Hecataeus of Miletus
FGrH 1 F 302b — Herodotus, Histories 2.19-23 Converged + audit-sound
ἀλλὰ Ἑλλήνων μέν τινες ἐπίσημοι βουλόμενοι γενέσθαι σοφίην ἔλεξαν περὶ τοῦ ὕδατος τούτου τριφασίας ὁδούς … ἡ δ᾽ ἑτέρη ἀνεπιστημονεστέρη μέν ἐστι τῆς λελεγμένης, λόγωι δὲ εἰπεῖν θωμασιωτέρη, ἣ λέγει ἀπὸ τοῦ ᾽Ωκεανοῦ ῥέοντα αὐτὸν ταῦτα μηχανᾶσθαι, τὸν δὲ ᾽Ωκεανὸν γῆν περὶ πᾶσαν ῥέειν … ὁ δὲ περὶ τοῦ ᾽Ωκεανοῦ λέξας ἐς ἀφανὲς τὸν μῦθον ἀνενείκας οὐκ ἔχει ἔλεγχον· οὐ γάρ τινα ἔγωγε οἶδα ποταμὸν ᾽Ωκεανὸν ἐόντα, ῞Ομηρον δὲ ἤ τινα τῶν πρότερον γενομένων ποιητέων δοκέω τοὔνομα εὑρόντα ἐς ποίησιν ἐσενείκαιθαι.
But some of the Greeks, wishing to be distinguished for cleverness, gave three explanations of this water ... The second is more ignorant than the one mentioned but more marvellous to relate: it says the Nile flows from the Ocean and so contrives its behaviour, and that the Ocean flows around the whole earth ... But whoever spoke about the Ocean, carrying his tale into obscurity, cannot be refuted; for I myself know of no river Ocean, and I think Homer or one of the earlier poets invented the name and brought it into his poetry.
Apparatus — BNJ base vs open-corpus witness
Base text after Brill’s New Jacoby / Jacoby (FGrH). The apparatus records differences against the open-corpus witness (Scaife/Perseus) within the overlapping span; encoding and orthography are folded. Collation codepoint-verified and adversarially audited (2026-06-26).
| Lemma / locus | BNJ base | Witness | Type | Note |
|---|
| — | Ἑλλήνων (target/BNJ: eta U+03AE, eta+acute) | Perseus (Scaife) tlg0016.tlg001.perseus-grc2, Hdt. 2.20 | word-variant | Sole substantive character-level difference in the overlapping span. Witness reads Ἑλλῄνων with an iota subscript on the eta (U+1FC4 = eta+oxia+ypogegrammeni); target/BNJ has plain Ἑλλήνων (U+03AE = eta+tonos, no iota). Ἕλλην gen. pl. is Ἑλλήνων, so the witness's subscript iota is an orthographic anomaly in the Perseus encoding, not a recognised variant reading. Recorded as the witness's idiosyncrasy; BNJ form is correct. NOT a normalisation artifact — it is an extra COMBINING GREEK YPOGEGRAMMENI (U+0345) present only in the witness. |
Witness: Scaife/Perseus. Verdict: CONVERGED (apparatus complete, publishable as BNJ-based).
Open-corpus witness family: urn:cts:greekLit. This is a BNJ/Jacoby-based edition with an open-corpus apparatus, not a verbatim copy of the witness edition. Source data: explorers/_build/editions/ecoed-hecat-fgrh1-f302b.json.