[ … golden-haired Phoebus,] whom [the daughter of] Koios bore, [mingling] with Kronos’ mighty-named son. [But Artemis] swore a great oath … “I will always be a maiden … on the peaks of mountains … grant my favor …” The father of the blessed gods agreed … the gods [call her deer-]shooter, huntress … a great title … Eros(?) never approaches her.
The relative paucity of dots indicates that the extant text is fairly secure, but it is by no means complete: the square brackets at left indicate that only the right side of the column survives. Lobel-Page’s text represents what the ancient scribe wrote: occasional accents on the papyrus mark the Aeolic dialect’s characteristic barytonēsis (= recessive accent); punctuation in the form of a raised dot appears in lines 5, 7, 8, 10, and 11. The scribe also deleted an epsilon in line five, which changes ἀεί into Aeolic ἄϊ. Voigt’s articulated edition, by contrast, includes the interventions of modern editors, namely, the third line’s addition of iota adscript (to make the dative case explicit) as well as several textual supplements in square brackets to the left of lines 2–4 and 8–9. Those supplements are not chosen at random (see further, on Dialect and Meter, below), but they must nonetheless be understood as additions to the extant text (on which, see further, The Readings, below).
Common Abbreviations
The abbreviations commonly used in papyrology can be subdivided into two groups: those for the many scholarly editions, series, and corpora that are frequently cited on the one hand, and those pertaining to digital resources on the other. There is some overlap; the same text can be cited in several different (and interchangeable) ways, depending on the particular resource or system that is employed.
Printed Editions and Corpora
The most common form of abbreviation in the papyrological world (and the one employed by this chapter) refers to a text’s principal publication, frequently within a larger series. P.Oxy. 32.2624, for example, refers to the 2624th papyrus in the Oxyrhynchus Papyri series, published in the thirty-second volume (N.B.: volume numbers can be indicated by Roman numerals). The Oxyrhynchus Papyri enumerates its papyri consecutively, in their order of publication, but some series reset the counter with each new volume.
Each series or individual volume of texts has its own designated abbreviation, which typically refers to an ancient site (e.g., P.Oxy. = Oxyrhynchus), a modern institution or collection (e.g., P.Ryl. = John Rylands Library, Manchester), an individual or archive either ancient or modern (e.g., P.Dryton, P.Turner), or some other unique identifier (e.g., P.Nekr.). A checklist of documentary editions with robust bibliographical information is now maintained online (http://papyri.info/docs/checklist), though exclusively literary editions are not included. Like the journal abbreviations that have been standardized by l’Année philologique, checklist abbreviations vastly simplify the process of citation and are therefore ubiquitous in papyrological scholarship.
But there are other ways of identifying a text, too. For one thing, every papyrus has a collection-specific inventory number under which it has been archived: when one is published outside of a series, therefore, it will continue to be identified by its inventory number (i.e., P.Fouad inv. 239, Figure 7.1) instead of a number assigned by the series. In some cases, a text published in this way can nonetheless be republished within a series (i.e., P.Köln inv. 21351 + 21376 = P.Köln 11.429). Additionally, when the works of a particular poet are collected in a standard edition, they are renumbered by their editor (the same is true when groups of poets are edited together). Not only can such systems of numeration be complicated by the addition, over time, of new discoveries to the corpus, but competing volumes or editions may assign different numbers to the same fragment! This companion has elected to use the enumeration of Campbell’s Loeb editions, but much has changed since they were first published: for Sappho and Alcaeus, scholars frequently cite the editions of either Lobel-Page (= LP) or Voigt (= V.); for elegy, the editions of West or Gentili-Prato compete. Sometimes it is not the editor but the title of an edition which provides an identifying acronym, e.g., Page’s Poetae Melici Graeci (= PMG) or Supplementum Lyricis Graecis (= SLG), Davies’ Poetarum Melicorum Graecorum Fragmenta (= PMGF), and Lloyd-Jones’ Supplementum Hellenisticum (= SH). For these, and other common abbreviations, see the Abbreviations and Standard Editions in this Companion.
Digital Resources
Papyrology has long been in the vanguard of digital humanities: the Duke Databank of Documentary Papyri (= DDbDP) was established in 1982 (i.e., before the creation of the World Wide Web!); the Heidelberger Gesamtverzeichnis der griechischen Papyrusurkunden (= HGV) was launched in 1988, and in the mid-1990s, the Advanced Papyrological Information System (= APIS) was conceived and developed out of the Duke Papyrus Archive. Papyrologists now collectively curate papyri.info (http://papyri.info), which aggregates data and metadata from these and other resources. An equivalent portal for literary papyri (dubbed DCLP) was launched in December 2017 and has since been incorporated into papyri.info. But there are other important digital corpora of data and metadata about literary texts, which warrant mention in this chapter inasmuch as papyri can also be identified according to their unique systems of enumeration:
M.-P.3: Catalogue des papyrus littéraires grecs et latins3 (http://cipl93.philo.ulg.ac.be/Cedopal/MP3/dbsearch_en.aspx). This catalog is the online third edition of the Greek and Latin Literary Texts from Greco-Roman Egypt, edited by Pack and Mertens. Literary papyri are frequently identified by their Mertens-Pack (or M.-P.3) number.
TM: Trismegistos (http://www.trismegistos.org) aims to catalog metadata about all ancient texts on papyrus (and other media)—big data for the papyrological world. It assigns a unique, stable identifier to every record in the database (823,217 texts as of April 2020).
LDAB: Leuven Database of Ancient Books, now part of the Trismegistos catalog (http://www.trismegistos.org/ldab). This database collects basic information on literary texts from antiquity (16,561 items as of April 2020).
The various systems of enumeration both digital and archival can be used in tandem: for the purpose of illustrating the overlap, consider the cases of a codex from Berlin containing Sappho and the famous Lille Stesichorus.
| Berlin Sappho | Lille Stesichorus | |
| Inventory Number | P.Berol. inv. 9722 | P.Lille inv. 111c + 73 + 76a–c |
| editio princeps | BKT 5.2, no. XIII 2 (pp. 10–18) | • CRIPEL 4 (1976): 287–303 • cf. ZPE 26 (1977): 1–6 • cf. ZPE 26 (1977): 7–36 |
| Other Critical Editions | • Frr. 92–97 V.• Frr. 92–97 LP | • PMGF 222b • Fr. 97 F |
| TM | 62713 | 62787 |
| M.-P.3 | 1451 | 1486.1 |
| LDAB | 3901 | 3975 |
In the former case, six fragmentary poems of Sappho from a single codex have as many possible identifying numbers (LDAB 3901 = M.-P.3 1451 = TM 62713, etc.); so too in the latter case, where several separately inventoried fragments from a single poem are reunited under an individual number (PMGF 222b = fr. 97 F = LDAB 3975 = M.-P.3 1486.1, etc.). Encountering a TM or M.-P.3 number in the course of one’s research should not startle; knowing the different names for something is akin to mastering it—πολυωνυμία is not only