Historia 61-3-2012 New Studies on the Artemidorus Papyrus

HistoriaZeitschrift fr Alte GeschichteRevue dHistoire AncienneJournal of Ancient HistoryRivista di Storia Antica

Historia Band 61 Heft 3 2012 Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart

NEW STUDIES ON THE ARTEMIDORUS PAPYRUSJa Elsner et al.

IntroductionBy Ja Elsner1

The papers on the Artemidorus Papyrus gathered here were fi rst given in a colloquium at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in June 2011. They spring from two convictions, shared by all those involved. First, if the papyrus is to be regarded as a post-antique forgery, as many have argued,2 then the proponents of that view need to offer a more compelling piece of evidence, a smoking gun which can prove that some facet of its manufacture (inks, papyrus sheet or whatever) is defi nitively not ancient. Despite the extraordinary energy of those who wish to deny its authenticity, the case for its being a fake currently rests on a subtle structure of assertion, allegation and innuendo, which does not cons-titute a convincing argument. To be sure, the papyrus is unique (in the mix of its texts, its map and its drawings, as well as in each of these categories taken individually) but that is not in itself an argument for forgery. Indeed if the aim of a forger is to create something that will slip under the radar as not obviously problematic then the burden of likelihood from all the numerous unusual features of P. Artemid. points towards an exceptional ancient survival rather than a fake. This is not to endorse the papyrus authenticity beyond the likelihoods of relative probability but within that world, of the likely rather than the absolutely proven, the authors of the papers collected here are convinced that the papyrus is more likely to be authentic than to be a forgery.3 Even in the arena that has supplied the most powerful case for forgery, the appearance of a known text from Artemidorus himself in the papyrus, Jrgen Hammerstaedt argues here that the evidence points powerfully towards authenticity and not to modern fabrication.

1 Corpus Christi College, Oxford OX1 4JF, UK, [email protected]. Special thanks are due to Dr James Brusuelas for help with copyediting, and to the Corpus Christi Centre for Greek and Roman Antiquity for supporting the original colloquium. We are grateful to LED Edizioni Universitarie for permission to reprint the images which are copyright 2008 by LED.

2 Supremely L. Canfora in many articles and books notably his journal Quaderni di Storia and books such as Canfora (2008) and (2011).

3 In his paper here, DAlessio shows a number of areas where the arguments of the Canfora school of forgery simply cannot be upheld.

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It is only when questions of forgery cease to run the academic agenda, that the much more interesting historical and cultural issues can be raised. These issues include what the evidence supplied by the papyrus will mean for our understanding of ancient conceptions of geography and geographical prose, space, the mapping and visual re-presentation of space, paradoxography, zoological drawing, fi gure drawing, art history in general including issues of visual mimesis and book illustration. In all these areas, the Artemidorus papyrus has strong claims to be a cardinal item in the rewriting of cur-rently accepted histories. If the adventure of using it to inaugurate the retelling of these stories can begin, then all these fi elds will be enriched by a vibrant scholarly debate.

However, for all such discussions, scholars are in the hands of the editio princeps (Gallazzi, Kramer and Settis (2008)), about which very signifi cant reservations now need to be expressed. In particular, most students of the papyrus now agree (as do all the contributors to this group of articles) that the order in which the Artemidorus pa-pyrus was restored (and hence the order in which it was published) is mistaken. The independently-made suggestions by Nisbet (2009) and DAlessio (2009), and especially the new technical observations offered by DAlessio in 2009 (with the signifi cant further digital support of Tarte, in this fascicle) make it certain that section a of the roll should follow fairly closely onto section c, with the small fragment known as section d hanging loose and not possible to place in direct contiguity with any surviving segment. They make it clear that what survives is only about half of what the roll once contained and they make nonsense of the original editors views that the papyrus contained a coherent linear copy of a book by Artemidorus. The grudging acceptance by Kramer and Gallazzi (the papyrologists in the editorial team) of DAlessios position as certainly refl ecting one ancient condition of the papyrus (even if they insist on their reconstruction as being originally correct, and DAlessios as representing an ancient restoration) means that they have been persuaded too by his technical arguments (Galazzi and Kramer 2009: 21620).

The upshot of this discussion is that although all current and future students of the papyrus have no option but to use the editio princeps, nonetheless it needs to be used with much caution and care. Unlike other objects and texts from antiquity for which scholars have easy or ready recourse to the original in cases of doubt, P. Artemid. is not easy to access nor on public display. Moreover, what can be seen with the naked eye is not obviously clear. More than most objects, this papyrus has a virtual and di-gital existence made concrete through the editio princeps and its many interpretations among which the apparently documentary sets of images (all digitally doctored in different ways) must be included. Segolne Tartes paper in this volume, by an image-processing expert with signifi cant experience of papyrology, is an attempt to cast light on the problems and the benefi ts created by the existence of the papyrus in what we might call a new-media digital dimension, as well as a call for much greater openness and clarity about the digital metadata used to create the images which are the basis of current and future study.

In the course of their papers, Giambattista DAlessio and Irene Pajn Leyra call attention to a number of signifi cant omissions in the editio princeps of some mirror


New Studies on the Artemidorus Papyrus 291

images, of fragmentary drawings and labels on the verso and so forth. Again, this is an area where greater digital study, and greater understanding of what we are doing when using digital imagery, alongside autopsy of the actual papyrus, is ultimately going to yield a number of fresh insights. One entailment of Tartes paper and in particular her fi gure 7 is the potential usefulness of a facsimile in the new arrangement of the fragments with recto and verso correctly aligned on front and back of a single, long photographic sheet, which the user could roll and unroll to explore not only questions of ink offsets and markings but also juxtapositions of image and text in recto and verso, which are normal in the use of a roll (but hardly studied within papyrology generally). If there ever were a second edition, this would defi nitely be a worthwhile addition. The problem will be that the cost of the editio princeps and the excessively vested set of positions taken by the editors means that a second, much more usable standard edition, closer to the original, is unlikely to be produced. A second entailment of Tartes call for the release of all the images and the metadata, alongside Pajn Leyras comparison of two photographs of a very small section of the papyrus, taken respectively in 2005 and 2008 (fi gures 11 and 12), is that it is quite clear that very signifi cant and heav-ily interpretative changes took place in restoration, which could be documented if the visual information were released, and some of which may misrepresent what was originally on the papyrus.

In his paper Jrgen Hammerstaedt addresses the fundamental philological problems of the text of Artemidorus found in the papyrus at column IV in relation to the quotation from the same passage (conventionally referred to as Artemidorus fr. 21 Stiehle) in the eleventh century Paris manuscript of the de administrando imperio 23, a text commis-sioned in the mid-tenth century by the Byzantine emperor Constantine VII Porphyro-genitus and itself quoting not from the original but from the sixth-century geographical dictionary of Stephanus of Byzantium (which depended at least in part on an earlier epitome of Artemidorus by Marcianus of Heraclea). His conclusion is that not only is the text of the papyrus at col. IV an excerpt from the original of Artemidorus but also that the Artemidorus fragment quoted by Constantine is a somewhat edited redaction going back to Stephanus of an excerpt deriving from the original Artemidorus.

The presence of an excerpt from Artemidorus in the papyrus, alongside the rather different and high-blown prefatory text that followed it at col. III (which may very well not be by Artemidorus), in addition to the map and the different groups of images on recto and verso arguably point in the argument advanced here by DAlessio to the conclusion that the Artemidorus Papyrus was neither the luxury edition of Artemidorus Geography proposed by the editio princeps nor the fake suggested by Luciano Canfora and his collaborators. Rather it was a miscellaneous compilation peculiarly hybrid in its mix of images, texts and map plausibly created for some kind of didactic pur-pose that combined geography, zoology and paradoxography. The suggestion of Pajn Leyra, in this volume, that there is a geographic logic to the disposition of the drawings of animals on the verso and that this logic emulates the structure of Artemidorus text supports the hunch that the papyrus had an integrated didactic thrust in its composition, which need not be in confl ict with the view that the bestiary of labelled drawings on the


JA ELSNER et al.292

verso may have been intended to serve as a pattern or model book for the production of images in mosaic or paint.4

RECONSTRUCTIONS OF THE ARTEMIDORUS PAPYRUS By Giambattista DAlessio5

ABSTRACT: The Artemidorus papyrus was reconstructed by the fi rst editors as a roll, that opened with a short unwritten portion followed by three columns of text dealing with geography in general (fr. a). This would have been followed by a map (fr. b and c) and by two further columns of text with a description of the Iberian peninsula (in fr. c). DAlessio (2009) argued that the physical evidence provided by the papyrus implies that the sequence of the fragments was b-c-a, and that these surviving sections were preceded by a substantial portion of the roll now entirely lost. In this paper I examine recent reactions to these fi ndings, confuting Canforas latest hypothesis that the three fragments did not originally belong to a single roll, arguing against Gallazzis and Kramers conjectural reshuffl ing of the preserved fragments, and against Porcianis interpretation of the b-c-a sequence as a fragment from an internal section of Book 2 of Artemidorus Geography. On the basis of the new reconstruction and of parallels provided by other papyri, I suggest that the Artemidorus papyrus was, from the start, a roll containing miscellaneous selections of texts (at least in one case, an excerpt) and images (including a map).

