Bellum Alexandrinum: Why a new edition of the Bellum Alexandrinum?

Bellum Alexandrinum

Cynthia Damon, et al.

Society for Classical Studies

TEI XML encoding:

Samuel J. Huskey

Programming for automatic generation of TEI XML:

Virgina K. Felkner

Coauthor of content related to section 2.5:

Dallas Simons

Coauthor of content related to sections 12.1–2 and 13.5:

Tom Vozar

Coauthor of content related to section 26.1–2:

Marcie Persyn

Coauthor of content related to sections 35.3 and 36.4–5:

Maria Kovalchuk

Coauthor of content related to sections 47.2, 49.1, and 49.2–3:

Tim Warnock

Coauthor of content related to section 60.2:

Isabella Reinhardt

Coauthor of content related to sections 63.5 and 66.3–4:

Brian Credo

Coauthor of content related to sections 67.1 and 68.1:

Amelia Bensch-Schaus

Coauthor of content related to sections 72.2–3 and 74.4:

Wes Hanson

First Edition

The Digital Latin Library

650 Parrington Oval

Carnegie Building 101

Norman

73071

USA

The University of Oklahoma

Norman, OK

2022

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Library of Digital Latin Texts

Edited by

Samuel J. Huskey

Born digital.

Why a new edition of the Bellum Alexandrinum?

There are two answers to that question. The traditional answer is that the discoveries that underpin Damon's recent critical edition of Caesar’s Civil War (Oxford, 2015) should also be used to reassess the text of the Bellum Alexandrinum, which rests on the same manuscript witnesses.

OUP site: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/c-iuli-caesaris-commentarii-de-bello-civili-bellum-civile-or-civil-war-9780199659746?cc=us&lang=en&.

But the real answer is that in the digital era we urgently need new editors, and that creating an edition such as this is an excellent way to expose students to the editing process. The next generation of critical editions, digital critical editions, can improve significantly on past editions, but only if there is a next generation of editors who possess the skills required for bringing them to fruition. That is why students, both graduate and undergraduate, have been involved in every step of this edition's preparation, from collating manuscripts to encoding the edition's data in XML according to the LDLT's guidelines. Their training has blended the methods of traditional textual criticism with digital humanities approaches to texts as data. The goal has been to prepare the next generation of editors to work on a digital paradigm.

What is New?

The text and apparatus:

As can be seen from the Conspectus editionum, our text differs from that of Andrieu 1954, which we used as our base text, in nearly 100 places. Eleven of these changes are a consequence of the new stemma, in which the manuscript that differs the most from the rest, S, is treated as a witness to the hyparchetype nu rather than as an independent witness to the archetype.

42.2 exercitus alendos, 49.2 causae, 57.3 †in†, 60.1 educerentur, 60.3 animaduerteret, 61.6 sibi usui, 62.1 auxiliares, 62.2 Marcello fauebant, 64.3 derectam, 66.1 praefecit, 66.5 inceptum. See further the lists in Damon 2015b, 46 (note 93) and 48 (note 99).

In fifty-three places we print the archetype (or a possibly archetypal reading) where other editors emend it.

1.5 expectans, 7.2 casum, 7.2 ut … absumeretur, 8.2 Paratonio, 10.2 accessissent, 10.2 exposuissent, 12.3 miserant, 12.4 Caesaris, 13.5 Lycias, 13.5 et, 14.1 Rhodios, 14.1 Ponticos, 14.1 hos, 16.1 uictis, 19.2 certiorem, 20.4 perturbatos, 26.2 adducit, 26.2 multiplici praesidio, 27.5 constantiaque, 27.7 adiuncti his, 31.3 partibus, 32.1 magnae, 33.5 itinere terrestri, 36.5 siue amicus siue inimicus, 40.2 aperto, 42.3 Iadertinorum, 48.3 minuebat, 49.1 in ea, 51.2 uoluntate, 51.3 describerentur, 53.4 Laterensis, 54.3 indicaretur, 55.1 cohortibus, 55.5 Q. Sestio, 56.2 temporum, 56.2 animus, 57.1 Leptim, 59.1 detraxerunt, 60.1 educerentur, 60.2 esset 2, 60.5 educit, 61.6 sibi usui, 64.3 derectam, 66.1 legionibus, 66.1 praefecit, 66.5 inceptum, 67.1 Caesaris, 68.1 defensionem, 68.2 natura, 70.8 si, 72.2 superioribus … oppido, 75.1 operibus, 78.2 quod.

We print thirteen new emendations and propose a number of others.

11.2 ⟨suorum⟩ Khan, 15.3 ⟨moram⟩ Lewis, 16.2 ⟨exercitus⟩ scripsimus, 17.2 ⟨et hanc⟩ et illam [urbem] scripsimus, 35.3 ⟨constat⟩ scripsimus, 44.4 has adiunxit scripsimus, 60.3 animaduerteret causa Reinhardt, 61.4 adductus scripsimus, 62.1 auxiliares scripsimus, 67.1 ⟨et coactus⟩ Bensch-Schaus, 73.3 aggerere tum scripsimus, 74.3 contemptione scripsimus, 75.1 operibus reuocat Naqvi. Emendations proposed but not printed: 20.3 ⟨et⟩ sine ratione Callaghan, 26.2 ⟨gap⟩ adducit Persyn, 27.5 Mithridates [magna cum prudentia] D. Simons, 57.1 adducebatur J. Simons, 58.1 ueteranas J. Simons. There are also more than 40 new suggestions introduced at the end of apparatus notes with the formulas an … ? or nisi mauis.

We also revive fourteen.

2.1 ⟨armatorum⟩ Fischer, 7.2 esse Nipperdey, 15.8 ⟨nisi⟩ qui Fleischer, 17.3 quosque Lipsius, 25.1 Caesaris praesidia ed. pr., 36.5 aduentu sin Hoffmann, 40.2 circumire ac transcendere Nipperdey, 42.2 exercitus alendos M, 45.2 distentis Hoffmann, 49.2 simul et Latinius, 55.1 legionem quintam in castra remittit ed. pr., 58.1 Torius ς, 70.4 quamquam Dinter, 74.4 in procliuem Nipperdey.

In the process of our work we silently corrected dozens of errors in the apparatus of Andrieu 1954 and Klotz 1927. More broadly, we hope to have improved the apparatus everywhere by making the arguments relevant to the constitution of the text more salient and more explicit (see further below for our policy on apparatus notes).

The machine-readable form:

From the layout of the page to the typographical conventions used to represent manuscripts and other details about the text, traditional critical editions in print rely on complex visual cues to communicate information to readers who understand how to read and interpret those cues. For the most part, that information is inaccessible to a different type of reader: machines that can process and visualize information. If that information is presented in a way that both humans and machines can read and interpret, we can leverage the computational power of machines to open up new ways of exploring texts.

This is the first “born digital” edition of the Bellum Alexandrinum. It is encoded in Extensible Markup Language (XML) according to the guidelines of the LDLT. That means that the typographical conventions familiar to readers of traditional editions will still be rendered on screen or paper in their familiar form, but machines can also recognize them as more than just strings of characters. Rather, what a human reads as a crux (†), a machine can read in its own language. That is why this edition can be read in an online viewing platform, visualized with any number of data visualization tools, queried like a database, or rendered in a traditional form as a print-ready PDF.