Aristarchus’s line excisions prove he accepted the transmitted ending as original

Evidence

Some modern scholars have taken the words literally and pronounced the remainder of Book 23 and all of Book 24 a later addition composed by a different, and inferior, poet. They cannot, however, claim Aristarchus as their authority, for we know that he excluded the Greek lines 310–43 of Book 23 (in which Odysseus tells Penelope the tale of his travels) and lines 1–204 of Book 24 (the arrival of the shades of the suitors in the lower world). There would have been no point in doing so if he had already decided that the original poem ended at the line which put Odysseus and Penelope to bed. — Homer; Robert Fagles; Bernard Knox, The Odyssey, 284

Categorization

• XREF: Relevant to textual criticism and the analytic/unitarian debate about the Odyssey’s authorship; connects to framing questions about how editorial evidence bears on claims of single vs. multiple authorship. — connects to: the MOC “The Great Derivative: How the Athens-to-Washington Story Fabricates the Inheritance It Pretends to Record”