Unusual objects that do not fi t easily into familiar patterns have a tendency to prompt not only description and analysis, but fantastical stories as a background for them. Such stories provide both a fully-fl edged conjectural context in which to situate the unusual object, and an explanation for its oddity. This happens not only for artefacts that come to the attention of scholars but also for those that emerge in the antiquarian and ethno-graphic markets. In this case, the more unfamiliar the object, the greater the effort put into creating imaginary backgrounds, based partly on scholarly information, but, more often than not, on the sheer fantasy of dealers, collectors, and amateurs. To a certain extent, and quite naturally, fantasy plays a role in some aspects of scholarly research too. This can work reasonably well as long as we treat the products of our imagination as provisional explanatory models, and are ready to discard them as soon as they prove to be in substantial confl ict with the evidence provided by the object itself. But this is not always the case.

In recent times the fi eld of conjectural story-making offers few rivals to the so-called Artemidorus papyrus. Since the very fi rst announcement of its existence, this object, in many respects unique, has stimulated the fantasies of scholars as well as writers of fi ction to such a degree that it has become diffi cult for the reader to distinguish between the two different genres of approach. In some cases, these fantastic reconstructions have turned out to be incompatible with the evidence provided by the object itself. The

4 E. g. Gallazzi/Kramer/Settis (2008) 32022; Elsner (2009) 436.5 Dept. of Classics, Kings College London, London WC2R 2LS, UK, giambattista.dalessio@kcl.

ac.uk



paradoxical result of this, however, has been that much stronger effort has been put into defending the fi ctional context imagined for the object, than into a closer analysis of the implications that the evidence provokes.

The papyrus presents a sequence of drawings and writing of various kinds that cover both sides of what has been assembled as a fragmentary roll, around 32.5 cm high, and at least around 2.5 m long. According to the editors, before restoration the papyrus consisted of around 50 fragments that could be fi tted together into three (or rather four, as we shall see later) separate sections: two substantial ones (a and c), whose relative position is one of the crucial issues to be established for the interpretation of the ob-ject, and two smaller ones (b and d). The fi rst necessary step, in order to make sense of this, was to determine, if at all possible, the sequence of the sections. This was done by the two scholars in charge of the edition of the papyrus, Brbel Kramer and Claudio Gallazzi, fi rst in a preliminary article that appeared in 1999,6 and subsequently, without any substantial change, in their massive editio princeps proper, that was published in 2008. Their reconstruction was presented, according to their own account, as based both on an analysis of the material evidence and on the conjectural historical context the editors had imagined for the papyrus, which was to become known as the Three Lives of the Artemidorus papyrus. According to this, the papyrus was born originally as an early Roman period de luxe copy of the second book of Artemidorus Geography (composed in the late 2nd century BCE), that also included regional maps. Once the project was aborted, the papyrus was reused in the atelier of an artist, where its verso was covered with images of fantastic and exotic animals, resulting in the papyrus sec-ond life. At a later stage, on the occasion of the papyrus third life, the very substantial blank portions of the recto were fi lled, apparently by a different person or persons, with drawings of human feet, hands and heads.7 The editors therefore reconstructed the recto as a sequence starting with fragment a, which they identifi ed as the beginning of the roll, containing three columns with the proem of Artemidorus book, and preceded by a blank agraphon, later fi lled with two drawings of bearded heads. This would have been followed by section b, a small fragment attributable to the regional map, and by section c, a very large portion of papyrus with the end of the regional map, two further columns of the text of Artemidorus (this time identifi ed thanks to its partial overlap with an already known fragment), and a large blank space, originally meant for yet another regional map, that eventually (during the papyrus third life) was fi lled with drawings of parts of the human body. A smaller fragment with a further head on the recto and an animal fi gure on the verso was published in the editio princeps as part of fragment c, but is in fact unattached to it. The whole of the verso, as we have seen, is covered with drawings of animals, mainly exotic and fantastic ones. The physical evidence allegedly used by the editors for their reconstruction mainly consists of the offset mirror images

6 Gallazzi/Kramer (1998) [but published 1999].7 This reconstruction of the papyrus was the starting point of a fi ctional historical novel by the Italian

writer E. Ferrero that even preceded the editio princeps of the papyrus itself (La misteriosa storia del papiro di Artemidoro, Turin 2006: non vidi).


JA ELSNER et al.294

left by the ink of the recto on the surface of the verso, and vice versa, a feature to which we shall come back in greater detail.

The editors interpretation of the story of the papyrus did not meet universal approval. Alternative stories were very soon elaborated, the most fantastic of them being Luciano Canforas theory that the papyrus was the work of the 19th-century Greek forger, the feuilleton-like character Constantine Simonides. This theory, which involves a consid-erable amount of extremely unlikely conjecture, and which has aroused considerable scepticism (as well as some support) in the scholarly world, has been advocated with a passion and verve directly proportional to its implausibility, to such a degree that the boundaries between scholarly research and historical fi ction have become even more blurred than in the three-lives fantasy of the original editors.8 The physical reconstruc-tion of the sequence of the fragments, though, remained substantially out of the debate, as, up to 2009, Canfora himself never questioned the sequence as reconstructed by the fi rst editors.

An entirely different approach to the issue was independently put forward by G. Nisbet in a contribution to the Oxford colloquium dedicated to this papyrus in 2008, subsequently published in the proceedings of the colloquium in 2009, and by myself, in 2009.9 Even if the reconstructions of the sequence proposed by Nisbet and my own are somewhat similar, they are based on entirely different premises, and follow two entirely different methodological approaches to the evidence. The editors reconstruc-tion, as we have seen, was, according to their own description, based not only on their interpretative model (the story of the Three Lives), but also on physical evidence and, more specifi cally, on the position of the mirror images of the recto on the verso, and vice versa. This element was not taken into account by Nisbet, who challenged their reconstruction on entirely different grounds. Nisbet argued that assuming the alternative sequence b-c-a the two bearded heads drawn at the very beginning of fragment a would have been the logical continuation of the series of artists exercises in anatomical detail at the end of fragment c, and, based on this conjectural re-arrangement, proposed what he thought was a plausible framework for the two texts and the map, that is, that the papyrus was a commonplace book. That is, Nisbet substituted an alternative story (the commonplace book model) for that elaborated by the editors. Far from providing an alternative assessment of the implications of the physical evidence of the papyrus, though, Nisbet warned the reader that he thought this same physical evidence might actually turn out to be a counter-argument against his own view. Finally Nisbet also surmised the possibility that a modern forger improved the papyrus by adding the anatomical and perhaps the animal drawings.

8 Between 2006 and mid-2011 Canfora was responsible for almost 50 publications related in some way to the Artemidorus papyrus, including newspaper articles (most of them in the Corriere della Sera), papers published in the journal he directs (Quaderni di Storia, that also hosted several Artemidorean papers of Canforas collaborators) and, to a far lesser extent, in other journals and not fewer than 8 authored, partly authored or edited books. For a list so far, cf. Quaderni di Storia 74 (2011) 238241.

