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.