Conjectural criticism in scholiastic corpora: the case of the Iliad scholia

A paraliterary work created via a process of compilation, such as a scholiastic corpus, has characteristics that raise specific challenges with regard to both textual constitution in general and emendation in particular. Insofar as they are the result of the stratification of different sources (and therefore possess a low degree of authoriality), such works require an adaptation of many concepts of stemmatic philology. Notwithstanding the multiformity inherent in scholiastic practices, modern critical editions of scholia tend to employ a reconstructive approach, with the goal of restoring the corpus in a form as close as possible to that conceived by its original compiler. In this contribution a series of examples taken from the Iliad scholia is discussed in order to outline a typology of the kinds of emendations that can (or cannot) be made within such a corpus.