9 Nisbet (2009); DAlessio (2009).



In fact, however, it was exactly that neglected physical evidence that conclusively disproved the editors reconstruction (and, incidentally, ruled out Nisbets hypothesis regarding the possibility of subsequent additions to the papyrus). A fresh examination of the relative positions of the mirror images on the two sides of the papyrus proved that this was quite clearly incompatible with the sequence proposed by the editors (and not disputed by Canfora). A problem with some inconsistent measurements had been noted, to a partial and unsystematic extent, by Canfora (2009a). However, instead of draw-ing the conclusion that the sequence of the fragments had been wrongly reconstructed, he argued that this was the result of a botched attempt by the forger at a lithographic process.10 Bastianini (2009), on the other hand, while still not doubting the editors general reconstruction, came up with a sophisticated geometrical model that might have accounted for some, but by no means all, of the apparent anomalies produced by the mirror images. In an article published that same year (DAlessio (2009)) I inde-pendently examined the abundant evidence provided by the mirror images, coming to the conclusion that it unambiguously entails a reconstruction of the sequence entirely different from that proposed by the editors: the direction in which the distance between original and mirror images increases, and the presence of previously unidentifi ed mir-ror images linking the right margin of fr. c and the left margin of fr. a would not al-low any other possible alternative. According to my conclusions, the sequence of the fragments must have been b-c-a, with d, a further small fragment that the editors had erroneously appended to fragment c, probably to be located to the right of fragment a. This, incidentally, coincided with Nisbets re-arrangement of the fragments while, at the same time, depriving it of one of Nisbets original main arguments, i. e. the fact that it provided an uninterrupted sequence of drawings of heads. In my reconstruction it is very likely that further drawings of this kind must have followed fragment a, not only on the basis of the (conjectural) placement of fragment d to its right, but also because a further mirror image of a head seems to be (albeit very tentatively) identifi able at the far left extremity of the verso of fragment a (corresponding to V34: this head does not have its own number nor a description in the editio princeps).11 This might represent a drawing originally located immediately to the right of the upper part of column III of the text (its presence, incidentally, would also prove that there was a further interruption of the written portion after the third column).12

10 Cf. Canfora (2009a) 254264. For a punctual and patient refutation of the lithography theory as formulated by Canfora (2009a), see already Gallazzi/Kramer (2009) 199201. For further arguments against this, cf. p. 300 sq. below.

11 The issue of what mirror images we would expect to fi nd at the far right-hand end of the recto of fragment a is discussed by Gallazzi/Kramer (2009) 236 f., but without giving any account of the curved lines that can actually be seen in that position, if we trust the photographs published in the editio princeps.

12 An important caveat that must be kept in mind against this possible interpretation of the preserved traces is, however, exactly the fact that this hypothetical head would have been drawn far closer to the margin of the written column than happens in all the other preserved cases.


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The physical evidence seemed to be unambiguous, and my alternative reconstruc-tion is now widely accepted. There has been, however, a certain reluctance to draw the necessary consequences from it, and to discard the provisional, fi ctional stories that would now seem to have outlived their heuristic purpose. In his most recent contribution at the time of writing Canfora mentions le inoppugnabili osservazioni di Giambattista DAlessio e di Guido Bastianini that have demonstrated that the proem dovrebbe ad-dirittura essere spostato dopo la fi ne della colonna quinta.13 Strangely enough Canfora attributes here the same opinion to both me and Bastianini,14 while in his contribution Bastianini did not in fact challenge the editors reconstruction but only proposed an alternative model for the rolling of the volume with the intention of accounting for some of the anomalies with the mirror images that this reconstruction entailed. Only at the end of his article did Bastianini acknowledge my entirely different account of the evidence (which he came across only after he had already submitted a draft of his paper) accepting that this alternative reconstruction was hardly debatable.15 Canfora, however, cannot admit the idea of a miscellaneous roll, and, as a consequence, discards the value of this evidence altogether. In his new reconstruction there never was a continuous roll, but three smaller papyri, originally forged by Simonides, and subsequently manipulated by even later forgers with various additions, including that of at least some of the mir-ror images, in order to create the impression that they were all parts of the same large roll.16 This hypothesis is extremely problematic. Indeed, as I am going to demonstrate, it is straightforwardly impossible to reconcile with the physical evidence.

In this context Canfora reiterates his denial of the possibility that the mirror images may have been caused by the exposure of the written papyrus to humidity, on the grounds that this would have produced an altogether different effect, a halo that with time may become an indistinct black blot.17 This proposal (not new in Canforas writing) however had already been clearly refuted by Gallazzi and Kramer in the editio princeps as well as by others, and several counter-examples have been provided.18 In order to repeat this, Canfora has to ignore, and to dismiss with exceptional obstinacy, well documented evi-

13 Canfora (2011) 24. It is just one example of Canforas tendency to focus on what he perceives as the great importance of his own theories that he presents my reconstruction as an attempt at fi nding a terza via, a third way, a compromise, between his own position and that of the fi rst editors, rather than as an attempt at making sense of the evidence.

14 Cf. also Canfora (2011) 192 n. 14.15 Bastianini (2009) 220 f.16 Gallazzi/Kramer (2010) forcefully argued against the possibility that a blank papyrus of the required

dimensions for the reconstructed roll, and, more importantly, of the required date (the papyrus has been carbon-dated between 40 BCE and 130 CE with a 95 % confi dence degree), might have been available to a forger.

17 Canfora (2011) 188.18 Cf. editio princeps: 63; DAlessio (2009); Bastianini (2009); Gallazzi/Kramer (2009) 194196

(pointing also tp the case of Callimachus Lille papyrus). For other cases of mirror-writing in cartonnage papyri cf. also P. Kln. 11.440, 443 and 452 edited by C. Armoni and K. Maresch in Klner Papyri, Band 11, Paderborn (2007) 107, 144 and 173.



dence that puts the existence of this feature beyond any reasonable doubt. Mirror images, for example, are attested for papyri used for cartonnage, as is amply demonstrated by the Posidippus papyrus (P.Mil.Vogl. 8.309, a 3rd-century BCE roll), where such images are by no means non pi che qualche traccia sporadica as Canfora incredibly would have it.19 Once again, anyone who has used the editio princeps, its excellent reproduc-tions, and the detailed descriptions provided in the apparatus of the Posidippus papyrus can easily assess the extent of Canforas misrepresentation.20 Mirror images are attested also as the effect of the contact between the two sides of a rolled papyrus volumen, exactly as in the Artemidorus papyrus. Once again, Canfora dismisses the clear case of P.Yale 1.19 (dove si intravede qualcosa del genere) as alquanto sospetto, obliquely hinting at the possibility that this may be, again, a forgery.21 It may be useful to remind ourselves here that when the Yale papyrus was fi rst published, the mirror images on the verso were entirely misunderstood by the fi rst editors, and that, decades later, renewed and more detailed attention to this feature eventually solved the mystery. But this is by no means the only case. In 1922 Arthur Hunt had noted this phenomenon and used it in order to reconstruct the sequence of the columns (and some textual details) of P.Oxy. 15.1793, a roll with minor elegiac poems by Callimachus, including the Victoria Sosibii and the so-called Elegia in Magam et Berenicen (frs. 387 and 388 Pf.). In this papyrus the traces are far less easy to read than in the case of the Posidippus, the Yale papyrus or the Artemidorus one, but they were clear enough for Hunt to exploit them fruitfully. This is Hunts description of the feature: The roll has evidently been subjected to se-vere pressure, causing the layers sometimes to adhere tightly and the ink to leave more or less legible impressions of adjacent portions; by this means the order of some frag-ments, which could otherwise not have been certainly placed, has been fi xed, and some missing letters have been supplied.22 In this, as in other cases, the difference in clarity among the various mirror images can be easily explained as the result of different kinds of inks and/or of variations in the circumstances under which the damage was produced. A further case, P.Cair.Zen. 1.59034, has been very recently brought again to attention of scholars.23 In this case the authors draw attention to the fact that the transferred letters are more clearly visible and identifi able in the right side of the papyrus than in the left which suggests that while the papyrus was still folded this side became wetter than the other (Renberg and Bubelis 2011: 172).

Examples of mirror-writing, anyway, can be easily multiplied and the following list is likely to be far from being exhaustive: several further letters from the Zenon Archive,

19 Canfora (2011) 187.20 Cf. Bastiani and Gallazzi (2001).21 Canfora (2011) 186.22 Hunt in Grenfell and Hunt (1922) 99. On this see now Chiesa (2009). This and the following case

were overlooked also by myself in DAlessio (2009), where I mistakenly stated that this feature had not been noted before the 1990s.

