Ancient Scholarship and Grammar: Archetypes, Concepts and Contexts 9783110254044, 9783110254037

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Ancient Scholarship and Grammar

Trends in Classics – Supplementary Volumes Edited by Franco Montanari and Antonios Rengakos Scientific Committee Alberto Bernabé · Margarethe Billerbeck · Claude Calame Philip R. Hardie · Stephen J. Harrison · Stephen Hinds Richard Hunter · Christina Kraus · Giuseppe Mastromarco Gregory Nagy · Theodore D. Papanghelis · Giusto Picone Kurt Raaflaub · Bernhard Zimmermann

Volume 8

De Gruyter

Ancient Scholarship and Grammar Archetypes, Concepts and Contexts

Edited by

Stephanos Matthaios Franco Montanari Antonios Rengakos

De Gruyter

ISBN 978-3-11-025403-7 e-ISBN 978-3-11-025404-4 ISSN 1868-4785 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Ancient scholarship and grammar : archetypes, concepts and contexts / edited by Stephanos Matthaios, Franco Montanari and Antonios Rengakos. p. cm. -- (Trends in classics. Supplementary volumes ; v. 8) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-3-11-025403-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-3-11-025404-4 (ebk.) 1. Greek language--Grammar, Historical. I. Matthaios, Stephanos. II. Montanari, Franco. III. Rengakos, Antonios. PA251.A63 2011 485--dc22 2010050347

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. © 2011 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/New York Typesetting: Michael Peschke, Berlin Printing: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen ∞ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Contents Introduction .................................................................................... 1

I. “Philologia perennis”: History and New Perspectives Franco Montanari Ancient Scholarship and Classical Studies ........................................ 11

II. The Ancient Scholars at Work Richard Hunter Plato’s Ion and the Origins of Scholarship ........................................ 27 Marco Fantuzzi Scholarly Panic: πανικὸς φόβος, Homeric Philology and the Beginning of the Rhesus ................................................ 41 Stephanos Matthaios Eratosthenes of Cyrene: Readings of his ‘Grammar’ Definition ............................................. 55 Filippomaria Pontani Ex Homero grammatica .............................................................. 87 René Nünlist Aristarchus and Allegorical Interpretation ...................................... 105 Martin Schmidt Portrait of an Unknown Scholiast ................................................. 119 John Lundon Homeric Commentaries on Papyrus: A Survey ............................. 159 Bruce Karl Braswell Didymus on Pindar ...................................................................... 181

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Peter Bing Afterlives of a Tragic Poet: The Hypothesis in the Hellenistic Reception of Euripides ...................................... 199 Stelios Chronopoulos Re-writing the Personal Joke: Some Aspects in the Interpretation of ὀνομαστὶ κωμῳδεῖν in Ancient Scholarship .................................................................. 207 Konstantinos Spanoudakis Ancient Scholia and Lost Identities: The Case of Simichidas ................................................................. 225

III. The Ancient Grammarians on the Greek Language and Linguistic Correctness Jean Lallot Did the Alexandrian Grammarians have a Sense of History? ....................................................................... 241 Louis Basset Apollonius between Homeric and Hellenistic Greek: The Case of the ‘Pre-positive Article’ ........................................... 251 Philomen Probert Attic Irregularities: Their Reinterpretation in the Light of Atticism ............................. 269 Ineke Sluiter A Champion of Analogy: Herodian’s On Lexical Singularity .............................................. 291

IV. Ancient Grammar in Historical Context Alfons Wouters - Pierre Swiggers New Papyri and the History of Ancient Grammar: The ἐπίρρημα Chapter in P.Berol. 9917 ....................................... 313

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Wolfram Ax Quintilian’s ‘Grammar’ (Inst.1.4-8) and its Importance for the History of Roman Grammar ............................................. 331 Frédéric Lambert Syntax before Syntax: Uses of the Term σύνταξις in Greek Grammarians before Apollonius Dyscolus ........................................................... 347 Guillaume Bonnet Syntagms in the Artigraphic Latin Grammars ................................ 361 Louise Visser Latin Grammatical Manuals in the Early Middle Ages: Tradition and Adaptation in the Participle Chapter ....................... 375 Valerie van Elst Theodosius and his Byzantine Successors on the Participle: A Didactic Approach .................................................................... 405 Margarethe Billerbeck The Orus Fragments in the Ethnica of Stephanus of Byzantium ........................................................... 429

V. Ancient Grammar in Interdisciplinary Context Casper C. de Jonge Dionysius of Halicarnassus and the Scholia on Thucydides’ Syntax ................................................................. 451 Anneli Luhtala Imposition of Names in Ancient Grammar and Philosophy ........... 479 Maria Chriti Neoplatonic Commentators on Aristotle: The ‘Arbitrariness of the Linguistic Sign’ ....................................... 499

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List of Contributors ...................................................................... 515 Abbreviations ............................................................................... 523 Bibliography ................................................................................. 527 General Index ............................................................................... 563 Passages Index ........................................................................................ 573

Introduction Ancient Greek scholarship—the γραμματικὴ τέχνη in its original designation—and the linguistic theories which were developed in the frame of this discipline, are currently in the centre of a multifaceted and steadily growing research activity within Classical Philology. This activity is often shared and supported by related fields such as philosophy, rhetoric, literary theory and modern linguistics. The attractiveness that ancient scholarship and grammar enjoy among contemporary researchers is apparent from recent statistics which show the distribution of the relevant publications during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries:1 While the first half of the twentieth century reveals a continuous disregard for the subject, the works published since the 1950s indicate a constantly growing interest, clearly evident through a surprising increase especially during the last decades. Apart from the intensity of current activity, however, a geographical expansion of the research interest can also be observed. Although originally associated almost exclusively with German Classicists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the study of the γραμματικὴ τέχνη now figures as one of the central research areas in the Western philological tradition, in Europe as well as in the United States. From a historiographical point of view, the main impulse for the recent development originated during the middle of the twentieth century from the preparatory work on the new edition of the two most important corpora of ancient scholia, the Scholia vetera on the Iliad, edited by H. Erbse (1969–1988), and the Scholia on Aristophanes, published in a joint-project which was initiated by W.J.W. Koster and completed by D. Holwerda (1969–2007). On the ground of an exhaustive investigation into the formation and transmission process of these commentaries,2 1

