estimates that only some 5 percent of all literary manuscripts have sig-
nificant marginal notes.^70 Of the Alcaeus papyri listed in the Mertens-
Pack database, seven have annotations,^71 and of those seven, four—
more than half of all the known annotated copies of Alcaeus—come,
remarkably, from this one collection. We cannot, of course, know exactly
who added these notes, or when, although we can identify several possi-
bilities. Some seem to have been added by the original scribe in the course
of the production of the text (no. 20); others were probably added by a
second hand, but still in the course of production of the text, as in the case
of our matched set of two plays of Sophocles (nos. 25, 26); and some were
probably added by the owner/reader of the text (no. 21, Plato).
72
William
Johnson, noting that annotations are often written by hands that are
roughly contemporary in date, has suggested plausibly that many such
additions were the result of friends sharing texts with one another, dis-
cussing them, and adding comments or corrections.
73
We cannot know
the exact process, but it seems safe to conclude that the collection of
books from which Grenfell and Hunt’s second find derived was owned by
one or more persons who were interested in knowing about variant
readings, establishing correct texts, and adding helpful notes, and that
they were willing to have such information added to their texts or to
commission or purchase such texts with the notes already included. This,
then, is a serious reader (or series of readers), and accordingly we should
note the presence in the collection also of an edition of thehypotheseisof
the plays of Menander (no. 31), of a series of biographies (no. 34), and of
at least part of Satyrus’sLives(no. 24).^74 All of these would provide
background information on writers that would be particularly welcome
to our collector, given that ancient texts did not include prefaces or
introductions of the sort that we take for granted in editions of our
classical authors (such as, for example, the Folger Shakespeare Library).
- The life of the collection. How did this collection—Grenfell and
Hunt’s second find—come into existence, and how long did it continue
- McNamee 2007, 5. The figure is only approximate because there are many variables
(in definition of marginal notes, for example) and uncertainties in the texts themselves. - MP^3 59, 60, 61, 63, 67, 69, and 71.1.
- McNamee 2001 suggested, very cautiously, that the notes in the Plato manuscript
might have been added by the owner/reader of the volume, and that the presence of a
number of shorthand symbols in the notes might even suggest that he added the notes in the
course of listening to a lecture on the passage. - Johnson forthcoming. As Johnson points out, such a scenario is consistent with the
kind of sharing and commenting implicit in scholars’ letters such asP.Oxy. 2192. This
should not be taken as implying that these various readers added their personal reactions or
comments, for virtually all surviving annotations consist of material that derived from earlier
scholarly work on the texts and consisted of variant readings, explanations of obscure myths
and names, and the like. - Perhaps relevant here is the inclusion in this same concentration of what was
apparently an author’s copy of a panegyric on the gymnasiarch Theon (MP^3 1847) and the
(epideictic?) encomium on the fig (MP^3 2527), both of which imply an owner involved in an
active literary life.
Papyrological Evidence for Book Collections and Libraries 259