23 Renberg and Bubelis (2011) 170172. In this case the feature, not noted in the editio princeps (PSI 4.435, Florence 1917), had been identifi ed already by Edgar (1919) 173.


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including Westermann, Keyes and Liebesny (1940), no. 64,24 and P.L.Bat. 20.23, 28 and 34;25 a document from Bakchias published by Knudtzon (1946);26 P.Oxy. 51.3645;27 P.Oxy. 4152, an Oxyrhynchus fragment with an astrological table;28 P.Oxy. inv. 33 4B 83E (811), a fragment of Menanders Sikyonioi published by Eric Handley;29 P.L.Bat. 25.42.30 The feature, though well attested, does not seem to have attracted great attention and a fuller collection of the evidence may yield interesting results.31 The only general comment of which I am aware regarding the circumstances that may have concurred in producing such offset traces is provided by Vleeming (1985): coll. 520 f. discussing P.Michigan 3525B (a demotic document): In such and similar cases where the text has come off and can (partially) be read in mirror-writing, it is often said that the ink would have dried rather slowly. However, here is an instance in which this explanation cannot apply, because the texts fi rst two lines came off more clearly than did the subsequent lines. We in Leiden think that many of the cases of stained texts may rather have been caused by water long after the texts completion, since antiquity, or even in the process of unrolling.32 In conclusion, Canforas statements to this effect are based on misrep-resentation of the evidence and/or on his ignorance of the facts.

24 Westermann, Keyes and Liebesny (1940) 13 From lines 38 there are blottings upon the verso. By reversing these in a mirror, we have recovered etc.

25 In Pestman (1980) 113, 124 and 144.26 Knudtzon (1946) papyrus 12, 75: die Verso hat schwache Spiegelschriftspuren desselben Textes.27 The editor, J. R. Rea, notes: The back is blank, except for offsets left by the text of the letter while

it was rolled up.28 Cf. Jones (1999) 123 The back has legible mirror-reversed offset traces transferred from another

part of the same tables.29 Cf. Handley (1984) 25 On the back, in mirror-writing, as we may call it, are offsets from a similar

column, faint and (no doubt) deceptive shadows. What can be said in detail of this must await another occasion. For now, the presumption is that at some stage of its history the roll was exposed to damp in such a way as to cause the ink from a column now apparently lost to blot into the back of our piece, as part of the coil of papyrus next nearest the inside of the roll. If any of the mirror-writing could be made out to coincide with text otherwise known, the result would be of immediate interest; but so far all that has been divined, even with the avid eye of faith, has proved unprofi table.

30 In Hoogendijk and van Minnen (1991) 177 A strip of c. 1.3 cm of the left edge has been folded inside, as can be seen from the ink traces before ll. 20 and 2226: they are the beginnings of these lines in mirror writing Probably after that, the papyrus was rolled up from the right to the left (so as to leave the address visible), as is shown by the ink traces on the recto at the end of ll. 2326 and on the verso.

31 As far as I can see there is no treatment of this feature in Puglia (1997).32 I owe the reference to Hoogendijk and van Minnen (1991) 177. A further case that should perhaps

be added to the list is P.Oxy. 15.1790 (Ibycus). According to Barron (1969) 119 f. three separate series of offsets, the result either of accidental laying of another sheet of writing face-down upon the fi rst before its ink was dry, or of the rolling of papyri face to face in circumstances in which they then became wet and exchanged their ink. But the writing in the upper and lower margin surely belongs to a strip of papyrus used to restore the Ibycus: cf. Puglia (1997) 35 f. There are, however, traces also in the empty central space that cannot be accounted for in this way, and that are likely



Moreover, contrary to what Canfora repeatedly states with great self-confi dence,33 it is simply not true that in the Artemidorus papyrus the drawings of anatomical parts on the recto, as opposed to the writing and the animals on the verso, failed to produce a pervasive mirror effect. If one peruses the excellent reproductions of the papyrus in the (unfortunately very expensive and not widely available) editio princeps, it is quite clear that not only the writing on the recto, but also many of the drawings both on the recto and on the verso have left mirror images in a systematically coherent way on the opposite side of the papyrus.34 The difference among the three sets of traces is that some of the lines (in particular the writing of the text on the recto) have left a clearer impression than others. This difference need raise no suspicion and may be plausibly explained by the fact that different kinds of inks are likely to have been used for the different purposes of writing and drawing (Gallazzi and Kramer 2009: 196). And, of course, as is very clear from other comparable examples, we should not expect that all of the original traits of all the images would have left a corresponding and equally vis-ible trace on the other side, as Canfora somewhat naively does. Different portions of the papyrus, even at a very short distance, would have been exposed to different degrees of humidity; folds and creases in the papyrus, uneven rolling and even conceivably, the presence of extraneous pieces of papyrus or other materials within the roll would have affected the result; moreover, the degree of dilution of the different kinds of inks used for writing and drawing would, very naturally, have not been constant.

Anyway, the mirror images, both in the case of the texts and in that of the draw-ings, refl ect the object before it was damaged. The relative positions of these images (both within recto and verso, and of the verso compared to the recto) remain consistent throughout and closely refl ect their positions on the extant papyrus, but their distances to the left of the position of the original images (i. e. when examining the recto of the roll) regularly increase when we move from the left hand part of fragment c to the right hand extremity of fragment a. The relative distance between the writing and the two sets of drawings, on the one hand, and their respective mirror images, on the other, and the way the distance increases as one moves toward the right extremity of the recto, is consistent with their having been produced under the same circumstances. All of this can be easily accounted for by their having been produced when the papyrus was rolled with the initial part of its recto at the centre, and when the extant portion of the papyrus was preceded by around 2.5 metres (now lost) within the core of the roll. The geometrical

to be indeed offsets. Cf. also P.Mil.Vogl. inv. 1264, edited by C. Gallazzi in Hoogendik and Muhs (2008) 2.

33 Cf. e. g. Canfora (2011) 174, 185, 190 f.34 In the case of the map, we are dealing with thinner and relatively isolated lines, conceivably drawn

with a different ink, and it is to be expected that their mirror images would be diffi cult to make out in the more densely populated surface of the verso. For references to mirror images left by some lines of the map on the verso, cf. editio princeps: 63.


JA ELSNER et al.300

development of the spiral of the roll explains the fact that the distance between original and mirror image increases when we move further away from the centre of the roll.35

It is not entirely clear what technological process would have produced the effects so implausibly envisaged by Canfora. Canfora himself repeatedly hints at the possibility that this was the result of a technical accident linked to experimentation with lithographic reproduction.36 As we have seen, however, it has been conclusively demonstrated that the physical characteristics of the papyrus surface and of its ink are incompatible with such a process (Gallazzi and Kramer 2009: 199201). Moreover, the only practical way to generate the offset impressions as they are now, i. e. at a distance from the original images that gradually increases as we move farther away from the centre of the roll, would be to replicate the conditions of a three-dimensional spiral. The increase in the distance between the original text and its mirror image can be detected even within the span of a single column. This can be clearly demonstrated, for example, by the relation between the letters preserved in column IV lines 3536 and their mirror images on the verso.Here the two sets of images can be easily identifi ed in the infra-red digital reproduc-tion and there is no physical discontinuity in the surface of the papyrus between them.37 Figure 1 shows how, as we move from the beginning of the lines toward the right, the distance between the original letters and their mirror images gradually increases from cm 13.24 to cm 13.33, cm 13.41 and, fi nally (before a lacuna on the recto), to around cm 13.53, all within a span of cm 6.3. If that were not enough, fi gures 2 and 3 show that the length of a given sequence of letters is not the same on the original writing and in its mirror image: the original traits are projected onto an inner coil of the spiral and their dimension decreases accordingly.

