Making Meaning Where Evidence Is Sparse: Archaic Greek Poetry and the Power of Small Data

When confronting any field marked by a scarcity of data, the researcher inevitably finds himself at a crossroads: either he may scale down the ambition of his enquiry, redirecting his efforts towards the analysis of isolated phenomena, or he may seek ways to increase the available body of evidence. In the case of Archaic Greek literature, only one of these paths is truly viable, for no amount of funding can secure an increase in data. The most valuable material witnesses, consisting og high quality copies in medieval manuscripts, are already fully incorporated into the corpus, and any new discoveries can emerge only in the form of papyrus fragments recovered from the deserts of Egypt: a pursuit unlikely to benefit from more aggressive excavation practices, which may in fact jeopardize the very remains they seek to uncover.

This limitation has been the same stumbling stone upon which generations of classical philologists, from the third century BC onwards, have either faltered or grown discouraged. Yet a study published in 1990 by Purificación Nieto, now Senior Lecturer in Classics at Brown University, opened the way to a radically new approach—one capable of exponentially increasing the scholarly value of minimal data through the analysis of archaic similes. That possibility, however, has thus far remained largely unexplored. In this lecture, we shall first immerse ourselves in the scholarly circumstances that have historically hindered such approaches to Archaic Greek poetry, before examining to what extent an amplification of interpretative significance, rather than of raw data, may offer a viable solution in contexts of evidential scarcity.

Santiago Vicent
Visiting Fellow, Department of the Classics (Harvard)
Investigador en formación, Departemento de Filología Clásica (UCM)