Textual Criticism as Rhetoric.

By popular demand, another passage from Richard Tarrant’s Texts, Editors, and Readers. From ch. 3 “Establishing the text 1: recension”: Although the ideal of the recoverable original is impossible to achieve, the concept still has a useful part to play. One of its benefits is psychological: it seems unlikely that scholars would be willing to devote themselves to editorial projects that often span decades if they were not sustained by the hope of recovering the author’s text. It may also be necessary for critics to operate as if a single recoverable original existed, in order to avoid a bedlam of competing reconstructions. From what has been said it follows that the notion of a definitive edition is even more a myth than the concept of the recoverable original. No edition of a classical text can be definitive, in part because the possibility of new and convincing conjectures can never be ruled out, but also because in any text of some length there will be places where different editors…