Prosodia Catholica (Herodian)

About the text
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What this site is

This project translates the Greek text of Herodian’s Περὶ καθολικῆς προσῳδίας (De Prosodia Catholica) as printed in the 19th‑century Teubner edition edited by A. Lentz (1867–1870), the version widely reused in modern digital corpora (including TLG).

Herodian’s original Περὶ καθολικῆς προσῳδίας is not preserved as a complete work. What survives is fragmentary and mediated through later grammatical sources (quotations, excerpts, and epitomes).

What it is not

It is not a clean, continuous transcript of an ancient manuscript of Herodian.

Lentz’s Teubner text is a reconstruction: it attempts to re‑create a coherent “Herodian” by selecting, slicing, and re‑arranging material from multiple witnesses, and by inserting parallel material (including from the Stephanus of Byzantium tradition) according to Lentz’s hypothesis about the work’s original structure.

Why overlaps can be misleading

Because the Lentz text incorporates (and reorganizes) material that also lives in Stephanus of Byzantium (and elsewhere), substantial overlap is expected.

So overlap on this site should not automatically be read as “independent evidence” that Stephanus copied a continuous Herodian text; in many places the overlap reflects the editorial reconstruction itself.

Further reading
  • BMCR review noting the “idiosyncratic and arbitrary” character of Lentz’s reconstruction and its long influence: BMCR 2019.05.26
  • Oxford (DPhil) thesis summary describing Lentz’s approach as reconstructive rather than a presentation of surviving evidence: ORA record
  • Bibliographic record for the Teubner volume: Scaife / Perseus catalog entry

If you quote or analyze passages from this site, cite Lentz’s edition explicitly and (when possible) track the passage back to the underlying source (epitome/fragment/Stephanus) rather than treating it as a single ancient witness.