11. Beyond Variants: Some Digital Desiderata for the Critical Apparatus of Ancient Greek and Latin Texts

Introduction Texts from the ancient world reach us via a long, complicated process of transmission from copy to copy. As printed today they are at best near approximations of what an ancient author wrote. A critical edition, which presents the text along with the surviving evidence of the transmission process and an editor’s interpretation of it, allows the reader to go beyond a generalised expectation of error and to see whether any given bit of text is secure, or corrupt, or disputed, or we..