This progression is a clear proof that the offset images cannot have been produced by lithographic techniques, which imply the impression of a fl at print plate on a fl at surface. Nor would lithography work even if we took more modern techniques into ac-count, just for the sake of argument, where the plate is applied to a cylinder in a print-ing press; for, by contrast with a spiral, this too would keep the distance between the traces on the original plate and their impressions constant, rather than progressively and constantly increasing. The deformation of the original images in the mirror ones entails beyond doubt that these were produced when the papyrus was rolled in the shape of a spiral. The variations on the papyrus, moreover, would have been affected by any ir-regularities in the shape of the roll, which of course would never have been a perfectly aligned spiral, and must have been rolled with different tensions at different places (as is always the case). In order to replicate such effects, one would have to produce an

35 Cf. DAlessio (2009) and, for a digital and three-dimensional reconstruction of the model, Tarte p. 325 sqq. below.

36 Canfora (2011) 189, cf. e. g. Canfora (2009a) 258 n. 11.37 When taking these measurement, it is essential to select sections where the preserved portion of the

papyrus is continuous and unbroken. When dealing with differences in the region of 1 mm or less, we cannot trust that any, even partly, detached fragment has been placed exactly in its right position when the papyrus was mounted.



entire roll, approximately 5 m long (i. e. the lost portion at its centre plus the portion corresponding to its extant section), and to fi ll it with an undamaged copy of all the texts and the drawings. After having produced exactly that same entire roll which never existed according to Canfora, our imaginary forger would have had to wrap it in a coil around the three smaller rolls that Canfora imagines were used (all of them blank, and all of them composed with the same kind of sheets, in the same unusual format!), in order to impress the mirror images upon them. A two-dimensional process based on the impression of lithographic plates would require continuous and extremely complex adjustments in order to reproduce the mirror images at a gradually increasing distance from the original ones which would be practically impossible, even from a purely geo-metrical point of view (unless of course we are willing to fancy that the whole thing was produced through sophisticated software programmes, which require printing systems that are incompatible with the physical state of both the papyrus and the ink, as well as with Canforas own timeframe). Canforas solution, far from providing a simpler explanation of the evidence, is in patent confl ict with the evidence itself, and serves the sole purpose of salvaging his extremely unlikely historical premises.

To make things even less likely, Canfora conjectures that the mirror images may not all have the same origin. The ones left by the text of the recto on the verso could be the result of an earlier embarrassing technical accident, going back, it would seem, to Simonides himself,38 while the others would have been added at a later stage, by a secondary forger, or even again by Simonides, in order to give the impression that the three fragments originally belonged to a single roll. The location of that set of mirror images in relation to the originals, however, is the same as that of the other images. It is, as we saw, to be explained as the result of the superposition of the spirals of a pa-pyrus, rolled around an inner core corresponding to a lost section roughly 2.5 m long, and presupposes that columns IIIV preceded columns III within a single roll which is exactly the hypothesis that Canfora is so eager to deny. Moreover, since the position of the refl ections of all the other images, as we have seen, follows the same pattern, we would have to suppose the existence of two different rolls with the same characteristics, one fabricated by Simonides, and the other by a later forger (or by Simonides himself), that would have served the purpose of producing the mirror images as we can see them now. And anyway, the evidence provided by the mirror images of the text on the recto alone is suffi cient to conclude that the two fragments were rolled together in the sequence c-a. Canforas hypothesis is absolutely incompatible with the physical evidence, and has no heuristic value whatsoever. It is only a last-resource consequence of his having remained trapped in the feuilleton-like historical fi ction he has imaginatively created as a background for the papyrus. His reconstruction of the papyrus is not simply unlikely, it is plainly and defi nitively impossible.

In their critical survey of the most recent bibliography on the papyrus, Gallazzi and Kramer too acknowledge the implications of the new assessment of the mirror images

38 Canfora (2011) 199; cf. also 189, where Canfora had advanced the conjecture that this technical accident happened when Simonides was experimenting with a lithographical technique.


JA ELSNER et al.302

and accept the arguments adduced in DAlessio (2009) that the mirror images must indeed have been produced when fr. a immediately followed fr. c (Gallazzi/Kramer (2009) 218). A consequence of this is that their previous reconstruction of the roll turns out to be wrong. However, Gallazzi/Kramer (2009) are not ready to discard their theory in favour of new evidence. They rather prefer to conjecture the existence of an entirely theoretical previous stage in which the papyrus actually was arranged accord-ing to the sequence they had originally reconstructed, a-b-c-d, with a corresponding to the beginning of the roll. They imagine that, at a later stage the papyrus broke at a kollesis following fr. a. They further surmise that after this damage was produced, the papyrus was restored in a different sequence (with fr. a displaced after fr. c) and then reused for the drawings on its verso. Only after this restoration, and after the two sets of drawings had been added, according to their new hypothesis, were the mirror images produced. This is not impossible at a purely theoretical level, since it involves imagin-ing an entirely conjectural previous stage. There is, however, no evidence whatsoever in the papyrus fragments to support this hypothesis, and even Gallazzi and Kramer admit that this conjectural stage has left no physical trace in the papyrus. There are several reasons that suggest this reconstruction is very unlikely. In the preserved portion of the papyrus there is one certain case of ancient restoration. About 13 cm from the right margin of fr. c (looking at it from the recto side) the papyrus broke at the junction point between two kollemata, and was subsequently rejoined at the same point. In the process a few millimetres of the surface of the previous kollema were covered by the following one. In this case, however, there are two fundamental differences from the situation envisaged by Gallazzi and Kramer. In the fi rst place, no section was actually displaced, and, more importantly, the damage took place after the mirror images were produced, as the tracing of the mirror image of the head numbered as R20 corresponds to its shape before, not after the restoration.39 There are no signs of damage (and even less of restoration) from before the papyrus was covered with both sets of drawings and the mirror images were produced. But there is another objection to Gallazzis and Kramers latest hypothesis. As can be shown on the basis of the distance between the original images and their offset impressions, when these were produced, the papyrus was rolled with its beginning at the centre, and the preserved portion was preceded by a lost section that must have been around 2.5 metres long. If we accept Gallazzis and Kramers hypothesis, we should imagine not only that fr. a was misplaced after frs. b and c, but also that this entire sequence was attached to an extraneous and quite sub-stantial previous portion of the roll. Moreover, according to Gallazzis and Kramers own reconstruction, the original roll was a copy of the second book of Artemidorus Geography, and, consequently, the section with fragment c would have been followed by the rest of the book. At the time the mirror images were produced, however, this position was occupied by fr. a. So, if we want to follow Gallazzi and Kramer (2009), we would have to imagine that the papyrus broke not only after fragment a, but also after

39 Cf. Bastianini (2009) 219 n. 17.



fragment c. This amounts to a substantial reshuffl e for which there is no explanation, and of which no trace remains.

Far from being based on the actual physical evidence, Gallazzis and Kramers latest conjecture simply attempts to work around it. One might suppose that they have strong grounds for advancing an unsubstantiated hypothesis of this kind. But their only reason turns out to be that they do not want to accept the clear implications of the evidence as to the original sequence of the papyrus. They examine a number of possible interpreta-tions of the sequence, which include the possibility that the papyrus might have been an anthology, a miscellaneous roll, a collaborative work, an exercise-book, a sample or an autograph, and rule them all out since they prefer to stick to their original hypothesis, although to do this they must conjecture a complex and implausible reshuffl e.40 Meth-odologically, to put it bluntly, this is the wrong way round. We should, in the fi rst place, start from the evidence and only make radical conjectural change if it is unavoidable. And that is certainly not the case here. In fact, even before the new sequence was established, several scholars were struck by the strong stylistic and linguistic differences between the two portions of the text, at columns IIII and IVV respectively. Some argued that they were unlikely to be the work of one author.41 Now that the sequence of the frag-ments actually does suggest that the two portions of writing were not meant to be part of the same text, it seems to me that we should welcome this, rather than ignoring it for the sake of a hypothesis that was problematic from the start.

The reasons adduced by Gallazzi and Kramer against the line that this roll was a miscellaneous anthology are particularly weak. One of their objections is that in an an-thology we would expect to fi nd the indication of the authors name and/or the title of the text before each excerpt. This is indeed frequently the case, but there are numerous exceptions even among the relatively few cases of preserved anthologies. Gallazzi and Kramer are aware of this, of course, but think that this feature is to be found only in the more careless compilations made for personal use, which would be disconcerting in a papyrus they consider to be of high quality, like the Artemidorus papyrus. They fi nd equally unacceptable the possibility that, within such an anthology, a general introductory text such as the one preserved in columns IIII should follow the detailed description of a single region, as exemplifi ed by the text in columns IV and V. Finally, they do not think that the large blank intervals (actually now covered with drawings) between the texts are compatible with the anthology hypothesis. However, the absence of an indication of the

40 In a most remarkable instance of an entirely circular argument, Gallazzi and Kramer fi rst establish that fr. a must have preceded the other ones on the ground that they do not think that the alternative textual sequence makes sense to them; then they decide that the blank space at the beginning of fr. a must have been an agraphon (rather than being yet another of the blank spaces between columns of texts that we fi nd in this papyrus); and, eventually, from all of this they deduce: es kann also festgehalten werden, da der Papyrus den Anfang eines Buches aus der Feder eines bestimmten Autors enthlt, and that this book must, of course, have been Artemidorus, Geography 2 (Gallazzi/Kramer 2009: 237).

