III. Ox Bekker's Digammated Text ov Homer. By Prof. 



James Hadley. 



It is more than forty years since Richard Payne Knight published 

 in 1820 his famous digammated Iliad, or rather Vilviad, of Homer. 

 The book has taken its place among the curiosities of literature. Its 

 author was an ingenious and elegant scholar ; but he had his hobby, 

 and he rode it unmercifully. The horse of Phidippides, the spend- 

 thrift son in Aristophanes' Clouds, was marked with a K6nna {kott- 

 nailag). Payne Knight's hobby was branded with another lost letter 

 of the primitive Greek alphabet, the Digamma : wherever he goes, he 

 bears the digamma with him. 



It is one of the most remarkable circumstances about Payne 

 Knight's Iliad, that more than twenty years after its publication, a 

 distinguished American scholar should have thought it worth while 

 to reproduce three books of it on this side the ocean (see Anthon's 

 Homer, New York, 1 844). A page or two by way of specimen might 

 have been amusing at least, even if uninstructive : but to take up in 

 this wmy more than fifty pages of a schoolbook was to make the 

 joke somewhat ponderous. 



It might have been expected that the example of Payne Knight 

 would deter succeeding editors from repeating an experiment which 

 in his hands had tui-ned out in a w^ay at once so unfortunate and so 

 ludicrous. But Immanuel Bekker, the Coryphaeus of recent textual 

 criticism, has not shrunk from the hazard. In 1858 he brought out 

 an Iliad and Odyssey in which the lost letter is admitted to a place 

 in the Homeric text. This work embodies the results of many years' 

 minute and laborious study. In 1809, after the appearance of Wolfs 

 Homer in its third edition, Bekker, then a young man, reviewed it 

 in the Jena Litteratur-Zeitung. The review is said to have shown 

 great mastery of the subject, and great aptitude for those critical 

 labors which were to form the life-work of its author. In 1843 he 

 published a new recension of the Homeric text, which was immedi- 

 ately and universally recognized as a marked advance on that of 

 Wolf For the last five or six years he has been giving out in the 

 Monatsberichte of the Berlin Academy a highly remarkable series of 

 observations and researches in reference to Homer. With great inge- 