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The statistics referred to are included in Hyman’s review (2008, 425–426) of Dickey’s book (2007). For this purpose Hyman measured the approximately 1000 publications listed in Dickey’s bibliography, i.e. a chronologically and in terms of content well representative amount of publications. Most recent research activity and bibliography on the field of ancient scholarship and grammar is cited in Montanari 2009. On the history of the Scholia on the Iliad see Erbse 1960 and van den Valk 1963–1964. After the work of van der Valk 1949, ancient and Byzantine schol-

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based on reliable texts which these editions provided, the research done in this field triggered a series of further studies through which the traditional image of the development of ancient scholarship has been corrected in many aspects. In addition to that, the abundant evidence within the field from the documentation of related testimonies transmitted on papyri helped close several gaps in the textual base and provided a great amount of previously unknown commentaries, lexica and grammatical treatises.3 The history of the Hellenistic, and especially of the Alexandrian philological tradition, from which the Byzantine corpora of scholia originate, has increasingly attracted the attention of scholars and is today reconstructed through new editions and collections of fragments and through special monographs in a more precise way than ever before.4 This special trend, however, is also due to an external factor: the growing interest in Hellenistic poetry and in its philological presuppositions provided a strong impetus for the exploration of the specific discipline that had been founded in Alexandria at that time. Since R. Pfeiffer’s epoch-making History of Classical Scholarship (1968),5 strongly motivated through his Callimachus’ edition, the history of the Alexandrian scholarship has been accompanied by a rich number of publications on the Hellenistic ‘poet-scholars’ and the theoretical background of their activity. Moreover, the research activity on ancient grammatical theories which developed within the philological tradition, first with direct reference to the interpretation of poetry, then increasingly independent from the literary context, was promoted in the 1950s. A central aspect of these studies was the question of the authenticity of the Τέχνη

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arship on the Odyssey is investigated exhaustively by Pontani 2005a. Pontani prepares also a new edition of the Scholia on the Odyssey; two volumes of this project, including the scholia on the first four books, have been already published; see Pontani 2007–2010. The project Commentaria et lexica Graeca in papyris reperta (CLGP), founded by G. Bastianini, M. Haslam, H. Maehler, F. Montanari and C. Römer, aims at providing new editions and a collection of ancient commentaries and lexica known through papyri in one major corpus. New editions of Alexandrian grammatical fragments and of lexicographic texts from the Hellenistic era and the Late Antiquity have been published in the series Sammlung griechischer und lateinischer Grammatiker (SGLG), founded by K. Alpers, H. Erbse and A. Kleinlogel. In another relevant series, F. Montanari’s Pleiadi, a vast array of editions and studies about ancient scholarship is already published. The articles collected in the special volume La philologie grecque à l’époque hellénistique et romaine, edited by F. Montanari 1994, serve as supplement to Pfeiffer’s History, with particular focus on the history of Hellenistic scholarship.

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γραμματική which is transmitted under the name of Dionysius Thrax. This Τέχνη was considered to be the earliest manual of a systematic description of the Greek language and its constituents derived from the Alexandrian grammatical tradition. The turning point in the research activity on ancient grammar is marked by Di Benedetto’s articles of 1958 and 1959, which triggered an enduring debate about the theoretical competence of the Alexandrian grammarians. Up to that point scholars had assumed that Dionysius’ Τέχνη did not symbolise the beginning but rather the end point in the establishment of technical grammar in antiquity.6 The idea that the grammatical theory was fully developed during the period of the Alexandrian grammarians appeared to be too provocative to be endorsed without detailed assessment. The studies that have been published since then were mainly motivated by the postulate of the ‘re-writing’ of the history of ancient grammar.7 The growing wish for exhaustive documentation and analysis of ancient linguistic theory is answered by detailed research into the core period of Alexandrian scholarship, from Zenodotus and Aristophanes of Byzantium to Aristarchus and on to the grammarians of the first century BC, also linked with an evaluation and re-examination of the grammatical theory of Late Antiquity and its theoretical assumptions and background.8 However, not only at a historiographical level, but also with respect to matters of content, can a turning point in current research be observed. The greatest merit of the revived interest in ancient scholarship and grammar lies in the modernisation of the theoretical debate and of the perspectives of interpretation, which, at the same time, has caused a shift of focal points. During the whole of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century, ancient scholarship was mostly treated by Classicists as an auxiliary discipline. Commentaries, lexicographical collections and grammatical treatises from antiquity served as instruments for the exploration of textual transmission and criticism as well as for the interpretation of ancient literary production. In opposition to this attitude, all relevant texts are today being studied closely in their own 6

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Fehling 1956–1957, I 214–215 and 261–263 sums up with this observation the researchers’ consensus about the development of ancient grammar in the lifetime of Dionysius Thrax. This postulate goes back to Taylor 1986a, 190. The most important contributions for the exploration of ancient grammar include the edition of the grammatical papyri by Wouters 1979, the edition with commentary and translation of Apollonius Dyscolus’ Syntax and Dionysius Thrax’ Techne by Lallot 1997 and 1998, as well as studies on ancient grammatical concepts and their philosophical background by Blank 1982, Ax 1986 and Sluiter 1990.

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merit. Thereby, the special focus lies on the disciplinary profile, on ideological and cultural aspects, as well as on the interaction of scholarship and grammar with other scientific areas in antiquity. The present volume reflects the current research situation and aims at investigating archetypes, concepts and contexts of the ancient philological discipline from a historical, methodological and ideological perspective, following the structure of a preceding conference on this subject held in Thessaloniki in 2008.9 Under the heading Ancient Scholarship and Grammar, the volume intends to grasp the γραμματικὴ τέχνη in its original unity. In their role as inseparable components of ancient scholarship, the parameters ‘linguistic description’ and ‘interpretation of linguistic contents in literary contexts’ define the broad spectrum of the contributions included in the volume. The period examined coincides with the establishment of scholarship as an autonomous discipline from the third century BC to its peak in the first centuries AD. However, the volume is not restricted or limited to that period. Archetypes and paradigms of philological activity during the classical era investigate the origins of ancient scholarship; at the same time, the interdisciplinary discourse between scholarship, philosophy of language and rhetoric is illustrated. In this way, the thematic spectrum of the volume covers a wide range, stretching from the fourth century BC to the Byzantine era. Apart from Greek antiquity, central aspects of the Latin grammatical tradition are also addressed, though not to their full extent. Thus, the foundation of Roman grammar and the development of several grammatical concepts are demonstrated either individually or in comparison with their Greek counterparts, up to the Latin Middle Ages. The 26 articles included in the volume are arranged, according to their main subject, in two groups, Scholarship and Grammar; they are further divided into the following sections: “Philologia perennis”: History and New Perspectives (I.), The Ancient Scholars at Work (II.), The Ancient Grammarians on the Greek Language and Linguistic Correctness (III.), Ancient Grammar in Historical Context (IV.) and, finally, Ancient Grammar in Interdisciplinary Context (V.). To balance between the various topics discussed in each article, and in order to underline the relations between the contributions, we have taken into consideration a ‘horizontal’ as well as a ‘vertical’ interlinking between the different subjects. The horizontal link is defined by historical factors, especially by the period of time to which each article refers. With regard to ancient scholarship, the contributions 9

