Etiam si nondum recepit ultimam manum: Autograph Papyri as Erratic Drafts of Ancient Poems

This paper aims to discuss the peculiarity of the corpus of Greek autograph papyri. Unlike regular literary fragments containing copies of ancient works, these papyri preserve personal drafts of poems written by the authors’ own hand, as they were in the process of creating their works. The poems are left in an unfinished state and cannot fall under the usual label of “ancient books”. Moreover, the contexts of production of these papyri, stemming from Graeco-Roman Egypt, are widely unknown and the only authorial figure identified is that of Dioscorus of Aphrodito, a sixth-century notary and amateur poet, whereas all the other compositions remain anonymous (adespota). A special analysis framework therefore needs to be established in order to face these highly disconcerting papyri. This paper will focus on two elements: the writing and the paratext. As a matter of fact, the unknown authors reveal themselves in their papyri not only through the style of their personal scripts, which do not closely fit within the canonical typologies of bookhands, but also through authorial amendments, e.g., erasures, reworkings, variants and corrections, which fill the line spacing or margins of the works. This special type of paratext distinguishes these papyri from both professional copies of texts produced by scribes and from scholars’ personal copies used for study purpose. That is why these characteristics make autograph manuscripts unique and erratic written objects. Although they were most probably meant to sink into oblivion after more polished versions of the poems had been produced (which may have never existed if the poetic project was afterwards neglected), drafts were unexpectedly saved by time, offering a glimpse of the antique poets’ artistic mindset and the way it was physically transcribed on writing materials. Through a material and textual analysis, this paper will attempt to contribute to a better understanding of how this type of erratic literary documents could improve our knowledge on the ancient poetic composition process and its techniques.