Corrections, Conjectures, and Additions to Michael Psellus, Epistulae (Berlin and Boston, 2019)

The first complete critical edition of Psellos’ letters, published in 2019, contains errors – the editor confesses, with regret.1 Errors were to some degree inevitable given the extent and complexity of the edited text, yet one always hopes to avoid as many of them as one is able prior to publication. Still, it could be that, only once a book acquires its existence as a printed work, deficiencies become apparent. Or perhaps the old dictum still stands that “the lover is blind toward what he loves” (Plato, Laws 731e5–6; Psellos, Letter 170,13–14). Whatever the case, the present article is a collaborative effort which hopes to restore as many of these shortcomings as possible, so as to allow readers to fully appreciate Psellos’ literary art and use of Greek and also to prepare the ground for the still needed translation of the Psellian letter-corpus into a modern language.²Johannes Haubold generously reached out with a list of corrections and conjectures to the Greek text, Stratis Papaioannou added his own (some of them already published online in preliminary fashion earlier), and all items were reviewed and discussed in detail, many times over. What is published below are those items about which both authors feel relatively certain. To these interventions in the Greek text and the critical apparatus, Papaioannou affixed another register of additions to the apparatus of sources, allusions, and the like, as well as a few corrections to the edition’s introduction and to the index of notable Greek words. Moreover, all reviews of the edition that have appeared since 2019 were taken into consideration.3 Suggestions and corrections which were deemed worthy of inclusion were added to the items below. Others were left out, without being discussed, as this would have resulted in an even longer article – interested readers may wish to take on these further challenges and any that remain on their own. Critical editions of medieval texts, it seems, are bound to remain in part living and open-ended.