The conference had the title Language‒Text‒Literature. Archetypes, Concepts and Contexts of Ancient Scholarship and Grammar and was held in Thessaloniki in December 5 to 7, 2008.

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basically follow the chronological order of the ancient literary text to which the ancient commentator referred. This principle often reflects and corresponds to the importance attributed to special authors and literary genres by ancient scholars. Thus, Homeric scholarship precedes all other subjects because of its paradigmatic value for philological activity on subsequent literary production. At a vertical level, however, it is the criterion of content which provides the links between the articles and the transition from one to another. This is the case especially for those sections which are devoted to the complex of ancient grammar. Theoretical issues are often complementary examined in connection to their realization in the grammatical practice; additionally, theoretical patterns are described contrastively by investigating their development through several grammatical traditions and their transformation due to contacts with relevant disciplines in antiquity. The volume opens with Franco Montanari’s contribution Ancient Scholarship and Classical Studies, which puts the philological and grammatical discipline into the context of its historical development. Starting from an investigation of the γραμματική-concept and its complexity, Montanari explores the motivation that led to the foundation of scholarship as a separate discipline and poses the question of its legitimacy for the interpretation of literature and the description of language against competing approaches derived from ancient philosophy and rhetoric. In the second part of his article, Montanari demonstrates the importance of ancient scholarship as a role model for the re-definition of philological science and its scope during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and outlines the process that brought studies on the ancient tradition to the centre of modern philological research. The second section of the volume is devoted to the complex of ancient scholarship with special focus on the disciplinary profile of the γραμματικὴ τέχνη and on several aspects of the interpretative work on ancient literature. The first three contributions can be subsumed under the label ‘Archaeology of Scholarship’ and deal with the pre-academic stage of ancient scholarship, as well as with the process that led to its establishment as an autonomous discipline: Richard Hunter detaches Plato’s Ion from the context of Plato’s poetic theory and treats the dialogue as one of the earliest pieces of evidence of theoretical reflection on the character and potential of literary exegesis in the pre-Hellenistic period. For the model of ‘poet-scholar’, which is of special significance for Hellenistic poetry, Marco Fantuzzi presents a parallel dating back to the classical period: Fantuzzi refers to the opening scene of the Rhesus, which he does not interpret as poetic transformation, but as a dramatized form of a pre-Aristotelian philological analysis of the Iliadic Doloneia.

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Stephanos Matthaios offers an extensive interpretation of Eratosthenes’ definition of γραμματική—the earliest existing definition of Alexandrian scholarship—and illustrates the historical background as well as the ideological assumptions that led to the establishment of scholarship as an autonomous discipline. The next four articles of the second section focus on ancient Homeric scholarship: Filippomaria Pontani explores the question of whether Homer formed the norm for questions of hellenismos and to what extent the Homeric language influenced the linguistic theories and the descriptive models developed by ancient grammarians. René Nünlist analyses Aristarchus’ views on the allegorical interpretation of Homer and, based on a re-evaluation of existing evidence, presents a picture differentiated from the anti-allegorical attitude which is often ascribed to the Alexandrian scholar by current research. Martin Schmidt outlines the portrait of an anonymous commentator of Homer known through several passages in the corpus of the exegetical scholia on the Iliad and reconstructs his interpretative principles and ideological views about Homer and Homeric poetry. On the ground of a representative selection of ancient commentaries on Homer transmitted on papyri, John Lundon highlights the characteristics that constitute the genre of ancient commentary and, with regard to contents and methods, he investigates the features which these commentaries share with the Homeric exegesis derived from the Alexandrian tradition. The last four articles within the second section represent further areas of ancient philological activity. In the field of lyric poetry, Bruce Karl Braswell examines Didymus’ interpretation of Pindar and offers a new edition and commentary of selected fragments, thus pointing out central aspects of Didymus’ analysis of the Pindaric odes. Based on an examination of the earliest hypotheses of the Euripidean tragedies, Peter Bing investigates Euripides’ position and his reception in the Hellenistic era, essentially from an ideological and cultural perspective. Stelios Chronopoulos explores the ancient views on the Old Comedy based on the interpretation of personal attacks given by Aristophanes’ scholiasts. Ancient philological activity in the field of Hellenistic poetry is represented by Konstantinos Spanoudakis’ contribution, which investigates the identity of Simichidas in Theocritus’ seventh Idyll based on the testimony of the ancient commentators. A connection between the two main subjects within the scope of ancient γραμματική, scholarship and grammar, is provided by the third section of the volume, which, starting from the description of language in literary contexts, focuses on the views of ancient grammarians on the history of Greek and on the criteria of linguistic correctness. Jean Lallot

