BICS-59-2  2016 © 2016 Institute of Classical Studies University of London 121 DOCUMENTING HOMERIC TEXT-REUSE IN THE DEIPNOSOPHISTAE OF ATHENAEUS OF NAUCRATIS MONICA BERTI, CHRISTOPHER BLACKWELL, MARY DANIELS, SAMANTHA STRICKLAND, AND KIMBELL VINCENT-DOBBINS 1. The challenge of text-reuse Most of the texts of ancient Greek literature are irremediably lost and preserved only through quotations and text-reuses by later authors. In the last two centuries scholars have been looking for traces of lost authors and works in surviving texts and they have been producing many collections of fragmentary authors and works. 1 Based on a Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG) search, for the period between the eighth century BC and the third century CE inclusive, 59% of the authors are preserved only in fragments, 12% are known both from entirely preserved works and fragmentary ones, while 29% are represented by surviving works. 2 Such percentages reveal the great shipwreck of Greek ancient texts and the challenge of working with innumerable pieces of information about lost authors and works that are randomly preserved in our textual tradition. The term fragment is the result of a long tradition of print editorial practices, where the contexts preserving traces of lost authors and works are extracted from their sources and reprinted in separate collections. Even if such editorial workfow has made an incomparable contribution to the reconstruction of the personalities of lost intellectuals, the concept of the textual fragment remains quite problematic and misleading. As a matter of fact, it includes a wide range of many different kinds of text-reuse and it always implies a certain degree of originality, which is very diffcult to assess because the original text from which the reuse derives is always infuenced and determined by the cover text, i.e. by the intention of the quoting author and the characteristics of the context where the text-reuse is preserved. 3 This is the reason why we prefer to adopt the expression text-reuse especially in a digital environment, where it is possible to represent references to authors and works 1 H. Strasburger, ‘Umblick im Trümmerfeld der griechischen Geschichtsschreibung’, in Historiographia Antiqua. Commentationes Lovanienses in honorem W. Peremans septuagenarii editae (Leuven 1977) 3–52; G. W. Most, Collecting fragments. Fragmente sammeln (Göttingen 1997). 2 M. Berti, M. Romanello, A. Babeu, and G. Crane, ‘Collecting fragmentary authors in a digital library’, in JCDL ’09. Proceedings of the 9th ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on digital libraries (New York, NY 2009) 259–62. 3 G. Schepens, ‘Jacoby’s FGrHist: problems, methods, prospects’, in Collecting fragments (n. 1, above) 144– 172; G. Schepens, ‘Probleme der Fragmentedition. (Fragmente der griechischen Historiker)’, in Vom Text zum Buch, ed. Ch. Reitz (St. Katharinen 2000) 1–29; M. Berti, ‘Citazioni e dinamiche testuali. L’intertestualità e la storiografa greca frammentaria’, in Tradizione e trasmissione degli storici greci frammentari II. Atti del Terzo Workshop Internazionale. Roma, 24-26 Febbraio 2011, ed. V. Costa (Tivoli, Roma 2012) 439–58; M. Berti, ‘Collecting quotations by topic: degrees of preservation and transtextual relations among genres’, Ancient Society 43 (2013) 269–88.