Poetae Epici Graeci (abbreviated PEG) is an edition of fragments of ancient Greek literature. It was edited by the philologist , and published between 1987 and 2007. Its first volume brings together passages containing information from or about lost works of early Greek epic poetry. It opens with the fragments of the Epic Cycle, a collection of poems composed around the 7th and 6th centuries BC, and proceeds in roughly chronological order through to works from the 5th century BC. It was the first complete edition of early Greek epic published since 1877. A separate edition covering the same genre appeared in 1988, produced independently by Malcolm Davies.
The second volume of PEG collects fragments related to Orphic literature, the tradition of texts attributed in antiquity to the mythical poet Orpheus. The volume comprises three fascicles (or instalments), the first two of which include fragments pertaining to lost Orphic texts, Orpheus, and Orphic rites, among other topics. These initial two fascicles contain a total of 1151 fragments, the first 378 of which are assigned to the Orphic theogonies, works concerned with the origins and genealogies of the gods. The third fascicle presents the fragments of Musaeus, Linus, and Epimenides, three mythical or semi-mythical figures with connections to Orpheus. An appendix contains an edition of the Derveni papyrus, a text discovered in 1962, which preserves a commentary (dating to around the end of the 5th century BC) on an Orphic poem.
PEG includes around 500 more Orphic fragments than the previous edition of this material, Otto Kern's 1922 . Bernabé includes many fragments without explicit Orphic attribution, and often splits the text of longer passages across multiple fragments. In the section covering the theogonies, he attempts to arrange the fragments into a coherent reconstruction of each work's narrative, which in each case is presented as spanning from creation to the present state of the world. The second volume of PEG has been described as comprehensive and as superseding Kern's edition, although some scholars have questioned the way Bernabé contextualises the material.
Volume I: Early Greek epic
The first volume of (; sometimes abbreviated as PEG) was published in 1987, with a corrected second edition appearing in 1996. PEG was edited by , a philologist at the Complutense University of Madrid, and is part of the , a collection of critical editions of Greek and Latin texts. Critical editions attempt to reconstruct an original text based on an analysis of its extant manuscripts; this reconstructed text is accompanied by a critical apparatus, which notes discrepancies between manuscripts. PEGs first volume is an edition of fragments – that is, passages from ancient writings that convey information from or about earlier, lost works – of early Greek epic poetry composed before and into the 5th century BC. Bernabé's prior works on this genre included a 1979 translation of fragments, as well as multiple articles.
The volume opens with a list of dialectal and metrical features of each text's fragments, followed by a 15-page bibliography. The first fragments listed are those from the Epic Cycle, a collection of poems, at least most of which were composed during the 7th and 6th centuries BC. These poems were arranged so that, with the inclusion of the Iliad and Odyssey (which were composed before the poems of the Cycle, and are extant), a continuous narrative was formed. Exactly which poems were part of the Epic Cycle is unclear; the works usually included are six poems about the Trojan War and three covering myths related to Thebes. In addition to these, Bernabé presents fragments from poems less often included in the Cycle: a Theogony, a hypothesised work covering cosmogony; the Titanomachy, which narrated a war between two generations of gods; and the Alcmeonis, which centred on the mortal Alcmaeon. The remaining fragmentary authors and poems covered by the edition are presented in roughly chronological order, ending with the 5th-century BC poet Choerilus of Samos. Among them are works about genealogy, astronomy, regional history, and the deeds of the hero Heracles. Bernabé omits the fragmentary works attributed to the 8th- or 7th-century BC poet Hesiod, which had been edited twenty years earlier by and Martin Litchfield West.
The edition contains fragments, which are passages that claim to record, via quotation or paraphrase, specific information contained in lost writings, and (: ''), which provide information about the authors or works themselves. Fragments are grouped according to whether Bernabé views their attribution to the earlier poem as authentic, uncertain, or spurious. Below the fragments, there are as many as three apparatuses: a list of the sources for the fragments, with surrounding lines often quoted; a collection of comparable passages from other works; and a critical apparatus infused with commentary and citations to modern scholarship. At the end of the volume, an appendix by lists works of visual art pertinent to the study of the poems that the edition covers. Three indexes follow, as do tables outlining how Bernabé's numbering of the fragments differs from that of prior editors.