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treats the fundamental question for the Alexandrians’ methodological approach, that is, whether, in their linguistic analysis and argumentation, they took into consideration historical criteria connected to the development of Greek. Louis Basset transfers Lallot’s theoretical approach to the practice of Apollonius Dyscolus and outlines the grammarian’s interpretation of the idiosyncratic—according to ancient views—Homeric use of articles. Philomen Probert shows the importance of the Atticistic movement for the linguistic analysis of ambiguous cases, where grammatical rules are broken but the constructions are still accepted as correct because of their relevance to the Atticistic postulates. Returning to theory, Ineke Sluiter focuses on the criterion of analogy, the normative principle par excellence in matters related to linguistic correctness, and analyses its theoretical foundation in Herodian’s treatise Περὶ μονήρους λέξεως. The fourth section deals with the history of ancient grammar, putting linguistic patterns and grammatical concepts into the context of their development. Alfons Wouters and Pierre Swiggers present a first edition of the section devoted to adverbs of an ancient τέχνη γραμματική transmitted in P.Berol. 9917 (dated to 300 AD) and, in the detailed commentary, show continuities as well as innovative moments in the development of the grammatical theory of the word class system. Wolfram Ax explores the history of Roman grammar in an especially dark period, for which the ‘grammatical’ chapters in the first book of Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria serve as a unique and, for this reason, valuable source for evaluating the development achieved in grammatical theory during the first century AD. The next two contributions are concerned with the ancient notion of syntax, in both the Greek and Roman worlds. Frederic Lambert illustrates the diverse meanings of the Greek term σύνταξις in the period before Apollonius Dyscolus and analyses the establishment of the technical meaning of ‘syntax’. Guillaume Bonnet examines the Latin views on syntax on the basis of the syntagmatic relations between two or more lexemes which constitute an autonomous meaning. Louise Visser and Valerie van Elst describe in two separate, but, in terms of their content, homogenous articles, the theories on participle formulated in Latin and Greek grammatical manuals of the Middle Ages. Both contributions focus on the didactic aspect that led to changes in the theoretical fundament borrowed from antiquity due to its adaptation to the language standard of that time. Finally, ancient and Byzantine lexicography is represented by Margarethe Billerbeck’s contribution, which provides an edition with a translation and commentary of the fragments of Orus transmitted in the Ethnica of Stephanus of Byzantium.

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The fifth and last section of the volume presents linguistic concepts in their interdisciplinary context. The contributions included here refer to contacts of ancient grammar with rhetoric and philosophy, which had an enormous influence on the formation of ancient grammatical doctrine. Casper C. de Jonge compares the philological interpretation of Thucydides’ syntax with the views of Dionysius of Halicarnassus on the same topic and investigates the theoretical interrelations between rhetorical and grammatical syntax. Anneli Luhtala treats the crucial philosophical question of whether names are given by nature or convention, and examines its role for the definition of the word classes ‘noun’ and ‘verb’ in the theories of Apollonius Dyscolus and of Priscian. Maria Chriti analyses the testimony of the Neoplatonic commentators regarding Aristotle’s views on the ‘symbolic’ value of names, linking it with modern theories on the arbitrariness of linguistic signs. Now, with the result of a joint work of many colleagues in hand, we would like to thank all contributors for their participation in the Thessaloniki conference and their cooperation during the different phases of the preparation of this volume for publication. Sincere thanks also go to our colleagues Evina Sistakou and Christos Tsagalis (Thessaloniki) as well as to Heiko Westphal (Berlin) for their valuable help with the stylistic revision of some articles and of this introduction. On behalf of the publisher Walter de Gruyter, Sabine Vogt has again supported us with her exceptional commitment and efficiency, for both of which we are deeply indebted. Stephanos Matthaios‒Franco Montanari‒Antonios Rengakos Thessaloniki and Genoa in June 2010

I. “Philologia perennis”: History and New Perspectives

Ancient Scholarship and Classical Studies* Franco Montanari The definition of ‘ancient scholarship’ includes numerous phenomena that belong to the literary civilization both of the ancient Greek and the Latin world. However, I should start by stating that the focus of my attention refers to ancient Greek culture, although experts will have no difficulty transferring to Latin culture many of the concepts we will be dealing with. The term ‘scholarship’ refers first and foremost to all written works that aim specifically and directly to provide an interpretation of the literary works on various levels. Thus in this sense ‘scholarship’ refers in the first place to the different forms of commentary on the texts (from the extended ὑπόμνημα to short annotations) and to exegetic treatments of a monographic nature (συγγράμματα). For this set of works, it is appropriate to take into account the difference between a syntagmatic and a paradigmatic procedure in the treatment of the text or texts to be interpreted. But one immediately realizes that the term ‘scholarship’ also covers many other genres: in primis the impressive phenomena of lexicography and linguistic-grammatical studies. Thus the numerous forms of lexicographic works come to mind, ranging from the most ancient collections of glosses and λέξεις to the great Etymologica of the Byzantine age, through a long history of materials traced, studied and ordered. To this category there also belong various collections of linguistic data and of Realien classified by lexical form (including the onomastics). Equally lively is the broad array of studies on language: reflections on human language, springing at first from the sphere of philosophy (testified by Democritus, perhaps started even earlier), were further developed in the cultural framework of Alexandrian scholarship, where they gave rise to an independent linguistic-grammatical science. In the work by Aristophanes of Byzantium and Aristarchus the solid basis was already laid for the subsequent extraordinary flowering of this field, which would culminate a few centuries later in the epoch-making work of Apollonius Dyscolus and Herodian. And the shelf ‘scholarship’ can be expanded to *

English translation by Rachel Barritt Costa.

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include by no means accessory materials, such as studies on prosody and metrics, biography, paroemiography, mythography, not to mention the investigations into the form of the ancient book, with the peculiarities represented specifically by phenomena of graphic layout linked to ‘scholarship’. The vast field of rhetoric must also be taken into account, at least to the extent that rhetorical works may be found to include texts of different authors, such texts being used, quoted and interpreted. Nor should one overlook the reflections on poetics, another theme that deserves a passing mention here. Indeed, Aristotle’s Poetics focused specifically on the poetry of the previous centuries, to which the Alexandrians later devoted themselves with a profusion of effort and means. The Alexandrian philologists, and not only those among them who were poets in their own right, could hardly have neglected theoretical thought on poetry: in my view, it would be absurd to imagine that Aristarchus had no ideas of his own on poetics (we will return to this point later), while it is far too obvious to point to the fact that only very scanty evidence on theoretical and epistemological questions can be traced in the philological-exegetic fragments that have come down to us, as such fragments are of quite a different kind and have quite a different purpose. The kind of research and treatises on the poets and their works that was widespread in Peripatetic circles, and the thought expressed by Aristotle in the Poetics, are the concrete intellectual and cultural precedent of the scholarship of the Hellenistic age, and made a crucial contribution to encouraging a fresh approach to literature, in primis poetry: it was through this new vision that poetry became a privileged object of investigation and interpretation, of care and conservation. There had arisen an awareness of standing on the shoulders of an era that had forged decisive and influential cultural models, great poetic creations that embodied an overwhelming portion of the Greek παιδεία, and this treasure had to be understood, known, and handed down.1 The resulting picture is that of a comprehensive panorama, populated by a wide variety of remarkably diverse products, from treatises displaying profound critical-literary insight to the most unadorned and bare collections of erudite materials. However, there is a fundamental element that is common to the entire range of this variegated archipelago: namely, that the overwhelming majority of the contents present in works classifiable as ‘scholarship’ derive essentially and materially from 1

An extensive reconsideration of these problems was made on the occasion of the XL Entretiens Hardt, held in 1993; cf. Montanari 1994. Its starting point was the proposal to rethink, a quarter of a century on, the themes addressed in Rudolf Pfeiffer’s by now classical treatment, dating from 1968. Another fifteen years have gone by since that moment.