41 Among the scholars who had doubted the attribution of columns IIII to Artemidorus cf. e. g. Obbink (2009) 13; Parsons (2009) 31; Colvin (2009).


JA ELSNER et al.304

author and title of anthologized excerpts is found also in miscellaneous rolls written by well-practised hands that wrote their texts on the rectos of unused papyrus rolls. A good example of this is a late Ptolemaic papyrus now in the gyptisches Museum in Berlin, P.Berol. 13044. The papyrus is 23.4 cm high, and its preserved portion is 92.35 cm long.42 On the recto, a competent late Ptolemaic book-hand (probably to be dated to the early 1st century BCE; it shares some features, such as the famous rho with a long tail, with the recto of the Artemidorus papyrus)43 wrote a version of the dialogue between Alexander and the Gymnosophists44 and continued with a list of notable men and places published by Diels (1904) under the title of Laterculi alexandrini. This second text is not preceded by any general title, nor by the name of its compiler. Every section is preceded by a header, such as Legislators, Painters, Engineers, The greatest rivers, The most beautiful springs etc. Gallazzi and Kramer make a distinction between anthologies of excerpts, and miscellaneous rolls containing whole works. The Laterculi alexandrini in P.Berol. 13044, however, start with a list of legislators, but there is no reason to think that this was meant to be the beginning of the work as whole.45 The papyrus was meant from the beginning as a collection of miscellaneous texts, and it went on being used in this way when its verso was later employed by a different scribe for copying the prose paraphrase of an Orphic poem on the rape of Persephone (cf. 383, 3879, 3923 and 3967 T Bernab). Here too the papyrus provides neither title nor authors name. The Berlin roll belongs to a group of cartonnage papyri from Abusir al-Melek, for which an Alexandrian provenance has been proposed, based on their link with Alexandrian docu-mentary papyri dated to the Augustan age and arguably from the same cartonnage.46 A further Berlin papyrus attributed to the same context is interesting for its very unusual format and miscellaneous content. P.Berol. 13045 preserves the end of a comparison of various political constitutions (Pack2 2570) and a rhetorical dialogue on the trial of Demades (Pack2 2102) (Salmenkivi 2002: 42). According to its editio princeps,47 this consists of the remains of two different rolls glued together, the fi rst containing

42 Cf. the entries for this papyrus in the Leuven Catalogue of Paraliterary Papyri (http://cpp.arts.kuleuven.be): nos. 273 and 106.

43 The shape of the rho in the Artemidorus papyrus was considered suspicious by Wilson (2009) 27 f.; cf. Parsons (2009) 35 f.

44 On this text cf. Stramaglia (1996) and Bosman (2010), with previous bibliography.45 And, by the way, Gallazzi and Kramer can mention only two papyri that would fall within their

second category (i. e. miscellaneous rolls): P.Berol. 13044 itself and P.Lond.Lit. 134+130, another Ptolemaic papyrus, with the fi nal portion of Hypereides, Against Philippides, and the initial one of Demosthenes Third Letter. The latter begins without title, but with the introductory formula (Kenyon (1891) 56). Note that in this case (as in the Artemidorus papyrus, but to a lesser extent) there is a variation in the width of the selides in the two texts. In the Hypereides they are barely 134 in. (Kenyon (1891) 42), while in the Demosthenes they are 214 in. The texts are written by two different hands. Cf. Johnson (2004) 173, Table 3.1 B, and 206, Table 3.4 B.

46 Salmenkivi (2002) 4244. To the two literary papyri discussed here Salmenkivi also adds P.Berol. 13046, with Iliad 13.184367 (Pack 2 903).

47 Kunst (1923) 13 f.



the end of the political synkrisis and the fi rst section of the rhetorical dialogue, and the second with the continuation of the latter.48 The continuous line numbering, however, shows that the whole sequence was treated as a single roll.49 The evidence provided by these Berlin papyri points to the possibility that miscellaneous rolls might have been more common in the late Ptolemaic and Augustan periods than is usually supposed. We simply do not have a suffi cient sample to see whether any conclusion might be drawn regarding their typology.

Gallazzi and Kramer ask for an explanation why columns IIII of P. Artemid. (the so-called proem) follow rather than precede columns IVV. I do not think that, on the basis of the available evidence, we can reconstruct the intention of the compiler in pro-ducing exactly this sequence, any more than we can explain why the scribe of P.Berol. 13044 decided to copy exactly the Laterculi alexandrini after the Gymnosophists. And the fact that we cannot, does not mean that they do not exist or that they are forgeries. It simply refl ects the limits of our abilities to go beyond the available evidence. Of course, we can make conjectures regarding these reasons,50 but these are never going to be more than debatable guesses, unless some unlikely new piece of information comes to light to help us to fi ll the gaps. If anything, one might even argue that the sequence of texts in the Artemidorus papyrus is more coherent than that in the Berlin papyrus, and I cannot honestly understand why this greater coherence should be used against the hypothesis that it was an anthology.51 The main difference between the Artemidorus papyrus and any other miscellaneous anthology, of course, is the presence of the large portions of blank papyrus between the text sections, which, at a certain stage, were fi lled with at least one map/landscape and several drawings. But we have to be clear about this: the map and drawings distinguish P. Artemid. not only from other anthologies, but from practi-cally almost every other known preserved papyrus. Even if we follow the fi rst editors original idea, to which they still stick (Gallazzi and Kramer 2004: 240 Infolgedessen halten wir an unserer These fest), that P. Artemid. was born as an illustrated copy of a

48 Kunst does not give any indication that more than one scribe might have been at work on these texts and from his description Salmenkivi (2002) 43 n. 73 infers that both texts were written by the same hand, an impression confi rmed by Giuseppe Ucciardello, who kindly inspected this papyrus in Berlin in the summer of 2011. According to the authors of the entry for this papyrus in the Leuven Catalogue of Paraliterary Papyri (http://cpp.arts.kuleuven.be), M. Huys and D. Colomo, two different hands can be distinguished. I am not aware of any published photograph of the portion of the papyrus containing the fi rst text. The hand of the dialogue, judging from the published photograph, is not too dissimilar from the fi rst hand of P.Berol. 13044.

49 Cf. Kunst (1923) 13 f. and the description in the Leuven Catalogue of Paraliterary Papyri: the two rolls have to be considered as a unit, as appears from the continuous line numbering and from the lack of any interruption in the text at the join of the two rolls. The lines with the beginning of the dialogue are not preserved.

50 Cf., for example, Stramaglia (1996) 114 according to whom the Gymnosophists would have served as an attractive literary text on which the students could exercise, while dopo la piacevole lettura, magari il maestro avrebbe vessato gli alunni con le utili quanto noiose liste di parole

51 Porciani (2010) 212 n. 25, mentions this en passant but, strangely enough, treats it as an argument against the possibility that the Artemidorus papyrus may be a miscellaneous roll.


JA ELSNER et al.306

geography book, there are no parallels among extant papyri. The facts that only one of the blank spaces was actually fi lled with a map, and that this map is obviously unsuit-able as an illustration of the description of the Iberian coast that follows it or of the text that preceded it (the proem according to Gallazzi and Kramer) greatly weakens an already feeble conjecture.

