The Vienna Herodian Palimpsest

Aelius Herodianus (2nd cent. A.D.) was one of the most influential linguists of antiquity. His greatest achievement, General Exposition of Prosody, which he dedicated to Emperor Marcus Aurelius, was a systematic exposition of the rules for Greek prosody. Since it contained multiple kinds of knowledge, the work was frequently used by late antique and Byzantine scholars from various perspectives but only survived in the form of a couple of epitomes and numerous quotations by other authors. The discovery of ten palimpsest folios from a tenth-century manuscript of Herodians Prosody by Herbert Hunger, a renowned Austrian scholar, in a medieval codex at the Austrian National Library in Vienna sixty years ago caused great excitement worldwide. In the late twelfth century, the text of the Prosody, which had been originally written on these folios, was washed and scraped off from the parchment surface, and the valuable writing material was reused for a copy of the Life of the Church father John Chrysostom by the Byzantine author Symeon Metaphrastes. This new text was written in big characters in a distinct black ink over the lines of Herodian, thus covering them up to a great extent. With the help of technical means available in the 1960s (ultraviolet light), Herbert Hunger succeeded in recovering about 15 to 20 per cent of the text. There was an astonishing richness and variety of quotations from classical literature (epic, lyric poetry, philosophy, drama, historiography, philology, etc.)many of them new!cited by Herodian to illustrate the use of words listed for single rules. With the help of previously captured images, up to 55 per cent of the erased text has been deciphered by a research team of three specialists: Klaus Alpers (Hamburg), Oliver Primavesi (Munich), and Jana Gruskov (Vienna). The project seeks to reveal this important piece of our cultural heritage as completely as possible. Special images resulting from state-of-the-art non-invasive multispectral and x-ray fluorescence imaging and image processing of palimpsestswhich have rapidly developed in recent yearswill enable the scholars to further decipher and comprehensively examine the text. The main output will be a complete critical edition, including a wide-ranging introduction, a translation, a full commentary, and special images (available also online), thus making this unique textual witness accessible to all interested researchers and readers. Particular emphasis will be put on the reconstruction and interpretation of the new fragments of ancient literature, presenting them in greater detail in a further volume. The project will redefine our view not only of Herodian but also of many other authors, both ancient and Byzantine, as well as their works, many of which have been lost.

The project has recovered, deciphered, and analysed up to 85 percent of the Vienna Herodian Palimpsest, one of the most significant discoveries of ancient cultural heritage in the 20th century. More than 800 lines of the important but lost work "On Accentuation in General" from the 2nd century AD have been brought to light and thoroughly examined. These lines had been hidden for centuries beneath a later script. The work was written by Aelius Herodianus, one of the most influential Greek linguists of antiquity. It is a systematic presentation of accentuation in ancient Greek, in which quotations from ancient literature were regularly cited to exemplify the use of words which follow individual rules of accentuation. Herodian dedicated this masterpiece to the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius. The work was frequently consulted by later scholars and is often cited in modern dictionaries of ancient Greek. The Herodian text comes from an early-10th-century Byzantine copy, of which ten leaves were reused in the late 12th/early 13th century for another codex, now kept in the Austrian National Library in Vienna. The Herodian text was thoroughly washed and scraped off, and the parchment (a standard writing material in the Middle Ages) was used for a copy of the life of the Church Father John Chrysostom. The new text was written in large characters with intense black ink over the erased lines of Herodian. The international project team of five leading classical philologists - Klaus Alpers (Hamburg), Jana Gruskov (Vienna/Bratislava), Nigel Wilson (Oxford), Herbert Bannert (Vienna), and Oliver Primavesi (Munich) - deciphered the Herodian fragments letter by letter with great dedication and effort, thoroughly analysing the text. To render visible the erased and covered script, the project employed state-of-the-art, non-invasive methods of multispectral digitization and X-ray fluorescence analysis, as well as specialized image processing. For this purpose, the project cooperated with experts in digital recovery of erased scripts. The scholarly team thoroughly studied, edited, translated, and interpreted the deciphered text of Herodian. Numerous new quotations from ancient literature came to light. The number and diversity of authors and works are astonishing: epic and lyric poetry, drama, geography, historiography, philosophy, philology! Particular attention was paid to the reconstruction and interpretation of the literary fragments. The project's findings are thus of great importance for many fields of research. However, the digital recovery of the very badly damaged manuscript has proven to be particularly complicated, so that additional applications of the most advanced methods are necessary to fill the remaining gaps. The Vienna Herodian Palimpsest was discovered 65 years ago by Herbert Hunger, a renowned Austrian scholar. Using the technology available in the 1960s (ultraviolet light), Hunger was able to decipher approximately 15-20 percent of the erased text.