Metalepsis, paragraphe and the scholia to Hermogenes - Leeds ...

MALCOLM HEATH, METALEPSIS, PARAGRAPHE AND THE SCHOLIA TO HERMOGENES
therefore probable that the hypothesis derives from the work of a rhetorician
named Sopater who is not identical with the Sopater of the prolegomena. There
are independent grounds for dating both Theon’s Progymnasmata and the
fragments of Sopater’s Progymnasmata preserved by John of Sardis to the fifth
century. The late fifth-century Alexandrian Sopater is a plausible identification for
the author of both the work on Aristides and the Progymnasmata. 75
3.6 Conclusions
The conclusions of this enquiry can be summarised as follows:
(i) Sopater’s commentary, preserved in an abridged version in RG 5, was an
integrated composition.
(ii) Material adapted from Sopater, John and other unidentifiable sources was
combined to create deutero-Sopater, a less coherent compilation. Deutero-Sopater
should not be used as evidence for the Sopater of RG 5 in the absence of a parallel
(although, where the texts do run parallel, deutero-Sopater may help to improve
the text of Sopater).
(iii) Deutero-Sopater may be the Sopater who is known to have taught in
Alexandria in the late fifth century.
(iv) Extracts from deutero-Sopater were combined with extracts from Marcellinus,
Syrianus and others to make the three-man commentary.
(v) Subsequently extracts from the three-man commentary were rearranged and
recombined to make a new patchwork compilation.
(vi) This patchwork compilation and John, together with material from other
sources, were combined to make RG 7.
I have, of course, been working only from a limited sample. It is possible that
these conclusions would need to be modified if the analysis were extended to take
account of other sections of the published scholia. The extensive unpublished
scholia might also lead to modification of these conclusions. Gloeckner’s analysis
of the RG 7 scholia identifies alternating parallels to Nilus, from which only
extracts have been published, and to the unpublished klogaˆ scol…wn kat'
pitom¾n x ¢nepigr£fou e„j tÕ Perˆ st£sewn `Ermogšnouj in Vd (Vaticanus
2228). 76 In the samples which Gloeckner uses, some of the material which he
identifies as parallel to Vd appears in RG 4; this implies that the Vd scholia are, or
are related to, the patchwork compilation. 77 But with so much of the evidence
unpublished, conclusions on the structure of the tradition can only be provisional.
The present study does suggest, however, that the published evidence (despite the
dreadful state of Walz’s text) allows significant progress to be made.
75 The argument of this paragraph is presented in more detail in Heath (2003b).
76 Gloeckner (1921). For a description of the manuscript see Rabe (1908a) 128-30.
77 Cf. Gloeckner (1921) 6.
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