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the immense store-house consisting of literary and linguistic phenomena. That is to say, the contents of ‘scholarship’ depend crucially on the overall body of works composed by the authors of literature and on the phenomenon of language as the common tool utilized for their creation. Thus on the one hand we have, in the actual and direct sense, the edition, conservation and interpretation of texts (i.e. ecdotics and exegesis), while on the other we have the study of language phenomena (grammar, lexicon, rhetoric), which are the tool of literature. But the two spheres are organically linked: an understanding of the texts is indispensable in order to utilize them for purposes of describing and explaining linguistic and rhetorical phenomena, but at the same time an understanding of linguistic and rhetorical phenomena is indispensable for a good and satisfactory exegesis of the texts themselves. This is true, for instance, even for biography, which is based mainly on the interpretation of the statements made by the authors themselves in their compositions, but it is just as true for erudite genres such as paroemiography and mythography. The figurative arts and the observation of real life may also constitute important sources of information, yet they too are often filtered through a literary or para-literary form and so they give rise to commentaries and interpretations, enriching in this way the contents of the works of scholarship. ‘Language‒Text‒Literature’ are the keywords which rightly inspired the conference. Over the course of history the phenomena of ‘scholarship’ became considerably diversified, assuming different functions. Thus on the one hand scholarship presented the characteristics and fulfilled the function of direct interpretation of texts, i.e. a variably broad and organic discourse offering further developments on a pre-existing discourse or at least partly based on and motivated by it. In other cases scholarship presented the characteristics and fulfilled the function of a repertory of reference and consultation materials, at times with encyclopaedic breadth and pretensions. This theoretical distinction is of help in understanding the products by abstract categories, although in the concrete reality of the works the balance was more likely to be tipped in one of the two directions, but without completely excluding the other. However, to give a perhaps somewhat brutal example, there is an evident difference as regards the aim and treatment of materials between a study with contents of a critical-literary nature devoted to and based on one or more texts, versus a general lexicographic collection in alphabetical order. By contrast, the differentiation appears to be less marked when a comparison is drawn between a commentary or a series of annotations on a poetic text versus a specific glossary of that same text which follows its exact wording and order. Nor should it be overlooked that one of these

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two characteristics and functions may have developed secondarily compared to the original intentions of the composition, as a result of the different ways a work of ‘scholarship’ happened to be used on different historical occasions. For example, a commentary supplied with a capitulatio by topics (such as the commentary or monograph of Didymus on Demosthenes preserved by a Berlin papyrus, P.Berol. 9780) could be utilized through a consultation by subject, even independently of the text to which the commentary referred. In contrast, lexicographic works of general scope (like the major lexicons and the great encyclopaedic dictionaries) may have served a useful function in exegetic commentaries on various texts and may thus be abundantly utilized within ὑπομνήματα or scholiographic corpora. It would be interesting—although beyond the scope of this paper— also to consider the relation between antiquarian studies and historiography, in order to examine how far, and with what differences, this may constitute a parallel for the arguments being put forward here. The terms of comparison could be as follows: does the relation between the erudite and well ordered collection of materials and critical (philological-exegetic) interpretation or theoretical (poetic) reflection in the field of scholarship stand parallel to the relation between the collection of antiquarian data and of Realien of all kinds and historiographic reconstruction or theoretical reflection on history? In a slightly different sense, albeit not too far-removed on a plane of pronounced abstraction, it can be noted that in the case of Aristotle and the early generations of the peripatetic school the treatises on individual authors and works of poetry are to the theoretical reflections of the Poetics as the collections of data constituted by the πολιτεῖαι are to the theoretical reflections of Politics. But all this would distract us excessively from our basic theme. Works of a specifically exegetic character, such as a commentary or a monographic treatise, were naturally influenced by the contents of the text that was the object of interpretation, from which, however, they may diverge considerably, showing a notable degree of independence in content and arguments. Since interpreting authoritative texts was a highly favoured working practice, the literary forms taken by exegesis as well as the occasions prompting an exegetic attitude were strikingly varied. Passages of an exegetic character may be present in works of a different genre or objective: for instance philosophical treatises may include considerations on previous works dealing with the same theme or may focus on the interpretation of passages from literary authors. The stratification may be twofold: it may on the one hand involve cases of a comment on a comment, as occurs when Aristotelian commentators find within the text of Aristotle commented citations of previous au-

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thors; on the other hand, an exegete may quote a parallel passage and also add a particular comment upon it. The element all such works have in common is that their subjects and arguments are built on a previous subject and argument, the text is constructed on another text, the importance and authoritative nature of which is known and recognized. A very general definition of such works could be ‘text on a text’ or ‘text about a text’. One need only think of the enormous literature produced on Homer over the centuries to gain an eloquent picture of what I am conveying. But illustrious and grandiose examples are also to be found in philosophy (suffice it to mention the quantity and value of the commentaries on Plato and Aristotle), in science (the Corpus Hippocraticum and Galen) and in religion (the case of the Bible is emblematic). Even more than in other sectors of the literary civilization, scholarship can be identified as a cultural phenomenon in which literature grew directly on literature and drew its nourishment from itself, increasing over the course of history by virtue of its necessary and inescapable reference to previous exegetic products as well as to the texts that were the object of interpretation. Particularly important is the relation holding between such activity of commenting and interpreting literary works and the reference canon: the influence is reciprocal because scholarship on the one hand certainly reflects an acquired canon, since it deals with the things that belong to it, while on the other hand scholarship contributes to shaping and consolidating the canon, exerting a non secondary influence on the image a culture acquires over time. If we use the concept of ‘text on a text’ or ‘text about a text’, then the attempt to give a specific definition of certain exegetic products becomes less dramatic, while remaining important. This is the case, for instance, of fragmentary texts that one hesitates to label as ὑπόμνημα or as σύγγραμμα. Under the skies of Thessaloniki the Derveni Papyrus immediately comes to mind. This is certainly an exegetic text that deals with and explores another text, namely an Orphic cosmogonic poem, though it is not clear whether the author is proceeding in syntagmatic order as would be expected in a commentary, or in paradigmatic order like in a treatise. Nevertheless, it is definitely an argument that starts out from another argument, and its religious aim is pursued by exploiting the approach and techniques characteristic of text interpretation, which thus set it in the framework of scholarship. The religious sphere suggests a parallel with Christian homilies, which present a doctrinal argument developed with varying degrees of independence starting out from interpretation of passages from the Old and New Testament. Accordingly, this suggestion can be expanded to include the biblical catenae, which consist of collections of extracts taken from different sources, including

