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Cross-post notice

A week ago, I asked the exact same question (modulo the title) on Literature. It was met with an uproar of upvotes (alliteration casual, 9 upvotes), but not answers. I discussed the matter with Literature meta and on this site's CONLOQVIVM chatroom, and I was recommended to cross-post, so I am copy-pasting the question here to see if it gets an answer here.

The question

In Sappho 94 (τεθνάκην δ' ἀδόλως θέλω), there is this tercet at ll. 25-27, which is very incomplete, which Edmonds doesn't even have, and which Bibliotheca Augustana and Campbell p. 69 both read:

κωὔτε τις [^ ^ οὔ]τε τι
ἶρων οὐδ᾽ ὐ[^ – ^ ^
ἔπλετ᾽, ὄππ[οθεν ἄμ]μες ἀπέσκομεν·

Wharton seems to not even have the fragment, just like Bergk. Diehl p. 49 also has an incomplete (in fact, even more incomplete than the others) version. Can't seem to get ahold of Voigt online. Then safopoemas. This weird doc full of horrid typos, which is no longer available at the link it was at, which is now broken, but can be found as a pdf here, with the same garbage typos as the doc version, and is based on a Spanish edition of Sappho, has this semi-garbage:

χωΰτε τις[λόγος οδ]τε τι Τρον ούδ' ύ[δατος ρ6χ]
ϊπλετ' όπ π [όθεν Εμ]
μες άπέσχομεν

This is very messy, but it allows us to almost complete the above as:

κωὔτε τις [λόγος οὔ]τε τι
ἶρον οὐδ᾽ ὔ[δατος †ρ6χ†
ἔπλετ᾽, ὄππ[οθεν ἄμ]μες ἀπέσκομεν·

The safopoemas translation reads:

Y no hubo colina profana | And there was no sacred hill
o sagrada, ni fuentes de aguas | Or profane, nor springs of water
a donde no hayamos ido | Where we haven't gone to

This tells us that λόγος is probably a typo/mojibake for λόφος, given by LSJ as quoted by Perseus's Greek Word Study Tool as various things including crest of a hill, and that the incomprehensible ρ6χ must somehow mean spring. I looked for all possible combinations of vowels substituted for the 6 and endings, and found nothing on Perseus, but found ραχία, flood-tide, on the Rocci dictionary. Not too fitting, but maybe. Back in the days when I translated Sappho, I had temporarily settled for ῥέον, but now I guess a better way to do this would be ῥόος, both meaning stream and keeping the initial consonant and possibly a vowel. Analysing other fragments in that safopoemas, 6 is almost certainly an omicron, and the chi could be a kappa, so we could have ροχ or ροκ, neither of which yields anything interesting on Perseus.

I looked around for another source for this completion (possibly Reinach, which this document claims to be following in the quote at the other post), but was unable to find any. So my question is: what was this reconstruction supposed to look like, and who proposed it, and of course, how supported is this amongst critics?

UPDATE

Looking at Voigt, I still have λόφος (admitting that is what it was) unsourced, but ρ6χ might be the ῤόα (river, stream, =ῥοή) reported by Voigt as "Edm. '27 18", that is… Edmonds? But Edmonds' text stops at the preceding verse… then again, my Edmonds dates 1922, and here I read "'27", so was there a second edition by Edmonds in 1927 where this was suggested?

Also, looking better, I see χόρος suggested by "Dl.2 p. 223", which I assume means on page 223 of a "D[ieh]l" edition, though the 2 is wholly obscure to me. Could a terrible OCR actually turn χόρος to λόγος, thus leading me to misinterpret it as λόφος, and giving the "Spaniards' completion" a source at last?

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  • Voigt 1971 (the book) is available at the Biblioteca di Brera: Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense, T.71. B. 0121, 000611071 opac.braidense.it/bid/SBL0710188
    – Alex B.
    Jul 3, 2017 at 0:43
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    No, Voigt gives "]ψοφοϲ" and all the sources are explained on pp 1-13, including Edm. '27 (on page 4), i.e. "Some New Fragments of Sappho, Alcaeus, and Anacreon," Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 136/138.
    – Alex B.
    Apr 4, 2018 at 1:43
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    Dl.2 is the second edition, published in 1936, and again Voigt explains it on page 3.
    – Alex B.
    Apr 4, 2018 at 1:47
  • Thanks for the source references @AlexB - I expected the bibliography to be at the end, rather than the beginning, hence I couldn't find it. As for ψοφοϲ, are we talking about the same line? I know there is a line ending with that word, but it's the second line of the following (and last) stanza, and it is not in a lacuna... I am talking about the line before that of the Edmonds rhoa suggestion, where IIRC choros is given as a Dl. 2 suggestion (l. 24 IIRC).
    – MickG
    Apr 4, 2018 at 4:27

1 Answer 1

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Here is the relevant part of Voigt's apparatus:

enter image description here

It seems that:

  • The λόγος, which I amended to λόφος, is the suggestion of χόρος by "Dl.2 p. 223", i.e. p. 223 of Anthologia Lyrica Graeca, second edition (1936), by Diehl; I guess the corruption is due to a very bad OCR software that scanned the image and terribly misinterpreted it; see the black rectangle;
  • The ρ6χ, which I amended to ῥόος/ῥέον, was the suggestion of ῥόα=ῥοή by "Edm. '27, 18", that is (p. 18 of?): see the red rectangles;

enter image description here

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