190 reviel netz
volume, rather than in the third and fi nal volume (which is where critical
editions typically present their major philological observations).
In this case as in the case of excisions (to which the question of dialect
is aft er all closely related, as Heiberg’s excisions, as we saw, centred on
what he defi ned as Koine-only treatises) Heiberg could well be right. We
could never tell for sure whether Heiberg was indeed right on dialect, but
his position is indeed plausible. What Heiberg did achieve however is to
obscure the very question which, to my knowledge, has not been addressed
at all to date. Which dialect(s) did Archimedes write in, and what was the
signifi cance of such choice? I do not have the expertise required to solve
such questions, but I wish to emphasize that these questions have yet even
to be posed. Would a choice to write in Doric, or in Koine, carry specifi c
cultural meanings? It is very intriguing that a late source tells us that
Archytas is the model for Doric prose. 22 Archytas of course was primarily
a scientifi c author, indeed known for his contribution to the exact sciences.
Was there a cultural value attached to Doric as a marker of scientifi c prose?
(Eudoxus, from the Doric-speaking island of Cnidus, could have written
in Doric as well; for certain, he did not write in Koine which was not yet
available in his time.) 23 Clearly, dialectal choice was, in Archimedes’ time,
a charged generic marker. Hellenistic authors were keenly aware of their
position as heirs to a rich literary tradition, varied by genre and by dialect –
the two oft en going hand in hand. Elegy would be written in (a specifi c
variety of ) Ionic, epic poetry in the Homeric dialect (which in itself was a
Kunstsprache , an ad-hoc amalgamation of several layers of Greek that never
served together in any actually spoken Greek). 24
Heiberg’s implicit claim was that the question of dialect was minor,
because it was unmarked: what would Archimedes write in, if not his
native language? Even deeper lies the assumption that a mathematician’s
language does not matter. Archimedes would write in Doric, the unmarked22 Gregory of Corinth, On Dialects. (A6g in Huff man 2005: 279–80). Th is – Byzantine – source
mentions Archytas and Th eocritus as the models of Doric, Archytas clearly intended therefore
as the model of Doric prose. While late, it is diffi cult to see how such a statement could emerge
based on anything other than solid ancient testimony from the time that Archytas’ works were
still widespread.
23 Nor should we think in terms of a monolithic ‘Doric’ opposed to a monolithic ‘Koine’. It is
completely unclear to me, for instance, whether the Doric prose of Archimedes’ usage could
not have allowed των, instead of ταν, more oft en than Heiberg assumes (there are about
twenty cases of such variation in each of SL and Arenarius , where Heiberg always prints ταν).
24 Th e locus classicus for an interpretation of this traditional observation is an essay by Parry
from 1932, ‘Studies in the epic technique of oral verse-making. ii. Th e Homeric language as the
language of an oral poetry’, most conveniently available as chapter 6 of Parry 1971.