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the homilies themselves, and gathered together for exegetic purposes. Note in addition that the catenae existed both in the form of independent commentaries and also as annotations in the margins of the text being commented on. There is a compelling parallel with the formcontent relationship and the exchange of materials between the ὑπομνήματα and the συγγράμματα found in the Homeric scholarship of the Alexandrian grammarians, as is well documented in the sources. The considerations put forward so far on ancient scholarship prompt the introduction of another highly significant distinction, despite the difficulties and epistemological uncertainties with which the path is certainly strewn. A commentary and its arguments can have an aim which could be defined as philological-grammatical-historical, namely that of an exegesis designed to explain the intrinsic and genuine content of the text properly speaking, and to discover what it really meant and sought to express in its authentic and original linguistic and historical-cultural context. In this perspective, scholarship appears as a science that is independent with regard to its ends, and its exegetic aim is important and valid in its own right and not as part of an overarching purpose. The objective is to explain the text without any other motive than that of correctly reconstructing and preserving historical evidence, which has its own intrinsic value. But in a different perspective, a commentary starting out from an authoritative text may present an interpretation that seeks above all to put forward the interpreter’s own arguments, focusing on specific doctrinal points, often with the ideological intention of ‘enlisting’ the author who is the object of analysis. The interpreter utilizes the work as a starting point, not infrequently seeking to unveil meanings that may have remained implicit or even ‘hidden’, and if necessary putting forward the possibility of uncovering important meanings the author did not consciously intend to include. Ultimately, this went as far as implying that it is legitimate to attribute to the author meanings that are generated and motivated only by the cultural and critical history that has been built up around the work during its reception. A classic case, which happens in fact to be the first of which we have knowledge, is the analysis of the song of Simonides, carried out by Socrates, and Protagoras in Plato’s Protagoras (339a ff.). What is also significant is that this experiment was prompted by the sophist Protagoras. For it was precisely the Sophists, at least in their representation by Plato, that claimed to be the representatives of a practice that had always existed, but which had only recently come to light: the wise of earlier times, namely the poets, were likewise σοφισταί, except that they ‘masked’ their wisdom so as to avoid being envied by the overwhelming majority. The mentality seems to be precisely that of an interpreter, who is

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capable of uncovering the meanings hidden in the authoritative texts because he possesses the tools to do so. What we have here is a duality which comes to the fore throughout the history of the exegesis of texts recognized as important, a duality which displays features at times distinctive and spectacularly brandished as banners of a particular approach, at other times rather faint or even uncertain: features and elements in many cases intermingled and overlaid, in other cases difficult to disentangle and often the object of sharp polemics. Once again, it should be underlined that strictly speaking this is a theoretical distinction, an intellectual tool helpful in understanding phenomena through abstract categories, whereas in concrete reality pure and distilled exemplars are a much rarer occurrence. Rather, it is more usually the case that the balance is tipped more or less decidedly towards one of the two aspects, but without the other being necessarily absent or excluded, perhaps making itself felt in the facts and the results more than in the declarations and intentions. There should be clear recognition that the boundaries between the two approaches are very problematic, sometimes labile, and above all debatable and debated. The concrete contrapositions and intersections between the two modes of critical discourse and the attendant polemics give rise to the irregular and multiform evolution of the reception of the great works and the great authors. A fine and much cited declaration by Aristarchus, preserved in a scholion to Iliad 5.385, seems to be almost a classroom case designed to illustrate the concept, starting from ancient criticism. In the passage of the Iliad reference is made to the episode of the aggressive brothers Otos and Ephialtes, who were said to have imprisoned no less than the god Ares. Aristarchus warns that the statement by Homer should be taken as mythical content springing from poetic license, and one should not try to excogitate contents that are alien to the poet’s words, or to invent something he did not say. The Aristarchean observation is followed by the exposition of the myth to which the cited episode belongs, evidently with the aim of thus providing the mythographic explanation of the brief allusion present in the poetic text. Then the scholion introduces three interpretations of a completely different nature. The first, defined as ‘more convincing’, sees the myth as a misrepresentation of historical facts that did really occur; the second interprets it as a physical allegory concerning astronomic questions; the third (the most extensive) broadens out into a complex philosophical exegesis having ethical content. The latter interpretation appears to be the one preferred by the author of this doxography, since he introduces it by saying it is better to maintain that at this point the poet wants to φιλοσοφεῖν, as in fact is the case

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in the whole poem.2 We will not dwell in detail here on these three forms of allegoresis, which effectively belong to the most well-known and widespread typologies: they are interpretations which have in common the idea that the real meaning of the words of the text is different, is ‘something other’ than what a strictly philological method can derive from the author’s words, which, Aristarchus contends, should instead be adhered to more strictly. The above distinction has the consequence that the choice of exegetic method requires the critic to take an important and decisive position on the author’s poetics (whatever the degree of awareness in this regard). Only the conviction that the author deliberately intended to express his thought by allegory, symbols, metaphors, enigmas, obscurities of sundry types, justifies the interpreter’s adoption of decoding techniques and tools (accepted and shared or completely idiosyncratic) designed to highlight meanings attributable to the author and purportedly introduced by the author himself into his works in a veiled, or even intentionally obscure and concealed manner. To take an example, one may contrast the Homeric interpretation allowed by Aristarchus and the Alexandrian grammarians (nothing that goes beyond the words of the poet) with that abundantly represented in the Homeric problems written by one Heraclitus of the imperial age. Heraclitus believed that Homer wrote his poem using allegory as a means of expression, making deliberate use of this rhetorical tool: that is to say, the act of decoding the poetic creation enables the interpreter not only to defend the poet against any charge of impiety, but also to discover in his lines an enormous quantity and an extremely elevated quality of knowledge and doctrines, which became common knowledge later on. Techniques of this kind, or similar procedures, led to the idea of Homer as the source of all learning and all knowledge, widely pursued by ancient critics whose attitude was considerably different from that of Aristarchus. Aristarchus himself believed that Homer did not express his thought by means of allegories: thus he had no intention of attributing to Homer forms of knowledge which, for strictly historical reasons, the poet could not possibly have had; rather, he saw Homer merely as availing himself of the poetic li2

