Just a few of the many annotated copies of Homer

In a new Bwog feature, we go into Butler Library to explore some of the most checked-out books at Columbia. Once we find them, we look not at the content of the literature but at the discourse around them. The notes written in by generations of students, if they don’t illuminate some new feature of the texts, should at least tell us a bit about the students who studied them. For our first edition, we take a look at the eager first-years who got their hands on a Butler copy of the Homeric epics.

The fifth floor of the Butler stacks has an entire shelf of copies of the Iliad, and another for the Odyssey – and that’s just for the English versions. So it shouldn’t surprise that the marginalia, which comes from as early as 1961, represents a variety of challenges with the texts.

Since these works have been around for millennia, the central themes are pretty standardized by now. None of the characters in the Iliad can escape the overwhelming power of fate. Writing an essay on that theme is a lot of work – but we could also follow the lead of one reader and just write “FATE” in all caps all along the margins of Book 21 (ButlStax PA 4025.A2 H35 1987g). The Odyssey continues a fantastic history of treating women as impediments to male success. When Odysseus laments “how terribly from the beginning thundering Zeus has persecuted Atreus’ race through women’s guile!” one reader draws a parallel – “Adam + Eve?” Even Greek works can’t escape being compared to the Bible, even on such a tangential line (ButlStax PA 4025.A5 M74 1995).

A few editions had brief notes only in the form of definitions, explaining uncommon words like “cower” and “fawn.” These copies were from 1967 and 1978 – newer editions didn’t have a single definition scrawled in their margins (ButlStax PA 4025.A1 C5 1967; ButlStax PA 4025.A5 H8 1978). Perhaps the SAT’s verbal section, which still contained ambiguous analogy questions instead of placing such an emphasis on rote vocabulary, didn’t prepare freshmen quite as well for the often irregular word choices that come in Greek translations.

In one particularly rich copy, one reader couldn’t handle the spelling errors of former Columbia students. After several unanswered misspellings of the word “duel” in the Iliad, the reader went into a fit of rage in Book 7, Line 170 (ButlStax PA 4025.A2 L35 1961g). “SPELL DUEL RIGHT, PPL!” they shouted, perhaps to their predecessors and perhaps to future borrowers of this copy. “IT’S DUEL, NOT DUAL.” Another bit of text accompanied this, which could have been by the same reader or another source – “should know this if you go to CC!” But our reader’s pleas did nothing to correct the spelling, and they were helpless to do anything but circle the mistake when a margin note referred to the moment when “Aineas and Idomeneus dual” (13.495). I imagine that the reader felt utterly resigned when a Book 20 footnote stated, “Achilleus and Agenor deul.” This, in my opinion, is the true joy of marginalia – picturing a student from a generation ago feeling so angered by misspellings, and having no recourse but to scream in all caps into the void of the Butler stacks.

Lastly of note is that, in most copies, the notes are not so evenly distributed across the entire text. In that fruitful 1961 edition, a writer in green felt tip pen disappears in the last third of the book, and a blue underliner similarly fades away before the story’s completion. Several copies of the Iliad and the Odyssey were totally clean of margin notes after the first four books. This makes it all the more emotive when a lone margin note populates a page late in a book. For instance, that 1961 copy contains only one note in 23.400-500 – an underline under the comical phrase, “reckless horsemanship.” Readers of the past find some translation just as funny as we do. The big takeaway from the placement of notes is that even generations before us didn’t keep up with their readings. If they did, we could expect every edition to have an even distribution of marginalia. The notes of the past humanize alumni, and help us remember that, even in the 1960’s, students were pulling essays out of their asses.