The Present Edition
Homer and the Papyri was first created and edited by Professor Dana S. Sutton of the University of California, Irvine, who published it on CD-rom and later on the web. The previous edition of Homer and the Papyri, as it was established by Professor Sutton, was a website consisting of a) lists of published papyri and related items for the Iliad and the Odyssey, and b) a repertoire of the textual variants presented by this body of material, hypertextually linked to the lists of papyri. The introduction to the previous web-based edition may be found here.
In 2001 Professor Sutton handed Homer and the Papyri over to the Center for Hellenic Studies, with a view to its continuation and incorporation into the publications of the Center, including a multitext edition of Homer. At that time Casey Dué, Mary Ebbott, and Dimitrios Yatromanolakis were appointed as editors, and a team of advisors selected. Read the letter detailing the handing over of Homer and the Papyri to the Center.
The present edition not only continues the work of Professor Sutton but also expands its utility. The new edition is built on a fully searchable relational database, created by Michael Jones, with the cooperation and supervision of the Stoa Consortium, edited by Anne Mahoney and Ross Scaife. This database allows the user to search in one of six fields, such as title (Iliad or Odyssey), book number, and line number. There are also fields for variants, witnesses, and a more general description field, in which the user may search for special features (such as material, location, or editor).
All features of the previous edition of Homer and the Papyri continue to be available in this second edition. The user can, for example, obtain a list of all Iliad papyri by simply choosing the title (“Iliad”) in the search form, and leaving the other options blank. Such a list may be further restricted by specifying a book number or a range of books. Each field of the search form further specifies the search, and a list is then dynamically generated to meet the needs of each user.
Please see the help page for instructions on searching the database.
New Homeric papyri are published each year, and these can be easily added to the new database, which will be updated at regular intervals. Following the general procedures developed by the founding editor of Homer and the Papyri, Dana Sutton, the present editors intend to re-publish the texts of new Homer papyri as soon as the relevant publications appear in print or in electronic form. The numbering of the papyri after Papyrus 704a will normally follow the order of the appearance of these publications. Any alternative numbers assigned to these papyri before their publication, such as those given by Martin West in a list that has been published as chapter 4 of his Studies in the Text and Transmission of the Iliad (Munich/Leipzig, 2002), will be tracked by way of “comparatio numerorum” tables.