As mentioned in my previous post, I plan to assign categories to my various notes so users can filter them to see only what they want to see. This will become more important as their number increases.
Here are my tentative categories – many notes will of course fall into more than one.
- Textual (one of the larger categories, including any note that offers arguments on decisions between variants and conjectures – should I have a separate category for original conjectures?)
- Orthographic (for things like Pulydamas vs. Polydamas here)
- Punctuation
- Attribution (assigning lines to to speakers – mostly a problem in drama, but also a big problem in Persius)
- Exegetical (one of the larger categories)
- Puns and wordplay
- Structural (symmetry, ring composition, and so on – here is an example from Silius Italicus, not yet in the database)
- Intertextual (sources, parallels, and ancient allusions and imitations)
- Nachleben (modern allusions and imitations)
- Some kind of ‘Meta’ category for things like my note on semipaganus in 1.6 (here)
- Rhetoric, style, figures of speech
- Meter
- Questions and Hypotheses – passages where I have a partial solution, or an unlikely one, or none, and am asking others to help solve the problem.
I’m not sure whether these next four really cover what they need to cover, or should be redivided differently – I will generally be worrying about them only insofar as they affect text or interpretation:
- Realien
- History
- Prosopography
- Social Issues (including obscenity)
I’m also not sure whether these last five should be listed separately, or all together, or rolled into Textual. There’s no need to decide now, since none of them (except maybe obelization) comes up in Persius, but Propertius has plenty of all five, and Juvenal all but the last:
- Deletions
- Obelizations
- Transpositions
- Lacunae
- Divisions between poems
Please let me know if you have any suggestions for combining or subdividing any of these, or (very important) anything I’ve missed.
