inspired one academic to comment: "we almost had the Renaissance back again".<ref>{{cite journal|author=Louis Bevier|title=Bacchylides XVI (XVII)|journal=The Classical Weekly|volume= 17|issue=13 |year= 1924| pages =99–101 |jstor=30107807|doi=10.2307/30107807}}</ref>

As noted by Frederic Kenyon,<ref name="Google preview"/> the papyrus was originally a roll probably about seventeen feet long and about ten inches high, written in the Ptolemaic period, with some Roman characteristics that indicate a transition between styles, somewhere around 50 BC. It reached England in about two hundred torn fragments, the largest about twenty inches in length and containing four and a half columns of writing, the smallest being scraps with barely enough space for one or two letters. The beginning and end sections were missing and the damage done to the roll was not entirely the result of its recent discovery. Kenyon gradually pieced the fragments together, making three independent sections: the first, nine feet long with twenty-two columns of writing; the next section, a little over two feet long with six columns; the third, three and a half feet long with ten columns – a total length of almost fifteen feet and thirty-nine columns, in which form the papyrus remains in the [[British Library]].<ref>[http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Papyrus_733 London, BL, Papyrus 733]</ref> [[Friedrich Blass]] later pieced together some of the still detached fragments and concluded that two of the poems on the restored roll (Odes vi. and vii., as numbered by Kenyon in the ''[[editio princeps]]'') must be parts of a single ode (for Lachon of Keos) – hence even today the poems can be found numbered differently, with Jebb for example one of those following Blass's lead and numbering the poems differently from Kenyon from poem 8 onwards (Kenyon 9 = Jebb 8 and so on).<ref name="Campbell" />

Bacchylides had become, almost overnight, among the best represented poets of the canonic nine, with about half as many extant verses as Pindar, adding about a hundred new words to Greek lexicons.<ref>{{harvnb|Jebb|1905|pp=68–69}}</ref> Ironically, his newly discovered poems sparked a renewed interest in Pindar's work,<ref>{{cite journal|title=Some Aspects of Pindar's Style|author= Lawrence Henry Baker|journal=The Sewanee Review |volume= 31|issue=1|year= 1923|jstor=27533621|pages=100–110}}</ref> with whom he was compared so unfavourably that "the students of Pindaric poetry almost succeeded in burying Bacchylides all over again."<ref name=bu3/>