Does the new sequence, as reconstructed on the basis of the physical evidence, nec-essarily imply that the roll contained a miscellany of texts? Recently, Leone Porciani has argued that this may not be the case.52 While agreeing with Gallazzi and Kramer that P. Artemid. cannot be a miscellany, Porciani argues against their reshuffl ing of the reconstructed sequence, for which he proposes a new interpretation as a coherent and continuous section from Book 2 of Artemidorus Geography. Porciani maintains that the attribution of the two sections (columns IVV and columns IIII) to two different texts multiplies the levels of incoherence of an already incoherent papyrus, and that this is dangerous from the epistemological point of view (Porciani (2010) 213). I disagree on this point. Methodologically, we should start from an analysis of the texts and their position in the papyrus, in order to make sense of them, and not from our expectations of fi nding in them a preconceived level of coherence, which might or might not have been in the mind of whoever copied them. Porciani, nonetheless, fi nds the coherence he requires in the hypothesis that columns IVV would belong to an internal section of the second book of Artemidorus Geography (in which the author would have produced a summary of the physical and political confi guration of the Iberian peninsula) and that this would have been followed by a methodological digression in columns IIII. However, when dealing with the fi rst portion of text (coll. IVV) Porciani does not confront the small, but in my opinion crucial issue of the missing connecting particle in its opening sentence. That is present in the Artemidorean excerpt in Constantine Porphyrogeni-tus, in a position where there would have been no reason to interpolate it (the quotation is introduced by a verbum dicendi after which the particle does not make syntactical sense). It is therefore highly probable that it was already in the original. Its omission in the papyrus looks like a clear sign that this was an excerpt deliberately, if only slightly, modifi ed in order to make it self-standing and independent from its original context.53 This conclusion is reinforced by the circumstance that the whole section has been designed by the scribe in such a way as to occupy exactly two columns (with a different width from that of columns IIII). Porciani argues that columns IVV do not represent either a proem, nor (part of) a separate work, but a methodological section internal to the text of Artemidorus, elaborating upon the two notions of a regional geographical area and of comprehensive knowledge (conoscenza complessiva), that were used in the preceding descriptive passage (Porciani 2010: 225). This suggestion, however, does not face squarely the problems posed by the great stylistic and linguistic difference between the two sec-tions of the text. This would have caused serious problems if Porciani had followed the hypothesis that columns IIII show off the author at his most purple in the introduction

52 Porciani (2010).53 On the whole issue, cf. now also the much more detailed treatment of Hammerstaedt in this volume.



to one of his books (a theory that, in this case, I have never found persuasive). It is even more problematic if we think we are dealing with an internal digression or interlude.

Indeed, even if we accept this highly unlikely hypothesis, the idea that the extant portions of P. Artemid. might have been preceded and followed by the rest of Book 2 of Artemidorus Geography is not compatible with the physical appearance of the pa-pyrus, as Porciani himself is forced to acknowledge. As we have seen, we must accept (as Porciani does) that the extant portion of the papyrus was preceded by a lost section roughly 2.5 m long. The extant portion of the papyrus starts in the middle of a map, and we do not know how much of it might have extended into the lost section. The fi rst two preserved columns (IVV) are separated from the following three by another blank por-tion, roughly 0.85 m long. And the last preserved column was followed again by more unwritten papyrus. This means that the written text occupies roughly a quarter of the preserved length of the papyrus. There is no reason to suppose that in the lost portion the ratio between written text and blank elements must have been signifi cantly different from that of the extant section, as it is unlikely that the scribe would have started to leave extensive blank spaces only at this point of the roll. So, theoretically, 2.5 metres may correspond to no more than the same amount of text as in the preserved section; but, ac-cording to Porcianis hypothesis, this lost section must have accommodated a sequence of Book 2 long enough to lead author and reader to the recapitulation we eventually fi nd in columns IVV. Moreover, had the papyrus continued according to the same ratio between texts and blank spaces, a roll containing a whole book would have required a great and decidedly unwieldy length. If we add to this that the lay-out of the text, with its remarkable oscillation in the width of the columns, is highly unusual, and that the extant map is obviously not relevant to the preserved texts, the hypothesis that this was a complete edition of the geographers book becomes even more diffi cult to maintain. And it is not maintained, in fact, by Porciani himself, who suggests that P.Artemid. might have been a sample text made towards the preparation of such an edition. Now, if we have pretty few papyrological parallels for miscellaneous prose anthologies, I am aware of no parallel at all for such samples as envisaged by Porciani.54

We remain, once more, before the most obvious conclusion, i. e. that the papyrus is a miscellaneous compilation of geographical texts and drawings. Porciani, among oth-ers, stresses the didactic implausibility of an anthology of such texts (Porciani (2010) 211). And yet, geography and paradoxography, as well as art history were far from being alien to the educational trends of Greco-Roman Egypt. A good example of this, albeit at

54 Porciani (2010) 228 n. 70 quotes P.Col. 204, 1278 MP3, as a possible example of una prova di scrittura per una edizione. The case, however, is very different. In the Columbia papyrus a scribe used the verso of a documentary papyrus in order to start copying Isocrates, Contra sophistas, but did not go beyond the second line of the second column. Apart from being of interest for the scribes possible attempt at fi nding the most appropriate width of the column (moving from an average of 26 letters to that of 22 letters per line, a difference which is, by the way, far less striking than that between the two sections of P.Artemid.), this papyrus is hardly comparable to the situation of the Artemidorus papyrus, where the experiment would have covered roughly 5 metres of the recto of a large-sized roll.


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a more down-to-earth level, is provided by one of the miscellaneous papyri discussed above, P.Berol. 13044, containing the so-called Laterculi Alexandrini, dated probably to the early 1st century BCE.55 This is a wide-ranging list of names covering various categories, including both people and places. The greatest portion of the names of people represents artists such as painters, sculptors, architects (and engineers). The geographical and paradoxographical interest of the text is demonstrated by columns VIIIXII (after which the papyrus is broken), where a list of the seven wonders is followed by those of the largest islands, the highest mountains, the longest rivers, the most beautiful springs, and lakes. The geographical range is quite wide. The list mentions several exotic places from Asia, Africa, Eastern and Western Europe, as well as some from the Iberian peninsula. The list of rivers starts with . The Pyrenees, as well as the Alps, are mentioned among the mountains. The Balearic islands fi gure among the largest islands (in this, the list strictly follows Timaeus, F 65 Jacoby, criticised for exactly this treatment of the Balearic islands by Strabo 14.2.10, 654). The difference in range from a similar list in the teachers book of P. Jouguet-Guraud (dated to the late 3rd century BCE), where the westernmost location included was the Eridanos, is noticeable. In a paper presented at the 20th International Papyrology Congress at Copenhagen in 1992 Bernard Legras examined the evidence of particular geographical interest provided by 13 Greek school-papyri (including ostraca and wooden tablets) covering different educational levels from the fi rst rudiments up to specialized didactic material, arguably collected by teachers for their personal use.56 When dealing with the Laterculi Alexandrini Legras observes that their content suggests the work of somebody familiar with the geographical works of the likes of Eratosthenes Hipparchus of Bithynia and Agatharchides of Cnidus,57 and argues that they may have had a scholarly rather than merely didactic purpose. Their list of visual artists conveys pieces of information unknown from other sources.58 There is no reason to be surprised if the same kind of people who compiled this list might have been interested in excerpts from geographical writings.

What is really singular about the Artemidorus papyrus is not so much its miscel-laneous content as the fact that it is a miscellany obviously designed from the start to accommodate both texts and images. Regarding the nature and the extent of a unitary project behind the roll, in this as in other analogous cases, we can make only conjectures. Scholars dealing with the papyrus have already had occasion to draw attention to its coherent interest in geography and wonders from the extreme regions of the world that

55 Cf. p. 304 sq. above.56 Cf. Legras (1994).57 Note that Legras accepts a dating of this papyrus to the 2nd century BCE, but it seems much more

likely that it may have been written well into the 1st century. One may add, therefore, also Artemidorus among its possible sources, but, as far as I can see, there is no positive reason for advancing this conjecture.

58 Cf. Hebert (1986).



may link the texts to two of the sets of drawings, the map and the animals on the verso.59 The Laterculi Alexandrini with their focus on the visual arts as well as on geography and paradoxography may give us a further clue about the possible intellectual background of the kinds of people responsible for the preparation of this remarkable papyrus, from which we have undoubtedly still much to learn. This approach leads, unavoidably, to provisional conclusions and leaves many unanswered questions. But this is what we can reasonably do without distorting the evidence. It is to be hoped that some of these questions may be clarifi ed and this perspective may be altered by further research, but gaps and uncertainties are probably going to remain unavoidable. After all, this is one of the differences between scholarly research and historical fi ction.

