Note 269 — Chapter XXI · GRECIAN EPIC.—HOMERIC POEMS.
Reading edition
Knight, Prolegg. Homer, xxxii. xxxvi. xxxvii. That Peisistratus caused a corrected MS. of the Iliad to be prepared, there seems good reason to believe, and the Scholion on Plautus edited by Ritschl (see Die Alexandrinische Bibliothek, p. 4) specifies the four persons (Onomakritus was one) employed on the task. Ritschl fancies that it served as a sort of Vulgate for the text of the Alexandrine critics, who named specially other MSS. (of Chios, Sinôpê, Massalia, etc.) only when they diverged from this Vulgate: he thinks, also, that it formed the original from whence those other MSS. were first drawn, which are called in the Homeric Scholia αἱ κοιναὶ, κοινότεραι (pp. 59-60).
Welcker supposes the Peisistratic MS. to have been either lost or carried away when Xerxês took Athens (Der Epische Kyklus, pp. 382-388).
Compare Nitzsch, Histor. Homer. Fasc. i. pp. 165-167; also his commentary on Odyss. xi. 604, the alleged interpolation of Onomakritus; and Ulrici, Geschichte der Hellen. Poes. Part i. s. vii. pp. 252-255.
The main facts respecting the Peisistratic recension are collected and discussed by Gräfenhan, Geschichte der Philologie, sect. 54-64, vol. i. pp. 266-311. Unfortunately, we cannot get beyond mere conjecture and possibility.