Pseudo-Aristotle - Epitaphs for the Heroes

The Pepli Epitaphia seem to have been of the predilection of Byzantine poets and scholars, as well as late-Renaissance editors. In spite of their editorial record during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they were to be critically recovered only much later, in the nineteenth century. Made known and copied initially from a single thirteenth-century manuscript ( bfseriesLa in this edition), the corpus was in that century to be added with fifteen new components, identified among John Tzetzes' Scholia to the Carmina Iliaca. From this point on - and with the exception of some epigrams collected in other sources, namely the Greek Anthology - any edition or critical consideration of the text had to deal with two main manuscript branches (the anthological or Laurentiana, and the Tzetziana), a task this book performs in a rigorous way. By collating a total of 33 components from the two Matritenses ( bfseriesM = Matrit. BN 4562, and bfseriesMd = Matrit. BN 4621), this edition adds two testimonies to the textual transmission of the corpus, an addition portrayed by stemma 2, a short and revised version of Leone's (1995) stemma for the Carmina Iliaca, where bfseriesM and bfseriesMd, as the author, are to be inserted as legitimate partial testimonies of Tzetzes' Scholia.

To summarise, what this book offers is a first autonomous and commented edition of the Pepli Epitaphia, a group of texts until now only published in the edition of Aristotle's Pseudoepigrapha or as appendix to the Greek Anthology. May scholars and students of Greek literature, religion and even archaeology make the best possible use of it.

Felipe Gonzalo Hernández Muñoz