Sch. D ad Il. 5.385: Ἀρίσταρχος ἀξιοῖ τὰ φραζόμενα ὑπὸ τοῦ ποιητοῦ μυθικώτερον ἐκδέχεσθαι κατὰ τὴν ποιητικὴν ἐξουσίαν, μηδὲν ἔξω τῶν συμφραζομένων ὑπὸ τοῦ ποιητοῦ περιεργαζομένους. Ὦτος οὖν καὶ Ἐφιάλτης γόνῳ μὲν ἦσαν Ποσειδῶνος, [...]. ἄλλοι δὲ πιθανώτερον

ἐξηγούμενοι τὰ Ὁμήρου τοὺς Ἀλωείδας τούτους φασὶ γενέσθαι βασιλεῖς τῆς Ἑλλάδος. [...]. οἱ δέ φασιν, ἐν τῇδε τῇ ἱστορίᾳ περὶ τῶν μετεώρων διαλέγεσθαι τὸν Ὅμηρον, μαθηματικὸν ὄντα [...]. βέλτιον λέγειν δὲ ὅτι φιλοσοφεῖν βούλεται διὰ τῆσδε τῆς ραψῳδίας, ὡς καὶ δι’ ὅλης τῆς ποιήσεως.

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cence to construct legendary stories based on the matter contained in myth. Before him, Eratosthenes had said the poet should concern himself with delighting the spirit and not seek to educate in some discipline or other; and even earlier Aristotle theorized that the art of poetry is not required to ensure correctness in reference to any τέχνη that happens to be the object of representation: poetry can say and teach true things with regard to a different sphere of knowledge, but it is not necessarily obliged to. One further observation on a related question. We should maintain a careful distinction between the idea of allegorical interpretation of the mythic content of a literary work, and the allegorical interpretation of the myth as such. The fact that the myth constitutes a semiotic system of an allegorical character, which conveys its meanings through this semantic tool, is a problem that concerns religious-anthropological studies, whereas what a poet intended to convey by utilizing mythic content is a problem of exegesis and text interpretation. This is a delicately problematic point, but the two planes should not be confused, nor, much less, should they be identified, however intertwined or indeed overlaid they may come to be in actual practice. Moreover, it should also be clearly borne in mind that the problems pertaining to allegorical expression-interpretation do not concern merely the mythic content, even though myth is typically the sphere most intensely involved. One need only mention political allegory, such as the celebrated allegory of Alcaeus’ ship, to realize that the overall issue of allegory goes beyond the problem of interpreting the mythic content of poetry. The twofold concept of allegory/allegoresis already had a far wider scope even in antiquity, let alone in subsequent eras, from late antiquity and throughout the medieval age in the Orient and in the West. Over the course of history, the very term ‘allegory’ itself has covered an extremely broad and variegated range of meanings, both as regards the rhetorical-expressive mean and also the critical-exegetic tool. Thus consideration of ‘allegory’ in the strict sense should be expanded to consideration of all types of interpretation that seek real or supposed ‘hidden’ meanings beneath the letter of the text. But let us not yield to the temptation of casting the net of our enquiry too wide, which would draw us towards theory-oriented ambitions both on literary criticism and poetics. Rather, let us restrict ourselves, almost playfully, to citing a passage from Alcibiades II, Platonic if not by Plato, in which it is asserted that all poetry is by its very nature αἰνιγματῶδες and cannot be understood by a

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mere ordinary person,3 and then let us set this passage alongside the declaration by Northrop Frye4 that ‘it is not often realized that all commentary is allegorical interpretation, an attaching of ideas to the structure of poetic imagery’. The exegete stands in contrast to the ‘mere ordinary person’ and is seen as the one who is capable of understanding, who has the cultural and intellectual tools to perform the interpretation; furthermore, he attributes to his work and to himself the right to extract all kinds of meaning from a text and to construct his own line of argument, focusing on what he regards as useful and important to develop. The exegete not only enjoys great freedom (which can go as far as arbitrary discretion), but he also wields potentially enormous cultural influence. So powerful can his influence be that he can sway widely held opinions and shape general attitudes, all the more so if the text he is dealing with is recognized as a highly authoritative work and if the interpreter himself enjoys great authority. The critical currents linked to philosophical, political and religious ideologies belong to this general and generic framework, in which even the most blatant anachronisms are present and are in effect admitted. The ancient interpreters could tenaciously trace in Homer numerous forms of knowledge and discoveries actually belonging to later ages, and they had no hesitation in attributing to Homer references to historical events, or elements of Platonic or Stoic or Christian thought, leaving aside the mordant observation by Seneca (Epist. 88), according to whom the evidence that Homer was not a philosopher resides precisely in the fact that his works are supposed to contain the entire gamut of doctrines, even though in contradiction to one another. It was, and it is, better to have an open door through which to enlist within one’s own army any text viewed as authoritative and important. History right up to the modern times is studded with manifestations of this attitude and these cultural operations (and each of us must decide individually whether to consider them acceptable or not, and to what extent). The crystal-clear methodological position in Homeric scholarship proposed by Aristarchus provides a fairly specific characterization of Alexandrian philology, but it does not represent the most common and widespread situation of criticism over the course of the centuries. Basically, allegoresis or any form of ideological, philosophical or religious interpretation has only rarely been excluded: in fact, I believe that it can 3 4

Alc. 2, 147b 5–10. Frye 1957, 89 (my attention was drawn to the passage by Filippomaria Pontani).

