Textual Variants in Homer: an Overview

The text of the Iliad and the Odyssey swarms with variant readings attested in ancient and medieval manuscripts as well as in quotations from the archaic through the Byzantine age, and in what remains of the remarkable, if controversial, philological activity carried out by philologists at Alexandria in the 3rd–2nd century BCE. Since the late 18th century, these variants have been taken by many scholars as proof of the inherent fluidity and instability of the Homeric text, hence of its oral genesis and transmission. This paper aims at giving a very brief overview of the evidence and above all of its heavy impact on the widely diverging ways in which “Homer” (as an “author” or as a “text”) has been consid- ered over the last 200 years.