Before the publication of PEGs first volume, the most recent complete edition of fragmentary early Greek epic was Gottfried Kinkel's from 1877. Among Bernabé's advances over his predecessor are the systematic array of and comparable passages, as well as the inclusion of some new fragments. In 1988, an edition was published that covered the same genre, produced independently by Malcolm Davies. Whereas Bernabé's preface explains that he incorporates everything seemingly of epic provenance, Davies's, in his own words, "enunciates exactly the opposite principle". Bernabé's edition is the more comprehensive of the two, with Davies providing a very laconic critical apparatus for the non-cyclic epics and omitting an apparatus containing comparable passages. Davies's edition is easier to use, according to Jules Labarbe, owing partly to its less crowded presentation. In his 1989 review of PEGs first volume, Davies criticises the choice of certain editions used to reconstruct the fragments, the handling of conjectures in the critical apparatus, and the inclusive attitude towards more dubious fragments, concluding that "unfavourable comment could be extended almost indefinitely". Another reviewer, Francisco Rodríguez Adrados, writes positively about the comprehensiveness of Bernabé's edition, and Labarbe, despite some criticisms, describes it as "certainly deserving of high praise".
Volume II: Orphic literature Background
The second volume of PEG is split across three fascicles (or instalments), published in 2004, 2005, and 2007. They cover the fragments of Orphic literature – the tradition of texts, most of which are lost, ascribed in antiquity to the mythical poet Orpheus – as well as comparable evidence. For around two hundred years, Orphic literature has been part of the debate over what is known as "Orphism". Earlier scholars conceived of Orphism as a definable religious movement, which claimed Orpheus as its founder and held Orphic poems as its holy writings. Around the early 20th century, scholars of Orphism separated into two opposing strains of thought: "maximalists", or "PanOrphists", who viewed Orphism as a religious movement with shared beliefs; and "minimalists", or "Orpheosceptics", who repudiated the existence of a coherent Orphism. In 1922, Otto Kern published his (), which remained the standard edition of the Orphic fragments until the publication of PEG. In the latter half of the 20th century, several discoveries impacted the study of Orphism: the Derveni papyrus, found in 1962, preserved a commentary (dating to around the end of the 5th century BC) on an earlier Orphic poem; there surfaced multiple inscribed gold tablets that were associated with the Dionysian Mysteries; and a handful of inscriptions on bone tablets from Olbia, published in 1978, seemingly connected Orphics with the god Dionysus and eschatology.
Since the late 1980s, Bernabé has written extensively about Orphism. He believes that Orphism possessed a central cluster of doctrines, relating to matters such as eschatology, anthropogony, and cosmogony. Bernabé is characterised as the "leading exponent of the new PanOrphist position" by Radcliffe Edmonds, a minimalist scholar whose approach Robert Parker characterises as "diametrically opposed" to Bernabé's. In 2000, a chapter by Bernabé appeared in the volume (), in which he laid out the three projected fascicles of PEGs second volume, and explained aspects of the edition's approach. Bernabé's 2003 work, (), is a Spanish translation of some of the fragments in PEG.
Contents The fragments in Volume II are split across three parts: Part I, covering the fragments that pertain to Orphic texts, rites, and ritual practitioners, spans the first fascicle and some of the second; Part II, consisting of passages about Orpheus and related figures, occupies the remainder of the second fascicle; and Part III, comprising the fragments of authors similar to Orpheus, fills the third fascicle. The first fascicle opens with a bibliography that spans 72 pages and includes 31 sections, traversing every area of Orphism. It covers publications from the 19th century onwards, and includes numerous lesser-known works written in languages other than English. This first fascicle contains 469 fragments, the first 378 of which pertain to the Orphic theogonies, works concerned with the origins and genealogies of the gods. Scholars have typically inferred the existence of four main theogonies from the extant fragments: the Derveni Theogony, the work on which the Derveni papyrus comments; the Eudemian Theogony, from the 5th century BC; the Hieronyman Theogony, associated with writers called Hieronymus and Hellanicus; and the Rhapsodies, the largest theogony, which probably dates to between the 1st century BC and the 2nd century AD. Bernabé's edition covers the fragments he assigns to each of these theogonies; the Rhapsodies are allotted 270 fragments, which occupy over 200 pages. In the same part as the theogonies, Bernabé includes material from the Testament of Orpheus – a Jewish adaptation of an Orphic (; : ) – and from an Egyptian hieros logos. After the theogonic fragments, evidence relating to Orphic poems about the goddess Persephone and her mother Demeter is presented ( 379–402). Next come poems – such as the Net, Robe, and Lyre – which appear to have represented the world using the images of particular objects (frr. 403–420). The final section of the first fascicle covers passages about the soul's nature and destiny that may bear relation to Orphism (frr. 421–469), including the inscriptions on the Olbian bone tablets.