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be said for Homer that after the Alexandrians such a kind of exegesis was no longer excluded, right up until the modern age. Again, under the skies of Thessaloniki, we can cite the case of the archbishop Eustathius, whose lengthy Homeric commentaries gathered up the philological heritage of the Alexandrian grammarians but combined it with sweeping allegorical interpretations, capable of forging a link between Christian culture and the most venerated monument of ancient pagan culture. The methodological choice adopted by Aristarchus in the field of Homeric criticism rests on the idea that the exegetic method utilized by the interpreter must correspond to the author’s poetics, i.e. the instrument must be in tune with the object. Careful reflection suggests that this theoretical aspect accords well with the principle of internal and analogical criticism which holds that the author himself is his own best interpreter (no matter what was the exact formulation and to whom we owe it). This principle is recognized as essential and basic in Aristarchean exegetical practice. The picture that emerges is one of an intellectual framework of historical-philological exegesis, wherein studying and understanding a text is important and valid in its own right, and the objective is to correctly reconstruct and preserve a piece of historical evidence which has intrinsic value (for Homeric criticism, the nature and character of τὸ Ὁμηρικόν). Such an objective stands in opposition to any critical methodology that fails to respect these two principles, i.e. that admits the possibility of applying to some work a method that is unsuited to its poetics, or condones the idea of seeking within the work meanings that are quite alien to it in terms of cultural background, spatial location or time. All this identifies Alexandrian philology as a sort of ‘parenthesis’ in the history of ancient scholarship, since the predominant attitude throughout the long history of ancient scholarship right up to the modern age has been marked by critical attitudes of a sharply different orientation, according to the typology outlined above. It would certainly be of great interest to analyze this distinction and contraposition in modern scholarship from the Eighteenth century to the present day, but I am happy to avoid venturing into a province that is not my own, at least in this moment. Certainly, one can readily understand that within this parenthesis the practice of producing new editions of the works of the ancient παιδεία originated and became consolidated. In fact the Alexandrian scholars introduced a new idea in the sphere of scholarship, formulating for the first time the problem of the correctness of classical authors’ texts as they could read them, and addressing the question of the damage the ancient texts had suffered in the course of their transmis-

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sion. Such an approach involved collating different copies, examining and evaluating the variants of the textual tradition, deleting parts judged as spurious and emending errors in order to reconstruct the authentic text. This was enough to create a most peculiar intellectual and scientific situation, but it also compelled the scholars to consider the criteria of critical interpretation in a new light, and even to create new standards and principles arousing needs that were different and deeper: because, as Giorgio Pasquali wrote, ‘constituting a text [...] requires the same learning and knowledge as interpreting [...] constituting a text and interpreting it are, ultimately, one and the same thing’.5 What seems remarkable indeed is the fact that in comparison to the prolonged history of ancient scholarship, which has been built up over the centuries from the origins right up to modern time, this short parenthesis lasting no more than the period from Zenodotus to the Augustan age, or possibly to the 2nd century AD, is the very period which we regard as the cradle of philological science in the modern sense, of course with all the mutatis mutandis necessary both for a correct historical evaluation and also to placate the concerns displayed by a certain hypercritical hyper-scepticism, which denies similarities perhaps because it is unable to evaluate the differences properly. Let us now recall that the publication of the Venetian Homeric scholia by Villoison, in which (and this was the great novelty) the materials of the Alexandrian scholarship were mainly to be found, gave rise to the famous Prolegomena ad Homerum by F.A. Wolf (a pupil of C.H. Heyne), always considered as one of the first and most significant turning points at the end of the Eighteenth century leading towards the birth of modern classical philology. It will therefore hardly be considered intellectual snobbery to point out that Alexandrian philology once again played a vital role and exerted decisive influence at a crucial moment in the history of classical studies. In the second half of the twentieth century, studies on Alexandrian philology and in general on the history of erudition, exegesis and grammar in the cultural panorama of the ancient world, experienced a renewed period of great flowering, which continues unabated in this opening stage of the twenty-first century. As compared to the state and tendencies of studies in the first half of the last century, today the picture appears radically changed. The by now classic work of Rudolf Pfeiffer dating from 1968, the two volumes of Kurt Latte’s incomplete edition of Hesychius dating from 1953 and 1966, Hartmut Erbse’s edition of the 5

Pasquali 1920, repr. 1998, 26: ‘Insomma, a costituire un testo gli occhi servono così come le mani a scrivere un poema; occorre invece la stessa preparazione che a interpretare e a gustare: costituire un testo e interpretarlo sono, in fondo, tutt’uno’.

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Scholia Vetera to the Iliad begun in 1969, the launch in 1974 of a series entitled Sammlung griechischer und lateinischer Grammatiker (SGLG), can be remembered as significant symptoms and stimuli of a new season. These research themes have progressively grown in importance and presence in the current panorama of classical studies, and now rest on different cultural foundations and orientations compared to the manner in which they were considered and treated, albeit with abundance and attention, in the context of nineteenth-century philology. As new and adequate working tools are devised and editions of texts become available, the effort to construct solid bases for research in this sector is acquiring more concrete form, while studies and essays continue to shed light in greater depth on a number of themes that are relevant for these aspects of the ancient literary civilization. Furthermore, such progress on the one hand can be seen as forming part of movements towards a positive reappraisal, which is by now complete and consolidated, of the postclassical historical phases of ancient Greek culture, from the imperial to the Byzantine age. On the other hand, this can rightly be described as one of the important aspects of a definitive transition away from the aestheticizing and intuitionist tendencies of the misguided and often a-historical classicism that characterised a great part of the twentieth century. One fundamental element is that the investigations on the philology and erudition of the ancients no longer have an exclusively or predominantly ancillary value, and are no longer considered essentially or only as a repository of fragments of lost works, antiquarian curiosities or potential aids to modern philology. Ancient erudite and philologicalgrammatical production, in a word ‘ancient scholarship’, has acquired an independent meaning of its own, inasmuch as it is now seen as an expression and manifestation of a precise intellectual sphere and as an important aspect of ancient civilization. The exegetic observations and the erudite knowledge of the ancients are no longer considered only for what they tell us about a work or a phenomenon they aim to explain: rather, today they are and must be perceived as useful and interesting for what they tell us about themselves, i.e. about the ideas and the culture of which they are an expression. Yet even today one still too often notes the tendency to discuss the data of ancient philology and grammar on the basis of the principle of what is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ from the point of view of modern science; in other words, the tendency to try to gauge how far the ancients had drawn close to the ‘correct’ interpretation and to what extent they missed the point, whether they were good or bad philologists, with regard to their textual choices as well. These are evaluations that distort the historical perspective. Moreover, too often the criterion for selection

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of materials considered worthy of interest and study remains based ess