ARTEMIDORUS FR. 21 STIEHLE AND ITS RELATIONSHIP TO THE ARTEMIDORUS PAPYRUS

By Jrgen Hammerstaedt60

ABSTRACT: The Turin papyrus (P.Artemid.) contains a section of Artemidorus fr. 21 (Stiehle), whose text had made its way through the lost complete version of Stephanus Ethnica (c. 520 AD) into the medieval compilation De administrando imperio, executed under Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus in the tenth century. A correct interpretation of the textual differences between these two texts is of crucial importance for the debate on the authenticity of the papyrus. The present article offers a new explanation of these differences. The common view that all Artemidorus fragments in Stephanus derive from Marcianus Artemidorus epitome, and none is a direct excerpt from the original version of Artemidorus text, has to be given up. The differences between the papyrus and the medieval Ar-temidorus tradition appear to be due not to Marcianus epitomizing (c. 400 AD or later), but to the results of editorial changes in a text whose form was identical, or very close, to the original version of Artemidorus Geographumena and does not derive from Marcianus, who would have updated its geographical content. The most important changes are due to Stephanus.

The famous papyrus edited in 2008 by Claudio Gallazzi, Brbel Kramer and Salvatore Settis is generally called the Artemidorus papyrus because the fi rst 14 lines of its sum-mary description of Spain offer a slightly amplifi ed version of a fragment of the second book of the geographical description of the oikoumene written by this late Hellenistic geographer.61 Besides this text, the recto of the papyrus contains a comparision between

59 Cf. DAlessio (2009). For a new, coherent reading of the sequence of the drawings on the verso, cf. now Pajn Leyra p. 336 sqq. below.

60 Institut fr Altertumskunde, Universitt zu Kln, Albertus-Magnus-Platz, D-50923 Kln, [email protected].

61 Gallazzi / Kramer / Settis (2008). See esp. P.Artemid. col. IV, 114. Cf. Artemid. fr. 21 Stiehle. Bossina (2009) 139 recommended we speak instead of the Turin Papyrus, as I did (Hammerstaedt 2009a). But I used this expression in the context of a volume with the title Intorno al Papiro di Artemidoro and the title of his contribution was clear too: Artemidoro di Efeso nella tradizione indiretta e nel papiro di Torino. In the absence of a such a context it would not be wise to speak just about the Turin Papyrus without further specifi cations.


JA ELSNER et al.310

geography and philosophy,62 a hitherto unidentifi ed map, and drawings of human heads and limbs, while the entire verso is fi lled with a series of drawings of animals (some real, others imaginary).

No similar papyrus is known, and starting with Luciano Canfora, its authenticity has been challenged. Some scholars followed Canfora in considering it a 19th-century fake made by the notorious forger Konstantinos Simonidis. In a few years the authenticity discussion has taken many different aspects of this unique papyrus into consideration. I limit myself to some new refl ections on the most important and fundamental part of the philological controversy: Are the differences between the new papyrus text and Artemidorus fragment 21 Stiehle,63 whose text is indirectly transmitted in Constantine Porphyrogenitus,64 due to the work of a modern forger who reveals himself by using inappropriate modern conjectures and giving anachronistic geographical information, as Canfora believes? Or does the new text rather offer splendid confi rmation of the results of modern philological work, and fi ll, in one case, the lacuna of a corrupt passage in the medieval tradition which no philologist had been able to resolve, and certainly no forger could have emended?

Canfora tried to constitute the medieval Artemidorus quotation from Constantine Porphyrogenitus, De administrando imperio 23 without adopting three modern philo-logical emendations and operations. His text runs as follows.65

62 P.Artemid. col. IIII.63 Stiehle (1856) 203 edited Artemidorus fr. 21 in this way: Steph.B. p. 324,2 v. - -.

. - - - , (die obige Lcke fllt Berkel aus durch , was nach Meineke non suffi cit). Das Fragment steht auch bei Constantin. Porphyrog. De administr. imp. c. 23 .

64 Const. Porph. De administrando imperio 23.65 Canforas relevant articles fi rst appeared in Quaderni di Storia (QS), but they were republished and

are quoted in this article from Canfora (2008): Postilla testuale sul nuovo Artemidoro, in: QS 64 (2006) 4559 formed the chapter Se la geografi a

tace in Canfora (2008) 211217 (according to Canfora 2008: 222 n. 5 and Canfora 2007: 60, n. 5 this version is improved);

Le molte vite del fr. 21 di Artemidoro, in: QS 65 (2007) 271298, appeared later in an English version as the chapter The many lives of fr. 21 of Artemidorus in Canfora (2007) 5991 and was published again in Italian in Canfora (2008) 221242;

Perch quel papiro non pu essere Artemidoro, in: QS 66 (2007) 227254, was published in English under the title Why this papyrus cannot be Artemidorus in Canfora (2007) 93126, and fi nally in Canfora (2008) 243275.



Artemidorus fr. 21 Stiehle according to Canfora 2008, 234:

[] . - -5 - , , 10 . - , .

West and I have argued that in all three cases where the medieval text has not been accepted by modern scholarship it is indeed corrupt and/or lacunose.66 In two cases the Artemidorus papyrus confi rms previous conjectures, while in the third,67 it fi lls a lacuna which has never been fi lled convincingly hitherto. Canforas response does not address the three most important problems:68 the awkward word order and construction of in the medieval tradition of Artemidorus fr. 21 and the diffi culty of supplying a suitable subject for (understood as also) .69 Canfora proposed Iberia in one of his two attempts. But this would result in the nonsensical statement that Iberia is also called synonymously Iberia and Spain.70 The third problem consists in the impossible syntactical break after , which leaves without the necessary .71

66 West (2009); Hammerstaedt (2009a) and (2009c).67 P.Artemid. col. IV, 56 (text see p. 312 below). The lacuna of fr. 21 would be in line 9 of the text

constituted by Canfora (2008) 234 (quoted above).68 Canfora (2009d) 115f.69 In lines 57 of Canforas text, quoted above. Cp. West (2009) 97; Hammerstaedt (2009a) 6265

and (2009c) 9599. Billerbeck/Zubler (2011) 264 who printed the Constantinian text as Steph. Byz. 19a retained in line 14f. However, their translation (loc. cit. 265: von den Pyrenen landeinwrts bis zur Gegend um Gadara, heisst ohne Bedeutungsunterschied sowohl Iberien als auch Hispanien) does not offer a convincing construction of (with landeinwrts bis) and does not account for the problematic . Billerbeck (2009) 77 had instead adopted Schubarts transposition ( ), and explained this ibid. 80.

70 Hammerstaedt (2009a) 66f and (2009c) 99f; see also West (2009) 98.71 Text quoted above, lines 910. West (2009) 98; Hammerstaedt (2009a) 66f and (2009c) 100f.

Billerbeck (2009) 80 n. 29 criticized the awkward word order which is produced by Canforas


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Hammerstaedts (and Wests) belief that Canforas text does not resolve, and partially ignores, the corruptions of the medieval Artemidorus quotation, so that the papyrus text is superior to the medieval text, was challenged by Luciano Bossina72 and Federico Condello.73 However, neither offers new arguments or information concerning the three problems mentioned here: they just insist on the soundness of Canforas text and on the irrelevance of Wests and Hammerstaedts observations. Since I print Canforas text above, state the remaining textual problems, and offer below a conspectus of the papyrus and the codex unicus of the medieval Artemidorus quotation in Constantine Porphyrogenitus, it is left to the reader to form his or her own judgement on this matter.

Bossina and Condello made an important additional observation on the text which will be the starting point of the new considerations offered in this article. For the sake of clarity I present a conspectus of the papyrus and the medieval Artemidorus quotation.74, 75

P.Artemid. col. IV, 114:74

[] [] [] [] [ ] []

4 . []

8 [] [] []

12 - - .

Paris.Gr. 2009 f. 46v 114:75

. - - .

There are three groups of variants between the papyrus and the non-emended text of the Artemidorus quotation in Constantine Porphyrogenitus. The fi rst group, in bold italics,

supplement in line 12 and Billerbeck/Zubler (2011) 264 accepted the lacuna before and deleted the before .

72 Bossina (2009) 140142.73 Condello (2010) 503507.74 Text according to the editio princeps of Gallazzi/Kramer/Settis (2008) but without the half lower

square brackets (which are not necessary here), an orthographical change in line 3 (where the papyrus reads |) and an emendation in line 13, where Benedetto Bravo (2009) 60 proposed instead of (see p. 324 below).

75 Transcribed by Canfora (2008) 222.

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Historia 61-3-2012 New Studies on the Artemidorus Papyrus

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